NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Longest year since 1992
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2009 Jan 12, 12:26 -0800
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2009 Jan 12, 12:26 -0800
With respect to the quality of science reporting at The Times, just this weekend they published an article claiming Google searches have a massive carbon footprint: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134.ece?Submitted=true Down in the article is a claim that maintaining an avatar (an on-line personality that gamers create) uses as much electricity, 1752 kilowatt hours per year, as the per-capita electric consumption in Brazil. Doing the math, 1752 KWH/yr works out to 200 watts. A friend who is in charge of the server farm for a large web site says that his dual-processor Pentium servers consume on average only a bit over 100 watts. Two dual-processor servers to maintain a single avatar? Not on your life! Mr. Carr, the person who makes the claim about avatars, has a seriously misplaced decimal point. Google has also responded that their searches generate about 1/30 of the amount of carbon claimed by Prof. Wissner-Gross. http://timesonline.typepad.com/technology/2009/01/googles-respons.html Don't mean to take us off-topic, but I just thought I'd give a more accessible example of the "quality" of The Times' science reporting. Lu frankreed@HistoricalAtlas.net wrote: > And once again, some folks are raising silly objections about the possible abolition of leap seconds. > > See: > http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article5361670.ece > (article written by Mark Henderson, said to be "Science Editor") > > The article claims, "Sundials would become even more inaccurate than they are already, and it would become almost impossible for sailors to navigate by sextant." > > As we've discussed previously, accomodating a time standard without leap seconds would present no serious problem for celestial navigation. Needless to say, the comment about sundials is technically true, but only after decades and in a way that no one but an expert would ever notice. > > -FER > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Navigation List archive: www.fer3.com/arc To post, email NavList@fer3.com To , email NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---