Month: May 2009

A load of hot air

(Even more than usual from me, that is.)

When I read this article about a proposed data centre, I had mixed reactions.

The immediate ones were positive – well done, Ken and well done Telehouse for being sensible and having the foresight to realise what you could view as waste is actually a valuable resource, and so looking after the environment a bit better. (I know Ken’s not the mayor any more, but the rules were introduced when he was. 🙂 )

Then I was reminded of a friend who used to work for or do some consulting for British Sugar. They had a similar problem – their main activity (creating refined sugar etc.) produced lots of waste heat. They used this to heat greenhouses on site, and so grow tomatoes, which is a good bit of lateral thinking I think.

But then I compared the two sources of the waste heat – a factory and a data centre. How much has the UK moved away from its industrial past? The shift of the economy towards financial services has been highlighted by the recent stupid bankers saga – are we putting too many of our eggs in this basket? How much do we depend on the rest of the world (e.g. China) to do the unfashionable jobs i.e. make things? Do we realise the full social and environmental costs of this?

Also, it reminded me of the physical side of modern computing. We usually see our home PC as this shiny tidy portal into a huge amazing world of useful and/or fun stuff like online shopping, email, online banking, searching for and getting information quickly and easily. This is all true, but all this virtual-ness has physical underpinnings. The chips in all these computers were etched using nasty, nasty things like Hydrofluoric acid and contain arsenic and other unpleasant things. The big data centres run by the like of Google consume so much electricity they need to be built near power stations. When all these computers are got rid of (which, due to Moore’s law, is often fairly quickly) the cadmium, lead etc. put into them when they are made doesn’t always get disposed of safely.

I’m not saying all this to guilt anyone into not using their computer, just to bring in all the information when decisions are made. As I said, lots of hot air – time to put my brain to something more useful.

I heart wikipedia

I got back from Germany on Thursday evening, and while I’d been busy and getting tired doing work stuff, Katy and the children had been busy and getting tired doing lots of Home Ed. stuff plus dog sitting plus getting Kentwell costumes ready for the big checking / organising day on Saturday.

This meant Friday was late, doing final preparations, and Saturday started early to get there on time. As a result I was unpleasant company – and large crowds and important bureaucracy didn’t help. But all our costumes were approved and I didn’t make too much of a mess with the extra bureaucracy thrust upon me by my head of station not being there, so that was OK. What is stressing me somewhat is that for the 2 weeks I’m going to be in charge of the gate there will be a trebuchet someone’s making, a 200 lb pull crossbow someone’s bringing, and two blokes asked for an area to be fenced off so that they could fight without hurting the guests…

Sunday morning imploded due to my continued grumpiness and our general busy-ness up to that point. We turned it into a pottering and catching up day at home, which for Katy and me obviously meant playing with Ikea shelves. (Taking the shelves out of the house to the workshop and replacing the house ones with other shelves.) K and L played, including some den building.

J got out a kit for making glow slime, which was good cookery-style science and he enjoyed doing it and also the result. K and L spectated and they experimented with using food colouring as well as the provided colouring and produced a second lot that looked unpleasantly like offal.

This morning I looked up his ingredients online, and got some stuff on wikipedia. Polyvinyl alcohol (PVOH) is otherwise known as PVA as in the glue, although his stuff was clear which fooled me. Tetraborate solution is otherwise known as borax, which we already had for Kentwell aprons.

The way that the borax works is it creates links between the PVA molecules. This got me to vulcanisation, which I now understand – it was previously one of those embarrassing things that occasionally gets mentioned and you have a tiny idea about and hope no-one asks you about because you think everyone else knows about. Anyway, now I know enough to be dangerous!