rodcorp

Does cloud computing have weather?

 
[Berndnaut Smilde, Nimbus NP3, 2012]

How we guffawed a mist of flat white coffee onto our iPads when a survey said that half of Americans think that stormy weather affects cloud computing [1]. But they were right. The infrastructure running cloud computing both suffers and generates its own weather. Facebook kept servers heated so that clouds of water wouldn’t condense on them as they were brought across the humidity gradient from truck to a new cold-air server farm inside the Arctic Circle [2]. Data centres have long been air conditioned, climate-controlled and Halon-protected caves, and recently water cooling is making a come back [3] - rivers irritating server farms, carrying their heat safely away. Fire control is provided by gaseous suppression systems, whose alien atmospheres drive the oxygen from a burning room, or by water mist systems (with meteorological names like AquaFog) [4] which smother fire in a cooling mist.

There is weather, too, beyond the physical infrastructure. Our “likes” and “favourites” are small prayers to the social network gods to keep safe the photos, spreadsheets and status updates we entrust to their cloudy crypts. (Not all precipitation makes it back to the ground: virga is rain that evaporates (or hail that sublimes) before reaching the ground [5] - the observable spinning bar that never results in a file being displayed on our screens. Our status updates may not suffice as offerings: if we didn’t pay for the cloud service, we’re making a wish.) Service uptime websites are the weather charts [6]. A database fails, creating a ripple of low data pressure.

The “cloud” in cloud computing probably condensed from a million cartoon rain clouds drawn in documents and on white boards that represented the communications and computer networks you used but didn’t have to worry about. These drawn clouds lent us the cloud computing metaphor - the utility service or infrastructure that’s at arm’s length, yet ever-present, just there, like the weather. Microsoft explicitly acknowledged the weather in its Hailstorm idea in 2001 (services that “exist in the “cloud” of computers that make up the Internet”) [7]. Google directly added “cloud” to utility computing in 2006 (“we call it cloud computing”) [8], and Amazon put it in a funky product name, Elastic Cloud Compute, the same month [9].

Later, the cloud metaphor would be criticised for not naturally evoking the qualities we want networked services to have (predictability, reliability, clarity, persistence, identifiable boundaries and so on), and instead hinting at rain and other bad weather, fluffiness, nostalgia, vagueness, impermanence [10]. But of course that ephemerality is exactly constitutive of networked services - they fall over, they get closed down.

 
[Google data centre with water cycle diagram and Ruscha's Blue Collar Tech-Chem, 1992]

(And aren’t computing’s basic actions similar to the rain formation cycle? Perhaps a file evaporates from your screen, is carried up and advected into the digital troposphere where it condenses as a liquid file (or is deposed as ice) on a server.) [11]

“Network weather”, the output of human behaviour on the network, a million (or an absence of) explicit yet invisible hands liking, plussing, following, reviewing - a “highly dynamic overlay of current conditions, soundings and action potentials” [12]; weather that breaks across the internet and on city streets. And the tracking systems, cameras, GPS and other sensors that sieve and measure human behaviour are the network weather station barometers and anemometers.

There are micro-climates too. Website latency is a wind we lean into, making us click and tap harder. A thorny spreadsheet - the way its broken or circular formulae resist its users. The #NAME and #VALUE error messages in a cell that protrude from the grid of calculatory terrain, stopping the smooth cascade of numbers.

I have over-written: I am squinting at network computing through lenses misted with vague weather metaphors. Nebulous, hazy, foggy metaphors. A cloud.

Squally postscript, June 2012: a problem with the air-cooling systems caused a cloud to form inside Facebook's Prineville server farm: '"It was raining in the datacenter," [...] when the air came back into the cold aisle for the servers it was so wet it condensed'.

.

