Tesla Model 3 or Tesla Model S..

Walked around near the train station today and saw a Tesla car. Initially I did not notice that this was a model 3, it looked like a model S to me

Here is what the car looked like



The blue car is the model 3, the grey car is a model S.  The model S doesn't look that much bigger to me. I wonder if it makes sense for anyone to buy the model S at this point. Is there such a big difference between these two Tesla cars to warrant the price difference.  At the Princeton Junction parking lot there are about 8 or so Tesla cars I see regularly. Now with a ~33K price tag for a model 3, I wonder how long before we see more than 30 or even 50 of these cars?

According to Bloomberg, Tesla is producing 832 cars a week and have produced 10,299 model 3 cars so far.

You can see these number for yourself at the Bloomberg Tracker site here: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/


How about you, have you seen any Tesla Model 3 cars yet?

TWID Jan 15, 2018

This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these


Finished the blockchain pluralsight course this week and started on the Github course

Should be done with the Github course by tomorrow

Watched Hell or High Water,  the movie was really good and I especially like the music. The music is by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and it's I guess Western music?


Started to listen to the King of Kings podcast from hardcore history, I think this is the third time I am listening to it. Such great stuff!!

This Week I Learned

Merkle tree
While watching the Pluralsight course Blockchain Fundamentals I learned about a Merkle tree

In cryptography and computer science, a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every leaf node is labelled with the hash of a data block and every non-leaf node is labelled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child nodes. Hash trees allow efficient and secure verification of the contents of large data structures. Hash trees are a generalization of hash lists and hash chains.

The concept of hash trees is named after Ralph Merkle who patented it in 1979

More about Merke Tree here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree


White Plague
Heard about this on the Lore podcast episode 77. White plague is also known as consumption or tuberculosis, never heard it called white plague before. Tuberculosis I know very well, my grandfather died from it, he was 23 years old and when he died my father was only a month old. It was a rough time for my grandmother having to raise 3 kids on her own in the 1950s past war time frame.


Iron
Heard about the different kind of iron on the How it began podcast episode: Mastering Metals: From Sticks & Stones to Cars & Computers
Wrought iron... this is produced by putting the rock on a fire and then manipulating the iron by banging on it
Cast iron...  this is produced by using ovens and melting the iron.. it is however brittle
Steel... this is produced by removing carbon and it is not brittle like cast iron

This Week I Tweeted

A Vast, 430-Year-Old World Map, Full of Places and Creatures, Real and Imagined

The map shows a lush, highly personalized take on the world, with a surprisingly large collection of real and fantasy beasts carousing and cavorting on land and sea. Rumsey’s scan and digital assembly of the cartographic puzzle represents the first time that Monte’s work has been seen in its full glory: It is the single largest world map of the 16th century, and one largely forgotten or overlooked by cartographers and scholars.

Some interesting stuff, would be nice to have this hanging on the wall


Royal Mail’s Game of Thrones Stamp Collection available to order

These stamps look great.

Twitter, Snapchat tie up with Fox to provide coverage of FIFA World Cup

Twitter Inc is partnering with Twenty First Century Fox Inc’s Fox Sports to stream a live show on the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament set to be hosted in Russia later this year.  

Who is going to watch this on crappy telephone screens?

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

Good block chain material from ycombinator: http://blog.ycombinator.com/building-for-the-blockchain/

Small sample

• The official Solidity docs are a good place to start.
• The Truffle Framework is one of the best solidity frameworks.
• See how tokens and token sales are developed in the zeppelinOS repo, one of the most trusted libraries to build dApps.
• Blockgeeks also provides an in-depth Ethereum token guide with code samples and high-level concepts.
• You can even learn from Crypto Kitties and create your own digital game on the blockchain.

In addition, the developer communities are remarkably receptive and helpful. Check out:

• /r/ethereum
• /r/ethdev
• https://blockgeeks.com/

Find more here: http://blog.ycombinator.com/building-for-the-blockchain/

Some pics I took

Eight feet of snow.... will take a while to melt.

Use Purse.io to shop on Amazon and pay with bitcoin

A couple of years ago I mined some bitcoin with ASIC Antminers. This bitcoin amount was still sitting in my bitcoin wallet until now. I needed some stuff from Amazon and decided to see how I could use some of this bitcoin I had to pay for these items. Amazon doesn't take bitcoin as a payment but there is a 3rd party site you can use. This site is Purse.io

The way it works, you create a wishlist or add the items. Then you can add a discount, I tried 11% for the 4 items and someone accepted

Sweet, 11% on top of the low Amazon price is not bad at all. The way it works is that the people who buy the items for you will get the bitcoin.  Once the order accepted, the amount is put into escrow and when it is delivered and acknowledged by you, the amount goes out of escrow into the buyer's wallet

Not sure if this is the right way to do it, it worked for me and maybe it can work for you as well. Let me know if you tried Purse.io and if it worked out for you as it did for me