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Welcome to ANI In the Air, Under the Sky, By the Fire, and Around Baltimore, your daily podcast briefing of all the goings ons, ins and rounds, arts and ideas, Sudbury School.
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So today was Monday, March 8th. First day of another great week here. Starts off cold, but should be looking like a pretty nice day, or week I should say.
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Maybe even up to the 70s by the end of the week.
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We have our first fully vaccinated staff as of Saturday. Caroline just got her second shot.
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On Friday, Phil and I will get our shot. And then next Wednesday, Ashley gets hers. So soon we'll have fully vaccinated staff all around.
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And let's see, what else? Announcements today. It's announced about the Visionary Art Museum races. And let's see, what else?
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There'll be a discussion in school meeting about whether we think we might be able to do a camping trip at the end of the year. So the end of the year will be in June.
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So hopefully things will be good by then.
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And let's see, we'll probably have some other discussions going on in the school meeting tomorrow, so it might be good to attend. It'll be the same team as last week.
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We had JC today, two cases, both involving the social distancing, about being far enough away from each other.
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It's, you know, masks are really going well, but man, distancing is hard.
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And we currently have a bat and tennis ball being played in the field.
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It's nice. There was some frisbee throwing earlier.
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And today was Monday, so we had a nice long staff meeting discussing things. I believe our agenda went to 17 items. Hard at work.
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A lot of it had to do with, well, some of it had to do with various COVID pieces of information that we've been gathering.
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Looks like we're pretty much on target for doing the right things and some stuff about admissions.
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Visiting weeks will be coming up soon and, you know, things are looking good.
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We're having some people returning and we're reaching out to some others to see when they might be willing to return.
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And hopefully all of that will go very well very shortly.
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So, yeah, I think that's a good summary of the day. Lots of good activity.
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Wood room is being used nowadays. Some good music being played and lots of all the usual things.
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Lots of talking, lots of game playing, computer game playing, hanging out and wondering about the mysteries of the world.
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All right. What else? Oh, yes. So today is Monday. Millions Monday. So I thought I'd talk just a little bit about crypto art.
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So for those who are not familiar with that, it's a relatively new concept of basically assigning ownership to pieces of digital work.
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You know, obviously the work itself can be seen by anybody. It's just, you know, copied around. But, you know, there's kind of a notion of actual ownership.
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All of that sounds fine. Sounds like a nice way of for artists, digital artists in particular, to be making some money.
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The problem is, though, that uses, well, something like Bitcoin called Ethereum, this block chain idea where to verify transactions takes a lot of energy.
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And so there's a cool little Web site called Crypto Art WTF, where loaded up and it shows you the amount of energy used for particular crypto art transaction stuff.
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I've seen typical things of two to 400 kilowatt hours. And you might wonder, what is that? What is a kilowatt hour?
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How much energy is that? Well, to put it into context, watts are measure power energy per time, particularly joules per second.
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And lots of things are measured in watts. So like a light bulb used to be, you know, like 100 watts would be like a bright light bulb.
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Nowadays, of course, we use LEDs and so they're more like 10 or 20 watts. A kilowatt hour is 1000 watts used over the period of an hour.
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So how much does a general household use? Well, you know, that can be a little bit tricky to compute, because, you know, obviously there are times when there's a lot of energy being used, such as for stoves.
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Maybe some, you know, heaters may come in periodically, air conditioners, seasonal things happen, all sorts of variations like that.
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But just to give a certain sense of the measures, if you used one kilowatt for an hour, then, you know, for the entire month, well, a month has 30 times 24 hours.
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And so that's like 720 hours. So if you use one kilowatt hour, you know, an hour, one kilowatt, yeah, you'd be using 720 kilowatt hours a month.
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As it turns out, that's not a bad estimate. Apparently, average kilowatt usage really varies from state to state, possibly season to season too.
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I've seen ranges from something like 500 kilowatt hours a month to 1000 kilowatt hours.
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All right, so that's going to almost 2000 kilowatt hours, I think. So that's a rough measure of energy usage.
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Now, crypto art, if you go to this website, basically, every time you you sell something using this method, it has to be kind of verified in transactions.
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And so it's hashed this thing called hashing. Now, one could do that very quickly and efficiently.
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But that robs it of the value of having done this. This is supposed to be a very hard computation to be done.
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That's what makes it valuable, I guess. And so in particular, the energy used for just a single piece of crypto art, I've seen it 200 kilowatt hours, 500 kilowatt hours.
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So we're talking a significant chunk of energy over its lifetime of crypto stuff. So that is what crypto art is doing to our environment, just using up a lot of energy.
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Estimates are that the amount of energy being used in this process might be the equivalent of a small country usage, I guess over a year.
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So, yeah, I just thought I'd bring that up. If you want to know more about it, certainly go to the cryptoart.wtf website. And I might also post some links soon to some other articles, because I think that's cool.
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I might talk about an article club. I don't really know. But I think it's just fascinating this idea of, you know, digital art and trying to make some money from it all sounds good.
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And then it's just like it does this horrible thing of wasting all this energy for no real reason.
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There is a question of, you know, to what extent is this energy comparable to other activities that might replace it. But ideally, we would be reducing that energy as well.
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So there you go. I guess that's that. All right. You all have a good day and I will see you when I see you.