Tighter Code For A Greener Planet

Ever noticed how some websites take longer to display the page than others? Ever blamed it on bloat in the page? Now an interesting experiment has been reported that they not only take longer to load, they use more energy, draining your battery faster.

New Scientist reports "Wikipedia uses a custom file Javascript along with a generic library to collapse and expand the various sections on a page, but much of the library goes unused. By rewriting the site's Javascript to just perform the required function, [researchers] were able to reduce the energy used from 15 to 9.5 Joules.

Making similar changes to the CSS files and images, they were able to reduce the total energy used in loading Wikipedia from 35 to 25 Joules, a saving of 29 per cent.

Over the life of an average portable phone it must download several thousand to tens of thousands of pages. Lets' encourage tighter code for a greener planet.

Original article (New Scientist)

Single bin recycling bad for glass recycling

Glass maker O-I sustainability manager Penny Garland said that out of 78,000 tonnes of glass used a year in Auckland, about 42,000 tonnes was returned to be smelted in the furnaces of its Penrose factory.

"That's turning an old bottle into a new bottle."

The co-mingled collections in some former council areas e.g. the old Auckland City area where I live led to contamination, and only half of the glass recovered was recycled by O-I.

"In terms of sustainability, the fully co-mingled option is the worst option.

"Thousand of tonnes of glass recovered annually from the waste stream would be unnecessarily sent to low-level secondary markets, stockpiles, managed fills or landfills." From NZ Herald (edited)

Headless Chickens of the Apocalypse

Yep, that's me too. In the wake of the 22 February earthquake I officially nominate myself as a headless chicken of the apocalypse

For the benefit of archaeologists reading this in 1,000 years time, it's now 2 days since a 6.3 magnitude earthquake went off under Christchurch, killing at least 75 people (possibly as many as 300), demolishing buildings and destroying the water supply of NZ's second largest city.

On Monday, like many New Zealanders, I watched the continuous TV coverage in stunned silence. On Tuesday, along with thousands of others I asked myself "What can I do to help?". I can't do much, but I do have internet assets so I decided I could make a list of available services. Emergency services, contact services, etc. I reasoned it shouldn't require much infrastructure so I threw up a page on my personal blog. I then discovered that there are a lot of people out there creating internet resources to help and there is quite a bit of duplication. I don't want to pick winners so I listed everything I found. Eventually the page grew to the point where the blogger editior was unhappy with the nested blockquote / bulletpoint format I chose and started grinding to a halt.

Then I had my headless chicken moment. "I'll start a new blog" I said. I was alone, so nobody said "No, you fool, there are already enough blogs" so my Christchurch Earthquake Resources Blog was born. I placed it on a domain name I already had and made it with Wordpress. Why Wordpress? I don't know how to use wordpress. Why even a blog? I'm building a directory ... in retrospect I think it's because I already had a single blog page.

I worked on this for a couple of hours til around midnight & went to bed. This morning when I woke up I was a bit more logical and said "Julia, you make directories. You've got 9 of them, this is a collection of links, why not make a directory?" so 5 minutes later I had my Christchurch Earthquake Resources Links Directory set up and 10 minutes after that I had the links duplicated. I now have the blog page, the blog and the directory ... I think I'll leave them all up for now until I work out how to glue my head back on.

On the plus side, I now have a useful list of resources for peole needing help with canterbury or wanting to offer help. The red cross website has been overloaded since the earthquake. A posting of mine about this found someone who has plenty of bandwidth and is now trying to contact them to offer help (Their phones are overloaded too).

 The moral of this story, are

1. To help, pick something you actually know how to do
2. Don't rush in before you're sure it's the best thing you can do
3. Don't unnecessarily duplicate other people' efforts. Check sites like mine first and try googling. This is so new that the search engines may not have caught up, but at least try.
4. Do tell me & others with similar lists about your sites
5. Do co-ordinate with others who can help.

Julia

Oyster death hysteria

"Oysters being wiped out around the world" The Herald headlined on Monday "Wild oysters are now 'functionally extinct' in many places where they were once plentiful. More than 85 per cent of their reefs have been lost through overfishing, a study says." More...

Of course things aren't always what they seem. Note the "In many places", then read to the bottom and discover on the very last line that the article is a re-print of an Independent (English Newspaper) article.

Tuesday they followed up with "Bluff oysters defy trend towards extinction, says industry" a genuine local article with NZ details. This time they make it clear that they are talking New Zealand. Would have been good if they made that clear in the original article.

There's nothing wrong with reporting that overseas species are threatened, but please make it clear at the top of the article that this is what you are talking about.

Politicians and "celebrities" shamed for science gaffes

"Did you know that when you eat meat, it stays in your gut for 40 years, putrefies and leads to a disease that kills you? 'That is a fact,' according to the model and charity campaigner Heather Mills, one of several celebrities whose statements in the media last year have been scrutinised and where necessary challenged by the British-based charity Sense About Science in its latest 'celebrity watch' review." (From New Scientist.)

The article concludes 'Any readers disturbed by Mills's meaty assertions can take comfort from Melita Gordon, a gastroenterologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, quoted by Sense about Science: "Meat proteins, like all other proteins, are digested by enzymes and absorbed in the small bowel before they ever reach the colon. Any remaining indigestible matter is mechanically transited through the whole bowel in a matter of days and expelled"'

Of course the real shame is that the "media" reports this disinformation essentially unchallenged in the first place. How hard can it be to check the facts and confront the spouters of nonsense rather than slavishly copying their words? Oh, yes, that's right, this would require the media actually employing people to do some independant research rather than just rewriting press releases.

Meat feeds more climate change than food miles

With all the fuss over fuel miles affecting New Zealand's meat exports to Europe I was intrigued when I found this interesting report in New Scientist magazine's environment section.

"That locally-produced, free-range, organic hamburger might not be as green as you think.

"An analysis of the environmental toll of food production concludes that transportation is a mere drop in the carbon bucket. Foods such as beef and dairy make a far deeper impression on a consumer's carbon footprint.

"If you have a certain type of diet that’s indicative of the American average, you're not going to do that much for climate while eating locally,"

Of course as we're exporting meat, this doesn't directly help New Zealand's case, but when you couple this with the way we grow beef and lamb: free-range in paddocks eating grass and not grain, our cattle are a lot closer to carbon neutral than the factory farmed beasts in the northern hemisphere.

Let's hope someone can get the message out to the world and remember "Red meat isn't bad for you, green fuzzy meat is bad for you".