Two floors devoted to air conditioning. Sigh. When are the designers of datacentres going to realize that for at least six months of the year (more in Sweden and Canada), all they have to do is open a vent to the outside and they can get all the cooling they need for free, dramatically reducing their energy bill and their environmental impact?

Here in Ontario, we just put a sign on our mailbox (available for $2 in any hardware store) that says "no junkmail or flyers, please," and the postal workers are by law required to not give us anything addressed to "resident." The serfs who go around stuffing mailboxes with advertising for pizza joints are also required to not give us their crap. It works beautifully.

My father had to work around this bug when his firm was hired to plant wetlands around the margins of the L-Lake cooling reservoir for the US government's Savannah River plutonium manufacturing site in the late 1980's.

When the DOE wanted to reactivate the L-reactor starting in 1985, they first had to create a cooling lake (because the EPA would not allow them to just dump the boiling hot water back in the river anymore the way they had used to, back in the 60's). So they built a small reservoir called L-lake (cf the satellite photo on the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savannah_River_Site). The EPA further required that the margins of the lake not be left in a sterile state, but planted with wetland species. For which task my father, Gary Pierce, and his company were hired.

Planting the lake was complicated by the presence of Naegleria in the lake (which, when the reactor was running, was naturally quite steamy, especially at the north end near the reactor). Everyone who worked on the project was required to wear a surgical mask and rubber kitchen gloves the entire time they were in the water -- the mask to keep water from splashing on your nose and mouth, and the gloves partly to keep the bug off your hands, but more so to keep you from unthinkingly touching your face while out on the lake.

I helped them do some planting during spring break one year. It was good money for a poor college student, but the main thing I remember is the exquisite pleasure of being able to take the blasted mask off once we were away from the water -- an experience in some ways better than sex.

Many of these images are reproduced in "Futuredays: A Nineteeth Century Vision of the Year 2000," by Isaac Asimov (published 1986).

In that book, the artist is identified as Jean Marc Côté, "a French commercial artist," and the images are said to date from 1899, when they were commissioned to be made into "a set of cigarette cards" for distribution during the 1900 fin-de-siècle festivities. The company that commissioned the cards went out of business before they could be distributed. One set of cards survived, and Asimov's book reproduced fifty of them.