Stop pretending cyberspace exists - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/12/the_end_of_cyberspace/ <comment><USER2> Well, I agree that we abuse the heck of out the "cyberspace" metaphor, and say a lot of stupid things because of that metaphor. But aside from that, there's a lot to sneer at in this article.

First, on government and the internet. It's true that _"most Internet activity takes place in particular territories governed by states ... [as are] users, ... servers, ..."_ , but so what? States are not only trying to govern what is done within their borders, they are trying to govern what is done outside their borders. If I start a server in China, and serve pirated software to users in the UK, a country I have never visited, the UK government will still try to prosecute me. But all the things within the UK are things that do not belong to me and that I do not control! I'm not taking a position here on whether they should or should not.... I'm pointing out that Micheal Lind is encouraging an even dumber mental model than "cyberspace".

And it makes _perfect_ sense to say that California or the US is _"extending their jurisdiction "into" cyberspace"_. It is _not_ the case that they have jurisdiction over everything within their borders. For an extreme and unambiguous example, the US refuses to take -- and forbids California from taking -- jurisdiction over my religious belief. More relevantly, as I understand it, in 1900 the US took no jurisdiction over the movement of gold, and then later they extended their jurisdiction. States (both the kind that the US is, and the kind that California is) do extend their jurisdiction from time to time (and very rarely contract it). Again, Lind is talking nonsense.

As others have pointed out, people complain all the time about corporations invading abstract things. Public spaces, the classroom/academy/etc, your living room, the national news agenda... those are all "spaces" that people have complained about corporations invading, and they're not all literal spaces (and of the ones that are, at most one involves a literal physical presence). Metaphorical invasions, including of non-spatial things. Welcome to the English language, Michael Lind, are you new here? Or just disingenuous and demagogic?

All in all, the bulk of this article is worse than the thing it denounces.

That said, props for the mention of "A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace", which I hadn't heard of or read, and which I think is a pretty great rant (even if I think casting aside Article 27.2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights just might be a good idea).

[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9236603/A_Decla...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9236603/A_Declaration_of_the_Interdependence_of_Cyberspace)

</comment><comment><USER3> Extreme one way: Stop pretending the United States exists. It's an imaginary line in the sand that has changed many times through the years. There is nothing different about the physical land between Mexico and the United States, or the borders between any countries.

Extreme the other way: Cyberspace is a reflection of the world that we live in (kind of like a mirror - it's the same as the 'real' world, but a little bit different). It's real when we want it to be (print out this paragraph, it's now physical), it's a place where thoughts and actions occur, it's the 'coffeehouse' of our generation, where like minded souls can find one another and communicate. I can see pictures and videos of places I've never been to, imagine one day when I get a robot with a holographic camera that I can drive around to places I've never been to - but I might experience it just like I was there. The bridge between 'reality' and 'cyberspace' is strengthening everyday, with more and more people trusting this cyber world. If we all believe hard enough, can we make it just as real as the world we live in?

<comment><USER4> It seems to be something of a pattern that when the state has in recent history held monopoly power over something that is evolving in a way corrosive to that power, they immediately jump to the stage of dismissing it as "unreal" in some way, and just end up shooting themselves in the foot by pointing out that their own claims of sovereignty are exactly as "unreal".

The state rules by force, its currencies are real because they say they are and have the power to force behind them, its borders are real because they say they are and have the power of force behind them.

As soon as they lose that power, as in the case of bitcoin for currencies or other digital property or jurisdiction in the case of cryptographically protected distributed spaces which simply have no visible anchoring in the physical world, their claims are worth exactly nothing.

It will be an interesting world as more and more things move out of the sphere of state control and into this sphere.

<comment><USER5> > its currencies are real because they say they are and have the power to > force behind them

No. Currencies are real because people trust they'll have value tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, as Shakespeare said. Otherwise, the old Zimbabwe dollar would be in use, as opposed to being dumped after the hyperinflation.

<comment><USER4> Hyperinflation doesn't so much make a currency unreal as simply worthless, Zimbabwean dollars were still Zimbabwean dollars, and the government was still charging taxes in that currency and enforcing its laws and systems by fines in that currency, but it becomes a little bit of a moot point when as you point out the currency is devalued, there's no real way for governments to stop that.

That surely hasn't stopped them from trying, either in the Zimbabwe case or all throughout history, governments are extremely fond of making ridiculous proclamations to support their currencies whilst undergoing hyperinflation to very little effect, but when the great majority of people refuse to listen to you anymore and you have no credibility it ceases to matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author is severely underestimating the utility of metaphor. Space doesn't have to be physical, it can be abstract and related more to the imagination than a direct experience of our immediate physical world.

Cyberspace is an excellent term to cover this otherwise strange notion of real-time interaction with our fellow humans based on an abstraction of their identity and representation of their ideas, rather than geographical distance.

<comment><USER7> It's certainly easier to say than than the "Information Superhighway". (For you youngsters, that was the metaphor that got the Internet funded. ;-)

<comment><USER8> Yes - that term really sucked. I actually heard it used on a TV news show last weeked and cringed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> EDIT: I kind of hope that the idea of cyberspace doesn't die, because current metaphors for information handling suck. Cyberspace probably isn't the right metaphor to replace them, but something would be good. And I want things like Google Glass, or virtual retinal displays to become more real.

> _Let's start with government and cyberspace. Most Internet activity takes > place in particular territories governed by states. The users of the > equipment, as well as the infrastructure of servers, wireless towers, and so > on, apart from satellites, are physical entities located in sovereign > states._

Obviously untrue, since the US will happily claim that a .com can be seized no matter where the servers are; and the US will ask for people to be extradited no matter where those people are (or if they're not breaking any laws in their country) and etc etc.

> _Nobody complains that electric utilities are "invading" the Virtual Realm > of Electricity by generating and selling power,_

I seem to remember plenty of people who were annoyed at Enron for artificially restricting the supply of electricity to create profit - a lot of that criticism fits the "these corrupt profiteers should not raid Electricity" (where electricity was a nebulous concept of generation and delivery).

I also remember a lot of people very annoyed at Russia turning off the natural gas pipes to EU.

One of the reasons that metaphor of "virtual land" isn't as strong for electricity or gas is that those are just much simpler, and people don't do stuff in them, unlike online.

<comment><USER10> The servers for .com itself are in the US and .com is owned by a US company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cyberspace is real in that there is much going on in the world that is not reported on in the news.

For example, if a man or woman had 1,000,000,000 highly detailed pictures of porn in his/her house and that got reported to the news because they were stacked up on the porch, flying around everywhere, it might make the evening news in a "What a perv!" segment. But if that same person has access to even more pictures than that on the web and views them, they aren't called out on it if it is within the range of acceptable online and offline behavior.

By the same token, I'd post what I think on HN and would say it in person to the same people in a bar having a drink, but I'd never post the same things in an editorial in a newspaper or on a blog. However, on HN everything is public and global. It just isn't the same as the rest of the world, even if in the end it is contained in physical space with real physical people communicating with one another. So we have another term for it.

Our world itself is just as unreal, though. The media and government and even our friends and family just show us part of what is going on, and don't act or communicate as they would if they were being true. This is the reason that both philosophers such as Plato and Socrates differentiated between truth and what we learn in the world, and why popular religions such as Christianity teach us that the world is not truth- that there is something beyond it that we must aspire to.

</comment><comment><USER12> My interpretation of this piece is that we're putting too much focus on online activism when we should be doing offline activism to change the world.

I agree with this, but at the same time, someone must fight for the internet because information is knowledge, free exchange of information is free exchange of knowledge, and as we all know, knowledge is power.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wittgenstein would be rolling in his grave.

Here's another argument that is parsed exactly the same way as this CyberSpace one:

"Is all that is good beautiful?" As Wittgenstein would note, wonderful intellectual gymnastics, but you've essentially achieved nothing.

The author doesn't understand the concept of a metaphor. No one believes there is a mystical Narnia of 1s and 0s "somewhere out there" - no one reasonable, whose opinion matters at least.

CyberSpace is a way to visually describe certain perceived catastrophes, such as the internet being consolidated into public domains that restrict user rights - whether or not the catastrophes are valid is a separate debate. CyberSpace itself is a valid _framework_ of looking at internet protocols, communities and basic rights. It doesn't necessitate other views.

The author built a strawman argument by trying to invalidate CyberSpace in the "Fax Space" and "Telephone Space" argument. Okay, those two terms don't port easily, but that's only _one nuanced area of discussion_. Do you really believe you need to view CyberSpace as some sort of sovereign territory to understand what someone is talking about when they say the government is restricting rights? That's not the point. We _know_ there isn't an internet continent/kingdom/nation/whathaveyou being invaded by a host of other nations trying to use it selfishly. That's missing the point. The real point is, if the government has their way, you could lose the ability to make blog posts like this. That's the reality. And whether or not you _agree_ with this argument, that _is the argument_ \- not that the internet is being visualized as a sovereign nation of idealist hackers somewhere.

