Category: Ecology

Posted on

Day and Night

Day and Night: photograph

I’ve been looking at this photograph for hours, scattered over the last few days.

It was apparently taken from the space shuttle Columbia. No it wasn’t, scroll down for the comments. I shouldn’t need to point out that the big lumpy thing in the foreground is called Africa, and further back there’s the thing they call Europe.

It fascinates me because it — literally! — puts things in perspective. Some of the world’s greatest cities are invisible, at least in daylight. The Low Countries are just starting to blaze in artificial light. But the brightest lights are the flares of oil wells in the deserts of Algeria and Libya, and off the coast of Nigeria.

Hey, aren’t the people there starving? That can’t be right, if they’ve got all that oil, surely?

Thanks to Memex 1.1 for the pointer.

Posted on

Computer chips destroying the planet

This isn’t new news, but it came out of comments to another post. Weight for weight, the average computer chip does more harm to the environment than the car.

A team at the United Nations University in Tokyo found that to make one 2-gram memory chip requires:

  • 1.6kg of fossil fuel
  • 72g of chemicals
  • 32kg of water

That last one truly scares me — especially as I’m guessing the water has to be pure to wash microscopic components.

Posted on

Blackle: a “green computing” furphy

Blackle: click to see website

On the surface it sounds great. “A given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen,” says About Blackle. So if everyone turns Google black we’ll save heaps of energy, because it’s such a widely-used website. At least that’s the theory.

And Sydney-based Heap Media is getting attention because they’ve created Blackle (pictured right), a website which provides that black version of Google.

But as always the devil is in the detail…

  • It’s only old-style CRT monitors which use less energy when displaying darker images. Modern LCD flat-panels use the same power no matter what.
  • Blackle is a front-end onto Google, serving out the adverts and all. So using Blackie adds to the total power consumption. As well as whatever Google uses, you’re also adding in the overhead of routing your requests via Blackle.
  • Currently the Blackle home page claims “115,486.374 Watt hours saved”, up from 113,834.304 Watt hours around this time yesterday. That’s not a lot of electricity. 2kWh is enough to run a small server computer for maybe 4 hours — perhaps 6 if it’s not fully loaded. In other words, Blackle uses 4 or 5 times more energy than it saves.

Still, it’s a great way of getting attention for your business under the banner of “saving the planet”, eh? Plus, having a black background means your site can have that oh-so-current style of having everything look like it’s reflected in some shiny black surface.