Taking a Stand Against a Giant Data Center... in Utah

Thanks to Bill Lindeke for pointing me to this Guardian article on a giant Stratos data center that was recently approved by commissioners in a Utah county. It would be larger than Manhattan Island and will use 9GW of electricity. That's more than all of the electricity Utah currently uses. Its Shark Tank celebrity backer says they'll build their own clean energy to add to the grid, but he somehow doesn't seem to know that fossil gas is not "clean."

The data center will also, of course, use a large amount of water in a state that is not known as a water paradise, and has specifically been in a drought recently.

And get this: 

The network of industrial-scale fans needed to cool the datacenter’s hot pipes will result in so much waste heat that it could raise daytime temperatures in the surrounding Hansel valley by 2F to 5F (1.1C to 2.7C) and night-time temperatures by 8F to 12F (4.4C to 6.6C), according to an analysis by Rob Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University.

Not surprisingly, there has been huge push back from residents against the build. They have filed for

a referendum to reverse the commissioners’ approval of Stratos. If the group is able to collect 5,422 signatures from registered voters in the county in the next 45 days, the project approval will go to a vote in November.

Utah's governor, Spencer Cox, is quoted as saying, "Industry* is our state’s motto," but also that he will make sure to "require that the Stratos project doesn’t harm the Great Salt Lake or raise power bills."

His waffling sounds a lot like Minnesota Republicans promising that mining in or near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area won't affect the water there or in nearby communities, as they work to please corporate interests and billionaire owners. 

How will they guarantee that? The answer is, they won't. They'll let the project go forward and then hope people forget, once it's in place.

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* Industry, as in the Utah motto, did not mean modern-day corporate industry. When it became the motto, it would have meant something closer to the original meanings of the word: habitual diligence or effort, which came from the Latin industria, which meant diligence, activity, or zeal. 

Kind of the opposite of how people use AI. 

Impenetrable English

This morning for some reason, the phrase "pick up where we left off" popped into my head, and I realized it's one of those English (American?) idioms that would be impenetrable to someone new to the language.

"Pick up" in general is mysterious. According to etymonline, the verb phrase is from the 14th century, and relates to the idea of using fingers (as in picking) to lift or take up. The idea of casually obtaining (like "pick up a few things") dates from the early 16th century. The sexual meaning — which naive me had totally forgotten about — is from the very late 17th century. Its use to mean improving gradually is from the mid-18th century, while gaining speed doesn't come until the 1920s. 

Tidying up is from around the beginning of the U.S. Civil War, and the cops wouldn't have picked you up until about 10 years after that. One usage the site doesn't mention is pickup basketball. And then there's the question of whether it's two words or one when it's a noun or an adjective, or how adjectival uses become nouns (as in the way "pickup truck" becomes just "pickup"). 

Despite this substantial list of uses, none of these have the meaning of "start again," as in "pick up where we left off."

Then there's "left off." That doesn't even rate a page on etymonline. 

The main use I can think of for that phrase is something like "left off a list." I'm having trouble thinking of another example that uses "left off" to mean "stopped or stopped temporarily." 

But probably any adult native speaker of American English would know what "pick up where we left off" means, despite the fact that it's illogical that it should make any sense at all.

Talking Minnesota Turkeys

Minnesota has more than 70,000 wild turkeys, including a substantial number of urban turkeys. They live here in Saint Paul (and Minneapolis), where their traffic-stopping ways are well known. I just learned they even have an Instagram account at the University of Minnesota.

A few weeks ago, Minnesota Public Radio informed me that the wild turkey population of Minnesota was extirpated back in the 19th century and was only reintroduced in the 1970s from just 29 birds, which were brought from Kansas. They were released in Houston County in the southeastern part of the state.

These thousands and thousands of turkeys are the descendants of fewer than 30 individuals. Talk about a genetic bottleneck. 

According to the Minnesota DNR, we're not supposed to feed turkeys (so keep track of what falls off your bird feeder), and if a turkey is aggressive toward you, be aggressive back.


A teenaged turkey gang at a neighbor's house, 2012.


A different teenaged turkey gang in a neighbor's yard, 2021.

How Big Bird Works

A friend sent me a link to a video about Carroll Spinney, the man who was Big Bird from the time Sesame Street began production in the 1960s until he retired at age 84 in 2018, the year before he died.

This link goes right to the part of the video about how he did it from inside the Big Bird puppet — which I never thought about before. Spinney was not nearly as tall as Big Bird, so what part of him held up the bird's head? And if that's, let's say, his arm... what controlled the bird's arms? And… how did he see out of the puppet?

All questions are answered. 

(Spinney also played the Oscar the Grouch puppet.)

The whole video is more interesting than I would have thought, even for someone like me, who has never watched Sesame Street. 

Carroll rehearsing a scene in partial costume.

That Kind of Year

I've been saving this one:

It could have been posted any time, really.
 

Economics of London, 1919

I've read that Agatha Christie once wrote, "I couldn’t imagine being too poor to afford servants, nor so rich as to be able to afford a car."

I'm not sure she put it in those exact words, but according to Slate (2022), she did describe her young married life this way in her autobiography:

The year was 1919, the Great War had just ended, and Christie’s husband Archie had just been demobilized as an officer in the British military.