The author's rant on CyberSpace is simply too literal and completely misses the point. It sounds good at first, but when you examine the real logic behind it, the author is not arguing anything that has ever really been said by notable representatives of internet communities. Taking this article's view on "CyberSpace" to it's logical extrapolation, the article must think people who argue against SOPA and PIPA are ignorant of basic linguistics. But really, the author is just being deliberately obtuse for argument's sake, or is simply ignorant of the fact that _analogies are not designed to translate perfectly into concrete descriptions_. You can break an analogy by stretching it too far. And this is what the author did in analyzing the use of the term "CyberSpace" - extended it too far (and much farther than it is ordinarily used), and then defeated the argument he constructed.

<comment><USER14> > No one believes there is a mystical Narnia of 1s and 0s "somewhere out > there" - no one reasonable, whose opinion matters at least.

I think a lot of people _do_ believe that "cyberspace" really exists and that it's a place where we should be conducting war.

source: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwarfare>

<comment><USER15> Just like they believe in the twin lands of "Information" and "Electronic" two other places we travel to for conflict?

Or, you know, it could just be that when we militarize something we're not used to being involved in war we call it something something warfare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If nothing else, cyberspace can be delineated economically.

In meatspace, the economic leverage of a traditional business is scarcity and the leverage of traditional parasitic distribution business is distance. The economics of cyberspace can be based on neither of these things, because once a single instance of something is created, it is everywhere without scarcity. Traditional business attemts to create artificial scarcity and distance, but this is madness.

</comment><comment><USER17> Stop pretending cyberspace is owned by one country and set of laws, Salon. Idiotic article that misses the point of a lot of legitimate issues.

</comment><comment><USER18> The assertion/snow clone "[x] makes you dumber just for hearing it" can sometimes be more accurately formulated "I do not have an adequately developed set of reasoning tools to grapple with and understand [x]."

Usually it's paired with that "doesn't know enough to recognize inadequacy" problem.

</comment><comment><USER19> Are abstractions like freedom, rights, and individual any more real than the abstraction of cyberspace? Author is going down a slippery slope.

</comment><comment><USER20> Relevant blog? <http://guscost.com/2012/06/18/content/>

</comment><comment><USER21> You want cyberspace? It looks like this

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-Hg2Ft0Vtc></comment>


Graham and Feynman Meet in the Middle - <AUTHOR> http://www.jakevoytko.com/blog/2008/07/11/graham-and-feynman-meet-in-the-middle/

<comment><USER2> Bottom up design: Create a bunch of robust libraries so your goal system is simple to create.

Top down design: outline your goal system and work down to create the components (or usually one off custom made stuff) to create your system.

<comment><USER3> And in software, both work, as long as you're paying attention. Software isn't like rocket engine design in this sense, because you can still perform unit tests without incurring a huge cost, even if the units are the result of a carefully considered top-down design.

In any case, you begin to get into trouble if you're not clear on what your goal is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "First it is necessary to thoroughly understand the properties and limitations of the materials to be used (for turbine blades, for example), and tests are begun in experimental rigs to determine those."

I love this approach to engineering. Feynman always manages to remind me what I like about science and engineering.</comment>


Interview with David Heinemeier Hansson on climate change - <AUTHOR> https://www.myclimatejourney.co/episodes/david-heinemeier-hansson <comment><USER2> Last year was the first year I owned (and regularly used) a car, which made me think about mitigating my carbon footprint a little bit more seriously than paying the 'carbon tax' on my flights.

Like David says the offset projects all seem kind of snake-oil'y, so I looked for something that actually changes something in the world for the better. So far, building green infrastructure seems attractive, but I fear that in the end it just makes energy a little bit cheaper for people, and the real CO2 impact that happens in the transport and agriculture sectors doesn't really get solved.

I also was attracted to planting trees, since there's a very concrete impact there, that can't really be cheated against (unless people burn them down of course). So I started calculating how many trees to plant and it turns out that there's a lot of misleading info.

For example, in ideal conditions a tree might accumulate 20kg of CO2 in 40 years. My car did 16000km at about 1/14, on gasoline so that's 2742kg of CO2. So some website will tell me to plant 140 trees to compensate over 40 years, to compensate what I did in 1 year, assuming all those trees survive.

But they don't, only 55% lives, so I should plant 280 trees to be a bit more sure I really am compensating. And then it'll be compensated in 2060, which is useless because climate is changing now, not in 40 years. So it's better to compensate up front, so say I want to make sure I've made an impact by 2025, I should plant 8 times as many trees, so that's 2240 trees, and that's just assuming they grow linearly, which they probably don't do. And that they are planted in the tropics, which they probably aren't, and even if they were there's a risk they would be burned down for agriculture within the decade anyway.

And that's just me with an under average commute driving a mediocre car.

Does anyone have a better solution for offsetting carbon? Maybe we should pool money together and buy someone that's driving a range rover a tesla..

<comment><USER3> >For example, in ideal conditions a tree might accumulate 20kg of CO2 in 40 years.

Are you sure it is not 20kg of CO2 every year for 40 years? After all, dry wood is half carbon approximately.

<comment><USER2> Woops you're totally right, so that's shaves off a lot. I found a resource that says a young tree captures about 5kg per year. The 20kg per year figure is for a 10 year old tree. That brings it down to having to plant about 110 trees every year for 5 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The climate change debate is confused because a lot of people mix it with their own tangential and irrelevant issues. For example, broader environmental issues like plastic trash. If you're throwing carbon in a landfill and it doesn't decompose, it's not climate change. You may hate it, but it doesn't cause climate change, because that carbon went from being on the ground to being in the ground. And I'm not picking on the left and the green new deal crowed (where climate change is now a jobs, Healthcare and racial reconciliation issue as well). If you read right wing stuff, you'll notice the growing popularity of a sort of green fascism. Ie, people you didn't like immigrants before now have arguments telling us how you can't solve climate change without restricting immigration :rolleyes:

At the end of the day I see two inseparable requirements to solve it: new technologies which let us keep our standard of living without emitting carbon, and a cultural change to accept and desire low carbon substitutes. For example, EVs let you move around without emitting carbon, but they can't take off until people's attitudes towards ICE vehicles change to associate them with dirtyness. Or synthetic meat. It's very important that vegans put the idea that meat is not great, but they are going against super powerful millenia old traditions and so very good substitutes need to be available to help people overcome that.

Once you start running through the sources of carbon pollution and apply this, you get a pretty good idea of how to tackle the problem.

<comment><USER5> > If you're throwing carbon in a landfill and it doesn't decompose, it's not > climate change.

If it goes in landfill, it's not being reused or recycled to prevent more carbon from being produced to make something new. Some recycling processes are fairly energy intensive so the carbon savings are not always significant but recycling still reduces demand to extract more raw materials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stunning and brave

</comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like he endorses Bernie

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> DHH, co-founder of Basecamp, and Jason Jacobs, co-founder of RunKeeper and host of the "My Climate Journey" podcast, have a deep conversation about climate change, their own personal views on it, and taking the metaphorical "red pill," as it relates to the crisis.

You can find past episodes on the My Climate Journey website as well as request an invite to the Slack group, where discussions on the topic are taking place among technologists, experts and entrepreneurs: [https://www.myclimatejourney.co/](https://www.myclimatejourney.co/)

</comment><comment><USER8> DHH is misusing the term "red pill" here. He's saying he's accepted an inevitable negative outcome, not that he's been exposed to a hidden truth. The term he's looking for is "black pill."

<comment><USER9> Nice username. You made a throwaway just to post _this_?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Facing climate change fills you with dread . . . until you act. Then you see all the reasons not to act as self-serving rationalization. When you find the joy, community, and connection of acting on your environmental values.

When you realize that stopping all this polluting activity improves your life, you want to do more. People will comment that what one person does doesn't matter and other self-serving rationalization, but they miss that it improves your life.

I talk about this in my TEDx talks [http://joshuaspodek.com/my-second-tedx- talk-what-everyone-ge...](http://joshuaspodek.com/my-second-tedx-talk-what- everyone-gets-wrong-about-the-environment-and-how-to-get-it-right-went-live) and will treat it more in the one I'm giving this weekend, as well as my podcast, but the bottom line is that the more you act the more you'll stop navel gazing and the excuses not to act will melt away.

Avoiding packaged food led for me to avoiding flying, which led to a podcast, which led me to work with some of the world's most renowned and influential people (more to come!) [http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast](http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast), which led to a practice of environmental leadership executive training, where I train corporate executives in the specific leadership skills relevant to the environment, which leads to cultural change (and, for the executives: promotions, higher morale, attracting talent, and so on, which happens when you meet the demand everyone else is ignoring).

<comment><USER11> I'm attracted to the idea that acting makes you feel better. But how do you take part in the economy, for instance, without adding to the catastrophe? How do you socialize without emitting carbon? I feel like I'd have to join some sort of cult if I were to both take care of my material and socializing needs, and live a carbon neutral lifestyle.

And then again, would I feel satisfied with a carbon neutral lifestyle? When there's a fire burning, is it enough to tell yourself you're not adding fuel to the fire? Shouldn't you take part in throwing water?

For a long time it felt good showing virtue. Right now panic is kicking in again and I have no idea how to handle it.

<comment><USER12> You can't fix this alone. You can't even lead by example and get results, because a sustainable lifestyle in terms of climate change essentially has you living under a bridge if you account for your share of infrastructure. Personal responsibility is just not going to be the solution, so we need to look elsewhere.

