Banning Incandescent Light bulbs

On 24 Feb 2007 02:51:00 GMT, with neither quill nor qualm, snipped-for-privacy@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) quickly quoth:

Were I a Democrat, I'd say "I feel your pain.", but for Soft Greeners, that's a way of life. C'est la guerre. Read _Hard Green_. It's from a realistic environmentalist. The more you learn, the harder it is to be a soft green.

I wasn't going to get back into it, but doesn't that rule out reason? Why do you opine so heavily without a solid fact backing you up? I did read the cites you gave, but not in their entirety.

Wikipedia is public. Anyone with an opinion can vocalize it. It's as unpartisan and unbiased as talks between Reps and Dems in CONgress.

I wasn't talking about daily smoke. I was talking about major eruptions like Pinatubo and St. Helens. We didn't see chaos from the massive infusion of smoke and gases into the atmosphere. Earth didn't die. All we saw were burps in the climate. Keep researching. You'll find it.

You surprise me there. That's good.

In everything I've read (and believed), man is having only a VERY slight effect on the natural global warming as it cycles between ice and warm ages. As I said, read more and you'll see that many of the books you've read have been fed through mass hysteria and based on opinion of skewed data, not fact.

I'll send the bibliography to your email. I scanned double pages so there are 11 jpgs. Read a few of the books and let me know if you think the fiction writer (smart man, retired doctor, not easily fooled, and read all of these books for research) has his head up his ass. He got me started. Grab a copy of _Earth Report 2000_. Check the facts presented there and see if you still feel the way you do now.

In between repeating the fear mongering rants you've heard, you suggested CFLs. They're good and I use them myself. I've used entirely fluor lighting in the shop and hobby rooms, kitchen, and in indirect lighting in my home for 35 years. It's great.

"Smarten up and then do the next indicated thing." Fair enough? If you'd check your facts, you'd see what I'm talking about. You've been brainwashed by the fear mongers, Curt. Environmentalism is too close to religion and con games, which also prey upon the naive and unsuspecting public. Hell, even Rachel Carson wised up and recanted her story. A lot of the books I referred to were written by environmentalists who did enough research and got enough information to turn them around. They're now exposing the con games being played on us by showing us the facts and letting us decide which to believe.

Happy Reading! (I double-dare you!)

---------------------------------------------------------- --== EAT RIGHT...KEEP FIT...DIE ANYWAY ==--

ok ymmv believe me you dont want the effect. Stealth Pilot

There is no effect to not want. IF you use a strobelight at a specific frequency, sure, you can get the lathe to look like it's stationary. That whole noise & vibration thing would be a bit of a giveaway though. As has been pointed out to you in several ways, the frequency is so high that you can't get a lathe to GO that fast.

Your friend with an atypical power inverter from a solar source, probably was using a square wave generated from the DC battery bank. Mains power isn't _like_ that, it doesn't switch on & off 50 times a second, it's a sine wave. The phosphor decay time is longer

nevermind. Whatever. You saw it once so it must be true and universal.

It just boggles me when people, in the face of overwhelming reality to the contrary, will then speak as though they understand the situation, and will try to tell people who clearly understand it better than they do how things work.

Not really. Usenet is like that because there's only one author for each article. There's not even an editor to check them. Our articles reflect only our own views. They end up with a strong bias because of that. The wikipeda articles are edited by everyone - many times an hour for some of them. They are constantly changing. Imagine you and I trying to write one article on Global warming. I would keep changing your wording and you would keep changing my wording. We would not stop editing each others work until the article was so middle of the word and non-committal that both of us could live with it. That's what happens with wikipedia. The most popular articles end up expressing a fair balance of the known facts and tends to make only well accepted conclusions.

:)

Of course. That's a known fact. The issue isn't what we have done to the climet so far. The issue is what might happen in the next 50 years if we stay on this same corse.