The couple’s annual income was around 700 pounds ($50,000 in today’s dollars)—500 pounds ($36,000) from his salary and another 200 pounds ($14,000) in passive income.

They rented a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in London with four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and a “nice outlook on green.” The rent was 90 pounds for a year ($530 per month in today’s dollars). To keep it tidy, they hired a live-in maid for 36 pounds ($2,600) per year, which Christie described as “an enormous sum in those days.”

The couple was expecting their first child, a girl, and they hired a nurse to look after her. Still, Christie didn’t consider herself wealthy.

“Looking back, it seems to me extraordinary that we should have contemplated having both a nurse and a servant,” Christie wrote. “But they were considered essentials of life in those days, and were the last things we would have thought of dispensing with. To have committed the extravagance of a car, for instance, would never have entered our minds. Only the rich had cars.”

In 1919, Ford’s Model T cost 170 pounds—around $12,000 in 2022 dollars. So a car was worth about three months of income for the Christie family—but almost five years of income for their maid!

I'm sure the fact that they lived in a city with an extensive public transit system and businesses on every corner also made it possible for them to never think of having a car.

The pittance paid to the maid is the real shock in all of that. Just $2,600 a year in 2022 dollars! That's $1.25/hour if it she worked what is now considered full-time work, and I'm willing to bet that woman didn't work 40 hours per week. Yes, yes, she got room and board, too... 

Can you imagine legally hiring anyone for $1.25 plus room and board in 2022?

Now That's Emphatic

I saw this in the blood-draw area of a clinic:

The blue thing is a recycling bin, if I'm not mistaken. Not sure what kind of paper they put in the "DO NOT Throw away" box, but it must be something they want to keep.

The funniest thing about this is that this is a newly built clinic. The building opened in 2025 — purpose-built from the ground up in a greenfield location — but they couldn't make the phlebotomy area functional for the people who use it.
 

The Lost Art of Bus Passes

I always appreciate posts by the English stationery and ephemera shop Present & Correct, and share some of their visuals in my BlueSky roundups. They have a blog where they write up particularly interesting finds.

A recent one was a collection of weekly 1950s bus tickets from Milwaukee. Here are a few of them:

There are 30 tickets altogether, no two alike. 

Here are some thoughts about how the tickets would have been made.

Each one was printed in three ink colors. The large dates were hand-lettered, while the smaller words were set in metal type, likely either on a Linotype or Ludlow system, then printed to a proofing press. The proof type was cut out and pasted up with the hand lettering and other ornaments.

Each color had its own paste-up, possibly done as acetate overlays with the black on the bottom layer on illustration board. Registration marks were on each layer. The layers may have sometimes include rubylith for large areas of color.

Each layer was then shot with a large camera to make an offset printing plate, which was printed in one of the predetermined colors. Offset lithography was a common printing process by the 1950s, and was faster and cheaper for the type of long runs needed like these. These were probably sheet-fed, rather than web.

Why they used three colors instead of two or four, I don't know; I assume it was based on the press they ran on. Maybe it was a five-color press and they ran two passes at a time, with black ink common to both. Or if we could match up the dates of all the passes, we would find that two consecutive passes share one color in addition to black, and therefore could run on a four-color press. 

One additional detail to note: each ticket has an individual number added in the bottom right corner. So that's a final process the tickets went through before being distributed. I don't know why some of them have a letter A added and some don't.

It's clear these tickets were designed by the same person, and it was probably a major part of that person's job to create each one — from sketch to full design to final production and press check each week. 

All replaced by magnetic strips and barcodes. 

Some Mural!

I've had this tab open for a long time. It briefly tells the story of a mural in Lyon, France, created in 1987 by the artist collective CitéCréation, and updated several times since then:

This is what the wall looked like before:

It's really still there. Here it is in Google Streetview at 31 Boulevard des Canuts. 

The mural collective's website — with its tagline "monumental mural design" — includes a large number of other examples of their work over the past 40 years. 

Well worth checking out and exercising your French along the way. 
 

No Bug Zappers!

Take down your bug zapper, if you have one!

I've never had one, myself.
 

Nicole Hollander

I just learned today that cartoonist Nicole Hollander died on April 23 at the age of 87.  

I first found Hollander in the 1980s, probably when I was just out of college and working in Washington, D.C. Her work must have been in the City Pages.

I still have her first two collections:

The comiclopedia has a great write-up about her life and work, about which I knew just about nothing.

Among many other things, I learned that she began her mid-life switch to graphic arts and cartooning in Chicago's Monadnock Building, which I saw while on a trip to that city last December.

The description of her life makes me realize how few women cartoonists there have been.

Here's the final panel from one of her books, particularly appropriate now:

 
Thanks to Nicole Hollander for the attitude, the funky clotted line, and all the women.

It's Saturday

I had a pretty nice day today and I will not ruin it by looking at social media.

I had a meeting with a neighbor about trying go do something to make a local intersection safer.

I looked at plants in my yard and took some pictures.

I cut down some of last year's plants in a local public garden. 

I took a tiny nap.

I had some ice cream at the neighborhood ice cream shop, which opened for the season last weekend. 

I did some tasks for an upcoming major event. 

Now I am going to read a book, or maybe see if there is anything worth watching on television.

I will not ruin it by looking at social media.