“you know, like, your friends in california? they’re… like your friends. they kinda look like people, there’s a telephone involved. they have an automobile. but, they’re not like your friends back in new york. or boston. or seattle. or atlanta. or texas. as a matter of fact, your friends in LA don’t show up when they invite you somewhere. how do they make that work?”
– barry sobel

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I would perish
in the embrace of his stronger existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure and are awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Each single angel is terrifying.
And so I force myself, swallow and hold back
the surging call of my dark sobbing.
Oh, to whom can we turn for help?
Not angels, not humans;
and even the knowing animals are aware that we feel
little secure and at home in our interpreted world.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

check out Rising Phoenix Design and the Blackback Web Theory.

i promise i won’t say “i told you so”.

or, check out ecoIron, with their textual analysis of how a Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year:

As noted, an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. I thought I would do a little math and see what could be saved by moving a high volume site to the black format.

Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let’s assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background [on a CRT monitor! mjo] will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that’s $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.

via lostfrog:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
You think this will rhyme
But it ain’t gonna.
–Steve Allen