Well, I wrote so much and erased it I can't remember what I actually posted. But one thing I said was that I have not read a single book on Global worming and it's highly unlikely I will ever read a single book on the subject. I don't care enough about it to waste that much of my time. I'll let the scientists, and the politicians figure out what's happening and what they think needs to be done.

I doubt he has his head up is ass. I didn't say that or even imply that. I only said that you are quoting a (smart) man who's motivation and livelihood is to sell books. I don't know what he's written about global warming, but when I did a search and found out the book you have been quoting is one of his works of fiction, I was a bit surprised that was what you choose to quote as a reference in an argument you claim is rational.

I don't have the time or interest to read the book to find out why you like it.

Ok, I'll spend a few seconds on google and see what _Earth Report 2000_. But don't expect me to read it. :)

You are aware that most the science on this has changed in the past few years aren't you? My limited understanding is that it's only been recently (5 to 10 year time frame I think?) that the scientific community came to the general agreement about global warming. The conscious is that it's both real, and that it's caused by greenhouse gasses which were generated by man. The idea that greenhouse gases could cause global warming I think might be on the order of 100 years old, but because the data is so hard to collect and verify, it's taken a long time to collect enough data to convenience the scientists that the warming was happening and that the greenhouse gasses were the cause and that man was the cause of the rise in greenhouse gasses. But as far as I know, this is all now an accepted fact by the the scientific community. That wasn't the case only 10 years ago.

I'll try to tone those down in the future.

Yeah, see, we can keep editing until we accept each others words. :)

Well, all you have said is don't listen to (or repeat) the fear mongering. That's good advice, but it doesn't tell us much about Global warming. You haven't said anything about CO2 or what it's doing which is the only thing that I care about.

Well, other than the fact that there is a lot of fear-mongering we need to watch out for (which is always good advice), what do you believe the facts of the science and the risks are? Do you really believe that man's actions are not having a global effect that we need to monitor and control? If so, is there some reason you are taking a stance that seems to be in conflict with the scientists that are the experts in the field?

... especially after they are elected.

-- Mark

Larry Jaques wrote:

It would be nice to find an unbiased scientific based book that actually presented the facts. But checking on Amazon, I find comments like these about your book:

***** The TRUE state of the planet!!, "Earth Report 2000" was written by ten scientists, each with excellent credentials, each writing on a different environmental topic ... *____ Misinformation and omitted data This book is full of propaganda and misinformation. The general concensus of the larger scientific community is all but ignored by the various authors on virtually every subject. The one example I will site is in the essay Fishing for Solutions:The State of the World's Fisheries. Although the book has a copyright of 2000, and the author sites some data as recently as 1998, he chooses to paint a rosy picture of the fishing harvest by limiting his data to data available up to 1996. He fails to mention that it was at this point that the fishing harvest hit its peak and that it has been in decline ever since. Being a biology teacher, I have spent considerable amounts of time researching the literature on various environmental problems including population growth, global warming, loss of diversity and the state of our fisheries. In every case, the authors of this book are at odds with what I have found to be the general concensus of the larger scientific community. ****_ Good Science and Good News for Us All The True State of the Planet, according to this book, is good. In fact, it is much better then we have been lead to believe. Sometimes, perhaps, we focus so much on the negative, that we forget how many positive things are occurring. This book reminds of the this truth. *____ Typical contrarian rhetoric, I have been researching the motives of the good news industry for some time. As a population ecologist, my area of research concerns our understanding of the relationship between species richness and ecosystem function, as mediated through diffuse and strong multi-trophic interactions and feedbacks. What's scary is that, at present, we really have very little idea how large scale processes, such as nutrient and energy transfer in food webs, stabilization of the atmosphere and other life-sustaining ecosystem services at broad scales are generated at much smaller scales, where selection works at the level of individuals organisms. We do know that global ecological systems generate processes which serve as our life-support systems, and that their simplification impairs the ability of the biosphere to generate these life-sustaining processes for humanity. That's the state of the field right now. Many of my eminent colleagues across the world are working hard to understand how our continued assault on the natural world might affect the services upon which we depend for our own survival. In the background, are those, with virtually no scientific credibility, and who represent very vested interests (their paymasters in the corporate world) who dish out the news that everything in Eden is fine, without a shred of scientific credibility to support this. ...