Notes, sources, raindrops: 
1. 51% Of People Think Stormy Weather Affects 'Cloud Computing' 
2. Facebook’s Servers Stay Warm en Route to Arctic Circle: "A rapid rate of change (in temperature) can create condensation on the electronics, and that’s no good"
3. Watermist Installations - Their role in protecting computer data centres 
4. AquaFog
5. Virga: "an observable streak or shaft of precipitation that falls from cloud but evaporates or sublimes before reaching the ground"
6 Service uptime websites, eg Amazon or Facebook on DownOrNot
7. "exist in the "cloud" of computers that make up the Internet" via The origin of Cloud Computing  
8. Conversation with Eric Schmidt hosted by Danny Sullivan, August 9, 2006 via Who Coined The Phrase Cloud Computing?
9. Amazon Web Services Launches the Amazon Elastic Block Store for Amazon EC2, Aug. 21, 2008
10. Criticism, eg: Cloud computing is a bad metaphor, Why Is The Cloud The Prevailing Metaphor For Pervasive Data Storage?, Cloudwashing Failed – Now We Need New Metaphors, The top 7 most overused cloud metaphors, sorted by weather pattern. On the other hand, this is good on the suppleness of the cloud metaphor.
11. Water cycle 
12. Adam Greenfield, The City is Here [For You to Use]: Table of contents: “3. In recent years, a class of networked information-processing technologies has emerged which permits the built environment, and discrete objects in it, to sense, process, store, communicate, display and take immediate physical action upon information. The result is a highly dynamic overlay of current conditions, soundings and action potentials made explicit and superimposed on the city – something we might think of as network weather. 4. This weather is already exerting pressure on the delicate parameters that between them do so much to condition the life of our urbanized places. We can see both the urban milieu and the array of choices available to people moving through it beginning to evolve in response"

Images: the first cloud is Berndnaut Smilde's excellent Nimbus NP3, 2012. The fourth is a collage, a Google data centre with a water cycle diagram and Ruscha's Blue Collar Tech-Chem, 1992.

Fluttering drafts, twitter fabrication

Last year, I talked to Kim and Matt about doing some twittery fiction, started writing some, got bogged down in trying to make it good, and then abandoned it. But this is the year of getting more work done, so I went back to it briefly and brutally, and here’s something over-long, with gaps in it, definitively unfinished.

One of the characteristics that interested me most about Twitter is pacing – the frequency between messages, and their speed. I wanted to explore that rhythm, and to try write within the Twitter’s natural scene – that of the mundane commute, meetings, coffees: office-desk rather than kitchen-sink realism. Or rather: I wanted to start from that realism, because no-one, when they write “running” on Twitter, is actually running. They’re reporting after the fact, announcing an intention, or fabricating. Which is the second interesting thing – Twitter’s performativity. Twitter is as much theatrical performance as conversation. Un-realism.

So: a story empty of character and reasonable plot, and a blank-sheet MacGuffin. A story for an audience of 85, and a tentative use of direct messages that only a few of the audience will receive.

The story takes place over a single daytime, and was pruned down from 100+ messages to a slightly more wieldy 25 odd, but that’s still too many for the recipient to eyeball. But here, this was it, with the times I scheduled (with Twaitter) the messages.

0815 (direct message to c.6 people) / Something scary happened - I'm sending you these messages in case something happens to me

0818 / From an empty seat on the morning tube I’d picked up some blank sheets of paper – they’d be good for drawing on

0821 / As I left the train, a dark suit bumped into me heavily. He grabbed at the sheets of paper in my hand but I pulled free.

0824 / I started walking up the escalator. After a moment he followed, taking the steps two at a time, rapidly. Two others followed him. 

0827 / I went faster as he closed in. I fell, landing on my elbow – 3 cuts matching the step’s teeth. http://bit.ly/972qjr

0832 / When I flex they re-open sharply as if re-cut every time the escalator step completes a full circuit. Have I left skin on its teeth?

0838 / But then – no sign of the men as I got to the train station. The next train was leaving in a couple of minutes. Just made it.

1000 / Relaxed a bit. Late commuters respecting social space and taking seats evenly spaced from each other. None of them look out of place.

1010 / The escalator climbs a mile and a half hourly for about 19 hours every day. 

1030 / Why grab the sheets of paper? – they’re blank, scrap, empty. And did I see a weapon? This isn't real.

1040 / The sheets of paper aren’t new. No printed, written or distinguishing marks. Nothing except creases - minimal evidence of my fall.

