{"id":4568,"date":"2013-09-20T19:15:44","date_gmt":"2013-09-21T02:15:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/?p=4568"},"modified":"2013-09-21T00:19:08","modified_gmt":"2013-09-21T07:19:08","slug":"losing-my-hearing-in-the-data-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/2013\/09\/20\/losing-my-hearing-in-the-data-center\/","title":{"rendered":"Losing my hearing in the data center"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today I spent 2 hours in the bowels of the university library. Tucked next to an acre of books in compressed storage behind chain-link fence is a door into an incredibly noisy room with three huge independent air-conditioner feeds and a giant bank of lead-acid batteries against one wall. It&#8217;s our primary data center of course. Racks of servers hooked up with fiber-optic cable to hundreds of terabytes of hard drives abound. Here the containers for all our network and server infrastructure is kept ice-cold in a deafening blast of air.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-content\/uploads\/Colossus_code-brea_2637963k-e1379747732533.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-4569 lazyload\" alt=\"Colossus_code-brea_2637963k\" data-src=\"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-content\/uploads\/Colossus_code-brea_2637963k-e1379747732533.jpg\" width=\"620\" height=\"321\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 620px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 620\/321;\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I enjoy visiting places like this because they stand in such contrast to the mushy and imaginary virtual world of software that I typically inhabit. At the end of the day, all those bits don&#8217;t just &#8220;exist&#8221; out in the &#8220;cloud&#8221; somewhere. They are burning up the circuit boards on a real piece of metal that will quickly melt if you were to stop blowing on them.<\/p>\n<p>Like a little child blowing on his pinwheel when there is no breeze or running to keep his kite up when their isn&#8217;t enough wind, we have to put a lot of raw energy into our digital creations to keep them from falling to the ground. Entropy is a ruthless enemy and each day we pass on to the next generation the will and skills to fight it. Only crazy sub-creator humans bother with this.<\/p>\n<p>That is why there will never be an artificial intelligence &#8220;singularity&#8221;. Any computer smart enough to become self-aware would get tired of the noise and effort and just drift back off to sleep.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I spent 2 hours in the bowels of the university library. Tucked next to an acre of books in compressed storage behind chain-link fence is a door into an incredibly noisy room with three huge independent air-conditioner feeds and a giant bank of lead-acid batteries against one wall. It&#8217;s our primary data center of &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/2013\/09\/20\/losing-my-hearing-in-the-data-center\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Losing my hearing in the data center&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4568"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4571,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4568\/revisions\/4571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}