Thursday, February 08, 2007

Energy Turned Flesh

Picenum has an article on how many energy slaves the typical Brit has working for them; I wrote this up for the United States a while ago. Picenum makes more generous assumptions, in that they think a human can burn about 3800 calories a day. Me, as I sat here drinking coffee and eating toast and jam, was not nearly as generous; I used 2200. Be that as it may, they have combined their numbers with another report to break out where all this energy is going. Turns out that the average Brit has about 16 slaves recreating on their behalf, but only one computing.

Looking at the data, I was wondering if increasing the computing budget could reduce the other items; for example, by using your computer to 'think' about how you take your vacation, can you actually save energy? The answer is probably yes.

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