1110 / I hold them up to the window. The train and the sunlight turn them to overlapping, translucent panes. Fluttering drafts.

1330 / I think those men are now in this carriage some seats away. They arrived separately, but all watch me without eyes ever alighting.

1345 / Tried to call the office and home, but voicemails everywhere. And what message could I whisper? The police wouldn’t believe this.

1430 / The watchers are alert at each station to see if I leap off: they tense, ready to spring up.

1500 / I imagine attacking: sitting next to them. But none of us can move – we’re trapped between the protocols of commuting and of the chase.

1530 / Again I think: is this happening? My mobile buzzes with a sender-less message: RT []: @rod keep the papers from them!

1534 / I look up. The first man is standing, at last looking directly at me, unblinking. I shiver, frozen.

1600 / The train is slowing. Two other men step up and flank him, move forward as one. I stumble backwards, towards the end of the carriage.

1605 / I step into the vestibule between the carriages. It twitches like a huge gullet - a sudden sense of scale dropping away from me.

1608 / They grab my arms, snarl "Paper now!" Pull free as train lurches. Free hand waving madly in front of the door sensor.

1700 / In the last carriage, last door. Train pulls in. Again we ape commuter behaviour: ignore each other during the pause before the door opens.

1705 / I hurry out fearfully, they saunter. One pursuer remains on the train, his face distorted and delayed in glass.

1710 / Called police – on hold. No time. Run away from the station - empty streets. They let me run, then make ground without effort.

1715 / Sun setting, shops shut. A building ahead – lit. A library. Run up steps and straight into the ranked shelves.

1719 / They soon follow, well drilled, fanning out. Look back – shadows among the dim stacks.

1726 / I'm in shelves of files - thrust the sheets of paper into an un-labelled sheaf, and quickly move on

1729 / Silhouettes approach. White smiles and dark weapons. I raise my empty hands -

1745 (direct message to c.6 people) / My skin on the escalator will now have travelled fifteen miles, rotating inexorably, catching me up and leaving me behind.

Reception ranged from concern to enthusiastic encouragement - many thanks to those who kindly commented. I had got so wrapped up in the journey/chase that it hadn’t occurred to me that the sheets of paper themselves would be of interest. I also forgot that a story should really signal its ending clearly if it is going to be dropped into a reader's constant flow of twitter messages. Perhaps a second chapter might be conceived, in which the protagonist teams up with librarians and information taxonomers to turn the tables on the pursuers... (Update: I should add that the difference between the story as printed on the page and as performed into the twitter flow was as much a revelation for me too, only the other way round - this slab on the page was what it looked liked in the writing, though I did make some frequency charts to make sure that its U-shape looked ok. But it felt very different watching it go out. And the feedback was very gratifying and exciting: it was tempting to re-write on the fly to respond, but I had a busy day at the office, so I let it play out as originally written.)

Related/influences/inspiration: Novels in three lines, Ian Bogost’s Bloomsday, Will Ashon’s Trundlespike, Tom Armitage’s Twit4Dead, very short fiction passim, David Markson, ‘The Purloined Letter’, Duchamp meets spy fiction - particularly Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, Jonathan Safran Foer's collection of blank paper, Candida Hofer's libraries.

The Underwater Death Trap (c.1978)

The small schooner chugged away at sea. We had to go carefully because of the great Barrier reef up the eastern side of Queensland, New South Wales and more parts of Australia the largest Island in the world. Suddenly we struck the reef itself then we got our diving kit and dived 10ft down. We clung on, I saw great big thick pieces of seaweed that looked like tentackles We both grabbed one piece each and pulled as hard as we could. The "seaweed" as to our horror turned into an angry octopus we turned tail and swam for our lives. to the boat. We jumped in to the boat which immediately started to sink faster than ever so we hopped on to the coral which the Octopus was using to climb out. He got Jims (My Friend) legs and arms so I got an air tank and whacked the octopus on the Head. The Octopus looked dizzy and it sank slowly back to its tropical home in the sea.

