Bill Gates has made some of Richard Feynman’s lecture videos available at Microsoft’s Project Tuvo site. These are his Cornell lectures of 1964, and address his insights on the “character of physical law.”
Of all the people who ever lived, Feynman is the one I most wish I could have met. He was not only brilliant, but had an extremely strong curiosity that worked synergistically with his brilliance. Plus, he just had a way of seeing and explaining things that was uncanny. One of my favorite books of all time is his Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)
Here are two fascinating stories on Google’s efforts to save energy in operating their data centers:
- GigaOM talks about how Google can shift operations from one data center to another half-way around the globe, during peak energy-use times. Quoting a piece from the article “Miller calls it a ‘follow-the-moon’ strategy because a company with a larger number of data centers could shift computing around the globe so processes are completed at night when the temperature is lower and cooling costs are cheaper.” I do not know how many megawatts a data center uses, but I am sure it is several. Hence, this is a way to save significant energy.
- Even more information on Google’s “Green Data Centers” is provided in this Google article: Data Center Efficiency Measurements.
Although not as high-powered as the above articles, I was intrigued by the author of the Daring Fireball saying that he is using VMware Fusion 2.0 to experiment with the Live Android “netbook” OS release, using his Mac. I may try that out myself. Sounds interesting.
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