Do 2 Google Searches Really Use the Same CO2 as Boiling 1 Cup of Tea ??

One lump of fear or two, love?

On Sunday, the UK’s Times Online published a story claiming research by Harvard U. physicist Alex Wissner-Gross proved that just 2 searches on our favorite internet tool are spewing out the same amount of carbon as boiling a cup of tea. (story here)

7g CO2 per search (!!) is the figure the Times cited. And with the thought of all the kids googling the newest Brittney sighting non-stop I think it took about five minutes before I started feeling a little asphyxiated.

Of course, the truth of the matter wasn’t so easily settled.

It didn’t take long for search giant Google to fire back on this statistic with its own retort on its own blog (here), claiming the figure was closer to .2g. Google then went on to compare this figure to all the other things we humans do each day, like driving, using a computer and breathing.

Certainly, though, the debate is still out. Perhaps the most insightful comment was posted to the follow-up article by the same Harvard U. physicist, where he personally corrects the errors made in the Times online piece (here):

Google can try to greenwash its voracious energy hunger all it can, and pimp out a few feel-good initiatives such as the annoying electric vehicles that prowl its campus, but while its two manchild founders cavort around the world on their own private wide-body jet burning a typical individual’s lifetime’s worth of CO2 for quick jaunts to the Caribbean, we know that’s all rubbish! The greenwash rot starts at the top and percolates down from there. If Google really cared, it would make its server infrastructure public, publish its auditted CO2 emissions, and pledge to become CO2 neutral in a public, transparent fashion. Microsoft has made its server infrastructure information public, why not Google?

Posted by none other than user “altavista”.

Nice one.

All You Haters just keep Lining up on my Long Carpet of Dollars

One of the perils of op-ed news reporting is that you must stake your claim immediately. At the very first scent of a story, you must say, “I am on the left side of this situation, and on the right side of that!”

Oh, it is sometimes an embarrassing profession, indeed.

Anticipating the 25th anniversary of its debut during a Superbowl ad, AAPLinvestors has run some choice quotes from the Mac’s first reviews. Here’s my fave:

Jan. 1984: How critics reviewed the Mac

Ye Olde Macintosh

“The nature of the personal computer is simply not fully understood by companies like Apple (or anyone else for that matter). Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation — as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices.“

––San Francisco Examiner, John C. Dvorak, 19 Feb. 1984

Another One of Those Wam-V’s

The WAM-V Proteus boat is one of those things I saw long back before I started this blog,  and I filed away in some folder marked “AWESOME”. After seeing it pop-up on sfgate, and boingboing I figured the word was out.

All your other sails and paddles are useless against me.

But maybe someone out there has not seen this thing, I thought. This thing that truly passes the test of awesomeness and excellence. This is what they mean by disruptive techonologies. I saw a PBS special with Ugo Conti, the WAM-V’s inventor (achived here) and its as much his story that’s as interesting as the boat’s. I mean, this guy built this thing in his backyard, out of spare parts, for 200k. Now that hard-core, ingenere! (and again here)

and (by far the best link) here:

In 1975, Conti left his research job at the University of California at Berkeley, sold everything he owned, and bought a fifty-foot wooden ketch to sail around the world with his wife and their four-and-a-half-year-old son.

Take that, Thor Heyerdahl!

UPDATE: KQED (San Francsico) is playing the WAM-V special again this Tuesday night (1.13.09) at 730pm!

My Galaxy Can Beat Up Your Galaxy

the top 5 videos of 2008 at the New Scientist compiled into one youtube link misses one IMHO:

This round-up of the top five user selected videos from New Scientist in 2008 is simply amazing and abzolutely worth sharing. I can’t at all pick a favorite between:

• Japanese Scientists Recreate Shockwave Traffic Jams
• Rat Brain Cells Power Robots
• 2000 year old computer recreated
• Deepest Snailfish Filmed
• or Human Egg Caught on Film Leaving the Ovaries

But I do feel it misses the mark in one very big way. These things, while amazing, are merely of a global signficance. Forgive me, if I’m inclined to direct your attention to this matter of galactic proportions…

“Galaxy fires powerful particle beam at neighbor”

A jet of hot gas and high-energy particles is shooting out from the core of a galaxy called 3C321 and hitting a neighbour. … “We expect a jet to be a pencil beam of emission, but we saw it flaring, and wondered what was going on,” says lead author Daniel Evans of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US.

