… and now it is definitively the green thing to do. (Whew!)
A study by the UK pressure group Waterwise…. showed that new, water-efficient dishwashers used as little as nine litres of water per wash, although the average was between 12 and 16 litres. By contrast, washing and rinsing dishes by hand used as much as 63 litres.
According to the study, just under 30 per cent of households in the UK use a dishwasher, compared to 5 per cent in 1977. But growth rates have slowed and the number of households with dishwashers in the UK compares poorly with other European countries.
I’ve had a dishwasher ever since I’ve been in London, and couldn’t possibly live without it. (Having unfortunately misplaced along the way a former boyfriend who used to be so disgusted by the piles of dirty dishes in my sink that when he arrived for the weekend the first thing he’d do was wash them up – his mother had trained him well.)
Staying on the practical science side, a fun bit of whimsy: 340,282,366,920,938,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 new web addresses have been created.
Of the internet addresses available, more than three quarters are already in use, and the remainder are expected to be assigned by 2009. So, what will happen as more people in developing countries come online? The answer is IPv6, a new internet protocol that has more spaces than the old one: 340,282,366,920,938,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 spaces, in fact. “Currently there’s four billion addresses available and there are six billion humans on Earth, so there’s obviously an issue there,†said David Kessens, chairman of the IPv6 working group at RIPE, one of five regional internet registries in charge of rolling it out.
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