I need to clarify here that I agree with GP that taking personal action is empowering and can lead you down a virtuous path. I just think that the goal needs to be changing society, not changing your own life. So if you want to make a difference, you have to be part of society. You have to take part in the economy, even if that means you will personally directly contribute more to the problem than you would if you went full hermit in the woods. There's no simple solution, but if there is one at all, it has to involve a lot of people working together.

<comment><USER10> GP back again. I did a podcast episode on the point of personal action and the difference from influencing others, which I also do: [https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the- environment/episo...](https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the- environment/episodes/224-clarifying-my-strategy)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Project Natick: Microsoft's Underwater Data Center - <AUTHOR> http://www.projectnatick.com/ <comment><USER2> > 50% OF US LIVE NEAR THE COAST. WHY DOESN'T OUR DATA?

It's corrosive, expensive to get things to and from it for replacement, leaks destroy the hardware, it's not close to power generation, internet access needs cables because RF doesn't penetrate water, everything is going need watercooling which is rather expensive.

<comment><USER3> Imagining they completely solve the problem of sea water, leaks, etc, it still is amazing to think that you would want to do your server maint by pulling a data center out of the ocean on a boat and replacing hard drives and the like.

The only way this makes sense to me is if there is the ability to create something akin to the cargo container as a building block of a data center, where you can have arbitrary compute and storage plug into a greater complex.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like that's exactly what they want to do: they would only pull them out of the water every 5 years to do computer replacements / maintenance. If some components fail then who cares. They wouldn't do a full rebuild for 20 years.

<comment><USER5> I worked in large data centers before and I just don't see how this can be done practically. Data centers require quite a bit of physical maintenance.

Every computer design has some element that will render a large part of the design inoperable in case of failure. Either it is a SAN head (even if you have two, the fail over can malfunction), or a switch setup.

Then there are things like failures of simultaneously purchased components (hard drives purchased at the same time, that are worked the same load will roughly fail at the time).

<comment><USER6> Cloud datacenters are not complex heterogeneous mixes of components. There's no SAN head. It's one thing multiplied + some networking gear. Even if a top of rack switch fails they're still not going to yank the box yet because the TCO will be lowered by too much maintenance at this scale. They wait for their maint interval and fix everything at once (or just upgrade the hardware).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A clever idea. People are wondering why such a thing might be useful, so let me advance a theory:

Latency.

Suppose you have a bunch of people somewhere, say, the US, and a bunch of other people somewhere else, say, China, and there's an ocean in between. If they need to work collaboratively on something, placing a datacenter in one country or the other yields asymmetric latency; someone has a lot more.

If you can just plop a datacenter exactly at the midpoint, everyone wins. It needn't be the biggest datacenter ever, just one that can handle the latency- sensitive tasks.

Neat project.

<comment><USER8> More likely it's to reconcile latency requirements with national borders. If you want to be close to a country to offer low latency, but political or legal or tax reasons mean you don't want to be _in_ that country, then an ocean datacenter can get you close enough.

<comment><USER9> Hint hint - China! Those damn ICP licenses!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Speaking about effectiveness and stuff: I am still amazed how these modern bootstrapy landing pages, that, in this particular case, basically contain nothing more than text and a couple of pictures, can make browser noticeably slower. I mean, yeah, it works, can be built quickly and, since users are used to it — nobody really complains. If it would be some yet another tiny startup, I wouldn't even bother to comment.

But when it's a landing for some futuristic Microsoft project, which is about doing significant work to achieve relatively small improvement in something, and which is very likely to be non-environmentally-friendly… Really, just look at it. Enjoy how scrolling up and down makes your browser lag. And then look at the source. Just marvelous.

<comment><USER11> It's rendered entirely with JavaScript, has images (and gifs), and an iframe with a Bing map on it, some sort of plugin for "Azure Media Player", and it appears to also have some scrolling-based JavaScript. It's a good example of an obese website: [http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cooling data centers with seawater is not new, Google has been doing it since at least 2011. There are many ways to mitigate the corrosive effects on the equipment. "For instance, Interxion uses materials like Cunifer and titanium, which will last approximately 10 years in seawater." [1]

There also are many tried and true ways to manage the heated water so that it is safe for the environment [1, 2].

"We pump that seawater through cooling modules - which are direct water to water heat exchange modules - and then the water is gravity fed from the cooling modules back out to a temporary building, which serves the purpose of mixing incoming seawater with outgoing return water, so when we return the water to the Gulf it is at a temperature more similar to the incoming water." [2].

I'm sure Microsoft was aware of all this before publishing their report. Good on them for thinking creatively.

[1]: [http://www.datacenterjournal.com/industry-perspective- seawat...](http://www.datacenterjournal.com/industry-perspective-seawater- cool-data-center/)

[2]: [http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/power-cooling/googles- finl...](http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/power-cooling/googles-finland-data- center-pioneers-new-seawater-cooling/32932.fullarticle)

<comment><USER13> Can't all the pipes and valves be made of plastic?

<comment><USER14> Sea water decomposes plastic faster than it corrodes metal. This is one of the issues with plastic pollution of the oceans they break down release nasty chemicals and end up as micro plastics.

Most plastics will decompose under a year in the oceans turning it into soup basically. [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/08/090820-plast...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/08/090820-plastic- decomposes-oceans-seas.html)

<comment><USER15> Interesting - I didn't know that. But the article you cite says it only really happens in tropical waters above 30C (86F). Is there evidence plastic decomposes in sea water in cooler climates?

<comment><USER13> By definition if the water is used for cooling, it will be warmed up when flowing through the datacenter.

But you could use sea water just a secondary cooling system, with non sea water flowing through the datacentre and a heat exchange between the two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The main advantage I would think that is not mentioned is mitigating the price of real estate in expensive regions like Hong Kong, New York, San Francisco etc.

<comment><USER17> I came here to say the same. Cities with expensive real estate are often the cities where latency matters even more. This is essentially a datacenter that can be dropped in the ocean, rent-free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Natick is a town in Massachusetts, as the FAQ says; it's also the home of Natick Labs, which over the years has done interesting R&D.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Natick_Sold...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Natick_Soldier_Research,_Development_and_Engineering_Center)

ETA: that's what I get for typing mindlessly instead of cutting and pasting.

<comment><USER19> Massachusetts, not Maryland. I live right next door to Natick. Read that Wikipedia article more carefully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> See also [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/technology/microsoft- plumb...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/technology/microsoft-plumbs- oceans-depths-to-test-underwater-data-center.html) (via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008851)).

Since the current post is more of an original source and is currently ranked higher on the front page, we treated that one as the dupe and merged its comments here.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm still not sure why one would want to place the data center at the bottom of the ocean. I would think that the disadvantage of not being able to perform maintenance for 5 years would be more significant -- can't they just create the data center near a water source and pump the water through pipes that run across a heat exchange on the backside of the servers?

<comment><USER22> Your idea is what's being done at the largest computing center in Switzerland, the CSCS. They pump water from the relatively deep Lake Lugano [1]. Europe's currently fastest supercomputer (world No. 7) is hosted there.

[1] [http://www.cscs.ch/cscs/an_innovative_centre/cooling_system/...](http://www.cscs.ch/cscs/an_innovative_centre/cooling_system/index.html)

[2] [http://www.top500.org/lists/2015/11/](http://www.top500.org/lists/2015/11/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It seems like putting this in freshwater would help with a lot of issues. A data center in say Lake Huron gets you relatively low latency access to a lot of US & Canadian population. Putting it in an artificially dammed lake on a river gives you free-ish power & cooling (and probably population proximity as well, since river-side areas tend to be densely populated).

</comment><comment><USER24> Talk about a Digital Ocean.

</comment><comment><USER25> It would be pretty amazing to put servers undersea in the _middle of an ocean_ for transaction efficiency reasons -- say between NYC and LON directly on the straight line path.

The crazy thing is there probably are financial market applications/HFT where having processing power exactly equidistant between to market centers with the most efficient path would make sense. (Running microwave instead of fiber, to get 1c vs. 2/3c, would also be interesting, but there are different engineering challenges there.)

Amazed Microsoft didn't mention this.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sure, some heat will be added to the ocean. But land-based data centers add heat to the environment and also need to be air conditioned.

One question, what happens when there's a tsunami?

This is a particularly relevant question on the US west coast: [http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-to-stay-safe- when...](http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-to-stay-safe-when-the-big- one-comes)

<comment><USER27> A tsunami would have relatively little effect on a pod suspended/anchored to the sea floor. They only get violent when they reach the shallows and come onto land. It'd have more effect on the shore connection point where the data and power go into the ocean. These could be buried up to the shore though and anything above ground secured in a sealed bunker though that doesn't solve the problem of keeping the pods powered through the power outage after a tsunami.

<comment><USER26> That's somewhat reassuring (there's thought to be a 12% chance of a Cascadia mega-quake and accompanying west coast tsunami in the next twenty years).

