A good day for open-source software
Abbie and I are down visiting my folks in San Diego — My mom’s partner has been struggling with the transfer of 7 years’ work from his old XP machine to a new one running Windows 7; He’s been struggling with poor compatibility for literally months, with the new computer still setup on a card table and the old computer still indispensible. Meanwhile, my mom’s computer is an ancient e-Machine with 256 MB of RAM and it takes 15 minutes to start up a web browser. She’s been waiting to receive John’s old computer (which is certainly no spring chicken, but a big improvement over the present one). more))
For Coffee Drinkers…
Interesting result here:
Dutch study (pdf in english) on the life cycle impacts of reusable vs disposable cups for coffee service found that hand-washed ceramic coffee cups are the most impactful way of consuming coffee, machine-washed porcelain coffee cups are the second-most impactful, and disposable single-use paper cups are the least impactful, with the notable exception of very high ozone depletion potential due to chemicals used in paper cup production. Polystyrene was middle-of-the-road. But read on…
Looking closer, the assumptions of the study are a little eye-opening. In particular, the study assumes the reusable cups are washed after every use, and that hand-washing uses an always-on under-sink electrical water heater. In this case, the environmental effects of the ceramic-mug system are “virtually entirely the result of using electricity” (46). Electricity is also the culprit in dishwasher-cleaned porcelain mugs, although dishwashers are more energy efficient than standby electric water heaters. Finally, the non-electricity-caused environmental impacts of the reusable systems come from eutrophication from detergents; non-phosphate detergents would mitigate this effect.
Most of these issues are considered in the sensitivity analysis (they didn’t talk about phosphate-free detergents). All you coffee drinkers should be relieved to know that simply by washing your mug with cold water (which the study calls “hygienically questionable”), ceramic-mug drops to rock-bottom in terms of impact. Even under their high-impact assumptions, washing with hot water is ok as long as you only wash after 4.5 or more uses.
The moral is that before you sneer at people drinking from disposable coffee cups (as I often do), you must first ask yourself, “are these the type of people who leave the hot water running when they do dishes and/or use a fresh cup every morning?” If they are, maybe you should thank them for using disposables instead.
Now, back to work…
Fog rolled in
These pictures are from several weeks ago, during the heyday of the La Brea fire which, though distant, was still near enough to change our atmospheric chemistry here in Santa Barbara, and also drop ash all over everything.
On the morning of 8/13 the sky was deep red and purple; then, as the evening drew in, the temperature dropped suddenly down to around 60F, and a thick blanket of fog covered the coast.
This is what I saw leaving my office that afternoon:
