taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Spirit of Ireland looks very nifty.

It’s extremely simple — a group of Irish ‘entrepreneurs, engineers, academics, architects and legal and financial experts’ are calling for Ireland to achieve energy independence and become a net exporter of green energy within five years, by building a number of wind farms on our western seaboard, buffering the generated energy in water reservoirs using pumped-storage hydroelectricity.

This kind of massive-scale public-works engineering project has a strong historical precedent in Ireland — Ardnacrusha, opened in 1929, was the largest hydroelectric station in the world for a time. Given that Turlough Hill is a pumped-storage facility, it can even be beautiful ;)

We can certainly do it, given sufficient government vision. I’d love to see it happen. Great stuff!

• the Spirit of Ireland site
• John of Dublin’s blog post
• comment by Prof. Ray Kinsella in the Irish Times
• Irish Independent
• Eddie Hobbs

(image credit: CC-licensed image from Ganders on Flickr. thanks!)

Tags: generation, hydroelectric, ireland, power, spirit-of-ireland, wind, wind-power

A good post from Lars Wirzenius on measuring the electricity consumption of his computer hardware. Here’s a previous post of mine on the subject.

With the rising cost of energy, a keenness to reduce consumption for green purposes, and an overweening nerdity in general, I did some more investigation around my house recently.

I have a pretty typical Irish electricity meter; it contains a visible disc with a red dot, which spins at a speed proportional to power usage. (There’s a good pic of something similar at the Wikipedia page).

The fuse-board works out as follows (discarding the boring ones like the house alarm etc.):

• Fuse 7 - gas-fired central heating (on), fridge (on), kitchen power sockets

• Fuse 8 - TV in standby, idle PVR, Wii in standby, digital cable set-top box, washing machine

• Fuse 9 - telephone, DSL router, Linksys WRT54G AP/router

• Fuse 10 - bedroom sockets, home office with laptop, printer, speakers, laptop-server etc.

The approach was simply to turn off the house fuses at the fuse board, one by one, and measure how long it took the disc to make a full revolution; then invert that (1/n) to convert from units of time over a static power value, to some notional unit of power consumption over a static time interval (I haven’t figured out how to convert to kW/h or anything like that, they’re just makey-uppy units).

(I stopped measuring on the last one and just estimated; it was crawling around.)

Breaking out the individual fuses, that works out as:

Good results already: (a) it was pretty clear that fuse 7 was doing all the quotidian legwork, eating the majority of the power, and (b) the TV equipment and internet/wifi infrastructure was pretty good at low-power operation (yay). However (c) the computer bits aren’t so great, but still only half the power consumption of the kitchen bits.

Breaking down the kitchen consumption further:

Subtracting the baseline:

So the central heating, despite being supposedly gas-fired, eats lots of power! I guess this is the electric pump, used to drive the heated water around the house to the radiators. Ah well, I’m not skimping on that ;)

More practically: the dishwasher result is incredible. That’s 30 times the power usage of the house’s computer hardware. This is a ~7-year-old standard dishwasher; obviously green power consumption wasn’t an issue back then! We’re running it less frequently now, obviously; the odd hand-wash of bulky and nearly-clean items helps. With any luck when we move in a few months, we can replace it with a greener model.

The washing machine is about what I would expect, so I’m OK with that.

Also interesting to note that our dehumidifier is unnoticeable in the volume of the dishwasher; I could have tried to work it out properly in isolation, but couldn’t be bothered by that stage ;)

Tags: electricity, energy, geekery, green, house, power

This question came up on a forum I’m on. It turns out it’s really quite easy to work out — this page covers pretty much all the details.

In addition to what’s there, it’s worth noting that the current Irish price for a kilowatt-hour under the ESB’s domestic rate is 12.73 cents per kWh, which works out as 14.41 cents per kWh once the 13.5% VAT is added in. So Irish users, pretend you live in New Hampshire (15 cents per kWh) to get realistic figures from the excellent cost calculator.