<comment><USER27> Yeah the main factor in how much will a large wave or tsunami affect a structure at sea is how deep is the water the object is in. Out in the deep ocean the surface swell is less than a meter and the wavelength is huge (200 km or so long) so the change is relatively gentle and gets subtler as you get deeper. It's really neat.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami#Characteristics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami#Characteristics)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here (and member of the Project Natick team) - the site has been updated with our video, and there's now a blog post with some more information: [http://news.microsoft.com/features/microsoft-research- projec...](http://news.microsoft.com/features/microsoft-research-project-puts- cloud-in-ocean-for-the-first-time/)

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't get it. If this is all about heat, I would think that putting the data center _beside_ the ocean and then pumping seawater around to cool things would be far easier than sinking the entire kit. Even if they really really want to be underwater, I'd assume digging an artificial lake and pumping water in and out would be easier than dealing with an actual ocean.

<comment><USER29> Eh, I think it's indeed more of an intellectual curiosity than anything else, but personally I cannot support enough our encroachment on the ocean. It truly is the last frontier on the surface of the Earth that we have yet to reliably explore.

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have a lot more potential to expand our understanding of this planet and I think it is exciting. Just because we can't go there doesn't mean we can't tap into its power.

At the risk of sounding like a BBC documentary, the oceans are the engine of this planet and they deserve to be investigated thoroughly.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> At first I was concerned that there would be so much humidity inside of the capsule from the condensation caused by the temperature difference between the outside and the inside, but I see they've addressed that by replacing the atmosphere with Nitrogen.

I wonder if they've considered an inert fluid to immerse the computers in? If you can use something like Fluorinert, or even high-grade mineral oil, you might be able to make the vessel not required to withstand crush forces as high since the fluid in the capsule can be at the same pressures.

I do love this idea because they can start putting data centers along of submarine cables. One in the middle of the Atlantic, between London and NYC would be great for HFT traders.

I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA wouldn't love something like this too. A whole data center on cross-oceanic cables would provide a lot of infrastructure they can use to analyze traffic in real-time.

<comment><USER31> I'm not sure what nitrogen has to do with humidity. I don't think anything. If humidity was the problem there are other ways to deal with it (the water doesn't come from nowhere, and once it's gone, you won't get any condensation anymore).

Sounds like (pressurized) nitrogen had more to do with increasing the air density for heat transfer. But I still don't know why they chose nitrogen.

<comment><USER29> Yeah I'm not sure what it has to do with it either, desiccants[1] are nothing new and they are the standard when it comes to humidity reduction in shipping. You might be familiar with those little packets of silica beads in foods and computer components that say "DO NOT EAT" on them.

That said, nitrogen-refrigeration is commonly used for temperature control.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiccant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiccant)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Changing the water temperature locally more than a few degrees has bad effects for the environment. Keep that in mind.

<comment><USER10> First thought as well. I mean, those datacenters on land also are pretty bad (especially compared to how "useful" they are in the most common cases), but that thing in the sea is somehow a bit more scary for several reasons.

But then I'm thinking: there are volcanos deep in the ocean, and life around them is surely different than in colder areas, but it doesn't seem to have much impact on larger area. It surely depends a lot on _where_ you place your datacenter, but, theoretically, it should be possible to make it harmless.

The other thing is that of course tech giants placing their datacenters under the water won't care a bit about correct placing, and in the end there won't be anyone to stop them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Data Sovereignty? Could this, for better or for worse, allow Microsoft to completely dictate the terms of how it stores and manages its data in international waters?

<comment><USER23> Ha. In "international waters", you're at the mercy of whomever has the strongest navy - usually that means to USA. Especially when they can make an at-all-plausible case that you're in some sense US-flagged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > 50% OF US LIVE NEAR THE COAST. WHY DOESN'T OUR DATA?

Regardless of the effort and results, I think they should reconsider putting an illogical and patently false statement at the header of this article in attempt to gain interest about it.

Some of my data, or more specifically "my data" lives in my house, in servers in my garage. While the collaborative argument has some merit in proposing splitting latency differences, I think the vast majority of "our data" should end up living near where we are.

That results in a better question to ask, and that's "Why do people tend to put their data where they don't live?" Following, one may ask "Are there valid business models that can be created to help people put their data near where they live?"

</comment><comment><USER35> Microsoft loves to hype these things; remember container data centers? It all makes for nice reading, but I suspect their TCO is crap.

</comment><comment><USER36> When the USS Jimmy Carter[1] splices an intercept into an undersea fiber optic cable it probably leaves something similar to this behind of locally filter the data and only uplink relevant data.

Makes you wonder what vendors the Navy uses and if MSFT is using the same.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/new-nuclear- sub-i...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/new-nuclear-sub-is-said- to-have-special-eavesdropping-ability.html)

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm surprised that no one has commented at all on climate change. Having a data center in a body of water would surely heat up that body of water to a certain extent - even if it's just the surrounding area which can cause dramatic effects to the water, life, and relative climate/weather patterns.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is a nice PR piece but building operational systems in a marine environment usually requires hardy engineering, equipment, and constant maintenance. It's not a friendly environment.

I can't see the benefits here, if they want water cooling colocation with hydro-electric or other freshwater flows seem much better.

</comment><comment><USER14> Would be quite interesting to see what exactly comes out of this.

If the datacenter will be located in international waters it can pretty much chose the country which it belongs to as it will have to sail under a flag (this effects stationary ojbects also e.g. oil rigs in international waters).

Now every country can claim upto 200KM as their exclusive economical waters so it will still be under the jurisdiction of the country to which those waters belong to unless MSFT plans to really put the datacenter in the deep ocean.

On the side and more hilarious note if anyone hacks a datacenter in international waters they've technically committed piracy so I wonder how will this effect the NSA :D Although the downside of this is that countries can board and search vessels under the laws of the sea quite easily if they are in international waters.

</comment><comment><USER39> Ha. With the project name, I somehow kept expecting this thing to be off the coast of Boston. Took me a while to realize it was off the West Coast :)

</comment><comment><USER40> Given how much heat racks of servers on land generate, I don't understand how they can claim that there is no heat being added to the ocean.

<comment><USER41> I came here to say exactly the same thing ... it requires a lot more calories to heat up water one degree Celsius than it does air but the heat still has to go somewhere.

<comment><USER42> An interesting question would be, how much heat do all of the world datacenters produce and how much energy would it take to raise the average temperature of the Ocean by 1 degree?

<comment><USER43> The world's oceans contain 1,335,000,000 km^3 of water. Heat capacity is 4.2 KJ / liter / C. So it requires 5.6e24 joules to heat the oceans by 1 C.

The world generates 20,000 TWh of electricity per year, and maybe 10% is for IT. That's 7.2e18 joules of electricity / year in IT.

So it would take 780,000 years to heat by 1 C. Or 780 years to heat by 0.001 C.

Other sources of global warming are far, far worse.

<comment><USER40> The problem I'm concerned about isn't raising the average temperature of the ocean. The problem I'm concerned about is localized heating. Marine life is far more vulnerable to rapid temperature changes than life on land. We've seen dead zones developing in the past downstream of power-plants, as the warm water discharge from the steam turbines raises the temperature of the water and reduces its oxygen carrying capability. My concern is that if we put datacenters in the ocean, they'll create localized hot-spots with much the same result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> >Project Natick reflects Microsoft's ongoing quest for cloud datacenter solutions that offer rapid provisioning, lower costs, high responsiveness, and are more environmentally sustainable.

I don't understand how an underwater data center would help with that

>The vision of operating containerized datacenters offshore near major population centers anticipates a highly interactive future requiring data resources located close to users. Deepwater deployment offers ready access to cooling, renewable power sources, and a controlled environment.

I don't understand why that needs to be done in an underwater data center.

>Enables rapid response to market demand, quick deployment for natural disasters and special events such as World Cup.

I don't understand how an underwater data center solves that.

>Latency is how long it takes data to travel between its source and destination. Half of the world's population lives within 200 km of the ocean so placing datacenters offshore increases the proximity of the datacenter to the population dramatically reducing latency and providing better responsiveness.

Let's imagine you throw an underwater data center in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea to provide access to everybody. How is that more advantageous to just building the data center on one of the islands?

Overall, I guess I don't understand why we need an underwater data center, like at all. Is it mostly because of advanced cooling capability?

</comment><comment><USER45> [http://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer- Appea...](http://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appears- ebook/dp/B006ACIMQQ)

This reminds me of a book I read recently in which they put the servers on barges. I was an entertaining read, 1/1 would recommend.

</comment><comment><USER46> Microsoft trying to be relevant/interesting. This is worse than Zune. I just might short MSFT tomorrow morning.

> you have a bunch of people somewhere, say, the US, and a bunch of other > people somewhere else, say, China > If you can just plop a datacenter > exactly at the midpoint

That would be Hawaii

</comment><comment><USER47> Somewhat unrelated, but nice endorsement of Grafana! [http://www.projectnatick.com/images/gifs/grafanaloop.gif](http://www.projectnatick.com/images/gifs/grafanaloop.gif)

</comment><comment><USER48> The "Leona Philpot"? Surely a reference to the "I Love Bees" ARG for Halo 2?

[http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Leona_Philpot](http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Leona_Philpot)

<comment><USER49> > "The first prototype, affectionately named Leona Philpot — a character in > Microsoft's Halo video game series..."

<comment><USER48> Oh... I should really pay more attention :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> With the layoffs in the oil exploration industry and the knock-on effects for engineering firms who helped with undersea exploration this is great timing from Microsoft.

Cheaper labour/costs to pick up the technology needed.

