Amazon's new power-hogging data center in Indiana is super-mega-giant-sized.

Karen Weise and Cade Metz, At Amazon’s Biggest Data Center, Everything Is Supersized for A.I., NYTimes, June 24, 2025.

A year ago, a 1,200-acre stretch of farmland outside New Carlisle, Ind., was an empty cornfield. Now, seven Amazon data centers rise up from the rich soil, each larger than a football stadium.

Over the next several years, Amazon plans to build around 30 data centers at the site, packed with hundreds of thousands of specialized computer chips. With hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber connecting every chip and computer together, the entire complex will form one giant machine intended just for artificial intelligence.

The facility will consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power a million homes. Each year, it will use millions of gallons of water to keep the chips from overheating. And it was built with a single customer in mind: the A.I. start-up Anthropic, which aims to create an A.I. system that matches the human brain.

The complex — so large that it can be viewed completely only from high in the sky — is the first in a new generation of data centers being built by Amazon, and part of what the company calls Project Rainier, after the mountain that looms near its Seattle headquarters. Project Rainier will also include facilities in Mississippi and possibly other locations, like North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Project Rainier is Amazon’s entry into a race by the technology industry to build data centers so large they would have been considered absurd just a few years ago. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is building a two-gigawatt data center in Louisiana. OpenAI is erecting a 1.2-gigawatt facility in Texas and another, nearly as large, in the United Arab Emirates.

These data centers will dwarf most of today’s, which were built before OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot inspired the A.I. boom in 2022. The tech industry’s increasingly powerful A.I. technologies require massive networks of specialized computer chips — and hundreds of billions of dollars to build the data centers that house those chips. The result: behemoths that stretch the limits of the electrical grid and change the way the world thinks about computers.

A power hog:

AEP[American Electric Power] has told regulators that new, large-scale data centers will more than double the amount of peak power it must provide Indiana, from about 2.8 gigawatts in 2024 to more than seven gigawatts by approximately 2030. Amazon’s campus alone accounts for about half of the additional load growth.

“It will be the largest power user in the state of Indiana by a country mile,” said Ben Inskeep of the Citizens Action Coalition.

The utility told regulators in April that it expected to use natural gas plants to provide about three-quarters of the additional power that would be needed by 2030.

There's more at the link.

The New York Times interviews Andrew Schulz [“America’s Foremost Political Journalist”]

David Marchese, June 23, 2025. Starting at 40:59:

Democrats I think were
and I hate to make this so like Democrat Republican because it’s not all Democrats by the way
I think that there some Democrats are quite critical of this
you’ve seen obviously Bernie you see AOC like there’s
But I think what happens is the Democrats are like tied to the same you know uh corporations that are funding the Republicans 
and they can’t actually push back against those corporations because they get so much funding from them
and in order to really make it a class war
which you should because that’s honestly the thing that’s going to resonate with the most people
they can’t do it because they’re in the pockets of
you know pharmaceutical companies the pockets of the medical industrial complex
just like Republicans are as well
so what they have to do is they made it an identity politics issue
and I think that that was unrelatable probably
and made people sway
and I would say that is part of it
and I would say the other part is
and I think that it’s important to say this for progressives in general
it is a harder
job to be a progressive publicly than it is to be a conservative
progressives are trying to push progress forward
how can we get more equity more equality for our marginalized people
it is much harder to just [ __ ] around with your boy on a podcast and say whatever words as we normally would
when part of your identity and your agenda is to seem like push these things forward
because it can be immediately used against you whereas a conservative can say whatever they want as long as they’re not talking about the gun lobby or you know Christians

Now that’s interesting. The Democrats were in effect forced to go hard on identity politics as a means of differentiating themselves from Republicans because they share the same corporate backers. I’m not at all sure that that is true, or to what extent it is true – I’ve not had time to think about it – but it’s interesting.