When we had dived down in to the deep I saw a giant pole about sixteen cms or eight inches wide we found it was the mast of a ship we went lower down we swam to an old door it opened without much difficulty. The ship was near a chasm. In the room where the old Oak door was opened it looked like the Captains cabin some clothes had been parted to shreds lower down we found some more cabins and the kitchen we both opened an Old Oak door which was quite hard to do so. giant containers when we prised them open to our surprise contained gold! Some bars as long as our arms or legs but mostly they were about 22cms long we went to the surface and found we were about quarter of a mile away from an island I reckoned to be about a good mile long.

Soon we were getting quite used to living on the island we caught shellfish to eat and sometimes even octopus or eel. There was shark-bay at the bottom which was rather unusual and lookout-point at the top of the Island and quite a few rivers near to the middle and to the bottom and forest right across the top of the Island. I had made a tree-house  near the top on the eastern side of the Island. I liked the treehouse so did Jim. One day we were attacked by Pirates they swarmed up on the bottom  of the island so we dug traps which were covered  with leaves brittle bamboo sticks. And then we bombarded them with logs After they had been "logged" we bombarded them with boulders and then they fled and never came back. Then a few days later a container ship appeared over the horizon. We set a fire to attract them then the ship came to the island and we all helped to bring the gold up and we all went back to England.

(This is somewhere between 1978 and 1979 I think, and the Willard Price/underwater/adventure/danger theme continues - previously: The Deadly Battle. Jim is perhaps borrowed from Jim Hawkins.)

The Deadly Battle (c.1978)

The old Octopus came from his cave and fish swam away. But the great eel waited to become king of the coral old killer the octopus saw the great eel. He darted to one side and attacked a tentackle then old killer turned around and deceided to squeeze the great eel. I in my diving sauser found it Interesting then I saw the two fighting deceided to creep up to them.

I slid up behind a big rock or was it? My rock the old giant turtle moved off in to darkness. I had to move quickly now the pirhanas joined in on the fun. The Octopus got a bite and was bleeding he did not give up. The eel was flatter but wide he was struggling. In a few minutes I was behind a large clump of seaweed as two killer whales and some sharks moved in to it.

The eel had been devoured and the pirhanas, sharks and Octopus went away.

(This is somewhere between 1978 and 1979 I think, and I must have been putting Willard Price books together with Commando comics. Posted to remind myself that I need to find the ability to write without burying plot underneath layers of performative ornament. See also The Underwater Death Trap.)

I'm not angry

I was walking in an unseeing cloud of frustration after a tiring work day, but when I got to the tube station I was humbled.

I step into the lift and a man there says "Is this going down?"
"Don't know. Should be," I reply curtly, without any warmth.
"I'm not angry. I can't see. I'm blind," he says, though perhaps he saw enough of the flush on my face as I softened. I try not to wince at my own embarrassment and the lift descends.

There's a silence until I say, "Can I help you at the bottom?"
He turns to me, and his chameleon eyes fix me uncertainly. They waver as if behind thick glasses and for a moment I have an image of Joyce's dimming sight. There's a shiny tracheotomy scar in the V of his rugby shirt. "I'm very disabled. I'm blind," he says.
"Where are you heading?," I ask over the sound of the lift doors opening at the bottom.
"I'm not angry. South."

"OK, here we are. Would you like to take my arm?"
"I'm not angry. No," he says. We get out of the lift and turn left, and my hand hovers palm up, to guide and support if required. He walks slowly, lurching a bit. He stops. "I had a terrible accident. Smashed my brains."
He takes another step and then stops again, turning to me. "I'm disabled... can't see."
"Yes..."
"I was in a hospital in Spain for five years. They saved my life," he explains.
"Oh."
"I'm not angry...," he says, an explanation and a self-preserving ritual. And then he surprises me: "I was a stuntman. I had an Oscar nomination."
"A nomination for what?," I say quite loudly, because a train is approaching. He holds up a hand defensively.
"I'm not angry. I'm... Die Another Day," he says, eyebrows raised. The train is just about to arrive at the platform.
"Wow, the Bond film. Brilliant!" I say, and then quickly, to cover my insensitivity, "Which station are you going to?"
"I'm not angry", as if to say so why are you?, with a little indignation. The doors of the train are still open and we're just stepping onto the platform. "Euston. Is it this train?"
I look. "Yes, this train..."
"Quickly," he murmurs.
"... goes to Euston, but...," I say, because the doors are going to close any second. He doesn't hear me say but because the train is beeping its doors-closing alarm and he's taking a step forward and up into the doorway. The doors start to close but he holds them open easily, and then the doors are pushed back and open by arms as strong and sure as if they were pistons in the door's folding mechanism.