</comment><comment><USER51> Would putting a big data center underground work? (ala geothermal cooling?)

<comment><USER52> You've heard of geothermal heating?

Of course, the ground can be reasonable cool, if you don't go too deep. The problem is, the heat will mostly stay where you put it---the ground is bad for actually moving the heat away.

<comment><USER51> IIRC, in geothermal cooling, don't they pipe liquid to disperse the heat to the surrounding ground? Also, earth homes?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What I don't get is how do you swap a disk? A datacentre requires pretty much constant maintenance. I guess a robot could swap a disk. But we are talking about a pretty costly equipment then.

</comment><comment><USER53> Is the white paper that they mention on the website publicly available? I think it would offer more information than the website so people would understand the rationale for this investigation.

</comment><comment><USER54> This sounds like a great idea, kind of. I'd be seriously concerned about the immediate environmental impact. Otoh, volcanic vents are hotbeds of life, so maybe it'd be ok.

</comment><comment><USER55> Funnily enough, this was sort of predicted in a paper[1], even though the intended use there would have been HFT.

[1]www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf

</comment><comment><USER56> Google Earth Amazon Fire Apple Air . . Microsoft Water?

</comment><comment><USER57> They should think of how to handle security.

There is a risk of not just industrial sabotage, but international espionage & terrorism.... and of course... Tom Cruise.

</comment><comment><USER58> It sure saves on cooling, but watching someone trying to replace a failed drive will prove entertaining.

</comment><comment><USER59> Why don't datacenters of scale use a fluid specially designed for heat dissipation that doesn't damage components like this? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6ErbZtpL88](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6ErbZtpL88)?

</comment><comment><USER60> I hate to be the cynical in the room, but this smells like tax avoiding.

</comment><comment><USER61> Working for the company, I really really f'n hate this website.

</comment><comment><USER62> How long till we start putting datacenters in space? 20 years?

<comment><USER63> With no convective medium, the primary cooling mechanism in space is radiation, making it no so easy to keep computers cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> MS is misunderstanding what deep learning is :)

</comment><comment><USER65> Cooling for free

</comment><comment><USER66> Will there be any noise pollution?

</comment><comment><USER67> SOMA flashbacks

Watch out for that structure gel!

<comment><USER68> Came in here looking for SOMA reference. I'd imagine a data center would sort of work as its own ARK, though (Not to mention the petabytes of sensitive, personal, possibly secret documents, pictures and videos for your perusal).

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Seems like a bad idea to dump waste heat into the ocean.

</comment><comment><USER70> the lack of diversity in that team is astounding ! not a single eastern european there.

</comment><comment><USER71> I'd imagine the NSA would be pretty happy about this.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells)</comment>


Do Millennials Really Want Cars? - <AUTHOR> http://business.time.com/2013/08/09/the-great-debate-do-millennials-really-want-cars-or-not/

<comment><USER2> I want a car.. but I don't necessarily need to own it. In fact, I find owning things to be a burden. It keeps me unnecessarily tied to a location, working for things I don't need really need, and things I don't really miss when they're gone. Having had the opportunity to do some traveling and live abroad (South America, I'm from the US), it's really changed my opinion on owning lots of things, cars included.

For the past 3 months I've been renting a car because I've needed it for a few particular reasons. However, I'm very glad that I can simply return it at whatever time I choose and be done with the responsibility of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> No. I'm 31[1] and I own a 9 year old car (purchased new on July 2, 2004) on which I've clocked 33,000 miles, the vast majority of which happened in the first three years I owned it (live in Seattle, worked in the burbs). I very intentionally live in a neighborhood where I rarely have to drive, and try to use Uber and car2go whenever possible. Most of my shopping is done on Amazon (Amazon Prime, ftw).

Car ownership is expensive and annoying, but still too convenient to give up. I wish Seattle had a better public transit system than it does. If I lived in New York, I'd happily give up my driver's license.

[1] Which means I was born in 1982, and turned 18 in 2000, making me one of the first millenials.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree. I hate just about everything about driving: it's a time-suck, incredibly stressful, and environmentally awful (not to mention lazy). I live in a walkable and bikeable area specifically to reduce the amount that I have to be in a car. Rent tends to be a bit higher in these areas, but for me the tradeoff is completely worth it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If they live in the Silicon Valley, they almost definitely do.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes. I lived in San Francisco without a car due to the prohibitive cost of owning one there. It made visiting friends and family a nightmare. It stopped me from singing in the car (since, you know, what car?). It meant I was confined to the area I could walk to from home. Just me and some stores and restaurants, alone in the world.</comment>


Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-one/accessories/controllers/elite-wireless-controller-series-2 <comment><USER2> If only they kept the 2 AA batteries, but that's just me.</comment>


How not to return API errors - <AUTHOR> http://blog.shopful.me/how-not-to-return-api-errors <comment><USER2> As cliched as it may sound, it...depends on how is the API consumed? Is the error code going be processed further and passed onto logger or other sub- systems? Are there possible cases of collision with other existing enumerations or type restriction (magic handling relies on error code being of a certain value, for example). Most common way is to have an array of enumerated constants in code and that also adds a maintenance debt across front and back ends to sync up unless there is a separate micro-service to enquire about those enumerations which translates to extra development cost. It could get complicated fast and so on. Oh, hopefully the documentation (or code comment) stays up to date as well.</comment>


We shouldn't be using R0 to measure the rate of Covid-19 transmission - <AUTHOR> https://get21stnight.com/2020/04/27/the-troubles-with-how-the-rate-of-virus-transmission-is-measured/ <comment><USER2> I actually thought this was a fairly well reasoned post rather than the expected hit piece we see so much of these days. If you listen to the politicians and certain medical experts, they keep spouting that testing is the only way out of this, while ignoring you cannot possibly test 330 million people frequently enough for testing to do any good (at least every week). There isn't enough machines, nor qualified people to run them, nor places to house such a large scale venture.

I do disagree that there is any evidence that isolation or social distancing has had any impact on the spread. If you compare the graphs of what would have happened if the government did nothing versus the ones that imposed stay-at- home, they are virtually the same. There is no evidence of a flattening of the curve. The flatten the curve theory leaves out the fact that capacity doesn't stay level and goes down as it is used up. At best you would have mirror-image curves where capacity goes negative versus the infection rate peaks until patients pass or recover, freeing up capacity. The curves would be offset based on time of infection until hospitalization.

It is easy to graph that based on public data, but the media nor medical experts will show that as it disputes the advice they are giving. Time will tell of course and the places to watch are CA and FL where people have gone back to the beaches. If CA and FL spike in the next couple weeks, social distancing should continue to be kept in place. If not, then it was never an effective tool to begin with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you saying that social distancing doesn't work to immediately stop the spread, or that it would never work to stop the spread?

<comment><USER2> Here is one of the first studies ([https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01248-1](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01248-1)) on the relationship between lock-down policies and death rates. In the graph shown in the middle of the article, you can see there is no impact on the death rate by moderate to severe lock-down policies. All countries experienced essentially the same rate of death from Covid regardless of lock-down and social distancing policies. The only outlier is Hong Kong, whose reported statistics are questionable at best given the level of government oppression occurring in that state leading up to the Covid crisis.</comment></comment></comment>


Calculate the day of the week for any date in your head - <AUTHOR> http://rudy.ca/doomsday.html <comment><USER2> Here's the easiest way I've seen [1] to determine if a year is a leap year:

 _If the last two digits of the year are 00, throw them away and keep only the first two digits. Otherwise, keep only the last two digits. The year is a leap year if what you kept is divisible by 4._

Examples:

\- The year 1705 does not end in 00, so throw away 17 and keep 05. 05 _is not_ divisible by 4, so 1705 _is not_ a leap year.

\- The year 2000 ends in 00, so throw away 00 and keep 20. 20 _is_ divisible by 4, so 2000 _is_ a leap year.

The standard method [2] is more complicated:

> Years that are divisible by four are leap years, with the exception of years > that are divisible by 100, which are not leap years, and with the final > exception of years divisible by 400, which are.

[1] [https://twitter.com/jordancurve/status/1012203999716618240](https://twitter.com/jordancurve/status/1012203999716618240)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/feb/28/leap-year- al...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/feb/28/leap-year-alex-bellos)

<comment><USER3> Got tricked during a CS course with this. I bet a lot of the people in that class will remember the full rule. It then came back on the final.

<comment><USER2> What do you mean, "tricked"? The method is original to me and I don't think it has spread very far. Is there a Gregorian calendar year for which the GP algorithm gives the wrong result?

<comment><USER4> The two methods are exactly - exactly - the same. Just different ways of phrasing. Don't fool yourself.

<comment><USER2> The standard method and mine give the same result, and I believe that mine is simpler to carry out in your head.

In what way do you believe that I am fooling myself?

<comment><USER5> Not so much as fooling yourself, but I agree with the OP your method isnt really 'original' in the sense that it's indeed exactly the same as the 'standard' one, just a tad different in how you _explain_ the math. E.g. 'if not ending in 00 throw away...' is really just the same thing as 'except when divisable by 100'.

<comment><USER6> To add to your comment, being divisable by 400 is also the same thing as throwing away the 00 and checking the remaining is divisable by 4. One explanation is just a rephrasing of the other for the exact same method.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If not for religious groups, we could have had World Calendar and all this would be unnecessary: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Calendar](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Calendar).

