Earth Notes: About Earth Notes aka EOU

This site is about practical steps that I have taken to make my own life (and that of my family) a little better and lower-carbon.

Cutting carbon at home to slow climate change, using high and low tech. Living a normal life — no hair shirt required!

EOU aka Earth.org.uk aka "Earth Notes" celebrated its 10th birthday in 2017.

Early in 2007 I had a small brainwave and decided to create a simple single-page microsite about composting vs domestic solar power. It was an issue that was exercising me at the time, and the remnants are now in their own page.

Now, something like 10 years after that 1-pager idea, Earth Notes [was] well over 100 pages

Almost all "Earth Notes" content is written by Damon Hart-Davis. There are a few contributions from guests.

Photos and images are largely from Damon. Some are from the Gallery. In all other cases appropriate permissions are held or available. (The images are in the public domain in some cases.)

For images from others, look for:

• Upper-case initials at the very end of the image name before the extension, eg some-image-DHD.jpg would be an image by 'DHD', ie Damon in this case.
• A text file alongside the image file at URL X as X.txt. An 'information' link 'i' may be automatically inserted in the page in some cases.
• Description of the origin or thanks in the body text and/or image alt text.

All texts such as articles created for EOU and not otherwise explicitly licensed or restricted are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0) licence. You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

For declared datasets follow the stated licence where provided. The intention is for most data to be used freely, with attribution requested where possible. Most EOU datasets are licensed under CC0, ie it is effectively public domain; if you make use of this data, attribution is welcome but not obligatory If a licence is not stated then please contact Damon before using.

For photos (and audio, video, and other media), if they are embedded from the DHD Multimedia Gallery, follow the Gallery's terms and conditions.

For photos (etc) that end with author initials in the same style as the Gallery, for DHD you may use per the Gallery rules, else contact Damon before using.

For photos (etc) with a descriptive .txt file, if that indicates source and/or ownership rules, follow those, else contact Damon before using.

In any case please do not use any of our media or data to abuse us or friends, nor to mislead or harm others.

Damon has a BSc(Hons) and an MSc (both in computing), his name on a molecular genetics paper [march1989cloning] oddly enough, and a patent or three. Damon has spent decades in startups and investment/retail finance optimising things from trading algorithms to energy use, while being inventor and C-suite. Damon is now researching for a PhD [hart-davis2024zone].

See Damon's home page for a bit more on him, education, CV, etc.

Here's how Damon got into optimising energy after being a UK Internet pioneer. Then working in defence, oil and banking.

A few years ago I suddenly saw my energy bills as another performance metric that I could tweak just like optimising Lehman Brothers' derivatives calculations that I was nominally paid squillions to do.

In fact, this whole area is full of numbers and graphs and science and gadgets and interesting techie puzzles, never mind the grand+ per year that I'm saving on my energy bills or indeed that "hippy commie yoghurt-knitting greenie" conspiracy about cutting carbon footprint to help avert global warming.

From aerogel and LEDs to iButtons and thermal imaging, you should see some of the fun I've been having!

Earth Notes aims to be clear, honest, accurate and transparent.

At the start and/or end of most articles you will find a section with sources and links relevant to the article.

Earth Notes is all about reducing climate change. Even unpalatable ideas may need to be considered, to that end. Views may change over time as evidence accumulates. Articles will be updated as appropriate to reflect those changes. Earth Notes will continue to report these "inconvenient truths", annoying nuances and real uncertainties as necessary.

Many datasets are published on the site. These are often data gathered by Damon Hart-Davis. Sometimes the data may be from third parties.

Earth Notes uses metadata such as schema.org to help maximise machine-readability of material on the site, including datasets. Metadata also enhances interactions with social media and search engines.