I have two links about "Earth Hour". The first is Neanderpundit's grandstanding and the second is a more sober discussion of the failure of Earth Hour.
Look at the picture here. Do you see anything wrong? The buildings are a little less bright. That's it.
Hey, apparently Earth Hour prevented the release of 25 tons of carbon in Sydney, Australia. Twenty-five whole tons!
...out of an annual man-made carbon contribution of six billion tons. So let's add it up. Lighting one less candle during Hanukkah: 5 tons of carbon. Earth Hour: let's be really generous and say it saved 1,000 tons of carbon, all told.
Total annual human carbon emissions, March 29, 2007 to March 29, 2008: 5,998,995 tons.
Total annual carbon emissions from both natural and man-made sources over the same time period: 205,998,995 tons.
Reduction in carbon emissions: 0.0005%
Yeah, we've licked global warming now.
* * *
Some psycho built a computer primarily of relays. Hats off to the guy for doing it; I mean, it's an impressive bit of hardware hacking--but WTF.
Further adding to the WTF factor is that this page is part of a freaking web ring. In other words, there are a bunch of people out there who are building their own CPUs from discrete logic, relays, and WTF-ever else they can build it from. (Tinker Toys would not surprise me.)
I could probably do this, too, though I'd have a bit of a learning curve. It's similar to a few projects I actually did in tech school, in fact.
But I wouldn't want to.