<comment><USER8> Yea nope. Leap days not having a weekday? How would that even work?

<comment><USER9> Instead of just dumping the first thought that comes through your head on us, could you explain _why_ you think it wouldn't work? What issues do you see arising?

It seems to me we go through life with little exceptional circumstances all the time, and go right back to normal pretty easily.

Is it that hard to imagine having a holiday _not_ disrupting the weekly rhythm of your life? For example, there's a group I go to every Wednesday. But since Christmas and New Year's are both Wednesdays, it's being skipped two weeks in a row. On the other hand, if Christmas and New Year's "didn't count" then we could carry on without changing the schedule, getting in the way of other standing plans, etc.

<comment><USER8> Because that's all I've got and I haven't really given it much more thought than my initial gut reaction. It just seems infinitely bizarre not to have a weekday, and writing about it now seems like it would make synchronizing and automation hell with a day like that.

<comment><USER10> There's more to life than synchronizing and automation.

<comment><USER8> That's the least warranted, holier than though sentence I've ever read here on HN. I don't even know where to begin to pick this apart. It's not about enabling automation in the factory making sense, it's about keeping order in our minds and in our software...and having an "oopsie" blank day with no way to logically derive will do more to fuck with your intuition about time and calendars than having everything else around it neatly fit. Even something as simple as counting days on your hands will become wholly unintuitive because you now have to consider something worse than an edge-case.

But go ahead, make this about how narrow-minded my view on life is. Arguments like this are why wishy-washy calendar ideas like the one being proposed got blown to bits and relegated to a single page wikipedia article barely worth the occasional mention.

<comment><USER10> Come on, I don't disagree with you. But when I was a kid and I first found out about calendar proposals with blank days it all seemed magical to me and it just seems weird to me (with regard to this topic) to think about practicalities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks like an algorithm that could be useful if programmed rather than carried around in one's head.

It also still requires a lookup to bootstrap it: the day-of-week of the last day of February for the selected year. So it's a clever and well-observed compilation of identified patterns, but not self-contained.

<comment><USER12> The version they have here is somewhat inefficient and not well presented.

You can get from the year to the doomsday by a simpler formula:

If odd, add 11; divide by 2; if odd, add 11. Count up to nearest multiple of 7

So e.g. 1955 turns into 66 turns into 33 turns into 44 turns into 5. Add that to 4 for the century (1900 is 4, 2000 is 3, that's all you really need to memorize) and you get 9, so the doomsday for 1955 is Monday.

From there it's simple, 4/4 6/6 8/8 10/10 12/12, 9/5 7/11 per the mnemonic mentioned, last day of February, Jan 3/4 depending on leap year, and March 7 counting forward from February.

There, that's the entire algorithm.

<comment><USER13> To go from "any" century, you can also memorize "2053", which is the days in a 4-year cycle: 2000 = 2 = tuesday; 2100 = 0 = sunday; 2200 = 5 = friday; 2300 = 3 = wednesday.

For years other than the centuries, we need to add an offset. Given the year CCXX, we have:

        (a, b) = divmod(XX, 12)
        c = b // 4
        offset = a + b + c
        doomsday = start + offset

E.g., for 2020 (XX == 20) we get:

        start = 2  # from the "2053" rule
        (a, b) = divmod(20, 12)  # (1, 8)
        c = b // 4  # 2
        offset = 1 + 8 + 2 = 4 (mod 7)
        doomsday = start + offset  # 2 + 4 = 6 = saturday

<comment><USER12> The "add 11" trick in my comment is easier to remember and apply than dividing by 12 and taking remainders.

<comment><USER14> I like my current method [1], while only requires addition, doubling, and a couple of conditional increments or additions. Even if you don't bother doing any mod 7 reduction along the way, you never have to deal with a number above 32.

With both divide by 12 and odd 11, I would find myself occasionally making a goof when dealing with years near the end of centuries.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926543)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My Autistic son does this in a couple of seconds. He can only really do the last 50 years tho.

Savants who do this are called "human calendars".

<comment><USER16> What method does he use to calculate?

<comment><USER15> He can't explain it. AFAIK none of the Human Calendars can, there have been studies.

I reckon it's memory related, he has an incredible memory and can tell you everything he did on a specific day in the past!

Maybe at some point he just scanned the Windows calendar or something!? We (and his teachers) can't work it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> A simpler and easier way to calculate the day of the week for any date is the _First Sunday Doomsday algorithm_ : [http://firstsundaydoomsday.blogspot.com/2009/12/quick- start-...](http://firstsundaydoomsday.blogspot.com/2009/12/quick-start- guide.html)

(There's also a earn-by-example page: [http://firstsundaydoomsday.blogspot.com/2011/01/learn-by- exa...](http://firstsundaydoomsday.blogspot.com/2011/01/learn-by- example.html))

Using Sundays rather than doomsdays simplifies the arithmetic. Another improvement the above approach incorporates is the odd+11 rule for calculating the year code.

</comment><comment><USER17> For all but the most basic details my rule is that if I have to remember it, the system is broken. I know a small handful of passwords off the top of my head, a few email addresses, my wife's and my phone numbers, and the phone number of my home during childhood. (I'm obviously exaggerating, you know, for dramatic effect.) This trick requires so many mnemonic devices that it makes my head spin. It's still impressive if you can do it. Just not for me.

<comment><USER18> You only need to remember 5 things:

\- For 2020, the doomsday is Saturday.

All the dates below are doomsdays (So this year they are all Saturdays):

\- 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12, easy enough

\- 9/5, 5/9, 7/11, 11/7 (9-to-5 at 7-11)

\- 0th of March (last day of February)

\- 3rd of January for non-leap years, and 4th of January for leap years. So this year the 4th is Saturday.

And to calculate dates: mod 7.

So e.g. 7th of July: it's is 4 days before Saturday 7/11, so it's a Tuesday.

<comment><USER19> You can skip the leap year info completely if you consider both January and February as belonging to the previous year. That makes sense as the additional day (Feb 29) is at the end of Februry.

Last year Pi Day was Thursday, this year Saturday.

So the general rule then is: March 14th, April 4th, May 9th, June 6th, July 11th, August 8th, September 5th, October 10th, November 7th, December 12th, January 2nd, February 6th are Pi Days.

Edit: another nice rule is that usually Pi-Days increase by 1 each year (2 in leap years), so next year it will be Sunday, then Monday, Tuesday, Thursday (leap year), Friday, etc.

<comment><USER18> But why do you call them Pi-Days? Pi Day is 3/14 because that's somewhat similar to 3.14, which is Pi to 3 significant digits..

<comment><USER19> They are the same weekday as 3/14 and it makes a little more sense than 'Doomsday', which the article chooses.

<comment><USER18> I vehemently disagree, you can't just redefine Pi-Day to what you want. Pi Day is 3/14, not 4/4 or 6/6.

As for calling it Doomsday, well, it's from the title of the paper about the algorithm, by the man who invented it, the famous John Conway: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule)

<comment><USER19> I didn't come up with this. According to the article, Roman Weil of Princeton teaches the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "[hey seri|ok google|alexa], what day does April 8th fall on?"

</comment><comment><USER21> The 4-6-8-... and 9-5-7-11 rules are really nice to have on hand. The rest of relating years; 99% of the time I'm going to be calculating dates for the current year so those seem less useful to me (not to mention that part is a lot more complicated to remember)

</comment><comment><USER22> This is how I do it: [https://incubaid.wordpress.com/category/algorithms/](https://incubaid.wordpress.com/category/algorithms/)

</comment><comment><USER23> > There are actually 52 (or 53) other days which are all on the same day of > the week as "the" Doomsday at the end of February

That seems incorrect, there should always be 51 other days

</comment><comment><USER24> Doesn't Zellers' Congruence do the same task? Zellers' has been around since 1883, and has been very widely implemented.

</comment><comment><USER14> Here's a summary of the methods I know for computing the factor based on the last two digits of the year that gets added to the factor from the century number to get the Doomsday for the year.

Notation: "A // B" is integer vision (think Python 3 // operator). "A, B = C /% D" means that "A = C//D" and "B = C % D". "A ≡ B" means A and B are the same mod 7. "A ≡⁴ B" means A and B are the same mod 4. I'll use x for multiplication. X + <a,b,c,d> means the four values A+a, X+b, X+c, X+d.

Let Y be the last two digits of the year.

Observation: 365 ≡ 1. If it weren't for leap years, the year factor would simply go up by 1 each year. A leap year pushes the start of the next year back a day, and that's cumulative, so we need a correction of the number of leap years that have past.

1\. That gives the first, and simplest, way to compute the year factor for year Y.

      return Y + Y//4

Advantage: simplest algorithm.

Disadvantage: numbers get larger than you might be comfortable with for fast mental meth. Doing 99, for example, gives 99 + 99/4 = 99 + 24 = 123 ≡ 4, which has plenty of opportunity along the way to goof.

Many people will do better with a method that uses a little more complicated algorithm but cuts down the size of the numbers.

2\. The divide by 12 method, which is the one given in the article, does this.

      a, b = Y /% 12
      c = b // 4
      return a + b + c

Here's why it works.