Unfortunately, there’s no sound. But, seriously. When one galaxy is caught firing a particle beam into another one, then what’s next? The big bang questioned on counts of tax fraud? Dare I say, we can at least brag that we in the Milky Way aren’t cut from the same cloth???

Get the New Scientist’s fairly great take on this here.

Superconductors Levitate my Morning

For those of us who dream in science fiction, for whom breakfast is a over-sized pill and their morning commute traffic rides on invisible cushions of magnetized air, this news published yesterday evening in Science Express brings at least the latter one step closer.

That's friggin floating!

In the science community, they are called high-temperature superconductors. For you and me, that means that these things can operate at tempertures above 30 K (-243 Celsius)––or still pretty damn cold. Just what is a superconductor? Well, the answer is a little beyond the reach of my layman translating engine; but here’s a shot:

Superconductivity is a process by which a pair of electrons travelling in opposite directions and with opposite spin direction suddenly become attracted to one another. By pairing up, the two electrons manage to lose all their electrical resistance. This superconducting state means that current can flow without the aid of a battery.

In other words, normally, when you transmit energy (let’s say, electricity) over long distances it tends to lose more and more of itself in the process of getting where it’s going because of a number of things, but mostly having to do with “resistance” in the transmission properties of the metal that’s doing the conducting. A superconductor (high-temp or not) is something where the electrons have given up that resistance and just pretty much lay down and let the electricity pass right through them.

Why is this important, you ask? Well, with the 21st century demands we’re now putting on our 20th century energy grid, understanding this technology is becoming more and more critical so that we don’t overload our outdated grid every other week, and all of our TiVo’s stop working and we have to read Harry Potter by candlelight–like we did in New York and the whole rest of the Eastern seaboard in ‘03.

A superconducting grid would allow for the transmission of great loads of energy from one part of the country to another, transferred over vast distances with little to no loss of power and no dangerous increase in the load upon the system.

What the scientists have done here is trace the behavior of the incredibly non-understood relationship between superconductivity and magnetic resistance back to absolute zero. In other words, they took perfectly good superconductors and blew them up––carefully; then they watched how they fell apart.

Understanding just how the superconductor falls apart is the key. Because at the moment, it’s kind of like watching a genie in a bottle come together. We have no idea how it works; we just know that it does.

Pssst...here, what the hell is going on here?

While this discovery is by no means the holy grail, given a greater comprehension of the properties at play we just might be able to hand these things to a few imminently qualified materials scientists and voila, we’ve got wires that will be able to carry 100 gigawatts or more…!

What’s crazy is that this idea is old news to those in the science community. Just check this reference from a 2006 Scientific American article on developing new power grids to handle the killer electric crunch (emphasis mine):

In 1967 IBM physicists Richard L. Garwin and Juri Matisoo published a design for a 1,000-kilometer transmission cable made of niobium tin, which superconducts at high currents. Extraordinary amounts of direct current (DC) can pass resistance-free through such a superconductor when the metal is chilled by liquid helium to a few degrees above absolute zero. The scientists proposed a DC cable with two conductors (made of superconducting wire or tape) that together would carry 100 gigawatts–roughly the output of 50 nuclear power plants.

Garwin and Matisoo were exploring what might be possible, not what would be practical. It would not make sense to inject that much power into one point of the grid, and liquid helium is a cumbersome coolant. But their ideas inspired others. In the following decades, short superconducting cables were built and tested to carry alternating current (AC) in Brookhaven, N.Y., and near Graz, Austria, with the latter operating connected to the local grid for several years. (more here)

Now that is some kind of badass! And here I was still worried about plugging in my hair dryer and running my washing machine and microwave all at once.

In sum, let us not ask what have superconductors done for us lately, but what they may do for us soon…

via Metafilter (by way of PHYSORG.com)