Links for 2011-06-05

  • “Over the past few years, in conditions of strict secrecy, a multinational team of scientists has been making a mighty effort to change the light bulb. The prototype they’ve developed is four inches tall, with a familiar tapered shape, and unlighted, it resembles a neon yellow mushroom. Screw it in and switch it on, though, and it blazes with a voluptuous radiance. It represents what people within the lighting industry often call their holy grail, an invention that reproduces the soft luminance of the incandescent bulb — Thomas Edison’s century-old technology — but conforms to much higher standards of energy efficiency and durability. The prototype is supposed to last for more than 22 years, maybe as long as you own your house, so you won’t need to stock up at the supermarket. And that’s fortunate, because one day very soon, traditional incandescent bulbs won’t be available in stores anymore. They’re about to be effectively outlawed.”
  • “I initially dismissed Cowboy Bebop just because I idiotically objected to the show’s slickness. “Style over substance,” I huffed to myself at the time. I kept watching the show when it screened at my middle school’s Science Fiction Club (yeah, right, I’m so old, man). But I don’t really think that I got into it until I saw Cowboy Bebop: The Movie. It seems strange to me now, but at the time, it made sense.
    Now as I rewatch Cowboy Bebop one week at a time, I don’t remember how many of the show’s 26 episodes I’ve actually seen and how many just seem familiar. I certainly wouldn’t dream of dismissing it as a superficial show today though. Now, I see just how innovative the show is and the way that its style is largely a function of its characters. “Asteroid Blues” is a great reminder that the show’s greatest asset is its ability to look cool and be smart in ways that other anime only strive for.”
  • “We’ve got an employment crisis. We’ve got 13.9 million Americans who can’t find work and our economy only added a measly 54,000 jobs in May.

    It’s time to panic. It’s probably even time to PANIC!!!

    The following aren’t my best ideas for job creation. Those would be things like repairing our roads and bridges, upgrading our energy infrastructure, attending to our national deferred maintenance and front-loading our preparations for the future.

    But these seven ideas would also work. Probably. Maybe. They would put people to work.

    They may sound goofy, and they probably are goofy. But none of them is as goofy as the status quo. None of them is as goofy as the current situation in which 13.9 million Americans can’t find work and our political leaders are more concerned with deficits than with the unemployment inflating those deficits. In the midst of an employment crisis, politicians are arguing about budget cutting.

    That’s cruelly absurd. My ideas here are merely eccentric.”

2 thoughts on “Links for 2011-06-05

  1. I’m glad to hear about the new light bulb, hope it works out and is affordable. As for the unemployment crisis, I propose (in part) having a superdeductible for genuine US Labor costs (paid to US citizens inside our borders only.) That means multiply the “labor cost” by say 1.2X, but not other expenses (but cap at say 1M per an individual.) Then keep corp. rate the same instead of lowering like some think. That rewards companies for US labor by making it relatively less expensive compared to other ways of doing things.

    PS, would be nice to have “remember personal info” etc.

  2. There are a lot of big payoffs for an efficient light bulb. I’m down here in sunny Florida and pretty much every building is air conditioned. The waste product of incandescent bulbs, mostly heat, has to be removed from the building at considerable expense. It is a double whammy. You use bore electricity to create the light and have to pay even more to haul off the heat.

    We changed a largish coffee house out from MR-16 halogens to new reflectors and spiral florescent bulbs and the owners electric bill dropped about 20%. Payback is expected in about two years.

    The other payback is in reliability and lowered maintenance costs. We used to run a man through that shop every month or two to replace lamps, their connectors, sometimes fixture transformers, that had failed. Halogens run so hot they tend to cook the wiring near them. Even the high temperature wiring and connectors used in the fixtures. The coil fluorescents need no transformer and last longer on average than the MR-16s. We are scheduled to stop by once a quarter but I expect that may stretch to every six months.

    It isn’t all about direct savings from the lights using less electricity. That is good but it ignores indirect savings and efficiencies that can justify the extra cost of changing over to a new technology.

    So far changing from MR-16 or standard flood bulbs to a new reflector and spiral lamps is an easy sell in terms of return on investment.

    The LED bulbs are a different story. They are not a whole lot more efficient in terms of watts per lumen than the spiral fluorescent and the return on investment just isn’t there IMO. As the price drops that will, no doubt, change.

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