On Blackle: Ecological Friendliness, or E-faux-logical Fanciness?

Some of you may be familiar with the search engine called Blackle. If you're not, don't freak out, click the link, congratulations, you're now familiar with the search engine called Blackle. Basically, it's a black Google and to start, let's be clear: There's absolutely nothing wrong with a black Google. Where I take issue is why Blackle has made itself black, and why it expects you to set it as your homepage rather than good ol' Google. (or Bing or Yahoo. Calm down, fanboys.) Right on Blackle's homepage you'll spot a little counter: "3,424,049.764 Watt hours saved". And counting. That's an impressive quantity of energy; for lack of a more relevant example, that's enough to constantly run a 1kw hairdryer for 143 days (why you would ever want to do such a thing is none of my business, but I digress). Where do they get that from? In their "about" section, Blackle claims that on computer monitors, it costs less energy to display black pixels than it does to display white pixels, and "even if the energy savings are small, they add up." They even cite a 2002 paper from a .gov that says so! (in 2002, most computer monitors were giant CRT displays that precluded today's slim LCDs)

All well and good, it makes sense, black light being dimmer (and more stylish) than white, so what's the problem? Let's consider how an LCD display works. (unless you are from 2003 or before, you are almost certainly reading this on an LCD display. If your computer fits on your lap, you are reading this on an LCD display.)

Basically (VERY basically), right behind every tiny pixel in your LCD display are three semitransparent Chinese hand fans - one blue, one red and one green.

By default, these liquid crystal fans hang down and don't block any light, so the white light from the display's backlight (located somewhere behind the hand fans) shines right past them through to your eye - this is how your monitor displays white pixels. However, it turns out if you put a potential difference across these Chinese hand fans (read: "you shoot them with magic electricity"), they stand up and block some of the light coming from the backlight of your display. So, if you want the pixel to be red, you put some volts through the red hand-fan. For a purple pixel, you magickify both the red and blue fans. To display a black pixel, all three of the hand fans are electrocuted such that very little of the light coming from the backlight gets through the display to your eye - even if the backlight is shining as brightly as ever. This is the important bit: You only have one backlight in your display, so it shines at the same brightness (therefore using the same amount of energy) no matter what the Chinese hand fans are doing. Not only that, but you'll notice that the voltage that you have to put through all three fans to block all the white light actually makes black pixels require slightly more energy than white ones! We should start an image search engine called Whitele! (Whitle? Wytel? Witel?)

An optional experiment: If you'd like to see a visual illustration of the difference between your backlight being turned off (zero energy used) and all the hand fans working as hard as they can to color your screen black (maximum powah!), bring up Google (or Blackle, if you like torturing my soul) and image-search for "black". View full-screen an image of total blackness. If you're in a dark room with your monitor displaying a black image, you'll notice that some of the backlight's light escapes your fans and lights up your face and keyboard ever so slightly. Remember what this looks like. Now try turning your display off completely (this may require shutting down your computer if you're on a laptop). If your monitor is turned off, there is no light coming from the display at all, and you'll be completely in the dark.

(a shameless plug, disguised as a relevant aside: Your GPU - the chip responsible for telling your display what to do - is a very power-hungry component of your computer. Especially when it's working overtime on those superfluous pixels in your fancy Retina display.)

So, Blackle is not ecologically friendly - nor is it very attractive from a graphic design perspective. Indeed, Google (or Bing, for that matter) seems to have bested every potentially redeeming feature. What Blackle might be, however, is ecologically fancy. By fancy I mean it's not actually effective in and of itself, but inconveniencing yourself by using it might inspire you and your friends to be environmentally friendly in some other small (ACTUALLY effective) way. (this is the stretchiest stretch I've ever stretched, but I had to find a counterargument somewhere)

Fleshed-out counterarguments be damned. Long story short: Use Google.

More plugs: Separately, if you want to be ecologically friendly rather than just fancy, why not consider going vegetarian? A small group called the United Nations seems to look upon it kindly. (maybe I'll write a post about that soon!)

If you want to be ecologically fabulous, I'm sure there's scope for that as well, and someone on the Google has probably already figured it out.