When the doors close again I'm turning away, but have just enough time, through the scratched-translucent panes of glass in the doors, to glimpse him starting to speak to a woman in the carriage.

Larger

A tall man in his late forties stepped carefully onto the Northern Line yesterday evening. He was about 6' 8" and broad, large enough that he had to stand right in the centre of the carriage, and even then he had his head bowed slightly. He wore a black suit and some black Puma trainers that looked like they were size 15 or 16. His stance was controlled, as if he knew the damage his size could do if he moved thoughtlessly, and the averted head was the only thing that stopped him from being physically intimidating. In his left fist was a plastic bag, in which could be seen a packaged ream of foolscap paper.

Biscuit meatspoon VC pitch

Hi, I'm Tim Timpsonson and I've a great opportunity for you today. Here's the idea: you know how it's nice to have salty snacks with your beer beverage? And you know how it's nice to have a biscuit with your tea? Yep.

Well, try this. Go on, take it. Take a bite. No, really. See how good it feels to hold, how good it tastes (you know the technical guys call that "mouthfeel". Mmm.)

I know: you're thinking it's a knobbly spoon. No, sir it is not.

Not at all. Well, taste it: I think you'll happily agree then that it's nothing like a dog biscuit. Now, imagine you're on a night out with the guys. You're drinking beer, catching up, telling the old stories. You want something to go with it - something more than a mere bag of crisps or nuts, but you don't want to bother with a full bar meal.

This product is the BISCUIT MEATSPOON FOR BEER. Yes, a meaty dipping biscuit spoon for beer. Dip it in your lager like a biscuit, or if you're in an up-market bar you can use it to politely and delicately spoon the beer into your mouth. Or you can just eat it without beer! Personally, I like it with a Becks after a long day at the office.

Our master meat brewer and her colleague the maestro di biscotti are very proud of what they've achieved. It has these proteiny nodules and rich seams of flavour in a layered matrix of bonded rusk biscuit. That ensures that the flavour is delivered in a quality-controlled manner throughout the course of your beverage, and the biscuit doesn't crumble or get soggy and dissolve in the glass - cloudy beer is the last thing you'd want, ha ha!

Yeah, it's made out of various salty meats - I have the list here. Basically this is value-added snack consumption for the discerning, time-poor quaffer. It's a winner.

So, this is a high-margin consumable retailed out of the pub-hotel-gaming-leisure industry. It's tasty and healthy, so you're going to feel good eating it. It's salty, so it's going to catalyse beer beverage sales. Here's the deal: I'm looking for 15 million to develop the product and marketing for a launch across Northern Europe. The market for meat and biscuit snacks is 800-1,200 million annually, growing 10% year on year. We'll get 10-15% of that within three years, and the margins, as you see from the charts here, are as healthy as the snack!

Well, we're in talks with M&B and the other big names in licensed and leisure obviously, but no, nothing on paper yet.

Oh yes. Further down the line we'd add value packs and so on. And broaden the range: we'd add a vegetarian option. And a darker, more rustic ale/stout variant alongside the vanilla flavour targeted at lager/pilsner drinkers. Not that it's vanilla, ha ha, no.

[...]

At this point the door closed, and I couldn't hear any more from the outer office. I don't know if the pitch was successful, but did later see a venture capitalist emerge from the boardroom patting his stomach, a few crumbs falling from his three-piece.

Art history alert!

In 1936 Duchamp completed mending the Large Glass, which, after its single showing, had broken in 1931 en route from the Brooklyn Museum to Katherine Dreier's home in West Redding, Connecticut. He had to set aside some of the most damaged glass, replacing several sections.

