ethereal ideas shimmering overhead

There was a short article in last month’s Harper’s (which I just found in my kitchen a few days ago) about a data center that Google is building in The Dalles, Oregon, a dessicated industrial town situated on the Columbia right around where the desert starts. (It’s kind of jarring to drive into it along the I-84: you go from majestic tree-lined hills to flat hot rolling nothingness and the skeletons of old factories.)

The energy consumption of the server farm will be approximately equal to the energy consumption of the city of Tacoma, and Google’s purchase of the property was contingent on an assurance of access to cheap hydroelectric power. The article also talks about how many other energy-intensive processing facilities like this are being built in countries with weak or non-existent environmental protections to keep energy costs down.

auditory plasticity

The paper I’m currently trying to read is depressingly incomprehensible to me, so I’m gonna cheat and backtrack a few weeks to something with fewer undefined mathematical terms. This [pdf] is a review paper about learning-induced plasticity in the auditory cortex.

Ok, so!

for SCIENCE!

I’m belatedly realizing that this wasn’t the best time to start a reading blog, since I also just started a programming class at PSU and now have even less time to read than I did before. I’ll try to write something later about a couple of cognitive imaging papers. In the meantime, I’ll fall back on the beloved Hollywood trick of glossing over a lack of content or depth by talking about sex!

I thought about this article yesterday while in the MRI scanner for the first time: Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal. I’m amazed they pulled it off — it’s pretty cramped in there! I guess they did remove the table to make it more spacious. This testimonial by one of the women involved is pretty awesome.

A search for “MRI orgasm” on Medline turned up a paltry 7 results, one of which was this: Tooth-brushing epilepsy with ictal orgasms. Vast untapped potential for study here, people! Get it together!

Oregon’s healthcare lottery

Ugh. This is horrible in so many subtle and multifaceted ways. For me, it immediately brings up flashbacks of doing options counseling and helping broke women and girls figure out how they were going to pay for an abortion.

elegant variations and all that

Here’s an article I found while reading about the guy whose quote inspired my blog title. It’s a review of his revised edition of Fowler’s guide to modern english usage, which was originally one of the most staunchly prescriptivist style guides in existence, and which Burchfield substantially (and controversially) reworked in accordance with his more descriptivist philosophy.

Based on this article, Fowler sounds fucking hilarious, often unintentionally so. Just check out this melodramatic list of fire-and-brimstone adjectives culled from this article alone: linguistic errors are absurd! Ludicrous! Wrong! Ugly! Needless! Barbaric! Worse than electrocution! Inexcusable! Fit for parrots!

…fit for parrots is definitely my favorite. I’m stealing that.