Video about the Antartica chunk that fell off

March 29th 8pm-9pm 2008

24 of the world’s major cities will voluntarily turn the lights off to deliver the message about global warming. The event began last year and is organized by the World Wildlife Fund. More information can be found here: www.worldwildlife.org/earthhour

San Francisco also has a new proposal that would mandate all skyscrapers to turn off nonemergency lights after work hours. If the proposal passes, it will be the first one in the nation. The proposal would fine each floor where the lights are on with $50 for the first offense, $100 for the second, and $250 for the next thereafter. The proposal also calls for businesses to install devices that automatically turn off the lights when no one is in a room. Having pretty lights on at night in downtown is something that we are used to seeing but in reality it really is a waste of electricity. I definitely see this changing soon as we become more aware of our power usage.

via SFGate

Huddler is a new product and review community website. As described from the beta site, Huddler will be a vibrant group of connected communities, or “Huddles”, each with a unique focus. Huddles will be centered on Home Theater products, Digital Photography, Skiing, Parenting and any other interests that you suggest to us. We plan to have more than a dozen by the end of the year. In each of these Huddles, users can:

• Write product reviews
• Track what they own and want to easily find others with similar interests
• Participate in our custom built discussion forums
• Create/edit wikis on a myriad of topics
• And a variety of other features all tightly integrated like no other site online

The first focus of Huddlers is on green products for the home and is encouraging people to submit reviews of things such as appliances, lighting, plumbing fixtures, cleaning products, to cars, paint, and anything else that you would want to have a review for. You can leave a feedback as well as rate the products and add a new one if it does not exist yet. The interface of the reviews and products look pretty friendly and easy to navigate. There is also a discussion forum section for green products that has been fairly active for a beta testing site. There is also a wiki section, which may not be as useful.

There are quite a few other websites for reviews. For green products there are a couple others and I will name two others. Sustainlane is a website specifically for green reviews not just for products but also have reviews for businesses, local restaurants, clothing, and more. GreenGuide is a site that has green product reviews, but it is not allow for customer reviews. GreenGuide also have a blog, tips, and articles, so reviews is not the main focus of the website. The good thing about Huddler is that the website is focused on products and is not locally focused. A bad thing may be that there are so many products that exist and to be useful, there have to be a decent amount of reviews for a product and that may be hard to fulfill. Currently, it does the job of listing all the products in each specific category.

If you are interested in getting a beta testing account, you can send an email to Cristina Foung at cristina@huddler.com.

A chunk of ice about seven times the size of Manhattan has collapsed in western Antartica. The 160 square mile chunk was the edge of an ice shelf and most likely fell off due to global warming. The rest of the ice shelf is about the size of Connecticut and scientists worry that it may eventually collapse as well about 15 years from now. This is a problem that will continue to worsen and we are seeing more proof the global warming effect.

Video about the chunk of ice here

via SFGate

The latest BusinessWeek magazine had an article that talked about the cost of powering and cooling datacenters. Several companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Cisco and Microsoft have been discussing having data centers in Iceland. According to the article, “the cost of power consumption by data centers doubled between 2000 and 2006, to $4.5 billion, and could double again by 2011, according to the U.S. government.” Having a data center in Iceland could cut a lot of the cooling costs down by pulling in the cool air from outside to cool the servers. It makes a lot more sense to have a data center in a cold place and the idea of using outside air and air from ice has been used for existing data centers in other places.  I assume there are a lot of other factors that are preventing a growth of datacenters from popping up in places where it is really cold, such as getting the power, internet cable fibres, and the resources. With the growing costs of power, I am sure that the huge amount of vacant land, cheap geothermal energy, and cold temperatures will draw some interests. Verne Holdings announced plans for a $306 million data center near Keflavik International Airport. It will be the first data center in Iceland set to open in 2009. Hopefully we will see more companies build out their data centers in cold areas to take advantage of the natural cold air.