Skipped out of work to meet some old friends for lunch downtown and see some of the South-By sights.

I read Barry Ritholtz’s “Ritholtz’s Reads” in Bloomberg every day.  Today’s reads are nearly all worth a look:

Fake News, Obsessions and Life-Changers

From Deutsche Welle:

Clocks in Europe are running late because of the Kosovo conflict

For weeks, digital clocks in Europe have been lagging behind. The unexpected source of the problem: Kosovo and Serbia, whose power grid operators can’t find common ground.

I have read quite a bit on blockchain / cryptocurrencies and can’t say I ever understood what all the fuss is about.  I have joked that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have all the disadvantages of a credit card combined with all the disadvantages of cash.    I believe the original goal (like PayPal) was to make a new payment system.  Lots of the claims and directions the technology has taken since then seem … unusual, at least to me.  A good write up from The Verge:

‘BLOCKCHAIN’ IS MEANINGLESS

One quote I liked:

“‘Private blockchain’ is just a confusing name for a shared database,” wrote Arvind Narayanan, an assistant computer science professor at Princeton who co-teaches a popular blockchain class on Coursera.

For my money, the funniest movie ever made.  But I was a fan of the Cohen Brothers already and went in expecting something different.  I also recall reading a review in a local paper before I saw the movie that said something like “looking for the point is to miss the point entirely”.  From the Washington Post:

‘The Big Lebowski’ is 20. We reached out to the critics who panned it to see what they think now.

All sorts of things happening around here.  Horns win a big one in overtime against WV, Saw Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds and had some good food.

A good on from the London Review of Books on Brexit:

What are they after?

William Davies writes about the Tory Brexiteers