Ellen Alaverdyan skirts the “Wrong Side of the Law”

The Big Ol' Nasty Getdown - "Wrong Side Of The Law" (featuring Ellen Alaverdyan & Dino Jelusick)

“Wrong Side of the Law” (feat. Ellen Alaverdyan & Dino Jelusick)
By The Big Ol' Nasty Getdown
Written by Hovak Alaverdyan & Dino Jelusick
Produced by John Heintz & Hovak Alaverdyan

Musicians on the Recording:

Vocals: Dino Jelusick
Bass: Ellen Alaverdyan
Guitars: Hovak Alaverdyan
Drums: Kenny Aronoff
Keys: Murzo (Ara Torosyan)

Mix: Hovak Alaverdyan
Mastering: Dave Gardner

Video Personnel:

Vocals/Outlaw: Dino Jelusick
Bass: Ellen Alaverdyan
Guitars: Hovak Alaverdyan
Drums: Billy McNicol **Kenny was on tour at the time of filming
Keys: Murzo (Ara Torosyan)
Sheriff played by: John Heintz

Hair and Make-Up: Marine Sargsyan
Director: Karen Khosrovyan
Grip & Lighting: Zhirayr Avetisyan
Editing: Karen Khosrovyan
VFX: Mihran Stepanyan
Color: Hovak Alaverdyan

Producers: John Heintz & Hovak Alaverdyan
Executive Producers: John Heintz

On the over-diagnosis of autism [NOT vaccines]

Dr. Allen Frances, Autism Rates Have Increased 60-Fold. I Played a Role in That. NYTimes, June 23, 2025. Opening paragraphs:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of health and human services, is correct that reported autism rates have exploded in the last 30 years — they’ve increased roughly 60-fold — but he is dead wrong about the causes. I should know, because I am partly responsible for the explosion in rates.

The rapid rise in autism cases is not because of vaccines or environmental toxins, but rather is the result of changes in the way that autism is defined and assessed — changes that I helped put into place.

Three and a half decades ago he chaired a task force which added Asperger's disorder to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV).

Based on careful studies, our task force predicted that the addition of Asperger’s disorder would modestly increase the rate of children given an autism-related diagnosis. Instead, the rate increased more than 16-fold, to one in 150 from an estimated one in 2,500 in the span of a decade. It has been climbing more gradually ever since and is one in 31 today. Our intentions were good, but we underestimated the enormous unintended consequences of adding the new diagnosis.

The resulting explosion in cases included many instances of overdiagnosis — children were labeled with a serious condition for challenges that would better be viewed as a variation of normal. It also sowed the seeds of conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine beliefs as people wondered how to explain the rising cases.

Many large studies have come to the same conclusion: Vaccines don’t cause autism. The role, if any, of environmental toxins is still to be determined, but there is no known environmental factor that can explain the sudden jump in diagnoses. The changes we made to the diagnosis in the D.S.M.-IV can.

Why did autism-related diagnoses explode so far beyond what our task force had predicted? Two reasons. First, many school systems provide much more intensive services to children with the diagnosis of autism. While these services are extremely important for many children, whenever having a diagnosis carries a benefit, it will be overused. Second, overdiagnosis can happen whenever there’s a blurry line between normal behavior and disorder, or when symptoms overlap with other conditions. [...]

There's much more at the link.

Trapped in work-mode @3QD [ultimately coping with AI]

I’ve got a new article at 3 Quarks Daily:

Trapped in Work Mode: The Real Challenge of AI is not Technical, It’s Conceptual, Mythic, and Institutional: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/06/trapped-in-work-mode-the-real-challenge-of-ai-is-not-technical-its-conceptual-mythic-and-institutional.html

It’s about how we’ve become trapped in work-mode, a form of behavior that became solidified during the Industrial Revolution, though I don’t talk about how that came about. I open by talking about how my father, a very talented man with man interests spent an enormous amount of time playing solitaire once he’d retired. I then go on to talk about the rise of retirement coaches, professionals who help people adjust to the “rigors” of retirement. It’s as though many have become so “broken to the harness” of work that they are unable to figure out what to do with themselves when their time, once again, is their own. In this situation, I suggest, instituting universal basic income to support people who’ve lost their jobs to AI, that will amount an indirect subsidy of the drug industry.

