Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain / Cursed ordinal Updated +Created
These were ordinals that were only indexed in later versions of the script. So to prevent changing the useless indices of existing ordinals, they gave them negative numbers.
The word "cursed" is a meme from the 2010/20s, e.g. knowyourmeme.com/memes/cursed-images--2.
Some examples:
Idaho stop Updated +Created
The traffic is designed for cars, which makes many red stops for bicycles completely stupid.
In a bicycle you just have too much more control and awareness than in a car, so if the way is completely clear, you should be allowed to stop, look if the way is clear, and then run reds.
Of course, this does increase the chances of hitting pedestrians a little bit. But the risk change feels so little that it would be worth it. Studies quoted by Wikipedia corroborate. It just feels extremely unintuitive to make cyclists stop in certain places when the street is clear.
Ilana Wisby Updated +Created
Founding CEO of Oxford Quantum Circuits.
As mentioned at www.investmentmonitor.ai/tech/innovation/in-conversation-with-oxford-quantum-circuits-ilana-wisby she is not the original tech person:
she was finally headhunted by Oxford Science and Innovation to become the founding CEO of OQC. The company was spun out of Oxford University's physics department in 2017, at which point Wisby was handed "a laptop and a patent".
Did they mean Oxford Sciences Enterprises? There's nothing called "Oxford Science and Innovation" on Google. Yes, it is just a typo oxfordscienceenterprises.com/news/meet-the-founder-ilana-wisby-ceo-of-oxford-quantum-circuits/ says it clearly:
I was headhunted by Oxford Sciences Enterprises to be the founding CEO of OQC.
Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain / Eternity Wall Updated +Created
This website used to allow embedding text messages with OP_RETURN, here's an archive from 2015: web.archive.org/web/20150718052659/http://eternitywall.it/
As of January 2024, it seems to read-only mode, where it simply indexes matching transactions that were made via other means: web.archive.org/web/20230929075331/https://eternitywall.it/
There were 3191 hits for the search term:
git grep '\bEW '
in our data starting with tx a3b3af21514bd79a4cbcac9916a8514636a72d813539192214542fd85247082e (2015-06-24):
EW Eternity wall is live
up to the last entry on tx 28820bc14cf2cfda58ecbc9ac6df3f41a1cb90f4246543f01ba42a5e9dac3cf8 (2023-06-15)
EW May our friendship endure, signed by hg, kty, wjj, and xyz.
no doubt initials of 4 Chinesepeople. A blood brother oath comes to mind, akin to the Oath of the Peach Garden. Will these four be the ones to take down the evil dictator Xi Jinping?
The very first message gives away the name of what we assume is a web-based upload system, "EW" being its advertisement signature added to every message.
Running bitcoin-cli:
bitcoin-core.cli getrawtransaction a3b3af21514bd79a4cbcac9916a8514636a72d813539192214542fd85247082e true
shows that the messages are encoded with OP_RETURN:
  "vout": [
    {
      "value": 0.00000000,
      "n": 0,
      "scriptPubKey": {
        "asm": "OP_RETURN 455720457465726e6974792077616c6c206973206c697665
Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain / Mt. Gox' shutdown Updated +Created
Mt. Gox was the first Cryptocurrency exchange in existence, and when it shutdowon in Febrauary 2014 because the website was crap and they got hacked, some people were not happy at all about their missing funds!
tx 0540b5dda23ee870330c6b1e18a88c592cf8d847c47f1dc1d5328f46115b12b3 (2014-02-25)
2014-02-25: The day Mt.Gox shut down. Farewell, may even you rest in peace!
tx c00a4a04905a2e8d8dee8a768165aa6bdf842413a8a648462a6349db89cd77f2 (2014-02-27) has an ASCII art of a seal, TODO understand meme:
        o
      / |
      | \
  .   |  |
.'\`  | \|
  | \_/ \ \
  \____/\/
<3 You Seals!