I am particularly dismayed by the non-scientific propoganda which spews forth from a long line of libertarian think tanks - The CATO Institute, the Hudson Institute, The Competitive Enterprise Institute, The Reason Foundation, are just a few - which contain very little credible science but considerable misinformation. Consider the so-called blurb at the beginning of the piece, which says that the list of writers are scientific "experts". Ronald Bailey's scientific credibility is about as thin as it can get: he has covered science as a writer for Forbes magazine and as a producer for PBS. That's it. And the ecological "authority" obtained a diploma in field ecology from the University of Zimbabwe. Unbelievable: considering the wealth of expertise available, they can only recruit someone with these credentials? I think that this is indicitive of the backlash and of their motives. I checked to see how many peer-reviewed papers this ecologist has published in relevant journals, and I couldn't find any. His chapter is a mish-mash of misinformation, misinterpretation of facts, and a basic misunderstanding of many important areas in conservation biology.

There is an unspoken belief pervading these right-wing organizations that all government is harmful and that corporations are a boundless good, which underpins the motives of Bailey and his ilk in writing this patent nonsense. I would gladly debate any of these individuals on these issues, to expose the degree of their scientific illiteracy, which stands out in the pages of books like this. It seems to me that these publications are meant to dupe the nonexpert into believing the corporate line. However, these publications do serve a dual purpose: they have inspired me and my colleagues in environmental science to enter the public forum and to expose Bailey and his backers for what they really are.

What I read in all these comments is that this book is far from an unbiased representation of the scientific facts. The most damming remarks about the book come from the scientists who say that the book in fact is not scientific at all. Not a single one of the reviewers giving the book a high rating claimed to be a working scientist. Every one that was a scientist, or anything like a scientist (biology teacher) gave the book a strong thumbs down for hiding the truth from the reader.

We don't need books like that any more than we need publications of the left wing greenes.

The simple truth is that the science is boring, complex, and non conclusive. We known enough to know that man is changing the global environment, but we don't know how dangerous these changes are. We simply don't know enough to know what we should do. The debate about how we should react to the information we do have, is all political. This book you suggested I read is nothing more than right wing propaganda in this political debate. It's not the unbiased science it pretends to be. It will appeal to the people who wanted to believe what it is dishing out before they read it, and will be rejected by people that want to believe the opposing view.

I have a fluorescent over the HLV-H. Ive tried repeatedly to get the strobe effect, all unsuccessfully. AND its infinitely variable speed. Ive tried it with a single tube as well as with both tubes.

Could never find any sweet spot.

Gunner

Political Correctness

A doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical liberal minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

Funny how independently-verifiable data can defy popular opinion some days -- just as you've noted re some of the global warming gloom & doom rhetoric extant.

If one actually wants a strobe effect, ya gotta work at it a little. To get sharp, well-limned strobe effect you need pulses of light of very short duration -- duration of only a few degrees of rotation. Even at 600 RPM (10 rps), the several-millisecond duration of a fluorescent's on time per half cycle would result in 15 to 20 degrees of smear. More smear is evident at higher synchronous rotational speeds. Persistence in the phosphor, if present, would result in even more smear.

Most timing lights use xenon flashtubes with flash durations of a millisecond or so at most and often considerably less. With 60-Hz sinusoidal excitation, neons and fluorescents are "on" for several milliseconds minimum, 120 on-periods per second. The longer duration of light results in significant "smearing" of the image. There may be some perceptable stroboscopic effect resulting from the relatively short dark periods, but it doesn't look at all like "frozen motion" because of the blur: the rotating part moves quite a few degrees during the "on" time.

