20160605/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolition
20160605/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction_%28building%29
- The literal meaning of the word “dilapidated” is “stones have been stolen from a building.
20160614/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilapidation
20160614/todo/south-part-episode-historic-sodopista
Efficiency and environmental friendliness. “Environmentalism is not a new idea.” On the contrary, lack of concern for the environment is the new idea, as historically, humans had to reuse and share the same living spaces for thousands of years, and given that their ways of life traditionally did not change much over thousands of years, making sure the environment was the same as you left it was paramount.
Sure, humans could have moved around to keep living in “new” spaces, but as a matter of fact, most human societies have preferred to keep living in the same locations rather than keep moving around to “new” locations. And even among those who did need to keep moving around, they designed their lifestyle around a portable mentality, where they could pack up all their belongings and leave the site where they were formerly living while leaving no traces that they were there.
Of course, in recent times, in industrialized cultures, people’s lifestyles have changed far more in far less time, so some curious new phenomenon have emerged.
Native Americans and new industrial culture neighbors. “Yeah, they didn’t like what they saw, but what could they do to stop them from cutting down all the trees?” Not just, but also those too within the same culture, it was very hard to effectively communicate. In other words, there just “emerged” a cohort of humans who clearcut forests “because they can.” If they couldn’t, they obviously wouldn’t. And, most importantly, the humans who were perpetrating this incidental behavior probably had no “former knowledge” of what consequences it would lead to. They had no connection to the past, thinking that everything they were doing was a “new idea,” even though, in fact, it wasn’t.
So the same, “deconstruction is not a new idea.” In fact, it has existed since antiquity, whereas demolition is a relatively new practice made possible only by modern technology. In the end, however, it turned out to be a short-lived practice, as once it became evident that the costs outweighed the benefits of demolition, people switched back to doing deconstruction for most practical uses. The only exceptions are when parties with highly confidential or classified documents want to destroy a site as quickly as possible and are adamant to slower alternatives, even if they are more economic.
This is useful for comparing “file shredding” on computers. Overwriting the file contents to make sure that no traces are accidentally left around is more expensive, and in this sense, it doesn’t make economic sense. However, there are many cases when people want to do it anyways.
Wood and paper are a great example of materials that are widely used, widely demanded, often times the preferred material for many applications, a sustainable resource, evironmentally friendly, and used since antiquity. Thus, because we have a vast amount of knowledge around the use of these materials and the best way to use them, we know exactly what their strengths and weaknesses are. Compared this to computers, where often times, the future is an unknown.
Tour de Force. Oh yeah, I really wanted to write this one down. Environmental impact of computers. The essential elements of computation are copper, iron, aluminum, silicon, gold, and dopants such as boron and phosphorous. Of all of these elements, only the dopants are toxic. All the others are environmentally friendly and occur naturally. However, the dopants occur only in trace quantities in the manufactured device, so the only place where they occur in toxic quantities are in factory mass production. But, I emphasize this fact, that is an artifact of industrial mass production, not of computers per se. Trace elements occur in the human body too, which in small quantities, are good for your health, but too much is toxic. Now, in the industrial manufacture of processed foods with additives, these kinds of additives can also be toxic in the factory floor.
So, that being said, computation per-se are not detrimental to the environment. Rather, it is the technology that surrounds them that is environmentally unfriendly. On an individual computer product, once you start to zoom out from the micro-scale to the macro-scale, you start to encounter larger and larger quantities of hazardous substances, not just because you’re talking about larger scales, but also because these substances are occurring in pure form rather than trace form. Take for example the plastic casing of electronics. Plastic is cheaper to manufacture than more environmentally-friendly alternatives. However, it is less opportune for the environment, especially when coupled with brominated flame retardants (BFRs). Also, many types of rechargeable batteries are also chemically hazardous. Often times, these batteries are just as much user-facing as is the external case, as they tend to reach the end of their life much faster than the remaining electronics and need to be changed quickly in comparison.
Finally, the fact of electronics production. Currently, for many electronics, the only technology that can manufacture them is mass production machinery. Fundamentally by definition, mass production requires considerable transportation, so applications that depend on the production of new electronic’s environmental impact is constrained to the environmental impact of transportation. Remember, modern electronic computers had to emerge from a highly industrial tradition that preceded it, often times one that preferred power tools even when using them would be less efficient in every measure except the time to complete a task. So yes, as a technology, computers are at the top of the pyramid, but the best thing about computers is that they enable additional efficiencies at the lower levels, even if the underlying technology does not fundamentally change. Take, for example, hybrid cars.
- Also, factories must invest a certain amount of their money on improving factory operation if this goal of safer and more environmentally-friendly factories is ever to be realized.
Much of the hype over environmentalism that has come is due to the realization of the tremendous advancement of computers. However, this is a rather isolated phenomenon that generally doesn’t happen in other industries. That being said, computers have the best future potentials and prospects, especially local computation and closed loop energy supply of highly efficient computers.
You might say that powering computer displays requires a major amount of power, but this in fact is not true. Again, there are solutions here for saving dramatic amounts of energy. You know lasers? Whereas regular non-coherent light generally requires a large amount of energy input to get a decent amount of light output, even weak lasers are powerful enough to cause temporary eye damage lasting for 3 months. So, laser-based displays could be used to dramatically cut down the amount of energy needed to power a display. Finally, for wall-mount displays, powerful computation could be used to implement a software head tracker to determine the position of the humans in the room, then shine the laser light only in that direction. So in fact, all of a home’s computers, including the displays and speakers, could be running off of a solar-powered energy budget, even in geographies with weak solar energy. (Excluding places that have no daylight for half of the year.) Also, I note that powering audio devices generally does not require that much electrical energy, as the human ear is very sensitive to even small amounts of sound energy.
Also, environmentally friendly computers are paramount when used for environmental monitoring, where the computer may get damaged or stolen by animals in the natural environment. Whatever happens, it is inevitable that the machines will get broken down and consumed by the environment, but when that happens, that must not cause deleterious affects on the surrounding environment. Computers, when properly designed, happen to be the perfect fit for environmental monitoring.
Again, I note. These phenomenons are particular to computers, and they should not be anticipated to happen in other technology sectors.