I confess. I was going to do this. I had a program written, as bencoder put it, intended for "trying to find a collision by brute force generating bitcoin addresses." But then a friend of mine calculated the odds and said that the time and hardware investment was worse than regular old bitcoin mining. Then he arrogantly tried to insult me further by declaring that, moreso, this brute force thing was actually less profitable than if I built my own physical mining equipment and set out to mine platinum from the icy south pole.
Now, you all should know that I'm not for doing things the easy way. Sure, you could mine platinum elsewhere, but I'll be damned if anyone's going to think that I took the easy way out by sitting on my ass doing virtual mining for bitcoins or by mining precious metals near the comfort of my own house. Do I look lazy to you guys?
I thought this Antarctic mining proposal was a great idea and was taking it as a personal challenge. I bought tons of scrap metal, welding equipment, and various used engine and hydraulic gear and built myself a real god damn miner. It was a giant machine made for doing only one thing: fucking up the earth like the bitch owed me money and then sluicing out the precious metals, again, like the bitch owed me money. I called it "Earth-Humper 4000" but then changed the name to "Jim". See, Jim was 200 tons and I have a fat friend named Jim who weighs about 2000 quarter-pounders with cheese. Jim also took dumps like a truck, what what. Yeah, that man has a cavernous colon.
I sold my house and bought a crappy old soviet icebreaker boat. By "bought," I actually mean that I paid some grizzled old portmaster to look the other way while the recently-mothballed boat somehow disappeared from the scrapyard. I also got a nice dog from the pound, because every ship needs a dog to bark at seagulls, growl at whales, and spontaneously bite the crew for my own entertainment. I didn't want no cute puppy thing or some fluffy ball-fetching wimp, so I picked the dog that all the other dogs looked at nervously, like he was going to shank them at any time with a sharpened dog bone. If you want a dog like this, the key thing to look for is a bunch of dogs packed into a kennel, and then another equally-large kennel with one isolated motherfucker in it. This mofo wasn't even barking like all the other yippy mutts. He just sat in the corner and looked at me as if to say "Hey, pal, maybe we partner up and go fuck some shit up together? You spring me out of here and we could break this town." In my mind, he has a Brooklyn accent.
Then me and Jim (the machine, not the fatass) sailed down to Antarctica with the dog who I had named "Dog." The ship and Jim were fueled by diesel that my crew of zodiac-riding pirates (AKA unpaid interns) stole from rich pleasure-cruisers along the way. Not one to sit around on a boat like some cocksucker, I turned a third of the boat into a marijuana grow-op. I don't smoke the shit. I need to keep my mind sharp at all times, knife at the ready. The only things I smoke are cigars and rifle barrels. I sold the yield on Silk Road for bitcoins.
I turned another third of the boat into one of the first and largest mobile distilleries in the world. Why? Because I'll damned if I'm going to go down to where this fucking planet keeps its stock of ice and not have copious volumes of whiskey at the ready. None of that surface ice, either. Jim was going to dig me down hundreds of feet to that crystal-clear prehistoric ice. This was ice from the time of the last snowball earth. I'll be damned if I'm going to waste my whiskey on "new" ice that was made during this modern age of morons and fuckwads. Ice is better if it came from when men were hairy cro-magnons who killed twelve-ton hairy mammoths just so they could eat a fresh steak, carve a big-breasted woman from a hunk of tusk, and let the rest of the meat rot as a warning to other species that in the next few millenia humans were about to fuck their shit up.
The other third of the ship was decorated like the interior of the ship from the 1986 movie, Flight of the Navigator starring Paul Reubens.
We pushed through the coastal ice to McMurdo station. Antarctica at last. I sold whiskey and pot and made friends with many bearded men and a few bearded women. I lost the ship in a game of poker, however. Deep down, that was my subconscious intention. Manly men tend to succeed when there's no easy way out, and I consider myself to be at least 2/3rds manly. But McMurdo wasn't the real Antarctic. It was on some shitty island named after that pussy, Ross, from Friends. I'll be damned if I'm going to strike it rich near there. Thus Jim was warmed up, fueled up, and fired up. His engines were loud enough to scare away all wildlife, giving me the side benefit of fucking over the hippy cetologists who were busy jerking off to the nearby whales. It was hard to leave, because this 200 ton monster could have torn apart McMurdo like Godzilla, but Jim lumbered over the ice sheet to the mainland and began the long trek to the South Pole research station.