      Y = 12 a + b
      Y//4 = 3 a + b//4
           = 3 a + c
      Y + Y//4 = 15 a + b + c
               ≡ a + b + c

Advantage: a <= 8, b < 12, c < 4\. Other than the first /%, you only deal with fairly small numbers.

Disadvantage: Still easy for many people to goof on the initial /%.

Note: if you divide by 20 instead of 12, you get a similar method, except that you'll need to use 4a instead of a. Since a is at most 4, 4a is not large. For many people %/ 20 might be sufficiently easier to deal with in mental math than %/ 12 that it is worth the cost of having to multiply by 4.

3\. The odd 11 method.

      Y += 11 if Y is odd
      Y //= 2
      Y += 11 if Y is odd
      return -Y

The easiest way to see that this works is to go back to Y + Y//4\. Write Y = 4q + r, where r = 0, 1, 2, or 3.

The first conditional add 11 step turns 4q + <0,1,2,3> into 4q + <0,12,2,14>. Dividing by 2 then gives 2q + <0,6,1,7>. The second conditional add 11 gives 2q + <0,6,12,18>. Negating mod 7 gives 5q + <0,1,2,3>, which is 4q + <0,1,2,3> \+ q = Y + Y//4.

Similar considerations give other divide by 2 and negate methods. If you note that if Y = 4q, then Y + Y//4 ≡ -(Y//2), then it is just a matter of how to take into account the r in 4q + r when r != 0. One way to do that would be first subtract r, then do the -(Y//2), and then add r back. That works because none of the r != 0 years are leap years, and so we just need to add 1 for each of them.

Another way would be to just go ahead and do -(Y//2), and then add in a correction based on r. Let Y = 4q + <0,1,2,3>. Then -(Y//2) ≡ 5q + <0,0,-1,-1>. We want 5q + <0,1,2,3>, so we have to add 0, 1, 3, or 4 if r = 0, 1, 2, 3, respectively.

That last correction can be split into two parts: add 1 if Y is odd, plus add 2 if Y//2 is odd. That gives:

      t = Y odd ? 1 : 0
      Y //= 2
      t += 3 if Y is odd
      return -Y + t

4\. The method I actually use, which views the two digit year as a decade part and a year within the decade part, and operates on them separately. Since I gave a long description of it yesterday, I'll just link to that [1] here.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926543)

</comment><comment><USER25> this is a great article went through it and can do it now

</comment><comment><USER26> It's a nice article and a good algorithm, kudos to all who can do this.

My philosophy however is that I don't need to learn this kind of stuff nowadays. There are computers even in our wrist, so I offload as much as I can, and spare my brain cycles more important stuff that matters.</comment>


If Printing Guns Is Legal, So Is Distributing the Plans - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-21/if-printing-guns-is-legal-so-is-distributing-the-plans <comment><AUTHOR> I think there is an interesting parallel with the legal issues around the encryption export ban in the 1990's.</comment>


Government scientist says 2m rule based 'fragile' evidence - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8339837/Government-scientist-says-2m-social-distancing-rule-based-fragile-evidence.html <comment><USER2> Already posted Apr 25 on this forum at

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23139023](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23139023)</comment>


The VC Gender Gap: Are VCs Sexist? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pehub.com/52055/the-vc-gender-gap-are-vcs-sexist/

<comment><USER2> > _What other major industry remains 90-95% male-dominated? What's the deal?_

Basically anything dirty or dangerous. Well over 90% of workplace fatalities are men. Plumbers, electricians, construction workers and mechanics are nearly always men.

Most of the prison population (which sadly, is an industry of sorts) is male, too.

It isn't _just_ the very uppermost echelons of society that are "male- dominated". Anybody truly concerned about equality would note that the bottom is, too.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a nonsense story.

Women are less risk taking than men, VC = venture capital, aka as advanced gambling with some ability to tilt the table.

Women start-ups are less frequent for exactly those reasons.

It's also why you won't see a 50/50 split in race car drivers and high speed car accidents.

The most practical result of that is that young males tend to take risks that they probably shouldn't be taking, which won't stop a few of them to get huge pay-offs.

<comment><USER4> I know HN has many times debated the reasons for the high ratio of men to women in the entire startup field, but I think it's important to point out yet again that sexism _does_ play a role in preventing more women from joining the field. This article is especially interesting because it takes the concerns one step higher and sheds light on how few women are even working at the VC layer.

I concede that not every industry needs to have a perfect 50/50 split. But I don't think it's fair to dismiss sexism with the argument that women are simply "less risk taking". Perhaps they're not willing to take risks in this area because they don't see their chances of being rewarded as very good -- e.g., they feel they won't be allowed to be a managing partner, or won't have access to the best investment opportunities.

<comment><USER3> > Perhaps they're not willing to take risks in this area because they don't > see their chances of being rewarded as very good -- e.g., they feel they > won't be allowed to be a managing partner, or won't have access to the best > investment opportunities.

How does that change from the point I made ?

The chances of being rewarded are minimal, even for the best of the best.

If they won't be allowed to be a managing partner then that's between a particular VC and a particular person.

That's nothing to do with the general case. If very few women are getting in at the top of the funnel it stands to reason that even fewer will come out at the bottom.

To change this you have to change the relationships at the top, the rest will follow.

If I would approach the females in my environment with the proposition of starting a business on a shoestring budget with a potential pay off in 3 to 5 years and a very high chance of failure most of them - if not all of them - will decline, but they'll be happy to be employees.

For males, using the exact same proposition the situation would be much different. As long as that's the case this situation will persist. You can't make people want to be entrepreneurs and risk takers, everybody makes their own decisions.

Those women that I know that are successful in business are probably better at what they do than the men, still, none of them would ever think of joining a fund or funding seed stage start-ups. The risk does not match their profile. They want to control the businesses they invest in. Gambling does not seem to be something that they wish to pursue. And it seems to work well for them, they appear to be much less under pressure than their male counterparts in the same lines of business. They won't make the millions in one go, but they'll steadily clock up hundreds of thousands per year.</comment></comment></comment>


Crowdsourcing: a million heads is better than one - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/crowdsourcing_million_heads.php <comment><USER2> Thanks for this article, ulfstein. One thing I'm on the edge about is flattening the crowd so that no one person or group of people have more of an influence. Although every opinion should matter equally there is always those people that know more about a topic. Those people should have more of an influence in the overall market. Good read though!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I agree. I've not yet had a closer look a the sites mentioned but am wondering whether any of them might employ such a system.</comment>


A History of Pizza - <AUTHOR> https://www.historytoday.com/archive/historians-cookbook/history-pizza <comment><USER2> Quick note: caciocavello is not horse milk cheese. It's a pasta filata cheese (stretched curd cheese) that is aged. It's formed into jug shaped cheeses with a string tied to the top to age it. Normally there are 2 cheeses tied to either end of the string and you hang them. It's called "cavello" (horse) because you could put it on horse back with one cheese on either side of the horse.

It's essentially a drier version of mozzarella, though (very similar to Italian provalone).

Edit: non-sensical sentence

<comment><USER3> It's actually: \- "cavallo" (horse) \- "caciocavallo" (cheese) \- "provolone" (cheese)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> By co-incidence I saw this on twitter today:

> A beautifully preserved thermopolium (cook shop), one of the places in > #Pompeii where one could purchase hot and ready-to-eat food. Most Romans > resided in insulae and did not have facilities to cook at home and relied on > thermopolia to buy their hot meals. (photo)

[https://twitter.com/carolemadge/status/1184381800656920577](https://twitter.com/carolemadge/status/1184381800656920577)

The baking ovens in Pompei are - of course - wood-fired brick structures with domed tops on the inside. Like a pizza oven.

[http://www.pompeiin.com/en/Bakeries_in_Pompeii.html](http://www.pompeiin.com/en/Bakeries_in_Pompeii.html)

I would be completely unsurprised if there is an unbroken lineage from these shops (in other towns that were not obliterated by Vesuvius) through to Pizzerias in present-day Napoli.

</comment><comment><USER5> In Lee Iacocca's memoirs, he recalls how kids in school bullied him and taunted him for eating pizza, calling it "Dago food". Now it's America's #1 food, but the change was within living memory.

<comment><USER6> Were they taunting him because he was eating pizza or because he was part of the "other" group with a funny name?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Some even had tomatoes on top. Only recently introduced from the Americas, these were still a curiosity, looked down upon by contemporary gourmets".

Well that settles it. Next time a pizza traditionalist blasts me for having pineapple on my pizza, I'll counter that he shouldn't have tomatoes on theirs.

<comment><USER8> There's a kind of pizza that I've had at a Turkish restaurant that comes without tomatoes. Really nice.

I'd assume a common origin with the Italian variety via the Romans (ancient).

<comment><USER4> Many varieties of Italian pizza are "white pizza" / "pizza blanca" and have no tomatoes.

<comment><USER9> Like pesto ones too right.

<comment><USER10> As an Italian (not from Genoa though), pesto to me has always been just a pasta sauce, so I was very surprised to see it used on salads and pizzas abroad. But recently (in the last 2-3 years) I've seen quite a few Italian pizzerias (not the most traditional, of course) starting to use it as an alternative choice to the tomato sauce, or, sometimes, in place of the olive oil on top. Not sure if it's a regional variation gone national or an influence from abroad... but if it's the latter, no Italian would ever admit that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is a lot of mysticism over the origin of Pizza. In fact, it's probably a very straightforward kind of dish that probably has been invented multiple times, of course with varying toppings and maybe a few other differing ideals.

