Man (Mads Mikkelsen) alone with the wreckage of his airplane, an AN-2, in the Arctic. He's been there for a few days at least. He's carved out a giant SOS in the snow, down through a couple feet of snow to the bare ground. The letters are like fifty feet tall, big enough that a passing aircraft should be able to see them. He's cut a couple of holes in the ice and is managing to catch some fish. He doesn't have any fuel for any kind of fire, so he's eating them raw. He has a hand cranked radio and every day he hikes to the top a nearby hill and cranks the radio and the radio blinks its red light at him.
One day while cranking the radio the green light blinks and shortly thereafter a helicopter appears, and immediately crashes. The pilot dies. The female copilot survives but she is comatose. He hauls her back to his airplane, which has the advantage of being right side up and level. They stay there for a few days, long enough for him to expand his ice fishing empire, but eventually he decides they need to travel to some kind of outpost. Pretty sad commentary on the local rescue service that they weren't able to get back out to where the last helicopter crashed. So Mads packs up his gear and loads the woman on a rescue sled that he found in the crashed helicopter, and starts hiking across the Arctic.
He does okay for a couple of days, but then he starts running into problems. He struggles but eventually he gets to the top of a hill and spots a live helicopter. The helicopter crew eventually spots him and all is well.
895 AD if I recall the opening scene correctly. Bloodthirsty tale of savages bent on murder and revenge. Norway, Russia, Iceland. Nicole Kidman, Bjork, slavery, foxes, ravens and hallucinogenic mushrooms. Vikings rowing and sailing longboats. It all looked pretty realistic. Not too much Hollywood, just some fancy metal working on the hero's sword. Fancy tapestry, though it looked like the designs were painted on. Maybe they were. People wearing cloth clothes, though no sign of a loom. Maybe they were knitted?
From the Wikipedia page: "nihilistic tone". Hit the nail on the head.
Pretty standard murder mystery. This one is set in Iceland, a small country. Just how small is it? I was guessing that is was about like Oregon, maybe three million people. Boy, was I way off. The whole country doesn't have as many people as Portland Oregon. Iceland has only 350,000 people. It only has about 40% as much area, so fewer people per square mile. Of course a lot it is totally inhospitable. Only one percent is used for farming. It's only about 200 miles across, which is almost far enough to justify using a helicopter to scoot around, which the head of the narcotics arm of the police makes good use of.
We've got bikers and meth dealers and gay boys and an assortment of family members. It's a pretty good show, well done. Touches on all the players but doesn't spend any time crying over split milk, which some other show's we've watched recently have done. East Asia, I'm lookin' at you.
Brot: The Valhalla Murders (2019) TV trailer w/subs
This is the third European murder mystery series we have watched that were based on revenge killings for abuse suffered in children's homes. This one and one other were based in Iceland, the other was based in Wales. This one was pretty good.
I came across a smaller version of this picture as a meme about Jehovah's Witnesses. It took a little pointing and clicking to find out where it was. When I did, I tried to locate it on Google Maps, but it's not there:
1939. Active; focal plane 34 m (112 ft); long white flash followed by a short white flash every 30 s. 4 m (13 ft) square concrete tower with lantern and gallery. Lighthouse painted white, lantern red. Ingvar Hreinsson has a closeup photo, Sigmar Þór Sveinbjörnsson has a photo, and Steve Fernie has a distant view from the sea, but the islet is not seen in Google's satellite view. Photos and videos of this isolated and "terrifying" lighthouse suddenly went viral in July 2016. Located on the largest of three isolated rocks about 13 km (8 mi) west northwest of Heimaey. Accessible only by helicopter (with an experienced pilot). VIT-278; Admiralty L4802; NGA 18080.
There are several other chunks of rock sticking out of the sea in the same general neighborhood, but this one does not exist.
Building a Cryptocurrency Mining Farm / Genesis Mining #EvolveWithUs - The Series Episode 2
I put $120 into Genesis Ether Mining a couple of months ago. I've been checking periodically to see if it had produced any results, but nothing has shown up. They seem to be a new outfit that is having normal start-up problems, so I cut them some slack, but like I said, it's been a couple of months so I inquired, and now I have some numbers. Since they sat on my money for a month to ensure that it was legit and not from some scammer, the money has only been at work for a month, but in a month it has produced $5.38. Theoretically speaking. To actually get the money, I have to transfer it to an electronic 'wallet', and from there I should be able to get actual moola.
I dutifully set up the wallet, but nothing had gotten transferred. Seems there are transaction fees, so Genesis doesn't transfer any funds until you have at least $15 to transfer.
Anyway, $5 a month times 12 months is $60, so in two years I should double my money. Assuming of course that this whole thing doesn't collapse like the house of cards it is.
The numbers on the Genesis website don't give you the total, so I copied the numbers (no, I didn't copy them down by hand, I used a mouse to highlight the data and then used Ctrl-C to copy them) and then pasted them in a Google spreadsheet and then used the sum function to add the numbers up.
Had a bit of a problem with the dates. Genesis, being in Iceland uses a European date format: day, month, year, which might be fine in Iceland, but it doesn't cut it in my little corner of the world. So I fussed and farted and looked in the help, but nothing seemed to work, so I ended up writing a nasty little function to take apart the old date and then put it back together the way I wanted it, something like:
Bitcoin came across my plate recently and I got to thinking that maybe I should set up a computer to do some Bitcoin mining and so make a little money. I mean, I've got old computers sitting around and I know something about computer software, I should be able to do this without too much effort, and then presto, free money.
But before I expend any effort on this project, I want to understand what I am getting into, which means finding out just how this Bitcoin business works. After much noodling around I think I have it.
