It’s hard to imagine that our browsing activities on the internet require any energy at all. Somehow it’s easier to accept that watching TV requires energy and to grasp that the longer we watch the more energy we consume. The NET is different. The information is not transferred in a steady stream as with television but more erratically. From low bandwidth activities like email and IM to video streaming and Skype calls.

In this TEDtalk Jay Walker states that it takes the energy in 1 lump of coal to move 1 MB of information across the NET. Of course not all of the energy we use comes from burning coal. However, this is an important idea. Whether Walker’s calculations are accurate or not, the “1 lump of coal = 1MB” soundbite at least acts as a memorable reminder of the link between information consumption and energy consumption.

For those wanting more in depth calculations, this article analyses the link between information consumption and energy consumption in more detail calculating that it takes 323,000 KW·hs of energy to download 100 web pages.

The Cult of Done Manifesto by Bre Pettis

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

Visualised using Wordle.

If you focus on doing something you love, the opportunities to make money tend to provide themselves. If you focus just on making money, you often find that you hate what you do… and the money isn’t as readily available.

From More Interesting Northern European Analyses Of The Music Industry by Mike Masnic Tue, Apr 21st 2009

To know how good you are at something requires the same skills as it does to be good at that thing. Which means if you’re absolutely hopeless at something, you lack exactly the skills that you need to know that you’re absolutely hopeless.

And this is a profound discovery. That most people who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they’re doing. It explains a great deal of life.

This wonderful quote - taken from a talk on creativity given at the world creative forum by John Cleese - like much of the comedy he has written over the years, is both deeply profound and darkly comical. I laughed out loud the first time I heard this. The truth of it and the horror of it’s implications ringing through my head.

I frequently need to jump between various programming / scripting languages and have often wondered if there’s a site out there that helps with this process by mapping the equivalent functions in the various languages.

I’m yet to find such a site and have recently wondered about the feasibility of a microformat for marking up programming language reference pages. I first thought about this while viewing the reference page for processing (screen shot below).

Would it be possible to mark up similar reference pages for other scripting languages like php, ruby, javascript, actionscript and python using a standardised set of class names and markup structure for the methods and functions that are common throughout each language?

I put this question to the microformats google group and Ilya Radchenko made the point that the scale and depth of languages like php would make this extremely difficult. But such an effort would not need to cover the idiosyncrasies at the dark edges of each of these languages. To be useful it need only map the common core, most often used functions like those dealing with strings, text, arrays and the more common math methods.

I’m sure that a consistent, standard and semantic markup format for scripting language reference pages and the resulting consistency in presentation would be a huge help to developers. As the microformat motto goes, “designed for humans first, machines second”, I wonder what the benefits of having this data machine readable would be?