Valentine Makhouleen — interactive art director
+1-416-857-2834
val@new-media.ca

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This is a scrapbook of ideas. One can hardly call it a blog, but I maintain it to file away things I find interesting, like shiny pebbles.
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How much CO2 does this article produce?

(CNN) — Twenty milligrams; that’s the average amount of carbon emissions generated from the time it took you to read the first two words of this article.
How green is your website? Calculating all the factors involved in a website can be tricky.

Now, depending on how quickly you read, around 80, perhaps even 100 milligrams of C02 have been released. And in the several minutes it will take you to get to the end of this story, the number of milligrams of greenhouse gas emitted could be several thousand, if not more.

This may not seem like a lot: “But in aggregate, if you consider all the people visiting a web site and then all the seconds that each of them spends on it, it turns out to be a large number,” says Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, an Environmental Fellow at Harvard University who studies the environmental impact of computing.

Read the rest on CNN

July 2009

“How David beats Goliath” by Malcolm Gladwell

A great article by Malcolm Gladwell on what it means to be a competitive underdog. Gladwell talks about why “common” sense is not always the most successful strategy on the courts, battlefields or in business.

The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider. Why did the Ivy League schools of the nineteen-twenties limit the admission of Jewish immigrants? Because they were the establishment and the Jews were the insurgents, scrambling and pressing and playing by immigrant rules that must have seemed to the Wasp élite of the time to be socially horrifying. “Their accomplishment is well over a hundred per cent of their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition,” the dean of Columbia College said of the insurgents from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. He wasn’t being complimentary. Goliath does not simply dwarf David. He brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David.

Full article in The New Yorker

May 2009