Matt Edwards

Matt Levine, writing in Money Stuff on 25 October 2022: Over the past few months I have written a long piece about crypto for Bloomberg Businessweek. It is out today, and you can read it here. Some of the themes will be familiar to Money Stuff readers: I touch on crypto’s sometimes hilarious and sometimes insightful reinvention of traditional finance, as well as Bitcoin’s revolutionary (re)discovery of the fact that, if a bunch of people decide that something should be valuable, that’s enough to make it valuable. But I also try to start from the beginning of crypto and build step by step, to develop complex modern crypto ideas from first principles. ...

As a follow up to Part I and Part II, which included some narrative and photos of a recent motorcycle tour of New England, here is a video which cuts together GoPro footage taken from our ride. The primary source of footage is a trip down Route 100 in Vermont, starting in Stowe and ending once we had crossed the Green Mountain National Forest on Route 73. The polaroid photo effect was really fun to build (thanks YouTube tutorial videos!). The moving photos within those polaroid frames were made possible by extracting the video file from an iPhone Live Photo and embedding it into the image frame. All of those motion graphic effects were created using Davinci Fusion. ...

From The Verge: But upon examination, these new features are hardly the panacea that their boosters imply. Some elements presented as safety enhancements (like lane keep assist) may be little more than driver conveniences. For now, at least, those technologies that could save the most lives (like pedestrian detection) remain deeply unreliable. And even if ADAS eventually works flawlessly, it is likely to have only a modest impact on annual traffic deaths. ...

Bit of a strange ride to have this happen on, but hey - 2,000 miles for the year! Given the disappointing year of 2021 when I spent a lot of time in physical therapy for the hamstring/groin strain, it was realistic to set such a low mileage goal for this year. Luckily, I’ve surpassed it with another two months and change to go this year. I’ll have to celebrate again when I hit 2,022 miles in the year 2022. And some other arbitrary goal I set now for the end of 2022. ...

This post if the second part of my recent motorcycle journey through New England to take in the changing of the leaves. Find Part I of this post here. Day 3: A Stopover in Stowe The cold night in Jackson, NH turned into a cold morning. Ice on the motorcycle seats! Luckily the sun was up soon after we were, and the ice melted off in a matter of minutes. Following an excellent pancake breakfast at the Cranmore Inn, I proceeded to pack on as many layers as would fit beneath my motorcycle jacket - sans pancakes things might have felt a bit looser. The bike engines roared to life and we got on the road northbound to the Mount Washington Cog Train. ...

Through the final few days of September and for the start of October, I took a motorcycle trip up into New England to explore the fall foliage and visit some of my favorite places. Unsurprisingly, many of those places were craft breweries. Also snuck in a good hike, some historical monuments, and a jaunt through downtown Albany. A productive long weekend, to be sure. Kristin came along with her Honda Rebel, and we made a good time of it. ...

Tools such as iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc have become the modern way to communicate about trivial things that were once fodder for occasional small talk. It is simply a truth of the world today; I can shoot you a text far more easily than I can connect with you physically, face-to-face. However, that is causing some issues for highly regulated industries, as Matt Levine relays in his column Money Stuff on 28 September: ...

Getting cooler out and losing daylight in the mornings and evenings, which certainly slows down the pace of outdoor riding. Vacations and other family activities kept me from riding too much on the weekends, as well. Am on track to close out the year in the 2,000+ mile range - which was my goal! - so there are things to enjoy about another season of biking. ...

From The Atlantic: The texts are juicy, but not because they are lurid, particularly offensive, or offer up some scandalous Muskian master plan—quite the opposite. What is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be. Some secrets to success: Luck. Timing. Proximity to other successful people. Being born wealthy. ...

From The Verge: Telescopes around the world (and a few in space!) are now turning their attention to the scene of the collision. They’ll be watching to see how much the impact changed the movement of Dimorphos. The crash is part of the first practical planetary defense experiment — a trial to see if humanity might one day be able to redirect the path of an asteroid headed toward our planet. ...