June 2011 Archives

Wouldn't it have been more radical for Apple to double down on an actual town? [...] 

A recent New Yorker profile of John Lasseter and Pixar, once owned by Jobs, emphasized the importance for their corporate culture of chance encounters. But in these corporate motherships, and on these corporate campuses, those chance encounters are only employee to employee. What about chance encounters with the rest of the world? Apple's employees are already in a number of existing Cupertino buildings, and Jobs indicated the room for 12,000 in the ring would not be enough. A) This sounds like they are about to willfully create second-class citizens outside the ring and B) couldn't strategic architectural insertions, renovations, reuses be made in Cupertino or some other town so that Apple employess might still dwell among us?

At Tuesday's open house Hamilton displayed a slide of modular data centers, including the Amazon Perdix. The unit appears to be a custom-built unit that is wider and taller than standard ISO containers. While it's hard to glean much from the exterior, vents at the side and top suggest cooling is managed in the upper section of the unit, which is air-cooled. Why Perdix? It's the name of a character in Greek mythology known for inventing useful tools.

It is a collection of books that have fallen out of routine circulation and been acquired for their visual content. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles, and given new life as a resource for artists, writers, cultural archeologists, and other interested parties.

"We're talking 30 tonnes of books. The weight of the books is pulling the house apart," she said. "We are kind of at a standstill. I work at two jobs. My husband is a full-time student. We have three kids and no time. And no money. And so we're at the point now where were looking at having to burn some of the books ourselves." 

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Peter Campbell i London Review of Books (via: Maud Newton) om tidig sumerisk mobil-kultur:

Held in the hand, a typical cuneiform tablet is about the same weight and shape as an early mobile phone. Hold it as though you were going to text someone and you hold it the way the scribe did; a proverb had it that 'a good scribe follows the mouth.' Motions of the stylus made the tiny triangular indentations of cuneiform characters in the clay. The actions would have been much quicker and more precise, but otherwise rather like the pecks you make at a phone keypad.

Started in 1921, the dictionary was created over the years by about 85 employees writing on millions of index cards in up to five large offices at the school's Oriental Institute at University Avenue and 58th Street.