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Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)
- skyberrys 6mo agoLove how many people were called over to provide expert advice on figuring out why diners couldn't enjoy the lovely outdoor seating without an adult on their nostrils.
- brookst 6mo agoWithout a what?
- despideme 6mo agoAssault, presumably. Pretty soon we may find ourselves introducing autocorrect errors like that on porpoise, to try to show we're not AI.
- mkbosmans 6mo agoThat's not just a good prediction—it is literally already happening right now!
- brookst 6mo agoCertainly!
- andrewflnr 6mo agoThat won't work for long. I've already seen reddit karma farming bots that introduce typos into repost titles to avoid duplicate detection. It'll be pretty easy write a program that takes a piece of slop text and swaps one word or so in every few hundred with a typo just a small Hamming distance away.
- skyberrys 6mo agoDid you make a dolphin joke there? My eyes apparently now only read intent.
- pixl97 6mo agoEvidently in the 90s facesitting was a popular pasttime in Palo Alto.
- skyberrys 6mo agoMaybe I should get my eyes checked because I was like I don't see it, looks like what I meant to write to me. It took the other commenters for me to finally see it. Ah yes assault not adult there...
- quickthrowman 6mo agoMinor nitpick, transformers are sized in volt-amps, not watts. Apparent power is measured in volt-amps and actual power is measured in watts, the ratio between the two is the power factor. Plus, “one mega volt-amp” sounds way cooler than “a million watts” :) It may have been a 1MVA transformer with a 480V three-phase secondary, that’s the properly sized transformer, but the utility may have undersized it at 500kVA based on calculated load. That transformer was already oil-cooled, so adding a couple thousand extra gallons probably didn’t hurt the transformer too much lol.
- jonhohle 6mo agoThat was my thought as well. This might have improved heat transfer, especially to the much cooler ground surrounding it.
- wvbdmp 6mo agoFun fact: I learned yesterday that that expression was popularized in English only as recently as 1991 by none other than Sadam Hussein when he referred to the Gulf War as “the mother of all battles”. At least that’s the story. Apparently it was a bit of a meme in the early nineties, so this post may be referencing it more or less directly. Hussein was of course referencing the Quran.
- Jtsummers 6mo agoPart of that popularity (for the "mother of all..." expressions) was Cheney's doing. Playing on Saddam Hussein's phrase "Mother of all battles" with "Mother of all retreats" when describing the retreat of the Iraqi army from Kuwait.
- Firehawke 6mo agoYep. "Mother of all X" memes weren't even remotely uncommon for a handful of years during and after Operation Desert Storm. The Iraqi Minister of Information, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, also gave rise to "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" and the like. Almost none of those memes are remembered outside of those who were alive and watching the nightly news at the time, but there were some pre-internet memes that were as spread as a modern internet one.
- quickthrowman 6mo ago> Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, also gave rise to "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" and the like. If you don’t recognize that name, “Baghdad Bob” was the popular nickname he was given back in the 00s.
- bob1029 6mo agoThe mother of all news conferences: https://youtu.be/wKi3NwLFkX4 https://youtu.be/wKi3NwLFkX4
- xtiansimon 6mo agoDuring p45 they dropped the MOAB on Afghanistan. The name got stuck in my head. I was making a lot of Jupyter Notebooks at the time. I would create several versions while narrowing down an algorithm or constructing the principle proof of concept code. When I finally arrived at an essential solution, I would make a single cell file that would write to disc. I named the file *-MOAF, Mother of All Files. Some things don’t change. https://archive.ph/Oxcsr https://archive.ph/Oxcsr
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- thehouen 6mo agoThat was a fun read. Thank you
- Animats 6mo agoOh, that incident. That was back when Altavista, the first search engine, was in downtown Palo Alto. Brian Reid was behind that. It was intended as a demo for the DEC Alpha CPU. They wanted to show that a large number of little machines could do a big job, which was a radical idea at the time. They were leasing an old telco building, on Bryant St. behind the Walgreens on University Avenue. The telco had moved to a larger building nearby when they went from crossbar to 5ESS, leaving behind the very tall racks typical of electromagnetic central offices. That's where the modern data center began. Before this, data centers were raised floor operations. This one was racks and racks of identical servers, with cable trays overhead. This was the first one to look like a telephone central office. Because that's what it was before. The building is still some kind of data center. For a while, it was PAIX, the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, the peer meeting point for west coast ISPs. Equinix has it now; it's their SV8 location, offering colocation services. Small by modern standards, but close to the early HQs of many famous startups, including Facebook. The grease problem was written up in the local newspaper, back when Palo Alto had one. Palo Alto Utilities (the city owns its power company) got the report, and quickly realized someone was dumping grease into their transformer vault. So they put someone on stakeout, watching all night. The offending restaurant employee was caught. The restaurant was fined and billed for the cleanup. In 2006, there was another grease dumping incident in a transformer vault a block further north. This one did result in a grease fire.[1] Palo Alto Fire Department has a CO2 truck, and dumped enough CO2 in to put out the fire. Power was out for most of the night. I used to live within walking distance of there. [1] https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2006/03/12/grease-dumping-suspected-in-fire https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2006/03/12/grease-dumpin...
- DoneWithAllThat 6mo agoOh man PAIX brings back memories. Most people have no idea how few true convergence points the Internet had back then or how crucial PAIX was to virtually the entire Internet at that point.
- TomMasz 6mo agoHaving worked in food service, I learned that restaurants are low-margin businesses that will cut every corner they can. Paying to have their grease taken care of when there's a convenient drain out back is a non-starter. It wouldn't be surprising if they also never cleaned their ventilation hoods or the grease trap in the drains. When you see a mention of a restaurant fire (that isn't arson), it's likely because of dirty hoods.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- dang 6mo agoRelated. Others? Just a Drop in the Bucket (1994) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19437905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19437905 - March 2019 (23 comments)
- amluto 6mo agoAnother stupid part of this: used cooking grease has positive market value! Quite a few companies, even in expensive places like Palo Alto, will happily supply you, for free, with barrels and such to hold your grease, and they'll come empty them when they're full, and I think you can even often negotiate to get paid to give these companies your grease. It gets recycled into various non-tasty but still useful commodities. (The economics work out at restaurant scale but not necessarily at household scale. If you deep fry a lot at home, you might be responsible for transporting your own grease to someone who wants it.)
- fwipsy 6mo agoWas this also the case back in 1994?
- tekla 6mo agohttps://www.thesylvaherald.com/history/article_c59f8f3e-dfb6-11e9-8ab9-3bdcad002238.html https://www.thesylvaherald.com/history/article_c59f8f3e-dfb6...
- jandrese 6mo agoIn the old days people would convert diesel trucks and cars to run on "biodiesel" which was lightly processed used cooking oil. You could tell who did that because their cars always smelled like french fries.
- ralferoo 6mo agoIn the UK, all the used oil from MacDonalds is converted into biodiesel. I often walk past the plan where they do this and there's usually a lorry waiting to be allowed in through the gates. A few years back there was some eco-warrior protest outside trying to stop the lorries going in. Not really sure what they were trying to achieve with that as it seemed counter to their aims.
- ajb 6mo ago