Using this, it looks like if I was to leave an 160W desktop computer on permanently in Ireland, I’d be spending 215 euros per year to power it. Wow, that’s pricey! My strategy of using low-noise, low-power hardware for home servers has paid off already, in that case. ;)

For what it’s worth, if you’re worrying about the power consumption of an NTL digital Pace Digital TV set-top box — if this Pace presentation is anything to go by, it appears the standby power consumption is on the order of 1-2 watts — about 2 euros per year. Grand.

Tags: costs, electricity, environment, green, money, power, saving, watts

Spam: Ask Slashdot: How Powerful is the Turn-Off Power of Spam? The question is, ‘How often do you make the decision to NOT buy something form a company because you know they engage in spamming activities?’

This is an old idea — it goes back to a December 1996 column by Roger Ebert, of all people, who proposes the following pledge that all internet users should take:

Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.

8 years later, it’s more important than ever.

However, it’s complicated by one additional factor — not everyone knows which products and companies use spam to advertise. For example, did you know that Kraft routinely advertise their Gevalia coffee through spam?

My suggestion — a daring individual (that rules me out ;) should set up a website where samples of major-product-advertising spam are collected from (trusted) reporters. A quick scoreboard based on how many reports a particular company accumulates, and we have a Boulder Pledge reputation service.

Some simple rules should be applied:

• Messages arriving at never-used spamtrap addresses, or scraped addresses from USENET or the web, especially if the message hits multiple of those addresses (indicating a high volume), is the basis for a listing;
• Failure to respect opt-outs, of course, would be a biggie;
• Using a known spamhaus, or sending via open proxies in Shandong, would be a massive thumbs-down;
• Failure to clean up it’s act after being made aware of the problem, oh dear.

It’d be essential to take an extremely careful approach to this; any hint of personal axe-grinding, and the site would be useless, written off as just the work of ‘another anti-spam kook’.

Essentially, this’d be a Fortune-500-oriented version of spamvertized.org.

Reportedly, many of the large companies using spam to advertise are fully aware at a management level that they are responsible for spamming. (That line about open proxies in Shandong is no joke — at least one Fortune 500 company has hired a spamhaus that does this.)

Doubtless, some spamvertisers may be victim to an overzealous but clueless marketing department, on the other hand — but either way, a public ‘name and shame’ forum gives a great impetus for them to avoid this problem, at least once they’ve been bitten the first time.

In some cases, it’s dodgy ‘affiliates’ that use spam to advertise their products — but a company that operates affiliates really should post a policy that says that affiliates found to be spamming will be terminated and have their commissions forfeited; reportedly, that has been found in other programs to quickly cut off the problem.

Tags: company, failure, message, pledge, power, powerful, question, slashdot, spam, turn

Security: Bruce Schneier points out some interesting angles on the official report into the US power blackout of Aug 14th:

Why the tortured prose? The writers take pains to assure us that the power generation and delivery systems were not affected by MSBlast. But what about the alarm systems? Clearly, they were all affected by something–and all at the same time.

To be honest, it sounds pretty damn close to me, as I’ve said before.

Tags: alarm, aug, blackout, delivery, generation, msblast, power, prose, report, security, time

Patents: One thing that gets pretty confusing when one investigates the whole patents/open-source/copyright protection field, is the nature of the term Intellectual Property.

What’s called ‘IP’ consists of three parts: copyright, patents, and trademarks. This extract from Harvard’s ‘Intellectual Property in Cyberspace’ series notes:

In the eighteenth century, lawyers and politicians were more likely to refer to patents and copyrights as ‘monopolies’ than they were to refer to them as forms of ‘property.’ … Thomas Jefferson was the most prominent adherent of this view, but many others shared his attitude to varying degrees. ….

Another, more general manifestation of the same trend has been the growing power of the phrase ‘intellectual property.’ Before the Second World War, use of the phrase as shorthand for copyrights, patents, trademarks, and related entitlements was rare. Since that time, it has become steadily more common. n105 Today, it is the standard way for lawyers and law teachers to refer to the field.

Why does the popularity of the term matter? The answer … is that legal discourse has power. Specifically, the use of the term ‘property’ to describe copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc. conveys the impression that they are fundamentally ‘like’ interests in land or tangible personal property — and should be protected with the same generous panoply of remedies. ….