I have a shard.

Several inches were cut from Jackson Pollock's Mural is a story on Masochuticon. Well, not really a story, more a slice. The scene is that of art's history of loss, iconoclasm and surgery: Duchamp allegedly trimming down a Pollock so it fit, Rauschenberg erasing a De Kooning drawing, a mother dicing many paintings in annoyance at her son the thief, and so on.

I once stole a painting, or rather a part of a painting. I used a knife to cut some chips from the raised peaks of paint meringue on an Auerbach. No-one shouted, and I quickly turned to go from the gallery, the flakes of paint red hot in my hand.

In his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes used the mutable, meltable physical characteristics of wax to illustrate that to properly grasp the nature of something he must rely on his mind rather rely on the sensed characteristics.

From a dealer I bought a lump of wax which purported to be Descartes'. I planned to melt it over a flame, reforming it into a flat tablet like Freud's mystic writing pad, but it crumbled like yellow dust.

So the references and leitmotivs are: body and breathing and air, sun and wax, fire and ash, glass and breakage, cutting and seams, and of course repetition and copying. Duchamp and Joyce throughout. Jas Elsner's 'Iconoclasm and the Preservation of Memory' in Monument and Memory Made and Unmade. Freud (mystic writing pad) and Derrida (passim, and poorly understood). Jonathan Jones and David Markson. David King's The Commissar Vanishes. There are several quotations and half-quotations, and nearly all of the facts and dates are true. The art history is presented in a chronological order (using the date the artwork was made, or re-made), and it has been hard yoking the story to that sequence. Even though it feels very unfinished - as ever - I'm quite pleased with where it might one day get to. I realise now that there's something about the elements to be drawn out too - fire and water appear several times, though air and earth are under-represented at the moment.

Jean-Antoine Watteau's 1717 drawing Two Men was one of over 200 artworks stolen by a waiter in a seven-year, 1.25 billion pound art theft spree. They were cached at his mother's apartment in France. When he was arrested, she cut most of them up and threw them in the rubbish, or dropped them in a canal.

One of the men in the drawing is holding a cloak as if it was for sale, or no longer required.

I now have many of the cut pieces of canvas and drawing, fragments of Watteau touching those of Breughel, Boucher, Cranach... though the black plastic bag she used to bin them has not survived, so I placed them in a new bin liner.

(Yes: this post is itself a remainder, a supplement, though not really in the Derridean sense, because it feels utterly deletable.) You may read it if you have time, and perhaps leave a comment below so I know if it's indifferent pablum/quite good/etc.

PS: there are a pile of relevant links on background material for the story, and since.

Fog about the legs of a walking prison

There was a new story up at Masochuticon last week but it's not pretty - it's what happens when you try to write a story in the two hours before you rush to get on a plane. But the great thing about Masochuticon is that it does force you to get something done. We'll be returning to the theme of walking prisons though.

The legs look like tiny lines in the sky but they get fatter as they get closer to us down here and then they just dissolve into the leg fog, which looks whiteish like normal fog but it’s hard to push through. Slomo! they shout at you if you’re trying to push through the leg fog, so I always try to keep clear of it. Gram said that’s the speed you move at when you’re up in the walking prison, slow as if you had run out of battery.

Person walks around a bit, thinks what's the point?

I seem to have a problem with writing story, the latest effort on Masochuticon being an exemplar. The story of Not the faintest sound of any kind could be heard is this: a person walks around a bit, hears some things, and - being a bit unhappy - thinks 'what's the point?' Ie: nothing happens. (Don't think it qualifies as a spoiler if there's an absence of plot to be spoiled.) Obviously I'd like to claim that it's like JPod rewritten by a Robbe-Grillet-enamoured amateur -- except that it lacks JPod's snappy dialogue or the witty apercus, and those blank pure surfaces and the other good things in Alain Robbe-Grillet, so it's nothing like either. Writing is hard.

The title is a quote from Heart of Darkness, and there are a couple of other Conradisms in there too.