[LINK] Solar cells

Glen Turner glen.turner at aarnet.edu.au
Sat Jan 20 21:28:11 AEDT 2007


Hi Karl,

Glad to hear it is working well.


On your point about economic sense, I quite like this quote from Sir
David Attenborough in front of some UK committee:
<http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmenvfru/uc88-iii/uc8802.htm>

> Q512 James Duddridge: In order to mitigate against climate change what
> two single actions can, first, individuals take and, secondly, would
> you advise the British Government to take?
> 
> Sir David Attenborough: I grew up during the war and during the war it
> was a common view that wasting food was wrong, and it was not that you
> thought you were going to defeat Hitler by eating up a little bit of
> gristly meat but that it was wrong to waste food. People felt that
> widely and universally and I think people do not do the sort of
> arithmetic which we have been talking about earlier on very often,
> some do and some do not. There should be a general moral view that
> wasting energy is wrong. Everything we do goes on up there and stays
> up there for 100 years or so in terms of carbon dioxide, and the more
> it does, the hotter it is going to get, the less it does, the less hot
> it will get. Therefore, it does not matter whether it is a tiny bit or
> a big bit, but it is your general attitude to life and I sense that is
> already in the process. People do look at 4x4s in central London and
> curl a lip already. It is part of the conversation, that that is
> wasting energy. I am hopeful that there is a real change taking place
> in moral attitudes which is not to do with saving pennies here or
> there, it is just that it is morally wrong to waste energy because we
> are putting at hazard our own grandchildren.

Computing, and networking in particular, is front and centre when it comes
to the wasteful use of electricity.  It's the weekend, and yet every
ethernet switch runs as though it is facing peak load, just so you get
this e-mail milliseconds earlier.

Cheers, Glen



More information about the Link mailing list