Basically if you have a wooden oven to bake bread, baking is risky. If the oven is too hot, the bread will become burnt before being thoroughly baked within, if you put it in too late, the heat will not be enough. So how do you, as a baker (or farmer baking for your own supply) test whether the oven has the right temperature? You trial-run with very thin patches of dough, that you can pull out easily and are always done inside, when the outside is nicely burnt: a kind of flat bread.

Putting stuff on top of the flat bread and making it your snack on baking day is just a logical conclusion.

In fact, around here, there are several regional dishes similar to a pizza serving this purpose. Flammkuchen from Alsace, and Denede from Swabia. The village where I work still has preserved (and renovated recently) a "Backhaus", a common oven of the village that would be fired regularly and then used by all villagers to bake their own bread. Did they triage the heat of the fired oven by putting in a small piece of dough? probably. Did they put stuff on top of that piece? I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised.

<comment><USER12> This. My great-grandmothers all used to bake bread in the village Backhaus once a week, and the oven temperature was always checked by baking something pizza-like, for example a crude Salzkuchen [0], which is basically a very thin Quiche, or just a flat portion of dough which was eaten without or with a cold topping. I guess that basically every culture which developed baking skills has one or multiple dishes which resemble a Pizza.

[0] [http://www.ebbi-world.de/brot/salz-kuchen-stueck.jpg](http://www.ebbi- world.de/brot/salz-kuchen-stueck.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Boo, no mention of New Haven's early contribution. Not that I'm biased (I am, they have the best pizza in the world, objectively speaking, of course)

[http://www.ctvisit.com/articles/new-haven-apizza- history](http://www.ctvisit.com/articles/new-haven-apizza-history)

<comment><USER14> Maybe the best pizza _in the United States_. I'm Italian, the classic United States pizza could hardly be called "pizza" here, since it's not risen enough for being a pizza.

<comment><USER15> Pizza quality varies wildly in America. There are a lot of places where the only "fresh pizza" you will find is something from one of the big chains. And there are a lot of places that serve pizza that just serve terrible quick food in general, so not surprising the pizza will be bad too.

Having said that, there is a lot of good Pizza in the US, especially in areas with heavy Italian immigrations like the north east. Obviously its a different style than most Italian Pizza, but its still really good.

I have only been to Italy once for three weeks to visit my cousins, but I read a lot about pizza. From what I have read/watched from Italian sources, even Pizza in Italy was in somewhat of a rut ~20+ years ago.

<comment><USER16> > Having said that, there is a lot of good Pizza in the US

Northeast region pizzerias are a given. Varasano's down south in Atlanta is pretty fantastic however.

<comment><USER15> Looks like a neapolitan style, which is maybe the third wave of pizza in the US. Lots of neapolitan style places have opened in in the last 15 years. I like that style, but I wouldn't say its my favorite.

I would probably put a well done Regina's pizza (Boston) or a Prince Street (NYC) spicy pepperoni square slice ahead of any neapolitan pizza, and I say that as someone who owns a pizza oven and makes a lot of neapolitan style pizza.

<comment><USER16> > Lots of neapolitan style places have opened in in the last 15 years.

Yep! But not in the American south.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The abomination created by putting pineapple on pizza is either Canadian or German:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_pizza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_pizza)

Dig a bit more and it seems the German claim is a bit stronger. The postwar years were difficult in Europe.

<comment><USER12> Afaik this goes back to the Toast Hawaii, which was invented by Clemens Wilmenrod, a TV cook in 1950ies Germany, and quite an interesting figure. He had no training as a cook at all, but presented his strange creations as an exotic culinary experience. Basically, when you put cooked ham, pineapple, cheap cheese and a cherry on toast in the 50ies and 60ies in Germany, you presented yourself as a cosmopolitan. He welcomed the audience at the beginning of each show as his "dear friends in Lucullus" and gave simple dishes grandiose names (according to Wikipedia, a trivial recipe for a simple Schnitzel was called "Venetian Christmas Feast").

Oh, and when someone claimed that Wilmenrod stole the "recipe" of putting an almond into a strawberry, he threatened to kill himself on live TV [0]. (He actually killed himself a few years later, though it is speculated that he was diagnosed as having stomach cancer shortly before).

[0] [https://youtu.be/IAQhpI9euwg?t=130](https://youtu.be/IAQhpI9euwg?t=130)

<comment><USER4> > Toast Hawaii

That's interesting to know.

I recently saw this dish on a TV show set in 1950s Germany, and I had questions about it. Starting with "wat?" and "But why?" and "was that really a treat?"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_Hawaii](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_Hawaii)

<comment><USER12> > "But why?"

Perfectly valid question. One thing that is true is that it is extremely easy to prepare for many people. When I was a child in the 90ies, we often ate Toast Hawaii at my grandparents at birthday parties. Just open a pack of toast, a can of pineapple, a pack of ham and a pack of cheese, place it on top of each other, put it in the oven, done.

> "was that really a treat?"

As a child, I never liked it, and even the generation of my parents did not really enjoy it and preferred a more sane toast topping. But the postwar generation swore on it. Keep in mind that the country was basically in ruins after WW2. That you were able to afford (or even get) canned pineapples in the 50ies again was kind of a sensation, so I guess they still ate it in the 90ies out of nostalgia.

<comment><USER11> In my childhood in the 90ies, we had a toast-hawaii night at home like once a month. My parents and my sister ate it, I stuck to toast with grilled cheese and ham as I didn't like pineapple (and still today I am not a fan)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Has "vulkanpizza" (volcano-pizza) spread to other countries outside of Sweden yet? [https://imgs.aftonbladet- cdn.se/v2/images/ce5c799d-dfe7-46e7...](https://imgs.aftonbladet- cdn.se/v2/images/ce5c799d-dfe7-46e7-b5a6-3b82d521ec1a?fit=crop&h=713&q=50&w=960&s=c76b10318295fa28685c569fd3d17ccb70c7584d)

<comment> barry-cotter That looks delicious but it's not pizza.

<comment><USER18> We also have the calskrove (Calzone + skrovmål) which is a hamburger baked into a Calzone: [https://www.thelocal.se/userdata/images/article/c963e09e3d27...](https://www.thelocal.se/userdata/images/article/c963e09e3d272eb8786f4285edc5ec39180b725e2d2051691fcabf2548a55499.jpg)

<comment><USER19> Why on earth???

<comment> barry-cotter Same reason Scots deep fry Snickers bars, because it seemed like a great idea to some drunk and then they woke up and remembered it was delicious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When I was a kid in the summer my dad would take me with him for the day on his sales route. One of my favorite places for us to stop for lunch was Detroit's first pizzeria.

When it opened in the late thirties pizza was totally unknown in Detroit. The founder was an immigrant from Naples. An Italian friend of my father's introduced him to the place and he took my Mother there on one of their first dates.

The owner and his wife were by then good friends of my Dad and it was almost like being in someone's kitchen, if things were slow they'd sit at the table with us.

</comment><comment> m-i-l Don't know how true it is, or whether it is a modern invention, but the story goes that the pizza created for Margherita of Savoy had basil, mozzarella and tomatoes to represent the 3 colours on the national flag of Italy (green, white and red).

<comment><USER21> When I was in Naples a few weeks ago I was told that the Margherita variant was created by the wife of the chef who added a single basil leaf onto the completed pizza. This pizza was served to the royal couple, where the queen (Margherita) was so taken by the creation that the chef decided to name it in her honour.

Also, the flag of Italy was only adopted in the mid 1940's, and Queen Margherita was around about 100 years earlier.

<comment> m-i-l According to the original article, the Margherita pizza was invented after Italian Reunification: "All that changed after Italian unification. While on a visit to Naples in 1889..." I'm not a vexillologist (expert on flags) but looking at the historical flags at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Italian_flags#Unificat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Italian_flags#Unification_and_Kingdom_of_Italy) there are many from 1889 that have the green, white and red, e.g. the state flag of the Kingdom of Italy from 1861. So I think the story is plausible, although that doesn't necessarily mean it is true or didn't come after the event.

<comment><USER21> Fair enough, I stand corrected.

<comment> m-i-l Actually the link SamBam has provided, i.e. to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_colours_of_Italy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_colours_of_Italy) , explains the tricolour better. It also says "An apocryphal story about the history of pizza holds that on 11 June 1889, Neapolitan pizzamaker Raffaele Esposito created a pizza to honour Margherita of Savoy, who was visiting the city. It was garnished with tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil to represent the national colours of Italy, and was named 'Pizza Margherita'".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here in Wales pizza was originally known as "Italian rarebit" and some still call it that.

The best pizza I've ever had was from a van in a lay-by off the A470, the "Route 66" of Wales.

</comment><comment><USER23> This documentary is very interesting about a man's obsession with pizza:

Scott's Pizza Tours

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5252674/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5252674/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Pizza is the only thing all of my family can ever agree on to eat! To now know the history of pizza will be a good conversation starter next dinner together.

</comment><comment><USER25> Happy to see a reference about the pineapple pizza invention.</comment>