Landscape Architecture

The book I read to research this post was Landscape Architecture A Very Short Introduction by Ian Thompson which is a very good book which I bought on kindle. The term landscape architecture is known to have been first used in a book title in 1828. It is a bit of an ambigous term that has little to do with architecture and there is a lot more to it than mere gardening or landscaping. In America you must have a degree in the subject before you can call yourself a landscape architect. They design a lot more than gardens, often whole towns and will often do things like study the impact a wind farm will have so it is quite technical. It is a very old profession easily going back to Roman times at least and interestingly China leads the world in this subject with its huge urban redevelopment since 1979. In China the tradition is as old as in the west with things like Feng Shui incorporated into it and although at the moment there is much western influence in years to come we may find Chinese ideas influence the west a lot more. In France there landscape architecture prior to the French Revolution was uniform which you can see at Versailles Palace and after the revolution Europe as a whole started to steer towards a more natural look. Hampton Court in London around this time had a huge amount of money spent on landscaping it. In Britain in the 1960's there were new towns built like Telford that incorporated the latest landscaping architecture and in one way that it failed was in the huge amount of tower blocks that were built and low cost housing in general. There was at least planning in things like shops and park space. Many of the so called futuristic buildings have come to be seen as follies that in many cases look worse with age than conventional buildings. The most important aspect of this planning is usability which is often forgotten when they are giving out awards for landscaping. I did really enjoy as it is very interesting and is written by a leading landscape architect. It is part of the A Very Short Introduction which has around 300 in the series and they get an expert to write around 150 pages on a subject. They are quite concise and informative.

Green IT

The book I read to research this post was Green IT for Dummies by Carol Baroudi which is a very good book which I bought from Kindle. This book differs from Green Home Computing for Dummies in that it concerns the data center environment. The biggest bill for most data centers is the electricity bill which can be offset in a green way by having solar panels or a wind turbine. Most data centers have diesel generators in case of power outage. Another big cost is cooling if the density of the computing power exceeds 200 Watts per square foot you need liquid cooling rather than fan cooling. Some companies use something like a canal or a lake where the water can be taken deep down where it's coolest & circulated around the plant. There are often restrictions on this like the water can't be heated to the extent that it kills living organisms. Often a data center will have a cooling tower on its roof to cool the water especially in moderately cold climates. Another development is virtualization which allows programs like exchange server & sharepoint server which at one time would have been run on separate servers to be run on the same server. Another point is the price per Gigabyte of hard drives has come down although there was a glitch when they had the floods in Thailand. Apparently most hard drives are manufactured there. A lot of companies use workstations that are thin clients which the programs are either run on either a cloud server or a company, this requires less maintenance. A final issue is netbooks which are as powerful as desktop computers which were built 2 years prior. A lot of companies are using these instead of laptops & they use less electric & are more portable. Also a lot of companies find it easier to offload newer computers which they often get paid for than to keep their computers as long as possible & then pay for them to be scrapped.

Photo Voltaic Design & Installation

The book I read to research this post was photo voltaic design & installation for dummies by Ryan Mayfield which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. PV stands for photo voltaic & is a fancy name for solar panels. These are panels that convert the suns rays into electricity. To start with you need to plan the installation you will need a small camera to photograph the site & a pyronometer to measure the strength of the sun. Then you need to measure the area where the panels are going  & multiply it by the suns strength & multiply that by the average hours of sunshine.

When you fit the panels bear in mind that while there is daylight there is an electric current flowing. If you are connecting directly to the mains you will need an inverter to step up the voltage. You will need a charge limiter if you connect to batteries because a spike can damage them. The batteries need to be deep discharge because you will discharge & recharge them completely. The cheapest batteries are lead acid but nickel cadmium are better. If you do the job yourself you have to get the wiring certified.