I am indebted to a reader, Carl, for correcting one point in my blog on oxygen depletion fire suppression systems. I stated that the cooling system plant would have to be uprated due to the lower mass of nitrogen compared to oxygen. Whilst true that nitrogen is lighter than oxygen, I missed the point that that we are only reducing the oxygen content from 21 percent to 16 percent and so the effect will be a minimal percentage. Sorry to all…

On the same subject, I did see last week at CeBIT / DatacenterDynamics in Hanover a novel ‘aerosol’ extinguishing system that had no toxicity or water content and no need for pressure relief. I asked the guy on the stand what gaseous molecule was used but he said that it was secret. I love secrets…

ICT is as fallible as the people who run it…

Walking around the vast halls of CeBIT/DCD in Hanover, it gave me the usual feeling of awe in how far we have come in connectivity, storage and compute. It’s almost as if the stands should be updated half way through the five day show to account for the latest innovations and developments.

However my wonder was jerked back to reality when I was reminded by the human interface with the technology layer is not always as super-dooper whiz-bang as the ICT infrastructure:

Did you know that in the USA there are 6.5 million citizens that have reached the age of 112?

Well, according to Social Security records that is the number. What is remarkable about this ‘fact’ is that the global number of 112 year-old folk last autumn was 42. The error margin is only 155,000x, but think about all of those 6.5 million opportunities for cyber-fraud and identity theft!

Mind you IF it were true then we would have plenty of opportunities to reuse waste heat from American data centres….