Monthly Archives: April 2018

Apr 28

English sentences and punctuation

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Barbara Bush died a few days ago, and The Onion had this to say about it:

Barbara Bush Passes Away Surrounded By Loved Ones, Jeb

This got me thinking a bit, how can we change the meaning of this sentence just by making some very minor edits to it?  As it stands right no, the comma at the end of the headline make two different groups, Barbara Bush’s loved ones and Jeb.  These groups are separate, and the headline would be the same if the comma was replaced with an ampersand(&).  What happens if we change the comma to a colon though?

Barbara Bush Passes Away Surrounded By Loved Ones: Jeb

As a headline in this case, this is saying that Jeb stated Barbara passed away.  There’s no relationship between Jeb and her loved ones.  Now what would happen if we add more people to the end?

Barbara Bush Passes Away Surrounded By Loved Ones: Jeb, George

By having more than one person here, we are now defining who the loved ones are of Barbara.  At least that’s what first comes to mind for me.

 

Anyway, I just thought that this was interesting.  And quite possibly confusing to people who are just learning English, as the punctuation makes a big difference in this case.

Apr 09

Bitcoin Mining for a Useful Purpose?

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So I was thinking about this the other day when I came across this article on Slashdot that points out that GPU prices are high due to the demand for Bitcoin(and other cryptocurrencies) mining.  This got me thinking, what’s the point for this?  What if we could do something useful(well, more useful) than mining for virtual currency?  I’ve been running BOINC for probably about 12+ years now, doing calculations for SETI@Home.  Originally, I wasn’t even using the BOINC client, SETI@Home had their own standalone software that has now been superseded by BOINC.  Which given that the original software was used until 2005, means that I have probably actually been doing this for 15+ years at this point(logging into the SETI website indicates I have been a member since December 2005)…

But I digress.  The question really is, could we mine cryptocurrency as part of the normal BOINC process?  It seems like this would have a number of benefits for people:

  • For mining people, they can still mine coins
  • For projects on BOINC, they gain computing power from people wanting to mine coins at the same time
  • This could result in more computing power for a “good” cause as well, instead of what is(in my mind at least) a rather useless endeavor

I’m not exactly sure how this would work, as I don’t really know anything about blockchain.  Could perhaps Ethereum be used to provide people with “compute credits” that would allow this scheme to work?  It could also provide a good way of storing the calculation results, and have them verifiable.