There are also a few Base58 messages referring to Mt Gox, the nicest and most expensive one being to burn addres:which as of 2025 holds 0.014537 BTC burnt on:
Many of these transactions also contain other quick messages, e.g.:
Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain / Nelson-Mandela.jpg Updated +Created
Figure 1.
Nelson-Mandela.jpg
. Source. Message:
"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." - Nelson Mandela Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, politician and philanthropist who served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. - Wikipedia Born: July 18, 1918, Mvezo, South Africa Died: December 5, 2013.
Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain / OnChainMonkey Updated +Created
From their site:
OCM Genesis is our flagship generative art collection that's set many historic precedents since its launch in 2021. Genesis is the first NFT collection where all 10,000 images and metadata (similar to DNA describing the NFT) were generated using code entirely on-chain in a single transaction on Ethereum. With the launch of Bitcoin Ordinals, Genesis is the first ever collection of 10,000 images to be inscribed on Bitcoin in 2023.
Some of their likely transactions were noted in our list of large transactions: github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-inscription-indexer/blob/master/data/payload_size_out e.g.:
004c3f1efa0095b229dd05ea247c94a5af742daf682fb082a6e62f4aeeb973f2 66033
ffc73ef454d512f98a451960e05a0a036406ed1078a1bd7082fd4036cf0af067 66021
but we haven't had the patience to index them properly yet. Boring art anyways.
Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain / Other blockchains Updated +Created
Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain / Quotes and threes Updated +Created
Starting tx 2f201c8518c7b012c03c2c82e40e86f6aaf616ea5fbe22570aac9d2c6611cb68 (2023-03-11), the chain is flooded with ASCII transactions containing many repeated double quotes " and digits 3, with some other characters interspersed in them without any clear pattern e.g. the first one:
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""jk""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""'}""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""/D""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""q1""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""XK""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
TODO what is up with that?
In that first trasaction the quotes appear as part of a multisig output script.
Corpuscular theory of light Updated +Created
The Quantum Story by Jim Baggott (2011) page 2 mentions how newton's support for the corpuscular theory of light led it to be held for a very long time, even when evidence of the wave theory of light was becoming overwhelming.
Cosmic microwave background Updated +Created
If you point a light detector to any empty area of the sky, you will still get some light.
The existence of this is quite mind blowing, since "there is nothing there emitting that light".
To make sense of how it is possible to see this light, you can think of the universe as the expanding raisin bread model, but it expands faster than light (thus the existence of the cosmological event horizon), so we are still receiving light form the middle, not the borders.
CMB is basically perfectly black-body radiation at 2.725 48 K, but it has small variations with variations of the order of 200 microKelvin: cosmic microwave background anisotropy.
Cosmopedia Updated +Created
Cosmopedia is a dataset of synthetic textbooks, blogposts, stories, posts and WikiHow articles generated by Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1.The dataset contains over 30 million files and 25 billion tokens, making it the largest open synthetic dataset to date.
Course of the University of Cambridge Updated +Created
Covering space Updated +Created
Basically it is a larger space such that there exists a surjection from the large space onto the smaller space, while still being compatible with the topology of the small space.
We can characterize the cover by how injective the function is. E.g. if two elements of the large space map to each element of the small space, then we have a double cover and so on.
C POSIX library Updated +Created
Exmples under c/posix:
C (programming language) Updated +Created
It gets the job done, but cannot make a large codebase DRY without insanity.
As of 2020, C is like Latin, and we are in the Middle Ages, where it has become a lingua franca.
It is interesting to note how late C appeared: 1972, compared e.g. to Fortran which is from 1957. This is basically because C was a "systems programming language", i.e. with focus on pointer manipulation, and because early computers were so weak, there was no operating system or many software layers in the early days. Fortran however was a numerical language, and it ran directly on bare metal, an application that existed before systems programming.
Examples under c.

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