Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)(milk.com) |
Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)(milk.com) |
That was back when Altavista, the first search engine, was in downtown Palo Alto. Brian Reid was behind that. It was intended as a demo for the DEC Alpha CPU. They wanted to show that a large number of little machines could do a big job, which was a radical idea at the time. They were leasing an old telco building, on Bryant St. behind the Walgreens on University Avenue. The telco had moved to a larger building nearby when they went from crossbar to 5ESS, leaving behind the very tall racks typical of electromagnetic central offices.
That's where the modern data center began. Before this, data centers were raised floor operations. This one was racks and racks of identical servers, with cable trays overhead. This was the first one to look like a telephone central office. Because that's what it was before.
The building is still some kind of data center. For a while, it was PAIX, the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, the peer meeting point for west coast ISPs. Equinix has it now; it's their SV8 location, offering colocation services. Small by modern standards, but close to the early HQs of many famous startups, including Facebook.
The grease problem was written up in the local newspaper, back when Palo Alto had one. Palo Alto Utilities (the city owns its power company) got the report, and quickly realized someone was dumping grease into their transformer vault. So they put someone on stakeout, watching all night. The offending restaurant employee was caught. The restaurant was fined and billed for the cleanup.
In 2006, there was another grease dumping incident in a transformer vault a block further north. This one did result in a grease fire.[1] Palo Alto Fire Department has a CO2 truck, and dumped enough CO2 in to put out the fire. Power was out for most of the night.
I used to live within walking distance of there.
[1] https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2006/03/12/grease-dumpin...
Almost none of those memes are remembered outside of those who were alive and watching the nightly news at the time, but there were some pre-internet memes that were as spread as a modern internet one.
If you don’t recognize that name, “Baghdad Bob” was the popular nickname he was given back in the 00s.
I was making a lot of Jupyter Notebooks at the time. I would create several versions while narrowing down an algorithm or constructing the principle proof of concept code. When I finally arrived at an essential solution, I would make a single cell file that would write to disc. I named the file *-MOAF, Mother of All Files.
Some things don’t change.
Plus, “one mega volt-amp” sounds way cooler than “a million watts” :)
It may have been a 1MVA transformer with a 480V three-phase secondary, that’s the properly sized transformer, but the utility may have undersized it at 500kVA based on calculated load.
That transformer was already oil-cooled, so adding a couple thousand extra gallons probably didn’t hurt the transformer too much lol.
It gets recycled into various non-tasty but still useful commodities.
(The economics work out at restaurant scale but not necessarily at household scale. If you deep fry a lot at home, you might be responsible for transporting your own grease to someone who wants it.)
A few years back there was some eco-warrior protest outside trying to stop the lorries going in. Not really sure what they were trying to achieve with that as it seemed counter to their aims.
No.
Biodiesel is fuel made directly from vegetable matter; typically it needs a ""special"" engine to run, or is blended in a low ratio with ordinary diesel (B7 in the UK and EU).
Processed cooking oil is made into HVO.
This can be used as a direct 1:1 replacement for ordinary diesel without engine modifications. Very green! Unsurprisingly, HVO has a higher price than biodiesel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrotreated_vegetable_oil
HVO is easily available in the UK and is typically bought by bus companies and delivery companies seeking to improve their green footprint.
Just a Drop in the Bucket (1994) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19437905 - March 2019 (23 comments)
The eco-warrior types protesting the pipeline probably think that they're reducing the use of oil. But they haven't thought it all the way through.
In today's dollars (adjusted for inflation) the US average gas price stayed below $2.75/gal from roughly 1986-2002. Then they broke through that barrier, only ever going below it again for two brief moments in 2016 and in 2020. Most of the time since, they've been well above $3.50, and above $4 sometimes. [1]
If you're right that demand for gasoline is highly elastic, meaning people adjust their demand in response to price, then since gas prices got much more expensive, we should expect that gas usage decreased. Have we seen this? (No. [2]) Of course we haven't, because somewhere between 63-67% of people in the US and Canada live in car-dependent suburbs.[3] These cities and towns, in addition to most rural areas, are fundamentally car-dependent and cannot function without daily car use by a majority of residents. The only way for our society to consume less gasoline would be mass electrification of private transport.
And notably, even the recent increased popularity of EVs in the post-Model-3 era isn't manifesting in the data [2] in the form of decreased consumption to my eyes. Perhaps for every new BEV out there not using gas, five people traded the cars they used to drive for inefficient, huge SUVs.
1. https://www.inflationtool.com/adjusted-prices/us-gasoline
2. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=w...
Or a train derailment destroying the town. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...
https://apnews.com/article/keystone-oil-pipeline-leaks-spill...
They didn't want an ecological disaster in their back yard, they didn't want their religious sites disturbed, and they didn't want there to be a risk that their water ends up contaminated with oil, and the pipeline company didn't want to pay the cost to navigate around the reservation.
So of course the government stepped in and forced the protesters to accept the pipeline and now idiots that don't understand the reasoning behind the protest mock them after the fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protest...
I don't think it particularly had a negative connotation until recently though, to me at least it was always just someone who had strong opinions about protecting the environment, and Greenpeace always had quite a lot of support from the general population and they weren't actively disrupting the lives of ordinary citizens in the way Just Stop Oil do for instance.