I go on to suggest that, if we are to flourish under AI, we need to structure our social institutions around something other than work (Homo economicus), which is the current arrangement in the advanced nations. But I do not, in that article, suggest what I have in mind. What I have in mind, of course, is Homo ludens, which I’ve been writing about here and there.

The Industrial Revolution trapped us in work-mode

Consider this passage from Johan Huizinga, Chapter 11, “Western Civilization Sub Specie Ludi,” Homo Ludens, 1938:

The 19th century seems to leave little room for play. Tendencies running directly counter to all that we mean by play have become increasingly dominant. Even in the 18th century utilitarianism, prosaic efficiency and the bourgeois ideal of social welfare-all fatal to the Baroque-had bitten deep into society. These tendencies were exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution and its conquests in the field of technology. Work and production became the ideal, and then the idol, of the age. All Europe donned the boiler-suit. Henceforth the dominants of civilization were to be social consciousness, educational aspirations, and scientific judgement. With the enormous development of industrial power, advancing from the steam-engine to electricity, the illusion gains ground that progress consists in the exploitation of solar energy. As a result of this luxation of our intellects the shameful misconception of Marxism could be put about and even believed, that economic forces and material interests determine the course of the world. This grotesque over-estimation of the economic factor was conditioned by our worship of technological progress, which was itself the fruit of rationalism and utilitarianism after they had killed the mysteries and acquitted man of guilt and sin. But they had forgotten to free him of folly and myopia, and he seemed only fit to mould the world after the pattern of his own banality.

Thus the 1 9th century seen from its worst side. But the great currents of its thought, however looked at, were all inimical to the play-factor in social lif e. N either liberalism nor socialism off ered it any nourishment. Experimental and analytical science, philosophy, reformism, Church and State, economics were all pursued in deadly earnest in the 1 9th century. Even art and letters, once the "first fine careless rapture" of Romanticism had exhausted itself, seemed to give up their age-old association with play as something not quite respectable.

Beyond the human

Someone calling himself John Doe left a helpful and insightful comment:

I would like to propose that it misses the non-human-but-still-life perspective. I believe it to be essential for human flourishing in the long run. Physically and mentally. Humans usually define themselves in relation to other humans, sometimes animals, much rarer other lifeforms. Most of us believe they care about those and yet on a planetary scale (which is by definition not the human scale but still relevant for most humans to flourish) we are arguably in a predicament. Which leads me to the conclusion that it would be helpful to find a way to support flourishing for more lifeforms with less use of resources in absolute terms. This will be a very tall order which some, possibly many, will knowingly or unknowingly but nevertheless actively, refuse. Sometimes violently. It will also become much more of a question of cooperation and healthy competition on many levels.

I would argue that deliberate contemplation, meditation, care work in a broad sense (not only human-centric) should be encouraged. To be very pragmatic about it, maybe it'd make sense to set up community spaces that enable contemplation/meditation in some sort of social group.

Looking out, looking in, Hoboken terminal

David Letterman talks with Billie Eilish [Media Notes 163]

Watch the whole thing. See how Billie and and brother work in the studio. Listen to her talk about her career and about performing. She talks about her tic too. Who'd've thought? It's on Netflix and it's wonderful.

