A variation on a joke we’ve all heard:

Me: Doctor, it hurts when I do this. (waggle arm)
Doctor: Yeah, it hurts when I do that, too! I know just the specialist.
Me (to specialist): It hurts when I do this.
Specialist: Then don’t do that.

The advice pounded into me over a few weeks of physical therapy: don’t do things that hurt. At first I thought the advice was laughable, until I realized just how many times each day I performed through the pain. Little things that put a twinge through my elbow were not things to gut out, they were things to avoid. More pain = more harm.

The other thing I learned: ice doesn’t just feel good, it helps healing at a structural level. I love the cold. I’ve had a knee bothering me for years, and now I work it harder than ever but always I ice it afterwards, with a donut-shaped product called ‘peas’ from CVS. My knee doesn’t bother me at all anymore. Maybe it’s the peas, maybe it’s better workout form, or maybe it’s just natural healing. I don’t care, I’m strapping the chilly donut onto my knee every day. My knee is doing just fine, now, thankyouverymuch.

Then came the elbow pain, and the above dialog. The professionals did a fine job getting me up and running, but the best thing they did for me was to say, “don’t do that.” The second best thing they said was, “put ice on it.” A tantalizing phrase from one of the therapists: “Ice massage.”

My elbow is feeling much better now. Better than I thought it ever would again. The knee’s all right, too. Now it’s my shoulder that’s bringing me down. It’s always something. Happily I live in one of the few countries on Earth that values the overhand throw. Have you ever seen a European throw a ball? Yeah, so you know what I’m talking about.

I live in a country where shoulder injuries are common. When my shoulder got sore, I resolved two things: I would avoid pain, and I would ice. No need to go back to the specialists. Onto Amazon I went, and I found the right icepack for the job. In this nation, options abound when it comes to icing shoulders.

My mornings go like this, now. The alarm clock starts shouting, and my sweetie slaps her hand on a button that shuts it up for a while. I take this moment of wakefulness and snuggle up with the one I love. Sleepiness returns, and I doze deeply enough that when the next alarm comes I jerk almost hard enough to knock my sweetie out of bed. I don’t awaken gracefully. “One more time.” I usually say, and we repeat the cycle.

Then I drag my sorry ass out of bed, weigh myself, and climb onto the exercise machine. When that’s done with, I shuffle to the kitchen and collect the frosty-cold items waiting to make me happy. Knee donut, elbow cooler, and my new shoulder freezer. I can imagine a time when I just dive into an ice bath, I have so many joints complaining.

It could be that I’d heal just as quickly without the ice. I’m not offering science, here. Just an anecdote. But man, I loves me some chill.

Ice for the knee! Ice for the elbow! And now, ice for the shoulder.

Sweet!

Thanks!

I am a manager of other people. Tonight, after listening to the unhappy men at the table to my left, I vow:

I will let you do your fucking job.
When I fuck up, I will admit it.

I’m pretty sure that will make me the best manager ever.

Sweet!

Thanks!

A while back I drove through a wind farm to visit a particularly smart friend of mine. I noted on the way that many of the turbines were still, and brought it up with Enrico Fermi (that’s not his actual name).

“Big problem with wind,” Enrico said, “is that it doesn’t blow when you really need it.”

I accepted it at the time, but today I say ‘fie’. Fie! Spin those turbines. If the power’s not needed immediately, it can be stored. Use the power to pump water back up to the reservoir behind a dam. That’s quality energy storage.

There’s a reservoir south of where I live, large and flat with a modest power-generation station at the end. It’s always windy there. If there were windmills local, set to pump water back up into the reservoir, then that modest power station would be able to put out a little more. It wouldn’t matter if the wind blew when no one cared, the power would be stored for later.

The reservoirs behind dams are our nation’s batteries, and they’re rechargeable. Mostly we rely on the sun to move water back upstream, but that doesn’t mean we can’t push the process a little bit.

Sweet!

Thanks!

Apple found itself on Greenpeace’s dirty list last year, receiving harsh criticism from the environmental group for its North Carolina data center. Based on Greenpeace’s estimates of the energy consumed at the facility, Apple was responsible for a lot of coal being burned. That’s not good.

While I’m really glad there are organizations like Greenpeace holding corporations to a higher standard than does our government, and I understand that Apple is a prime target for all sorts of activists because using their name generates a lot of press (Foxconn also makes Samsung toys), I really wish the activists would be a little more careful. It’s their own credibility at stake as well as Apple’s.

NOTE: I am completely aware that I come across as a shill for Apple in the following paragraphs. I went back over the text with the conscious resolve to temper the narrative, to be more balanced. The thing is, there is no balance. Greenpeace was stupid, and nobody won.

Take the data center in question. Both Greenpeace and Apple agree that Apple has built the largest solar farm in the US and the largest fuel cell generation plant in the US to provide power to the facility. Apple says those provide 60% of the power needed to run the place, and they are expanding the solar farm with the goal of reaching 100%*.

Greenpeace says the power those the solar and fuel cell plants generate is just a drop in the bucket, and the rest of the power must come from coal. Yikes. Apple says the facility will use 20MW when fully up and running, and they’ve got that covered. Greenpeace says it will use five times that much, and Apple certainly does not have it covered. That’s a big discrepancy. How do the two organizations end up so far apart?

Outsiders have used various methods to guess how much computing power is in the sprawling facility. The footprint of the building is very large; if it were filled with servers from wall to wall, power consumption would likely be much higher than what Apple claims. The thing is, the building is not filled to bursting with raw computing power, if public documents are to be believed. In fact, only about a third of the square footage is devoted to humming hardware; the rest of the building is devoted to ‘other stuff’.

So where did Greenpeace get their power estimate? According to an article I can’t find the link to anymore, the reasoning goes something like this: “Apple says they are spending a billion dollars on the facility. A typical billion-dollar data center would burn 100 MW of power, based on the performance of similar data centers. Even if Apple gold-plates the whole building, they’re not going to spend five times more for a 20MW facility than their competitors.”

OK, I can follow that logic, but you have to be careful that you don’t follow it off a cliff.

Here’s the thing: that billion dollars includes the cost of the largest solar farm and the largest fuel-cell generation facility in the United States. Greenpeace is including the cost of providing clean(er) energy to inflate their estimates of how much dirty energy the facility is consuming. If Apple simply used coal-fired electricity in their plant, they’d look better in the face of Greenpeace math.

Put another way, yes, Apple will pay five times as much for a data center as others will, if it means they don’t have to pay so much for power in the future. Apple is building a data center that is much less vulnerable to future energy cost spikes, which is a smart thing to do when you have the cash on hand now to control costs down the road.

Apple knows that electricity is its lifeblood, and there is a major initiative to make the company energy-independent. That’s just smart. They are also focussing on renewable sources for that power, which increases the up-front costs significantly, and won’t pay off for decades. From hearing the speeches, I honestly believe that doing what’s right is important among the execs at Apple. Note to investors: Apple is also becoming very good in the clean energy business. Ahead of the curve as an energy provider. I wonder, idly, if some of those dollars spent in North Carolina are to establish a beachhead in the coming energy war.

As for Greenpeace, they’ve said they’re happy about Apple’s commitment to clean(er) power, and they hope the tech giant keeps improving. We can all agree on that.

—–
* Time flies. Since I wrote my draft, I’ve seen a letter from a Big Shot at Apple saying the facility is now 100% renewable – though that’s a slippery term, and corporate big shots aren’t generally noted for honesty. They don’t lie so much as spin. But still.

Sweet!

Thanks!