This is so typical of Harvard Physicists: wait until after the problem has incontrovertibly occurred to identify it and sigh heavily while making irrefutable proclamations about what should be done, and how federal money should be spent to achieve that.

The results would have been interesting if they had been published ten years ago — say, at the time Al Gore invented the Internet or shortly thereafter — because they were perfectly predictable then. Someone who was selling clusters or building clusters or server farms could have done the analysis and interpolation back in 1999. But that would have defeated the Harvardian Purpose:

I paraphrase Frazier

“I went to Harvard. When I’m wrong, the world makes a little less sense.”

Harvard is an institution full of preternatually brilliant people who usually make the news because of the crushing obviousness of their conclusions, and the way in which the obviousness of their conclusions requires more intervention on the part of the State. Essentially it is their University. By the time they publish it, it’s like seeing an entrepreneur featured in Forbes: you know that it’s the next thing only because it’s old news. In this case it is: “Guess what? Great big, globally dispersed server farms require electricity to operate, and a lot of it. Are you surprised? Time to tithe.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that they don’t make a lot of money by timing their revelations that way, because they do, even though they’re bone-jarringly obvious and have been to anyone for about the past ten years.

Next Harvard will be publishing a paper or series of papers on the public health risks of video games — not because of the violence in games like Call of Duty 4, but because of the risk to the planet that comes from having twin nVidia SLI cards in your box.

I loved this, though:

His research indicates that viewing a simple web page generates about 0.02g of CO2 per second. This rises tenfold to about 0.2g of CO2 a second when viewing a website with complex images, animations or videos.

And it rises to about 2g of CO2 per second when about 30% of the people who are viewing the Internet are watching the kinds of images they use the internet for in the first place. Harvard against the online porn industry! It’s the future!

All of the inefficient heat energy that is being wasted by the computer I’m using to post this message is very welcome here in Massachusetts, where electricity already costs more than 90% of the rest of the country, and the current temperature outside is 15 degrees fahrenheit.

I partially use my computer to heat my living space, and it does a very good job. It’s particularly cold here right now — way below freezing in fact, and electricity from British-owned National Grid is just frighteningly expensive already. My nVidia graphics card does a good job of playing games and keeping the living space warm….it’s kind of like multitasking.

Otherwise I could use a space heater, but one of those doesn’t pump out half a billion triangles per second…