PUBLIC MARKS with search farm-in

Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship.

One of the more dramatic applications of plant-growing chambers under LED lights was by NASA, which installed them in the space Shuttle and the space station Mir in the 1990s as part of its experiment with microgravity.

These beauties were fresh picked on the Chino Nojo farm in San Diego, CA.

Take advantage of our web farm. Right now our server farm has ten fairly beefy, modern web servers with 16 GB memory each that are … pretty much doing nothing most of the time. We are almost comically overprovisioned. With Lucene, we can create an index on each webserver and have the “heavy lifting” of actually searching the index distributed across those 10 webservers instead of a single big iron database.

Although the number of people starting new farms fell overall, those in the under-39 age group rose by 6.9%. That suggests the current popularity of farmers’ markets, organic food and “sustainable living” in cities like Tokyo and Osaka is spurring some young people to head for the countryside, supported by grants from the farm ministry and help with agricultural know-how from organizations such as Refarm.

These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations. The photographs are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color.

I now inhabit another edge, not one one side of town, but on the outer banks of the grand archipelago that is the San Francisco Bay Area. Brentwood, CA, 94513, population 52,000 and change, a postmillenial hybrid of central valley farm town, bucolic suburb and struggling node of middle and working class diversity in the face of foreclosure. It is oddly beautiful, especially at dusk, when the central valley light bounces off the foothills of Mount Diablo and almost makes you forget that most of the people and families in the ubiquitous subdivisions are underwater (although this was once an inland sea, I mean they owe more on their mortgage than their home is worth).

Skype and Facebook are very different creatures, but it’s interesting to see how large a company that provides an actually useful service can get bigger than one who’s apparent key reasons for existing are for you to share embarrassing photos of yourself and tend a virtual farm.

The project also didn’t much consider the crews of low-wage farm workers that would be needed to plant and harvest the crops of the ambitious vertical farm; presumably these crews would share elevators and stairwells with the residents of the market-rate condos above.

Move most farming into cities, and grow crops in tall, specially constructed buildings. It’s called vertical farming.