Blue Eyes Designs

Don’t sit up straight!

(Shamelessly stolen from Digital Analogue.)

Stranger than Fiction is one of the first and best original movies out of Hollywood in a long, long time. I’m serious. E and I caught the last showing after work last night and it was so very, very good.

Will Ferrell has finally been cast in a role that allows him to show off more than his ability to be a crazy cheerleader. Fiction has a simple but elegant story with small cast of rich and powerful characters. It’s not a laugh-a-minute riot, but it’s not a slow, cerebral flick, either. It’s the common ground between mainstream comedy and the likes of I <3 Huckabees. It has the opportunity to walk down the existentialist path, but it pulls back to a more humanist, and more visceral end. Everything’s not happy-go-lucky, but there’s hope.

I can’t speak for many others, but I have to admit that during times of drama in my life, I can’t help but think that I’m living in some sort of story, be it film, play, or novel. It sympathizes with the insecurities that people feel in their lives, and is a subtle reaffirmation that we are not alone. There’s a great series of scenes in which Harold Crick (Ferrell) is trying to determine whether his life is a comedy or a tragedy. Who hasn’t wondered that? Especially when they’re feeling that it’s the latter.

I think everyone should see this movie. We need to deliver a message to Hollywood that smart, carefully-crafted movies will have an audience. E and I both noticed that the advertisements for Fiction played up the humorous side of the film, which is OK. I hope that it’s a successful tactic for getting people to come for dessert and stay for the meal, so-to-speak.

So I’m reading along in last month’s Wired (what can I say, I’m a little behind…) and read these articles:

My Big Biofuels Bet
and
The Information Factories

The first is an in-depth look at ethanol technologies. The article discusses its use not only as a motorfuel, but also for producing other forms of energy. In the interest of full disclosure, the article was written by a venture capitalist invested in the technology. But one of the things that I appreciated most about the article, not the fact that he recognizes it as a viable option, but the fact that he raises it not as a destination toward energy independence, but as a stepping stone – something I’ve been saying for what feels like years.

The second article is about the rise of distributed computing as the M.O. of the large service providers such as Google. Among the many topics of this article is the demand that these giant processing centers make in energy. Both to run the machines and to cool the building from the heat they produce.

Now, if you’ve hung around me a lot, you’ve probably heard my rant about how our energy (i.e. power-in-the-wall) infrastructure SUCKS. We produce power at great cost at high voltages in a few locations only to pump it to transformers that downgrade the voltage and re-release all that energy as heat. Not to mention the difficulty of keeping a “grid” that large stable and safe from sabotage. (Anyone remember the big blackout in the Northeast a few years ago?)

Damn my liberal arts education, this all of course, started weaving together in my mind…

So we’re developing these new technologies to create greener power with significantly smaller footprints than the massive plants currently in operation. We have huge server farms going into remote locations along the fiber backbones of the internet that are starved for power. What if, instead of running lines out to these places, we take them off the grid for real? How great would it be to produce power in DC as the machines desire it, right where they want it, and reduce the waste extensively. Or even (since almost everything is designed to take in AC and then convert it) produce it in AC, but still right there where you need it most. So you take this fast growing landscape addition and making it cleaner from the get-go.

Companies like Google certainly have the capital to spend a bit more on their brick-and-mortor, and it would be yet another way for them to set a good example for the rest of world. Most importantly, it provides a real-world proving ground for these developing technologies without having to completely redo the existing system.

I just hope somebody’s listening.