The Environment

[Haggis@wk]

local clubs in Dallas are organizing trips to Mexico to buy a supply of incandescent bulbs.

[BigJon]

Has anyone else noticed while driving at night those new LED taillights? Some of them are strobed, ie flashing but so fast they look continuous to our eyes. But just barely fast enough.
I notice when i move my eyes to scan traffic that the strobed LED taillamps produce a line of dots across my field of vision, and i find that disconcerting and annoying.

PWM=Pulse Width Modulation, or "string of pearls" as it is know to lamp designers. But I guess an old analog-head like yourself wouldn't know anything about it. Anyway, the designers would rather have all the bulbs taking pulses of power than have a few at full strength and turn on the rest when braking. Cadillac has the worst setup. Very large LEDs and very long power-off periods.

[Shapley]

Our city has begun replacing some street lights with High-intensity, energy-saving bulbs. They burn bluish instead of the orange-ish glow of the ones they are replacing, and I find them harder on the eyes, even though the light they cast seems to not be so bright. It may just take some getting used to...

I'll be curious to see if they improve visibility of the road striping in rainy weather. With the old lighting, the striping virtually disappears when the rain falls, although they've installed 'cat's heads' on some of the roads to make up for this. I've never noticed much difference in the visiblity of the striping between lighted and unlighted streets, so changing out the bulbs may make no difference, but it would be beneficial if it does.

[analog]

Shap your stepson might have hearing that goes beyond most peoples' range.

Do you remember when you were young and could hear the horizontal oscillator in TV sets? It's around 16khz...
I remember as a young kid maybe five years old when a TV set was an unusual thing, we neighborhood urchins would walk down the sidewalk around four-thirty.
We could tell which household had their TV on, you could hear the piercing whistle from the street...
If the house had a kid we'd ask to come in and watch "Adventure Time".


Those CCF lamps have a small inductor that very probably makes some noise at the tens-of-khz frequency where they operate.. it's within a couple octaves of normal hearing.

The CCF's shouldn't flicker at line frequency until their filter capacitor fails which would be real close to end of life.
As a kid i could see 60hz flicker in neon lamps in my peripheral vision. I was never around any 50hz so dont know if it would be more noticeable.. But 20 hz incandescent lamps in the men's room at Niagara Falls power station were visibly pulsing. 50-60 hz should both be beyond our eyes, but as b'jon said we see it as a 'string of pearls' during eye movement so it's not way out of range.

Newton is thought to have had vision into ultraviolet, as birds do. I wonder if those musical geniuses perhaps hear differently than us average bears.

B'jon - i am indeed an "analog head". Still figure my gas mileage with a slide rule because the hot car interior cooks batteries out of pocket calculators.
And you know my guiding principle has always been: "Never let a computer do anything important". [..I guess Iran just learned that on their centrifuges....] but i mistakenly let them install this damn pacemaker that's had two recalls and requires a monthly operability check by ekg.. i coulda built it analog...

a.

[analog]

anyone interested in a simple, well written hypothesis on climate stability?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/14/t ... ypothesis/

the guy runs a thought experiment - what if we looked at earth as the sun sees it and tried to figure out why its temperature stays so constant??
Then he proceeds to look at satellite photographs and do just that.

He concludes Mother Nature uses old fashioned steam to keep us comfy.

a.

[Shapley]

analog,

It's possible. His hearing is not considered to be very good, and he can only hear in one ear, but we don't know how much he can see or hear, since he can't tell us. We can only tell when he's physically agitated, and it is evident when he is near those lights. I read somewhere that they can trigger seizures, so this may be some symptom of that, although he does not appear to be having normal seizures because of them.

On Navy ships, the fluorescent lighting in engine spaces is alternated, with sets of lighting in the spaces, each powered by a different phase on the three-phase network, in order to prevent the 'strobe effect' from creating the illusion that moving equipment is stopped.

[dai bread]

My complaints with CFL's are as follows:
You're not supposed to use them in enclosed fixtures, which means I'll have to replace many light fixtures in my house when I
switch completely over to them (out of necessity, due to lack of availability of incandescents, not out of desire).

One of the reasons I like CFLs is that I can raise the light output from my fittings if I want to. I can put a 20w CFL into a fitting rated for 60w incandescent and get the equivalent of 100w of lighting. Enclosed fittings, too, though physical size can be a problem. I think you guys need to change the Chinese factory you buy from. I'm sorry I can't send you some CFLs. Ours run on 230v 50hz.

Your comments about your stepson are intriguing, Shap. Either flickering light or high-frequency sound would be distressing. Is there any way of finding out which it is?

[Shapley]

Your comments about your stepson are intriguing, Shap. Either flickering light or high-frequency sound would be distressing. Is there any way of finding out which it is?

I'm sure there is, but I don't know what it would be. We could experiment, but I don't want to put him in distress to find out. We simply do not use those lights when he is in that part of the room.

We used to have a strobe light, and he enjoyed it at lower frequencies, but it bothered him at faster rates. We bought it because he enjoyed the alternating lights when riding across bridges or through woods, and we were trying to simulate that. It didn't work as well as we thought, at least as far as we could gather from his reaction. He enjoyed it, but not as much. It could be lack of motion associated with it.