Three guys on Harvard and elite universities: Bruni, Douthat, and Summers

Frank BruniRoss Douthat and Lawrence H. Summers, ‘Are We Past Peak Harvard?’: 3 Writers Mull Higher Education’s Woes, NYTimes, June 22, 2025. About half-way in:

Summers: Frank, I am less optimistic than you about self-repair. Of the good changes — enhanced discipline of disrupters, scale backs of absurd identity politics, curtailment of academic centers engaged in propaganda and so forth — a disproportionate share of what has happened since Oct. 7, 2023, has happened in the last few months. I’ve never had any problem with students, even when I’ve been supercritical of ideas like divesting from fossil fuels or chanting “from the river to the sea.” 98 percent of students are curious and open minded. The problem is much more with faculty in humanities and the less quantitative social sciences and with the noncommercial professions like public health, divinity and education.

Still, institutions don’t become the oldest continuous entities in a society — Harvard at around almost 400 years — without the ability to adapt. Yes, the moves are way too slow. I tried to accelerate the process as Harvard president, and the antibodies were enormous. But if trustees do their job, this can be fixed. I am on the left’s 40-yard line in America and the right’s 10 at Harvard. It should not be that way.

Douthat: Exactly. Larry’s point about where he stands ideologically at Harvard — for readers who aren’t football fans, as the far-rightward flank of the university even though he’s himself a centrist Democrat — gets at the reasonable demand that American conservatism can make, which is that if you have a set of elite universities that are deeply entangled with the American government, with a profound and ancient relationship with the American people, they should make an effort to contain within themselves the actual diversity of ideas and worldviews that define America today. Not in the sense that 50 percent of every department needs to be Republican, but in the sense that actual conservatism — not just a mild libertarianism in the economics departments — should not be represented by a tiny handful of faculty members at a sprawling and powerful school.

Bruni: Ross, it’s clear that Trump and his allies actually don’t want sweeping protections for free speech. They correctly called out intolerance on the left but are now replacing it with intolerance from the right. When you’re essentially banning any mention of D.E.I., detaining students for political viewpoints they’ve articulated, putting institutions on notice that you’ll punish them for any deviation from just-two-genders orthodoxy, well, Trump is swapping one cancel culture for another. No?

Douthat: It’s completely fair to say that the Trumpist critique of elite universities isn’t actually sure what it wants. Does it want sweeping protections for free speech — or does it want universities to crack down harder on speech that seems to justify terrorism and anti-Semitism? Does it want a recommitment to academic freedom — or does it want universities to micromanage their departments to ensure ideological balance? And all of this reflects the fact that the Trumpist coalition is itself diverse and internally contradictory. [...]

Summers: I cannot follow the logic of the Trump attacks. But there is hypocrisy on both sides. When the subject is underrepresented groups, there is a set of arguments about the importance of merit, the danger of discrimination and so forth that are invoked by the right and in just the same form by the left when the idea is to achieve more ideological balance. My view is that soft tilts are warranted in both cases, but when you start mandating and using quotas and judging outcomes by litmus tests it’s problematic always.

There is certainly stuff happening at state schools, where they are mandating curricula or forcing books out of libraries that is stifling free speech. And there is some chilling of speech by those on temporary visas. That is terrible. But the overwhelming inhibition on Ivy League campuses remains of chilling conservative speech. Among students and faculty you have to be brave to support the Supreme Court’s judgments on affirmative action.

Somewhat later:

Summers: The Democrats acted with due process and circumspection, engaged in dialogue and did not summarily cancel funding. Even on the harshest judgment of the Ivy League on anti-Semitism, it is not Bob Jones University on race. When American companies make unwise decisions, government does not replace their management or change their taxation. Government should not be imposing strategy on universities. I don’t think government should start controlling things. There is a big difference between what is wrong with universities and what government power should legitimately be used to correct.

Bruni: Although Trump’s fusillade of provocative, puerile and just plain preposterous statements is such that we soon forget most of them, I remember clearly when he proclaimed: “I love the poorly educated!” I think he meant it. And I don’t think his assault on academia is primarily about squelching antisemitism or countering ideological conformity and liberal bias, though the latter at least is certainly relevant. But the attacks are more a cornerstone of his larger push to delegitimize — to vilify — experts and expertise, which get in the way of his complete control of the narrative and his twisting of truth. Am I too cynical?

