The article comes out and says that Google doesn’t give stats on its server farms, so how in the world would you come up with that answer? From further down the article it looks more like the energy expenditure of using a computer, period, that’s being calculated… and it was just tied into Google to be ‘hip’?

burn up coming up with the very idea of kettles as a comparative measurement?
Ya know….some folks just don’t deserve to continue breathing.

How insightful. Kinda like the Ph.D. study a while back that showed drinking makes the opposite sex more attractive.

I’m just sticking this statement of the obvious in the mental file in case the overwhelmingly Democratic Party-favoring Google tries to pass itself off as a “Green” company because it would like to use less energy. Kinda like the airlines would like to use less fuel. (Because they would save $$$)

Google’s Givers Go Democratic

Mr. Wissner-Gross was all that were left of him, it would be sufficient for my purposes.

but this is just a preamble to a Carbon Tax on all internet users.

They intend to tax us all into equality.

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!

I don’t really but I love the guy that created it, he saw this coming a long time ago. And he wrote a pretty sweet article about competing with the size of Google in what is basically a one-man shop.

Anyway, I get the feeling he may not even believe this stuff, but if it gets traction so much the better. It’s all so ridiculous anyway.

http://gigablast.com/green.html

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-search.html

In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. The current EU standard for tailpipe emissions calls for 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven, but most cars don’t reach that level yet. Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.