Brian Gongol
Facebook will build a data center in Altoona
The Des Moines suburb is on the opposite side of the metro area from the data center built by Microsoft in West Des Moines. The company says it's to be the fourth owned-and-operated data center for Facebook. Food farms and server farms can coexist in peace and harmony.
Work-commute times across America
It's no surprise that metro areas in the Midwest like Des Moines and Omaha have some of the shortest average commute times in the country. It's a meaningful contributor to quality of life. Save ten minutes a day over 250 work days a year, and you've just cut an entire work-week (41 hours, in fact) out of your annual time behind the wheel. That's a lot of valuable leisure time to add to a year.
Scientists test putting swarms of robots to work
Lots of small robots with small brains might be able to do things very effectively -- just like schools of fish or flocks of birds. The demonstrations of distributed behavior by small robots with tiny "brains" resemble the behaviors we see in nature, and may show promise for what we need out of the robots of the future, like when they're at the nano scale and are used for things like cleaning our arteries. In the words of the lab's chief, how much work can we get done without lots of thinking?
A public-service announcement about those Bill Gates pictures on Facebook...
...no, you're not going to get $1,000 for sharing
Yeah, we'll get to work. After the check clears.
