November 2011
154 posts
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The Utah teapot is a 3D model created in 1975 by Martin Newell which has become a standard reference object in the computer graphics community. It is a simple, round, partially concave mathematical model of an ordinary teapot. The objective of Utanalog by Unfold is to return the iconographic teapot to its roots as a piece of functional dish-ware while showing its status as an icon of the digital world.
Unfold - Projects - Utanalog, Ceramic Utah Teapot
Utah Teapot (teaproof version) by unfold — Thingiverse
(via @bashford and Dries Verbruggen)
TO satisfy our ever-growing need for computing power, many technology companies have moved their work to data centers with tens of thousands of power-gobbling servers. Concentrated in one place, the servers produce enormous heat. The additional power needed for cooling them — up to half of the power used to run them — is the steep environmental price we have paid to move data to the so-called cloud.
[…]
The paper looks at how the servers — though still operated by their companies — could be placed inside homes and used as a source of heat. The authors call the concept the “data furnace.”
“I was a guest at Trinity College Dublin recently, and there was a talk, the night before my own, on Darwin’s influence on Joyce, given by a “genetic critic”. These guys look at progressive handwritten draft phases of literary texts, how they change from one stage to the next, and correlate these with correspondence and notebooks and so on. So you can see exactly when Joyce read Darwin, and then how phrases like “ouragan of spaces” find their way into the Wake manuscript. It’s very interesting. Afterwards I was chatting with the speaker and cockily asked him: “So what are you going to do with me, then?” ie with my generation, given that there’ll be little or no paper trail. He said: “Dude, we have software that can reconstruct every keystroke you made since the beginning of time – MacBook, floppy discs, the lot.”
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Tom McCarthy: My desktop | Books | guardian.co.uk
(Worth noting here too that the Guardian Review used to run a series called “Writer’s Rooms”, which I analysed back in 2007. The desktop as writer’s room is a near-perfect update.)
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