Douthat: Certainly Trump is interested in delegitimizing institutions that challenge his claims about reality. (Though he’s still pretty happy to invoke Ivy League credentialism when he’s self-promoting — just get him started on his uncle who was a professor at M.I.T.!) But for people inside these institutions, the key lesson of Trump’s political success is that they already weren’t taken seriously as disinterested truth-seeking enterprises, and that the populist critique was pushing on an open door.

There's more at the link.

Pizza! Pizza! Pizza!

Torna’s has the best pizza in Hoboken. It’s a little whole-in-the-wall joint on 9th St. I’ve been getting pizza there for 15 years. Always the same, two slices of pepperoni and a soda, usually orange Fanta. Now, after 64 years in business, it’s closing. July 24, 2025, will be its last day of business.  

Physical restoration of a painting with a digitally constructed mask

Kachkine, A. Physical restoration of a painting with a digitally constructed mask. Nature 642, 343–350 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09045-4

Abstract: Conservation of damaged oil paintings requires manual inpainting of losses1,2, leading to months-long treatments of considerable expense; 70% of paintings in institutional collections are locked away from public view, in part because of treatment cost3,4. Recent advancements in digital image reconstruction have helped to envision treatment results, although without any direct means of achieving them5,6,7,8. Here I describe the physically applied digital restoration of a painting, a highly damaged oil-on-panel attributed to the Master of the Prado Adoration from the late fifteenth century. In parallel, 5,612 losses spanning 66,205 mm2 and 57,314 colours were infilled with a reversible laminate mask comprising a colour-accurate bilayer of printed pigments on polymeric films. To ensure the effectiveness of the restoration, ethical principles in painting conservation were implemented quantitatively for digital mask construction, a critically important foundation lacking in the current digital restoration literature. The infill process took 3.5 h, an estimated 66 times faster than conventional inpainting, and the result closely matched the simulation. This approach grants greatly increased foresight and flexibility to conservators, enabling the restoration of countless damaged paintings deemed unworthy of high conservation budgets.

At 67 Jane Juska wanted a lot of sex. She got it, and wrote a book.

Maggie Jones, Jane Juska, The Lives they Lived, New York Times, December 2017.

You are a 66-year-old mother and retired high-school English teacher, bred in a small, puritanical Ohio town. Though you’ve been divorced for 30 years and celibate for almost that long, your life is full in many ways, teaching a college education course, volunteering as a writing instructor at San Quentin State Prison, escorting women for abortions at Planned Parenthood.

None of it compensates for the lack of a man’s touch. The conventional avenues for dating at your age — senior hikes, senior bird-watching, senior mixers (you even hang out in hardware stores) — have netted little. Online dating is not yet commonplace. So, one October day in 1999, you write 30 words that will appear as a personal ad in The New York Review of Books. “Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.”

Within weeks, the letters begin to arrive from the Review of Books to your Berkeley, Calif., cottage. In total, you will receive 63, in seven manila envelopes. [...] The “yes” suitors come in a variety of ages, occupations and locations, but they have one thing in common: They can write a good sentence. For you — a lover of Trollope, Dickinson, Chekhov — fine writing arouses like the male body.

Some of the men:

Among the yeses is a man you agree to meet in a Manhattan cafe. You’ll refer to him as Sidney in your 2003 memoir, “Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance.” (All your men have pseudonyms.) You will eventually have sex with Sidney in a conference room at his office. Before him, there’s Jonah, who flies out to California for three nights in a hotel, during which you learn he’s 82 (he said he was somewhat older than you in an email). He steals your Champagne flutes and your pajama bottoms. Next comes Robert from Manhattan. He is 72, tall, slim, a martini drinker. He takes you to the opera, wants to know your fantasies, traces your body from head to toe with his finger and is one of the most skilled lovers you will ever know. You fall in love. But Robert, who struggles with impotence and has another girlfriend, is fickle in his passions.

