Nathan Lustig

How Much Pollution do your Google Searches Generate?

Category : Technology
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Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist and owner of CO2stats.com, claims that every two Google searches uses as much energy as boiling a kettle of water.   I have no idea if this is correct, but it seems very high to me.

Experts have also claimed that the Internet industry produces about as much carbon emissions as the aviation industry.  Server farms produce huge amounts of carbon because they are running 24/7 and have to handle huge amounts of calculations at all times.  
Wissner-Gross claims that Google is a big offender because of the way searches are handled.  When you submit a search, Google sends the information to multiple servers competing against each other for speed.  This procedure makes the site very fast, but wastes the server capacity for the requests that are not displayed to the searcher.
He has set up a website that allows companies to “make their sites carbon neutral.”  Its a similar idea to a company that two UW students have started: Powered Green.
Powered Green sells stickers to put on laptops that advertise that the computer is “Powered Green.”  The proceeds from the stickers fund alternative energy projects that offset the energy used over the life of the laptop.
I really like both of these ideas and it will be interesting to see if this type of personal environmentalism continues to catch even as the price of energy continues to crash.

Floating Plastic Island 2x the Size of USA

Category : Technology
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No, its not science fiction.

I just finished reading the Economist’s special report on the world’s oceans.  Its really good, worth the read, and best of all, its free on the Economist website.

One of the articles describes an area in the Pacific ocean 2x the size of the United States that is completely full of plastic.  Can you imagine walking across the USA, surrounded by plastic the entire time?  Apparently, water currents pull most of the world’s discarded plastic into this zone, creating a floating wasteland of plastic.  Another study found that for every square kilometer of ocean, there are 18,000 pieces of floating plastic.  Another found that the average Dutch seabird has 44 pieces of plastic in its stomach when it dies.
Check out the special report at Economist.com.

Would you Delete 10 Facebook Friends For a Free Whopper?

Category : Business & Advertising
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While I probably haven’t eaten fast food in at least six months, Burger King is my favorite burger chain solely based on its innovative marketing.

They are at it again with their Facebook application Whopper Sacrifice.  WhopperSacrifice.com says:

What would you do for a free WHOPPER?  Now is the time to put your fair-weather web friendships to the test.  Install WHOPPER Sacrifice on your Facebook profile and we will reward you with a free flame-broiled WHOPPER when you sacrifice 10 of your friends.

When a Facebook user defriends someone, Whopper Sacrifice notifies the defriended person with a notice that the person likes Whoppers more than them.
This is by far my favorite Facebook Application so far.  It fulfils an actual need, food, and makes fun of all of the quasi-friends that everyone has on Facebook.  It’s incredibly sticky and extremely viral: one user turns into at least 10 users very quickly.
As of today, over 30250 people have been defriended in favor of the Whopper and it is going up fast.  I am surprised that Facebook has allowed this app to continue, as it eats away (pun intended) at its user base.  Even if the Facebook team decides that this app violates the terms of service, it is a publicity coup for Burger King and a strategy that other web companies should emulate.

Club Trillion

Category : Sports
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If you like college basketball and have the humor of a college student, you need to read this blog called Club Trillion: Views From the End of the Bench.

It’s written by Ohio State’s last man on the bench Mark “The Shark” Titus and is absolutely hilarious.  I’ll let “The Shark” explain the origin:

Club Trillion is an exclusive club founded in 2007 by three very handsome and very financially well-off Ohio State basketball players–Kyle Madsen (#15), Danny Peters (#13), and myself. We named ourselves “Club Trillion” because as athletically limited white folk, we found ourselves riding the bench for the Buckeyes. When the time came for us to get in, there would usually only be 1 minute remaining in the game and after sitting down for 39 minutes, we really had no interest in trying to be all that productive. So we devised the plan of trying to get the “trillion” which occurs when we play 1 minute and do absolutely nothing that would appear in the box score, thus making our stat line say 1 minute played followed by a bunch of zeroes. I know what you are saying to yourself right now. You are saying, “That is side-splittingly hilarious. These guys are probably just a comical party waiting to happen.” You are absolutely right.

His post about being stuck in an elevator with some of his teammates is laugh out loud funny as well.

Hopefully he can parlay his successful blog into some sort of a job after college that lets him avoid cubicle life to continue to put his superb practical joking and writing skills to good use!
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