kazys's blog

Larry Lessig has a twenty-minute video up on his site about why he favors Obama over Clinton. 

Lessig makes the choice between the two clearer than ever.

Today's post is an uncomfortable follow up to last week's entry on "the undersea net" and the problems that ensued when a cable was cut in the Mideast. It turns out that more cables have gone offline. Techdirt asks "Did The Warranties Just Run Out On Undersea Cables?" 

One of the cable operators is downplaying suggestions that the any of this is related. 

Yesterday's post discussed the physicality of the Net in terms of its vulnerability. Today, it's time to talk about its impact on our world.

Over at Green Wombat last year, Todd Woody did some calculations as to how much power Internet servers consume. It turns out that by 2005, servers (not counting Google) consumed some 1.2 percent of the U. S.'s electricity. Around 14 1,000 megawatt power plants (each roughly the size of the remaining operational reactor at Three Mile Island or twice the size of Nevada's Reid Gardner, above) are required to keep the net humming. See here.

And see also Rodrigo Piwonka's project in the 2007 Netlab studio on Carbon Credits for a suggestion as to how the contribution to greenhouses gas might be remedied. 

I'm in Clemson getting ready to give a talk today that—with some luck—I'll be able to put up as a podcast next week. In the meantime, this week's disruption of Internet service in the Middle East (and elsewhere) due to a broken fiber optic cable yet again reminds us of the physicality of the Internet and its fragility. See Wired's Threat Level. My friend Paul Iverson sent along this story from the Guardian—"How one clumsy ship cut off the Internet for 70 million people"—while Steve Rowell pointed me in the direction of atlantic-cable.com, a huge historical resource on undersea communications systems.  

I'll be lecturing at Clemson this Friday. Peter Laurence has set up a blog for the course that I will be dropping in on: "Critical Practice for the Next Generation." 

We are working on the Infrastructural City book.

Over at the Netlab site, I have put together a selection of some of the best student projects in Network City, one of my signature courses. 

Here they are.

The thesis that Robert Sumrell did at SCI_Arc in fall of 2000 on "Superbrutalism" still stuns me years later. 

It began AUDC.

Two blogs of note mentioned me recently. First, Régine at we-make-money-not-art had a two-part review of the panel that I moderated at the DLD conference.

I wish I had had more time to talk, but that's the way conferences can be. For those of you who may be wondering what I said, here's how I contextualized the panel:

Cities are communications systems. Media and urban environments impact each other and develop hand-in hand historically. When we began to live in cities, we deveolped writing to keep tabs of what went on in those cities. In the nineteenth century, the rapidly growing metropolis gave rise to the telephone and the telegraph, which allowed management at a distance, facilitating the business district, with its distinctive form of the skyscraper, the factory district, and the residential district. Could suburbs such as Levittown be conceivable without the substitute for urban culture provided by television? So if during the last two decades we are faced with an intense transition in media, what does that imply for architecture, for urbanism?

Speaking of urbanism, Bradley M. Swarts at East Coast Architecture Review kindly included varnelis.net on his list of top ten blogs on urbanism. It's a great list and an honor to be included on it.  

On another front, if you haven't heard the news, Last.fm is now offering full-length albums on its site. This morning I've been listening to this one by Popul Vuh, Krautrock band founded by Florian Fricke (father of Johannes Fricke of DLD). It's the soundtrack to Aguirre: The Wrath of God, one of my favorite movies. In my book, it's the best soundtrack ever written.