What Jane wants:

What do you want from all this? Not marriage. You aren’t eager to pick up dirty clothes or stop your sexual adventures. Also, your lovers tend to live in New York City, and you won’t move away from your son, Andy, his wife and their new baby in California. (Andy, incidentally, will never read your book. Who wants to know such things about his mother?) What you do want is connection, which both good sex and good conversation create. You are also on a mission to shed the inhibitions of your youth, when your mother shunned all hints of your sexuality and warned of the dangers of men, and you favored XL sweatshirts to hide your breasts.

There's 32-year-old Graham:

The conversations start by email, then phone, then in person, during which you share passions and opinions about John Singer Sargent, Émile Zola, Herman Melville, W.H. Auden, Jane Austen. Graham is not only one of the most intellectual men you have ever met, but he is also six feet tall, with green eyes and an unabashed eroticism. In his first letter, he proclaims that “sex is extremely important to me, and my proficiency is quite good.” Later, at a picnic lunch in Battery Park, after pouring you wine, he explains that he doesn’t drink because he has “no inhibitions, so nothing to release.” That night, he lays you down on your hotel bed, kneels naked and tells you how sexy you are.

But age and the width of a country stand between you. Less than two years after you first meet, Graham will marry someone his own age, in his own city. Your heart will fracture. Still, the men keep arriving.

There's more at the link.

The book: Jane Juska, A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance, Villard 2003.

Floral delicacy

Tulsi has a mind of her own, opposes war, Trump displeased

Julian E. BarnesMaggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump’s Rebuke of Gabbard Signals an Uneasy Moment, NYTimes, June 21, 2025.

President Trump was angry.

Earlier this month, Tulsi Gabbard, his director of national intelligence, had posted a three-and-half-minute video to social media describing her visit to Hiroshima, Japan, and outlining the horrors caused by the detonation of a nuclear weapon there 80 years ago.

Speaking directly to the camera, Ms. Gabbard warned that the threat of nuclear war remained. “As we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” she said, “political elites and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tension between nuclear powers.”

Mr. Trump berated Ms. Gabbard for the video, according to two people briefed on the conversation. He said that her discussion of nuclear annihilation would scare people and that officials should not talk about it. [...]

Mr. Trump considers mounting a military strike on Iran. Ms. Gabbard, a critic of overseas entanglements, has privately raised concerns of a wider war. And on Friday Mr. Trump said “she’s wrong” when he was asked about her testimony in March that Iran had not decided to build a nuclear weapon.

After the video was posted, the president also told Ms. Gabbard that he was disappointed in her, and wished she had used better judgment, according to one of the two people briefed on the conversation. He told Ms. Gabbard that he believed she was using her time working for him to set herself up for higher office. Mr. Trump told Ms. Gabbard that if she wanted to run for president, she should not be in the administration, one of the people briefed on the meeting said. [...]

While Ms. Gabbard is a former Democrat, her credentials as a critic of America’s long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and as a skeptic of foreign military interventions appeal to Mr. Trump’s base, and her views dovetail with those of some of his other advisers. Her supporters are openly advocating that the president keep her.

There's more at the link.

Joe Zawinul - Orient Express

JOE ZAWINUL & The Zawinul Syndicate – Live at Festival Jazz Lugano (July, 2007, Switzerland)
JOE ZAWINUL – keyboards, vocoder
SABINE KABONGO – vocals, percussion
ALEGRE CORREA – guitar, vocals, berimbau
LINLEY MARTHE – bass
PACO CERY – drums, kalimba, vocals
JORGE BEZERRA – pecussion, vocals
AZIZ SAHMAOUI – percussion, vocals

Marvelous, and a real challenge to solo over. I love it! (And I'm going to work on it.)

Microsoft has overinvested in AI