First of all the worth of Bitcoin comes from being a ledger. It's kind of like paying an accountant to keep your books. Admittedly, it's of a special ledger, immune to the forces that normally bear on an ordinary, preson-type, accountant, which may make it more valuable to some people, but it's basically just a ledger.
Second of all, running a computer to mine bitcoins is not a stand-alone operation. You can't just fire up your computer have it make these magical numbers and when it finally produces one you take it and send it off to the great Bitcoin collective in the sky.
Bitcoin is a ledger, and one of things that makes it valuable is once a page has been recorded, it is stamped with a very fancy checksum which means any alterations to the page will render the checksum invalid. And since that checksum is included on the following page, fixing the checksum, will necessitate updating the following page, and the page after that until you reach the end. And since there are a zillion copies of this ledger floating around, someone is going to notice the difference and you will get found out and your evil plot to rule the world will come crashing down around your toes.
The way Bitcoin works is transactions are recorded on a page in the ledger. Once the page is full*, all the active Bitcoin miners jump in and try to compute the checksum. Now it's not an ordinary checksum, it's a very fancy checksum. You could probably compute it by hand in some number of days, but we have computers now, so we let the computers do it. A computer can compute this fancy checksum (called a SHA-256 hash, or some similar nonsense), in milliseconds. It's trivial. Bitcoin has an added requirement though, because not only do you have to compute the checksum, but it has to be 'pretty' (Bitcoin's version of pretty** is that the checksum must start with some number of zeroes).
Blockchain 101 - A Visual Demo
A block is like a page in a ledger. A block chain is like the whole ledger book.
In order for the checksum to be 'pretty', you need to add a magic number to the page. The only way anyone knows to find the magic number is to take a wild guess and then compute the checksum. If it comes out 'pretty', great, if not, try another one and run the computation again. Since it seems to be completely random whether any number will produce the desired result, you may have to try a few zillion numbers to find the one you need.
If that were all there was to it, it would be a mint, running diligently, popping out a bitcoin every ten minutes, which how often a page is filled. But there are also a zillion other computer geeks out there, all hooked to the net, trying to do the same thing, so whoever comes up with the answer first is the one who gets paid.
Since it seems to be completely random which number will provide the solution, it's possible that your little old Pentium processor, sucking up kilowatt-hours of electricity will find it, but it's more likely that it won't. So people have banded together to combine their efforts in order to improve their chances. And computer geeks have gone off the deep end building custom machines solely for the purpose of running these computations. Some people have even gone to the extreme of building custom ASIC chips to do this. The whole thing sounds a little insane, unless you really like doing that kind of thing, i.e. building fancy, special purpose computing machines. And given what we know about people, there is certain percentage of the population who really like doing that.
Genesis Mining #EvolveWithUs - The Series / Official Trailer
* 'full' seems to be when the checksum for the previous page has appeared.
** The amount of 'prettiness' is adjusted so that the average time it takes for the checksum to appear is ten minutes. I have no idea how many transactions are on a page. It could be one, or it could be a zillion.
It's a little hard to make out in this image, what with the cloud cover and all, but this flight path takes you somewhat North of Iceland. Nobody actually flies this route. It would be possible with our newest long range airliners, like the Boeing 777-200LR or the Airbus A340-500. Ordinary Google Maps doesn't show this route going so far North, but if you create your own map it does. But then you don't get the global view like you do with Google Earth.
Looking at plain map of Earth, Madrid looks like good waypoint, but going through someplace like Iceland, will save you 500 miles and an hour of time.
I suspect most economists of new speak, they just make up stuff as they go because no one really understands how this financial business actually works. Right now Cyprus seems to be having some kind of problem. Paul Krugman wrote about it his column a couple of days ago. In it he mentions Iceland. Remember Iceland? Not me, I had forgotten clean about it, but it had a financial meltdown a few years ago. It is recovering. Now that you mention it, I do sort of remember hearing about this. People were saying it was some kind of miracle because the government did not bail out the banks. They didn't say was what did happen. What happened was that the banks failed and those people who had put up capital to start those banks lost their investment. Poof! Gone. So the taxpayers didn't have to foot the bill, but some of the movers and shakers took a palpable hit, or so I surmise.
One reason places like Cyprus and Iceland get so much business is because of their bank secrecy laws. They don't have to tell nobody nothin'. So people with ill gotten gains like them. If you were a bank doing business with the mob, you might want to be careful with your money, and not go making risky loans to your brother-in-law in Florida. I mean, if your bank were to go bust, there are some not-very-nice-people who are going to be very unhappy with you. I wonder how many bank managers have died in mysterious circumstances since the Iceland debacle happened?
Rooting around for some evidence to support my wild speculations, I stumbled over this little bit on the Recovery Partners dot biz blog:
Under capitalistic forms of economic organization, Banks must ordinarily be held accountable to deal with their distressed credits promptly and the public balance sheet must not be used to subsidize bad risk decisions nor to prop up zombie companies at public expense and to the ultimate detriment of employees, taxpayers and other more efficient and productive entities. However, this departure from the norm in order to favor creditor interests is exactly what has been happening. These policies of Financial Repression have been followed before. The most obvious examples are failed communist states many of whom had to abandon the experiment over twenty years ago with the fall of the Berlin Wall and more recently, hyperinflationary Zimbabwe. Some examples in the developed economies include New Zealand in the late 1970’s / early 1980’s before the 1984 collapse and Germany in the immediate Post WWI “Weimar” period. In every instance, the outcome of these episodes was negative. Today, the Europeans (and North America and Japan) are conducting policies of Financial Repression in a variety of formats.