Regrettably, the pleas by Cohen and a few others that judges jettison the concept of ‘property’ and frankly confront the public policy implications of protecting certain kinds of information fell largely on deaf ears. The ‘propertization’ of the field continued — and is now well-nigh complete.

It’s common to read commentary by outsiders — journalists especially – who conflate all three forms of ‘IP’, and therefore assuming that all three should be considered as ‘equal’ to physical property. In other words, they fall into this trap.

In reality, a trademark should have much more protection than a patent; copyright over ‘bits’ is not the same thing as physical ownership of atoms; the concept of the public domain is a whole lot different between ‘things’ and ‘bits’; there’s a difference.

To this end, this disclaimer from the UN World Summit on the Information Society is very significant; they’ve recognised these issues.

This working group has come to recognize that the term ‘intellectual property rights’ carries bias and encourages simplistic overgeneralization. Therefore this working group does not carry the name IPR. In particular, this group does not endorse the legal school of thought, which advocates that productions of the mind shall be treated in a similar way as real estate property. This legal doctrine implicitly backs the concept that copyrights should last for ever.

Nice work! (thanks to Russell McOrmond and Seth Johnson for noting it.)

Tags: copyright, field, intellectual, patents, phrase, power, property, protection, term, thing, use

Bruce Sterling: 10 Technologies That Deserve to Die. I can’t disagree with any of these, really — except for manned spaceflight – I’m not giving up on that one dammit! ;)

Very informative details of what happened with the NY power failure, from an insider at one of the nuke plants supplying power.

Hooray — my new Gamecube’s arrived!

Tags: dammit, deserve, failure, gamecube, hooray, insider, nuke, power, spaceflight

Slammer worm crashed nuclear power plant safety systems for 5 hours (SecurityFocus).

Humour: BBspot: SpamAssassin Unveils New HomeAssassin Product for Unwelcome Visitors.

Aside: I wonder if the team behind NPR’s Day to Day program realise how close that name is to the classic Chris Morris/Armando Ianucci UK fake news programme, The Day Today. Hopefully there’ll be less sports reports from Alan Partridge on the NPR version…

Tags: bbspot, day, humour, npr, plant, power, safety, securityfocus, slammer, worm

Frank Bergmann forwards some bits on FoRK that are quite interesting:

The failed Niagara power station belongs to National Grid USA. This power supplier is listed as a reference customer of Northern Dynamics — who refer to themselves as the ‘home of the OPC experts’. … OPC stands for OLE for Process Control.

(I cleaned up some of the translation from this Heise.de article.)

Tags: customer, fork, grid, national, niagara, opc, power, reference, station, supplier

I’ve been reading an article in Edge Magazine, How To Get Rich, by Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs and Steel). He investigates more deeply into the differences between cultures, and the effect this has had on their history and dominance, as he did in GG+S; this time with economic might in mind.

For example, he notes that the Chinese, in the middle ages, were a sea-faring nation of astounding skill, exploring most of the coasts of Asia and Africa for trade. They were on the verge of rounding the Cape of Good Hope (and, in the words of Diamond, “colonising Europe” ;) when a new emperor with an anti-Navy bias took power, and recalled them. Since the entirety of China’s empire was ruled solely by one power, the emperor, that was that. (Compare with Columbus, who could “shop around” the many superpowers of Europe until his trip across the Atlantic was funded.)

Then, this morning, a pertinent link arrived via Kyle Moffat of forteana: an ancient Chinese map of Africa is now on show in Cape Town (BBC).

The Chinese map, covering more than 17 square metres, was produced in silk. It is thought to be a copy of a map sculpted into rock 20 or 30 years earlier. …

The Da Ming Hun Yi Tu, or Amalgamated Map of the Great Ming Empire, is a unique snapshot of history. Created in China in 1389, and clearly showing the shape of Africa, more than 100 years before Western explorers and map-makers reached the continent.

BTW, worth noting that I came across the Diamond article from a link in Clay Shirky’s guest-blog at Boing Boing. Clay, as usual, is throwing up lots of reading material, which I just don’t have time to read ;) so I’m syncing it all to my Palm with Sitescooper. Come on Xerox, where’s that electronic paper!?

Tags: article, boing, edge, emperor, history, link, magazine, map, power, time