Empire has Taken over the Television

So over the break besides the long periods of sleeping and not thinking of homework or anything of that manner.  My roomie convinced me to watch this show:

May I just say a round of applause to the writers, producers, directors and every other aspect of this show.  This show has reached a potential that I have never seen in any other show. It has the music, the plot twists and most important the talent to pull off such an amazing production. So worth while!

Empire was picked up on FOX in May. It is a musical drama television series, that centers around hip-hop music and an entertainment company---EMPIRE ENTERTAINMENT. The show was created by Lee Daniels and Danny Strong and stars Terrance Howard and Taraji P. Henson.

Rapping up this seasons finale this Wednesday. With an astounding amount of flips and turns, punches and blows. Leading someone to do some time...... 

According to Vulture.com---

**With the season finale it probably topped those number all together**

This is an amazing mind blowing show that continues to accomplish it's goal in pleasing their audience every week. I look forward to season 2 of EMPIRE ! 

Like Lucious Lyon said "This isn't over!

Fox's New Series Empire

Empire is an American musical drama television serious that debuted on January 7, 2015. The show is based on a hip hop music and entertainment company, Empire Enterprises, and the drama among the members of the founders of the company. They are all fighting to control the mass music company. It is shown every Wednesday for an hour, and has done so well that it is already renewed for a second season on January 17, 2015, only seven days after its television debut. The hit series is getting a lot of buzz on both music and television blogs.  Every show has a hook and ends in a nail biting cliffhanger that makes you wanting more!  It is only five episodes in and has quickly become my favorite television show. 

Empire is Fox's number 1 new show due in large part to Henson's captivating and unbelievable performance as the scorned and sassy ex-wife of music mogul Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard), who returns to the picture after a 17-year jail stint to claim a stake in the entertainment empire she helped launch.
"She's the truth. She is the walking truth!" Henson said when asked what she thinks draws viewers to Cookie. "She spent 17 years living with some of the most horrible humans on earth. She has nothing to lose."
Fans immediately embraced Cookie for her honesty and fearlessness.  I also admire her determination and ambition, she is truly a role model- minus the jail part.
"You can't scare her," Henson said. "She's not scared of anything or anyone."

I would definitely recommend watching this show, it's very well made and there is a character for everyone to relate to! 

The poet's vision

“Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours.

But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power.

For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”

Paul Valéry, Pièces sur L’Art, 1931

Quoted at the top of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, by Walter Benjamin, in Illuminations. Benjamin's quote is taken from Paul Valery, Aesthetics, "The Conquest of Ubiquity," translated by Ralph Manheim, p.225. Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series, New York, 1964

Think before you click

Google's data center, from Harper's magazine, March 2008

This blueprint depicts Google's data center, code named "02 PROJECT" at The Dalles, Oregon.

Google and its nemesis, Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask.com went there lured by the cheapest electricity in North America. And they need it. They are building gigantic server farms on the banks of the Columbia River.

We tend to think of the internet, the virtual worlds, our email and the "paperless society" as somehow a 'cleaner' option than the legacy of our ancestors. We talk of information and the exchange of ideas, as if these concepts reside on the sphere of intangibles that lead us to a gentler, greener world.

People are slowly realizing that driving their cars and SUV's leave a carbon "footprint" for which we will be hold accountable by generations to come. So we telecommute, we email instead of writing a letter or a note (would we write so much dribble if we had to use pen and ink?) and we search or, using the new verb, we google for information, sometimes for its own sake, the new addiction.

Little do we realize that this new industry is as heavy as they come, and like the article in Harper's 1 mentions: "...an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier." Currently Google is estimated to have in the order of a million servers. According to the article: "...the servers require a half-watt in cooling for every watt they use in processing". Some simple math will yield in the order of 103 megawatts for the Dalles plant alone. As a curious note, the Northwest Aluminum smelter across the street form the data center once used 85 megawatts before falling under soaring energy costs.

If you examine the blueprint above, you will see that 18,800 sq. ft. are devoted to the "cooling towers". Perhaps it will become fashionable again to wear the Top Hats of the 1920's to celebrate the new Information Chimneys of the New Millenium?

Can you identify the gentleman in the picture?
C'mon, I'll buy pizza for the first to name him!

And the winner is...Takumi! Choose your toppings (**>

While you are at it, look at the building on the upper right corner and you will see a suggestive label: "Transient Employee Dormitory Building". As with all things digital, employees are simply bits and blips in the flow of the new oil. And the "carbon footprint" is not pretty.

The article mentions that in 2006 American data centers "consumed more power than American televisions" and that in all locations currently active or in planning, both in America and Siberia, Shanghai and Dublin where AT&T, Microsoft and Google are heading in search (pun intended) of even cheaper electricity, most of this energy is produced by the burning of fossil fuels. I gives new meaning to the term "cloud computing"


1 The Harper's article "KEYWORD:EVIL, Google's addiction to cheap electricity", which inspired this post, was written by Ginger Strand, author of Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power and Lies, to be published this spring by Simon & Schuster