Driving Jim on glacial ice was like steering a hot dick through butter. I can't think of another analogy, but Jim's weight and heat carved a small valley all the way from the coast to the pole, which has all sorts of sexual innuendo. I had to drive Jim fast to avoid melting myself into an inescapable hole. Two hundred tons of murderous steel flew along in the desert cold with a driver who couldn't see a damn thing and was hungry for the sweet platinum ores that awaited him. Jim, being forged for the singular purpose of earth-raping, had just one thick-paned plexiglass window, so I navigated mainly by GPS for all 833 miles. If I accidentally hit a snow-mountain, Jim's massive inertia would turn it instantly into a white cloud, like a meteor had struck the snow. This occasional demonstration of epic power kept me and my crew entertained for the trip.
Finally, I pulled into the the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. By "pulled into" I mean that I just happened to notice Jim turning abandoned buildings on the outskirts of the station into splinters. The station residents were rather surprised to see me and the crew, to say the least, and had lots of questions and complaints about Jim hulking up the place. I told them I didn't have time for their south pole shenanigans. So, after some of my crew abandoned me out of, as they put it, "terror", I found a nice spot outside of town and stopped Jim. On the dashboard was a red button under a glass case. I rechecked my geology maps to see if I was in a good spot, and then flipped up the case and hit the button.
Jim was angry. He began chewing through the ice beneath us. Pulverized ice was thrown around us in a circle and Jim began a slow, noisy descent into the earth. He dug a long, slanted tunnel over the course of several days, but I had still not seen ground. Where was the ore? The ore was still beneath us. On the third day, Jim reached a mile of depth. He began sputtering from the extreme cold and the lack of fresh air at the bottom of the hole. Jim was made for surface mining, his engines sucking in air and pumping out smoke while I counted the money. We were well below the surface and deeper than I had planned. Jim died that day.
Now, in hind-sight, I see that I made a simple mistake: I didn't consult Wikipedia. I wasn't about to let "facts" ruin my expedition. Hell, I was there to piss all over the "facts" that were declared by my friend about the odds of my striking it rich. Facts ruin everything. It turns out that one of these so-called "facts" on Wikipedia is that the ice at the South pole is over 9000 feet thick. I'm not making a limp-dicked meme reference here, it really is slightly over 9000 feet deep. Damn you, facts!
I was trapped at the bottom of a massive hole and, mentally, made up several jokes about the deepness of the hole being akin to someone's mother's vagina, but there was nobody left to insult. The crew of interns had died at various times along the way and for various reasons, from freezing to death, getting mauled by Jim or Dog, suicide, or in an act of mutiny that I, Jim, and Dog just couldn't let go unpunished. None were left alive, but don't quote me on that because it's not like I looked around before leaving.
How did I leave? Well, it turns out that Jim was pregnant with a little Jimlet. He carried a small emergency ice tractor, and I didn't tell anyone for fear that they'd want to use it. Also, even though Jim was a big machine, I felt that him having a Jimlet somehow made him less manly. Dog and I crawled into the Jimlet and made our way back to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. As we arrived, there was a bit of a frenzy. One of the scientists had had a stroke.
Now, all of my crew of interns had been wimpy dudes. They were idiots without breasts or vaginas or anything interesting for me to look at or care about. But I'll be damned if someone lets a woman die on my watch, and this was a woman scientist! So there she was, stricken (or whatever the past tense of stroke is) and at the South Pole. Raytheon and the National Science Foundation, who are the big swinging dicks who run the show, decided that, despite the declaration of medical doctors at the site, this wasn't a medical emergency.
That was over a month ago, and it's still not considered a medical emergency. Now, I don't know Raytheon's definition of "medical emergency" but if I had a stroke and was, say, in Seattle, it would be considered a medical emergency approximately as urgent as being shot through the eye socket with a crossbow. This urgency would exist even long after the actual stroke. See, the brain tends to flip off the rest of the body after a stroke and just gets fatter and fatter, swelling up like my friend Jim (the human). Then it explodes or something, but the point is that the emergency doesn't just go away. The problem doesn't disappear even if you suggest dark ages medicine such as bloodletting and skull-drilling surgeries with rusty South pole tools.
Any minute now, I expect to hear a large cracking noise from when her cranial pressure, which has been increasing this past month, finally breaks through her skull and Raytheon realizes that maybe this is a life-threatening medical emergency. Hell, they have the ability, the rescue plan, the weather is fine, and the cost of a rescue is expensive, but is built into the cost of doing business at the south pole and getting paid shittons of federal grant money to run the place.
That's where the story ends, poorly. The last part is real. There really is a woman who had a stroke and is stuck at the South Pole because of bureaucracy and greed, waiting patiently either for her brain to swell up and kill her or for this to actually be classified as a medical emergency.
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/09/stroke_victim_not_evacuated_fr.phphttp://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/kw9uc/a_friend_of_a_friend_who_is_a_scientist_in/Oh well. It's not like a massive military contractor ever gave a flying fuck about people's lives when money is to be had.