Neon strobes were used on record turntables to check speed. They worked OK in that the pattern on the platter seemed to at least be a stationary or slow-moving blur, but there was no mistaking it for a stationary platter.

Recall Tom Gardner's need to time a moving part? I photographed a NE-2 (small neon bulb) powered by 60 Hz and swung smartly. What I got was an orange dashed line -- definitely not a trajectory of sharp dots or images of the neon bulb.

Then I made a little strobe for another guy, using a Luxeon LED. It worked quite well if, and only when, I drove it with short pulses rather than a square wave. The average brightness was lower because of the lower duty cycle, but the strobe effect was much more pronounced.

That's because the light just can't get though the smoke from the cutting oil ;-)

regards Mark Rand RTFM

That's for sure. Something about being in congress tends to make them lose their memory as well.

Or have an internet access. :-) ...lew...

But I LIKE that smoke!

Gunner

Political Correctness

A doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical liberal minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

Well it looks like a interesting timed response from GE:

GE Lighting HQ is at NELA Park in Cleveland. Problem is that anyone with any expertise is long gone and the US plants are being run into the ground. Maybe this $200MM investment is being done in China but there is certainly no investment in US plants. Not even to fix holes in the roof or buy replacement parts for worn out machines.

Interesting.

It reads a lot like a smoke screen meant to prevent countries from baning what is probably a huge product line for them. It sounds like they don't have a clue how they are going to produce incandescent bulbs with that level of efficiency at that cost point and that they just picked the 2010 date out of the air as a date far enough way that they will have some time to come up with a miracle but yet close enough to delay any attempt to ban the incandescent for a few more years. Nothing in the article gave a clue about what technology these new miracle bulbs will use.

But, that didn't stop them from giving them a trademarked name (HEI). Hey, if they have a name they must be real!

No one should ban incandescent bulbs anyway. If they make any laws, they should base it on energy efficiency and do something like what has been done with emissions with cars where the average emissions of all products sold by the company must meet some level defined by the law. So they should just set efficiency standards for the entire product lines. If the average efficiency of all the products actually sold meets the mandatory rate set by the law then everything is fine. That wouldn't cause low efficiency bulbs to be banned but it would instead just reduce the numbers that could be sold. And if they could improve the efficiency of the incandescent by 10% it would allow them to sell 10% more of them. The law should start out with a high number which slowly drops every year giving the manufactures something like 10 years to find ways to improve the efficiency of their product line each year. The best way might simply be to spend more money marketing CFLs to increase the percentage of customers buying CFLs.

It sounds like you have a grudge against GE or something.

Did you do any research at all before damning GE on this, or just assume based on a news article that there isn't a product? How often do news articles go into technical details in an accurate way, in your experience?

Right, you're accusing GE of pretending they have something they don't. Now back up your claim. If you can. I suspect you can't.

It wasn't a "news article" really. It was a GE press release written by a GE PR person.

Don't be silly. I made no implication that I have knowledge of what GE is doing. There is nothing that needs to be backed up. It was quite clear that I was only writing my interpretation of their press release. What I wrote is exactly what I saw in their words.

If you read it differently, feel free to share with us your interpretation of the message. If you actually know something about what they are working on, that would be very interesting to hear about.

Editorial expressing simliar views:

Substitute "news article" for "marketing press release" then. Question remains.

Oh, that's funny, because above you said "It reads a lot like a smoke screen meant to prevent countries from baning what is probably a huge product line for them. It sounds like they don't have a clue" ...

It sounds like you are making an implication there, sparky.

Riiiiight. And when is the last time GE announced a product they wern't ready to back up with reality? Show your work. This isn't aircar.com or scamorama.com we're talking about here.

If I worked in lighting my agreements would be such that I would not be allowed to share details with some random ranter on Usenet, sorry.

The only one's I've had trouble with were installed upside down in a lamp hanging on a chain from the ceiling. In the 15 years I've been using them, I've only replace two others.

It can also cause stress corrosion/stress cracking in Stainless Steel.