> Creating false narratives like they use huge amounts of water, when in fact the cooling is a closed loop system and use less water than a single busy restaurant
My understanding was that often multiple cooling methods are employed and the ratio of use shifts seasonally; however, that evaporative cooling was still primary method, especially in hotter climates like CA and AZ.
Can you help me understand what type of data center (size, location, etc) uses less water than a busy restaurant?
Microsoft CEO Nadella just recently said their Fairwater (315-acre facility in Wisconsin) only uses around the same amount of water as a single restaurant over the course of an entire year.
> I remember figuring all this out as a self-taught teenager (pre-internet) with some books, a whole lot of time […] but man did it make me feel like I accomplished something magical.
As a parent with kids in college, high school, and middle school, I lament (worry about?) how many obstacles youth now have reaching this dynamic. That thread of curiosity, discovery, struggle, and sense of accomplishment (or just learnings) is so profoundly formative. I’ve had mixed success creating space for it across my kids, but I sure miss the “pointless” threads I followed b/c of empty time when I was a kid.
Heh. I’m not in the trades, but ~15 years ago I decided to rock/tape/mud ~800sqft of my house myself… to top it off, my lighting design included wall grazing lights and a satin sheen finish and another wall that gets hit lengthwise for 10’ at sunset. That was a long, long period that tested my sanity and marriage. It was probably good enough after first pass, but my standards were far beyond unreasonable and I had to live with results.
I eventually got rather good, albeit slow, and now can easily finish a wall where you can’t find butt or tapered seams with a flashlight, with minimal sanding. It took many hundreds of hours over the years, and a clear idea of what the bar was, for me to get there. The results still bring me joy, but more also the intuition built up around working with mud translated to a quick ramp up for more ambitious projects with stucco and concrete.
The trick with drywall is to avoid all the extra effort. Your drive for the perfect surface limited your options when, at the beginning you had a universe of potential outcomes. You chose for it to become monotonically flat.
When my mom was in her late 60's having never done any work with drywall or mud, taping, floating, etc and attempting to make lemonade out of a situation where every room in the house was being sheetrocked because Dad was actively using some of his many skills to convert their house into a home, she became creative and produced a collection of decorative walls that anyone could admire.
There are rag-rolled walls with layers of colors over imperfect textures. There are walls painted a neutral background color and then combed with spectacular streaks. Some rooms are wavy and others are vertical lines. She layered colors and textures because the drywall, after all the work was done had textural flaws and places where use of a single color would make all the imperfections pop like Shiprock from the New Mexico plain. It was hard making 1/4" (6.3mm) drywall hide all the changes to the structure and the shiplap that had happened in the 80 years (80 years) since the house was built.
My favorite walls are in a hallway with nearly 10' (~3m) ceilings. She used a variable depth texture, thicker than anywhere else in the house and knocked relatively flat though with plenty of knife swirls randomly distributed. In the heavy texture she used a leaf print to impress hundreds of oak leaves from floor to ceiling in random orientations as if they are all falling. The colors are autumn colors with a light base and darker accents that create additional shadowing. It really is beautiful and is quite original.
Every time I walk that hallway I hear:
The leaves are falling all around, time I was on my way.
Thanks to you I'm much obliged for such a pleasant stay.
But now it's time for me to go. The autumn moon lights my way.
With the original oak hardwood floor painted a nice checkerboard pattern and the trim all Dad's handiwork it is really great.
I don't mind the old walls in my house with their lumps and bumps, but I do mind the half assed drywall job I hired out with poorly sanded joints, oversized electrical cutouts and other flaws.
Id love to develop the skill for drywall, but then amount of mess and dust it creates is too much for me and my SO. Even if I did it off site, taking a shower and changing clothes every time is a hassle.
Yes. The fine dust gets everywhere. Imagine rolling around in the sand at the beach, but 10x worse. Skiing, what, you turn the corner of the mountain and there's a snow maker running full bore at you so you're a little bit cold but then the snow melts into water when you do get inside. You're all suited up but it's okay because it's cold outside. You could wear a tyvek suit to do drywall, but then you're sweating too much to do the job.
Due South… now there’s a name I have not heard in many years.
Youth in the 90’s had all sorts of quirky content available and we had enough free time to consume it all while doing a lot of nothing along the way (in a good way).
I was reminded of Due South a few years ago, because I was visiting someone who was watching it. Nowhere near as bizarre as TP or Northern Exposure, but it was there. Twin Peaks definitely opened the way for less formulaic material.
Even Malcolm in the Middle had some quirky Alaskan side plot with one of the brothers going over there and marrying a native woman.
FWIW, ST:TNG only used the faux 3D effect for the season that aired on the year of Star Trek’s 25th anniversary. Subsequent seasons reverted to the 2d text.
I was going to make a joke that they should have just taken a page from the military and said “Rapid Unscheduled Maintenance”, but I guess that’s actually the phrase for it.
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