The Electronics Display Resolution Hyperinflation of the Early 2000s

I think we may have been misinterpreted by the electronics industry when they heard we crave resolution. We mean resolution as it relates to tension, not outrageously high display resolution. Yes, I know higher-res images are sharper, but there's more to it than that. These are some of the real drawbacks that no turtlenecked hipster sees when they drool over heretical 17" 2880x1800 absurdities.

1. High resolution stresses out your graphics card. Your computer has this special chip called the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) responsible for deciding the precise color of every single pixel on your display. For a full HD 1080 (1920x1080) monitor, this works out to 2,073,600 pixels (yes, I used a calculator, bite me). It refreshes these pixels at a rate of at least 60Hz, for a total of 124,416,000 little decisions every second. If your display has a 2880x1800 resolution, your graphics card now has to make 311,040,000 decisions per second. The work for your graphics card becomes especially ridonkulous when you're running a game or offloading multimedia transcoding (e.g. Final Cut rendering) onto the GPU. Everyone who has ever tried to run the CryEngine knows the best way to boost your frame rate is to scale down your resolution to reasonable levels.

2. It kills your power efficiency and portability. After months of anticipation, you eventually get ahold of the latest and greatest GPU: an octo-core nVidia GeForce XG99200XFXX G93X EX Ultra: Magnum Overclocked Edition with 1,427 stream processors and 8GB of GDDR7 VRAM and you can finally, finally run Crysis at 2880x1800 resolution. Yet every time you open the game, your whole room gets a little warmer and after a week your neighborhood nuclear power plant shuts down in contempt. It turns out GPUs and displays account for a pretty large share of your power consumption and running super-duper high resolutions is a real kicker in that department. That's why my friend's Frankenstein monster of a gaming laptop weighs 20lbs but it won't last him through a 50 minute lecture on a single charge. That brick of a battery is powering all those extra pixels that he can't even see.

3. Tiny text strains your eyes. When using the two-year-old "low-resolution" 1920x1200 17" MacBook Pro on which I'm writing this post, any time I want to read text without craning my neck, I have to use the ctrl-scroll hotkey to zoom in on where my mouse is pointed. (blowing up text in Safari using via the zoom command makes complex webpages like Wordpress do all kinds of wibblywobbly wonky things with objects popping out of their borders and buttons becoming unclickable, etc.) Applications don't usually scale up text with window resolution so when you plug in your Retina monitor, everything becomes minuscule, with heaps of useless negative space filling in the extra real estate (my desktop background is not that cool). I had to buy a 24" external display (1920x1080) to see big spreadsheets and documents. Supposedly the ultra-hi-res is worth the tradeoff but I can't even see the individual pixels on my external monitor (92ppi), let alone my Mac's 133ppi display. Useless!

4. It makes reasonable-res displays look bad. Because I am a brainless slave to Apple's fortune I needed a new phone contract when moving to the USA, I swapped my old iPhone 3G (320x480 resolution, 163ppi) for the iPhone 4 (640x960 resolution, 326ppm) as soon as the latter came out. At first, I didn't really notice the difference in the displays. My 3G always displayed sharp photos and very readable text. The 4's resolution (exactly double that of the 3G) appeared superfluous and I thought nothing of it. BUT THEN (cue the accordion cadenza of first-world problems) I had to switch back to the 3G while I visited the UK and goodness me, did I miss my Retina. I think this hardship is evidence of how invention in the electronics industry has mothered necessity rather than the other way around.

5. Apps running at lower than native resolution look awful. 1280x800 15" laptop displays look just fine at their native resolution. However, showing a 1280x800 picture on a 2880x1800 display of the same size looks horrendous. Don't even ask me why.

6. We could be making less expensive displays instead! I know, it's the competitive market and stuff. As soon as Apple invents some super-duper specification ("Retina"), everyone else has to follow, no matter how insane the specification is. But couldn't we try and outcompete Apple by making products that are cheaper, ditching the elitist pursuit of meaninglessly high numbers while maintaining good build quality? You see the same thing in the car industry, with manufacturers trying to one-up each other in peak horsepower. Same thing with motorcycles and engine displacement. When a numerical measure of performance becomes high beyond practical purpose, can we go back to trying to make the good as cheap as possible instead of playing a mindless numbers game?