D&D Reference in Nature magazine

[Yair]

I was reading the journal Nature (a high-impact scientific journal), and was amused to find a D&D reference. I thought I'd share. It's from Big data: Welcome to the petacentre, by Cory Doctorow:

I am, admittedly, prone to swooning over a well-designed bit of IT kit, but I have never developed as deep and meaningful and instantaneous a relationship as the one I formed with the two tape-loading robots in the basement of the CERN data centres.

The Vader-black machines, one built by StorageTek, a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, the other by IBM, are housed in square, meshed-in casings the size of small shipping containers. From within them comes a continuous clacking noise like the rattling of steel polyhedral dice on a giant's Dungeons & Dragons table. I pressed my face against the mesh and peered in fascination at the robot arms zipping back and forth with tiny, precise movements, loading and unloading 500-GB tapes with the serene grace of Shaolin monks. Did I say tape is tetchy? I take it back. Tape is beautiful.

Each robot-librarian tends 5 PB of data. It will jump shortly to 10 PB each when the 500-GB tapes are switched to 1-TB models

 

[Obryn]

Well, it's Cory Doctorow. If there's a Geek Emperor, he's likely it.

-O

 

[El Mahdi]

Sweet. "Polyhedral dice on a Giants D&D table". That means that giants play D&D too, a game within the game. The author of that story should post over on the Shame thread. He's obviously not worried about talking about D&D.

 

[(un)reason]

Ahh, the joys of working on the bleeding edge. I bet they can get a lot of last generation equippment cheap for their home rigs.

 

[Obryn]

Sweet. "Polyhedral dice on a Giants D&D table". That means that giants play D&D too, a game within the game. The author of that story should post over on the Shame thread. He's obviously not worried about talking about D&D.

If you have any doubts, check out boingboing.net.

-O