I thought about trying coloured filters with the strobe light, to subdue it somewhat. The light was quite bright, but we didn't shine it directly at him. Even so, the contrast was much more than he experienced in the vehicle while riding, so we probably needed to modify it somewhat to achieve the desired effect.

[Shapley]

Your comments about your stepson are intriguing, Shap. Either flickering light or high-frequency sound would be distressing. Is there any way of finding out which it is?

I'm sure there is, but I don't know what it would be. We could experiment, but I don't want to put him in distress to find out. We simply do not use those lights when he is in that part of the room.

We used to have a strobe light, and he enjoyed it at lower frequencies, but it bothered him at faster rates. We bought it because he enjoyed the alternating lights when riding across bridges or through woods, and we were trying to simulate that. It didn't work as well as we thought, at least as far as we could gather from his reaction. He enjoyed it, but not as much. It could be lack of motion associated with it.

I thought about trying coloured filters with the strobe light, to subdue it somewhat. The light was quite bright, but we didn't shine it directly at him. Even so, the contrast was much more than he experienced in the vehicle while riding, so we probably needed to modify it somewhat to achieve the desired effect.

[Haggis@wk]

low-energy nuclear reactions

I really want this to work out, but I’m not holding my breath just yet

[analog]

low-energy nuclear reactions

I really want this to work out, but I’m not holding my breath just yet

i believe scientists are near a breakthrough.

anything to do with neutrons and catalysts makes my ears perk up. There's something going on there, Germans noticed it before WW2....

Cold Fusion may just be a mis-diagnosis of neutron interaction, and nickel is right above palladium in the periodic table. Nickel is one of the three naturally magnetic nuclei...

http://www.neutronrepulsion.ge/Researches/29.pdf
http://www.neutronrepulsion.ge/Researches/25.pdf

a.

[Haggis@wk]

i believe scientists are near a breakthrough.

anything to do with neutrons and catalysts makes my ears perk up.

Well, I only post things like this to get your opinion on these kind of claims. I'm dumber than a fence post when it comes to these kind of things. I recall how coal became an important form of fuel when burning down our forests became a bad way to do things, similarly, steel ships were more "environmentally" friendly than using our last oak trees to build wooden ships. Oil technology came along at the time we figured we'd reached our technological peak with coal. I hope we are going to see a better way forward for our next big energy source.

[analog]

I hope we are going to see a better way forward for our next big energy source.

a breakthrough would sure be nice.
wind and solar are awfully expensive but lend themselves to places without infrastructure.
The uranium and thorium in the earth's crust is roughly equal to the fossil fuel, so nuclear could keep us going another century or two and by then somebody might just get basement fusion up. A lot of our fossil fuel is underneath things we don't really want to dig up, like the Rockies, Grand Canyon and Chicago so we should be more frugal with it..

Myself i think Tokomaks are just too unwieldy and the genius of Farnsworth's Fusor is that it eliminates the huge magnets.
But the centralization of research has headed it in another direction(as in Dai's Asimov story, which i want to find and read).

Look for more headlines like this one:

On August 1, 2010, an entire hemisphere of the sun erupted. Filaments of magnetism snapped and exploded, shock waves raced across the stellar surface, billion-ton clouds of hot gas billowed into space. Astronomers knew they had witnessed something big.

It was so big, it may have shattered old ideas about solar activity....

emphasis mine
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-glo ... n-sun.html

they're not even sure how the sun works. Or what a neutron is. Or why there's so much iron showing up in Hubble photos of faraway stars thought to be like our sun.

We could live long enough to see a step toward that breakthrough.
ever see "Starman?" Maybe whoever finds that space capsule we sent out with the Chuck Berry record in it will send back their kid's Erector Set with a fusion reactor...

a.

[Haggis@wk]

Narrative fail, cont’d: Himalayan glaciers are actually advancing rather than retreating, claims the first major study since a controversial UN report said they would be melted within quarter of a century.

[piqaboo]

New Zealand glaciers are retreating post-haste, however.

[Shapley]

New Zealand glaciers are retreating post-haste, however.

This 2009 article disagrees:

Contrarian New Zealand Glaciers Grwo In Age Of Global Warming

[dai bread]

http://www.foxguides.co.nz/facts.asp says Fox Glacier is advancing. Other sites, notably Wikipedia, say they're retreating overall and any advance is due to temporary weather conditions. They're probably right. Many of our glaciers are steep and fast-moving (for glaciers), which is why they get down to sea-level. Any variation in snow-fall in their collecting basins has a big effect at the terminus. It gets confusing.

[Haggis@wk]

Mad Meat Making Scientist Proves Climate Doomsayers Wrong.

“If he’s right, and if lab produced meat turns out to be practical and tasty, some big changes are coming — and I’m not just talking about heated debates over how the rules of kashrut and halal apply to artificial pork that has never touched or been touched by a pig or pig byproducts.”

[Giant Communist Robot]

artificial pork

Mmmmm.....artificial pork!

[Haggis@wk]

artificial pork

Mmmmm.....artificial pork!

"Facon"?