Computing and global warming

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Wow! Fascinating post by Martin Varsavsky. Excerpt:

Computing also requires enormous amounts of electricity. Every new chip developed requires more and more energy to function. If present trends continue computing and computing use and interconnection will soon make up 20% of all our electricity needs up from a current 7%. The person who brought this to my attention was Larry Page. During a session at CGI I asked Larry what he thought were Google´s limit to growth. His surprising reply was: electricity. Google he explained to me is by now the world´s largest owner of computers and therefore the internet´s biggest electricity user. This Larry said was of great concern to him and he was looking of ways to make Google carbon neutral.

Not so crazy pairings

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Last month I wondered why a small village in Cambridgeshire should be twinned with the celebrated German city of Weimar. Now comes an email from the eagle-eyed James Miller who reveals that

The “Weimar” twinned with Sawtry is not the grand seat of European culture.

In fact it’s a small district about 10km south of Marburg, in Hessen, on the river Lahn.

The main town is Niederweimar (try Googe images).

It’s nice to have these puzzles solved.

Taxation and mobile phones

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This week’s Economist has a fascinating report of research into the way mobile phones are taxed in developing countries. The findings are summarised in this chart.

The conclusion is obvious: there’s a strong inverse relationship between consumer take-up of the technology and the level of taxation. And it exposes a wider tragedy, because there’s no doubt that wide dissemination of mobile phones could be an important driver of innovation in countries with poor fixed communications infrastructures.

Message: I Care About those Black Folks

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My favourite NYT columnists are Paul Krugman and Frank Rich. Here is Rich writing about Dubya’s response to Katrina.

This White House doesn’t hate all pictures, of course. It loves those by Karl Rove’s Imagineers, from the spectacularly lighted Statue of Liberty backdrop of Mr. Bush’s first 9/11 anniversary speech to his “Top Gun” stunt to Thursday’s laughably stagy stride across the lawn to his lectern in Jackson Square. (Message: I am a leader, not that vacationing slacker who first surveyed the hurricane damage from my presidential jet.)

The most odious image-mongering, however, has been Mr. Bush’s repeated deployment of African-Americans as dress extras to advertise his “compassion.” In 2000, the Republican convention filled the stage with break dancers and gospel singers, trying to dispel the memory of Mr. Bush’s craven appearance at Bob Jones University when it forbade interracial dating. (The few blacks in the convention hall itself were positioned near celebrities so they’d show up in TV shots.) In 2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site had a page titled “Compassion” devoted mainly to photos of the president with black people, Colin Powell included.

Some of these poses are re-enacted in the “Hurricane Relief” photo gallery currently on display on the White House Web site. But this time the old magic isn’t working. The “compassion” photos are outweighed by the cinéma vérité of poor people screaming for their lives. The government effort to keep body recovery efforts in New Orleans as invisible as the coffins from Iraq was abandoned when challenged in court by CNN…

Lunch money

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Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer each earned a salary of $600,000 and a bonus of $400,000 for Microsoft’s 2005 fiscal year — which ended on June 30, according to Microsoft’s annual proxy filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That’s a million each — peanuts by US corporate standards, even in these post-Enron days.

Mr Tambourine Man unmasked

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Why, I asked the other day, did the credits for Martin Scorsese’s film about Bob Dylan include the words “With special thanks to Steve Jobs”. The answer, according to an associate director on the film, is that Apple sponsored the project.

More: Thanks to Fergus Cassidy for pointing out this on the Apple site.

A DVD version of the documentary, featuring additional never-before-seen footage, will be released on September 20. Apple will present the DVD and international version of “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan,” and is the corporate underwriter of the PBS broadcast. The Soundtrack CD will be released by Columbia Records on August 30th.

Nemesis

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A friend sent me these extraordinary photographs of Katrina on the move. They were allegedly taken in Alabama but I’ve no idea by whom. Since they were circulating via a UK government department (DEFRA) it’s possible they came from a US official source (who knows, maybe even FEMA!)

UPDATE: Ah, the wonders of the Web. Sean French points me at the Urban Legends site, where it’s claimed that, although these are real hurricane photographs, they are not images of Katrina. Still, lovely pics. Sigh. What was it that TH Huxley said about “the slaughter of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact”?

Katrina approaching