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On Thursday 18 September 2008 from 11:30-1pm CDT at Savvis’ main office, the St. Louis chapter of IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) is presenting a talk on Next-Generation Broadband Networks. More details on the event can be found at http://ewh.ieee.org/r5/stlouis/com/. The office can be located through this Google map entry.

Let me know if you’re coming, and I’ll try to say hello.

Cory Doctorow recently authored an article for Nature News called Big data: Welcome to the petacentre in which he discusses three big datacenters, including the Wellcome-Sanger, XS4ALL, and CERN facilities.

As a technologist for a datacenter operator, it’s always fun to read this sort of thing. An excerpt:

I am, admittedly, prone to swooning over a well-designed bit of IT kit, but I have never developed as deep and meaningful and instantaneous a relationship as the one I formed with the two tape-loading robots in the basement of the CERN data centres.

Cory also posted photos from the trip in his Flickr set called petacentres, including a photo of his tape-robot amour:

Eve Ensler wrote an article about Sarah Palin called Drill, Drill, Drill for The Huffington Post. It has a brilliant opening:

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks.

and goes on to say:

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God’s plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin’s view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, “It was a task from God.”

In honor of the successful LHC First Beam (webcast available at http://webcast.cern.ch/), and looking forward to the First Collision coming in about a month, here is a quote from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers
exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will
instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more
bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already
happened.