Concrete science and sustainability discussed

[saveasteading]

I highly recommend this from radio 4.

It is aimed at the radio 4 audience so is free from dumbing down. 

Concrete science explained and the sustainability issues.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0029rqw?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

[SteamyTea]

Is that the same one I posted up last week?

 

There is a good Curious Cases about diamonds.

Much more interesting than you would imagine.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0029rg8

 

 

[saveasteading]

22 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

the same one I posted up last week?

If it is, then yes.  I usually see  your posts but maybe was distracted.   In that case @SteamyTea that was an excellent suggestion. 

The experts really were and were good explainers.  

On the subject of sustainability and carbon. I read today that computer memory / cloud uses more carbon daily than the entire aviation industry, plus masses of water.

I have difficulty imagining that.

We are to have a clear out of those multiple photos and old files that we don't need.

I would rather save my documents on a chip than on cloud, but there isn't much choice.

One click now, and another file goes into the sky.

[SteamyTea]

34 minutes ago, saveasteading said:

I read today that computer memory / cloud uses more carbon daily than the entire aviation industry, plus masses of water

Aviation is really not that bad.

If you look at the CO₂/1000 km tonne, or even the CO₂/passenger km metrics are not too bad.

Cement production is similar.

 

Like all things, it really comes down to using them sensibly.

IT seems to be obsessed with speed and data transfer.

One of the things I used to show my students, 25 years ago, was the difference between the same text as a Word document, a text file and a compressed text file.

Why worry about about upload speeds when you can often make the data 50 times smaller.

[saveasteading]

5 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

you can often make the data 50 times smaller.

How do I do that? save to the pc memory from Word cloud and delete the cloud file?

anything else? what about 5MB photos that could have been very much smaller? Can I readily downsize them?

[SteamyTea]

37 minutes ago, saveasteading said:

save to the pc memory from Word cloud and delete the cloud file

Basically yes. You need to disable the cloud service, usually easy to do. You can also, usually, change the default location that different applications saved files to.

39 minutes ago, saveasteading said:

what about 5MB photos that could have been very much smaller? Can I readily downsize them?

This is a bit harder. It all depends on the format that the image is saved as. jpg is a compressed format, so compressing it again often makes the file larger as it has to add the algorithm that the compression uses. Formats like bmp and tiff can be compressed, tiff has an option to compress with the zip format built in.

Raster images, which are just dots on a grid, can be reduced in a number of ways.

You can have reduce the number of colours, say from 32 bit to 16 bit. Increase the number of pixels that get averaged i.e. a 4 by 4 colour, hue and brightness to 8 by 8 average, you loose fidelity though.

You can also reduce the number of pixel in the image, from say 1200 wide by 800 high to 600 wide by 400 high. The image is them around a quarter of the size. Again, fidelity is reduced and when you zoom in, it gets very fuzzy.

It really depends what quality you need. If it is just for a screen background, you can resize it to screen resolution, and it will look fine.

 

CAD files (vector) are a bit different. By default they are created with efficient algorithms, a start point, an end point and a formula that says what happens between those points, that is why they can be zoomed in on.

CAD files do have a lot of other stuff attached to them though, and some formats add just about all the options available, even if they are not used.

 

It is worth getting a copy of Irfanview, as it opens dozens of image file formats, and can save to dozens, it also allows easy resizing and compression.

 

7 Zip is a good, free, portable compression application that can crunch files, and encrypt them as well.

 

Audio files are a different kettle of fish, they are much more complicated than image files. Though there are compressed formats i.e. mp3. These use a variable 'bit rate' and frequency clipping.