🚰 Good Lord, those computers are thirsty

Following the success of Barbie, Mattel is planning other toy-inspired films, apparently including a horror-comedy written by Cocaine Bear’s Jimmy Warden and starring… the Magic 8 Ball.

But how did a fortune-telling billiards ball come about anyhow?

A good old-fashioned seance

Cincinnati clairvoyant Laura C. Cooper Pruden was one of several mediums cashing in on the spiritualism craze of the early 20th century.

She specialized in slate writing. Under a table, she and her clients each held a corner of an enclosed blackboard with a piece of chalk inside. Her free hand remained on the table, yet the chalk wrote on its own.

“It was the strangest feeling to hold the slate and to feel the thrill and vibration of the pencil as it worked away inside,” Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — a noted fan of Pruden’s — once wrote.

Family guise

Pruden’s device was called the Psycho-Slate. Her son, inventor Albert Carter, built on the idea, creating the Syco-Seer: The Miracle Home Fortune Teller.

• A die with “answers” written on each side was suspended inside a liquid-filled, windowed tube. Ask a question, flip it, see your fate.

Carter enlisted his Ohio Mechanics Institute grad Abe Bookman, to help mass produce it. Carter filed for a patent for a “liquid filled die agitator” in 1944, and he and Bookman formed Alabe Crafts to sell it.

Unfortunately, Carter never saw his invention become a success. He died of a hemorrhage in 1948.

Bookman carried on

He iterated, producing a smaller version, then changing its shape from a cylinder to a sphere, akin to a crystal ball.

It didn’t sell well, but it did catch the attention of Brunswick Billiards, which wanted it as a promotional product… shaped like an eight ball.

The eight ball version sold well enough that Bookman kept selling it, even after the contract expired.

In 1971…

… Bookman sold Alabe to Ideal Toys, founded by teddy bear inventors Morris and Rose Michtom. View-Master International acquired Ideal in 1984, Tyco Toys acquired View-Master in 1989, and Mattel acquired Tyco in 1997 for $755m ($1.4B today).

The Magic 8 Ball has remained popular over the years, selling 1m+ units per year as of 2012. And now, it’s gonna be a movie star.

BTW: The Ouija board follows a similar trajectory, including a huge toy company — Hasbro — turning it into a movie. Read all about it here, or listen here.

There’s this scene in “Silicon Valley” where Erlich pleads with Richard to focus on improving their startup’s cloud architecture.

“[It’s] just a giant turd that’s clogging up our pipes, we have to call in a plumber to fix it,” he says, describing the cloud as “this tiny, little, shitty area, which… in many ways is the future of computing.”

He wasn’t wrong about that future stuff…

… and not far off on the plumber either

Globally, data centers are forecast to consume 450m gallons of water daily by 2030, up from ~205m in 2016, according to data reviewed by Bloomberg.

This is particularly worrisome for drought-stricken farming regions like Spain’s Talavera de la Reina, where a $1.1B Meta-planned data facility could gulp 176m gallons annually.

• The project is expected to create 250 permanent jobs, and Meta says it will restore water, though it’s unclear where or how.

It’s a global issue, accelerated by AI

Data center operators need lots of energy to make the web run. As drought worsens worldwide, this issue has become a point of contention everywhere from Chile, to the US, to the Netherlands.

• Part of the concern centers around transparency, with only 39% of data centers measuring their water usage last year, according to one group.

Another challenge: Demand for computing power is accelerating faster than sustainability efforts. (Yes, AI, we’re talking about you.)

Want to imagine the impact in terrifying, everyday terms? We’ve got you covered — researchers have estimated that a 20-question convo with ChatGPT equates to ~500 milliliters of water use, about the size of a water bottle.

*Slowly closes ChatGPT browser tab, 600 questions later…*