Using a blackberry and checking email doesn't make you a nerd.
Nice pick and choose there. To sum up:
* One of the first things Barack Obama did when he became president-elect was to post his own Web site
* At the Al Smith dinner, Obama made a relatively obscure joke about Superman, cracking that his real father's name was Jor-El.
* Not only did Obama pose for a photo in front of a statue of Superman in Metropolis, Illinois, he went even geekier and posted the photo at his Senate Web site (since deactivated).
* Appointed nerds to key cabinet posts, including the appointment of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist to be secretary of energy.
* Obama was supported by nerd icon Leonard Nimoy during his campaign, getting donation money (in Quatloos, no doubt) from Mr. Spock himself. According to some reports, he's been known to flash the Vulcan salute.
* At a campaign rally, Obama joked that John McCain was Kato to George W. Bush's Green Lantern.
* According to Newsweek, after a campaign event Obama and his wife Michelle were making jokes about one another's wardrobe. Barack leaned close to Michelle's belt and tapped it, saying, "It's the (di)lithium crystals! Beam me up, Scotty!"
* According to the London Telegraph, he's also read every single Harry Potter book
* Obama is a gadget guy, making use of devices like the Blackberry, the iPod, and (by some reports) the Zune. His tech addiction is causing a minor dust-up, as his security personnel are trying to convince him to part with his beloved PDA.
* Not only has the president-elect admitted to collecting Spider-Man comics, he's actually going to play a role in an upcoming comic book starring the noted webslinger.
* There's a secondhand report that Obama, when an intern quipped "All your base are belong to us", he leaned over, cocked an eyebrow, and responded, "What you say?"
That would be an interesting concept, though -- "email tunnel" -- where you set up a local proxy and it communicates with your backend via email. Http tunnel software could be a good starting point for implementation.
Is anybody else here thinking of Jonathan Coulton's Re: Your Brains?
Heya, Tom' its Bob from the office down the hall Good to see you, buddy; howve you been? Thing have been OK for me except that Im a zombie now I really wish youd let us in I think I speak for all of us when I say I understand Why you folks might hesitate to submit to our demand But heres an FYI: youre all gonna die, screaming
(chorus) (zombies) "All we want to do is eat your brains!"
Were not unreasonable; I mean, no ones gonna eat your eyes
All we want to do is eat your brains
Were at an impasse here; maybe we should compromise:
If you open up the doors
Well all come inside and eat your brains!
I dont want to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan? To spend your whole life locked inside a mall? Maybe thats OK for now but someday youll be out of food and guns And then youll have to make the call Im not surprised to see you havent thought it through enough You never had the head for all that bigger picture stuff But, Tom, thats what I do, and I plan on eating you, slowly
(chorus) (zombies) "All we want to do is eat your brains!"
Were not unreasonable; I mean, no ones gonna eat your eyes
All we want to do is eat your brains
Were at an impasse here; maybe we should compromise:
If you open up the doors
Well all come inside and eat your brains!
Id like to help you, Tom, in any way I can
I sure appreciate the way youre working with me
Im not a monster, Tom...well, technically, I am
I guess I am
Ive got another meeting, Tom; maybe we could wrap it up I know well get to common ground somehow Meanwhile Ill report back to my colleagues who were chewing on the doors I guess well table this for now Im glad to see you take constructive criticism well Thank you for your time; I know were all busy as hell And well put this thing to bed When I bash your head open
(chorus) (zombies)"All we want to do is eat your brains!"
Were not unreasonable; I mean, no ones gonna eat your eyes
All we want to do is eat your brains
Were at an impasse here; maybe we should compromise:
If you open up the doors
Well all come inside and eat your brains!
My stats were from 1991 to 2003. Interestingly enough, it looks like it's slowed since then. Probably people recognizing that it's a dumb idea to go hiking through cougar territory by yourself.
Amen to that. Some day I hope to retire to the Rockies, some place with enough "rugged" around me that there's no area to build big cities so light domes will never encroach too much. My dream bedroom has a big glass dome right over the bed.
Lights also keep dangerous animals like cougars away.
Cougars kill an average of 0.8 people per year in the US, and most attacks are during the daytime. You blind me every time with your d*@! hurricane light, ruining an entire campground (where do you want us to go -- a different campground because you've decided to be a jerk?). Shut it the f*@# off. If you want to deal with wild animals, carry around bear spray, don't travel alone in dangerous areas, and in general practice common sense.
No kidding. When I'm driving around eastern Iowa at night (which you'd think wouldn't be very light polluted... but you'd be sadly mistaken), it's easy to find out where I am: I just look for the light domes on the horizon adding their orange glow to the sky. The bigger the light dome, the bigger the city. "Oh, there's Cedar Rapids, and there's Iowa City....". Even small towns are pretty visible.
It's all about instinct. Humans evolved on the African savannah where our main predators were big cats which had much better night vision than us. We fear the dark. Our first game-changing invention as a species, fire, scared our predators and helped deepen the light = safety, dark = danger concept in our psyche.
Criminals aren't big cats. They have the same eyes that we do.
What "statistics and facts"? Check out the Chicago Alley Lighting Project and its disastrous results from increasing the lighting in a high crime neighborhood (results: crime went *up* significantly compared to the control). And your claim about modern lighting and shadows is easily disproven by me stepping outside every single night where I live, both in my neighborhood, where I work, and everywhere in between.
First off, let's not pretend that light pollution is harmless to human health. The circadian system is at least in part regulated by the amount and type of light that our eyes receive. As for safety, there are several types. As far as traffic goes, street lights are generally positively correlated with safety at intersections, but lighting of roadways between intersections shows mixed results in the studies I've seen.
Back to the main point of your post, though: crime. Ever heard of the Chicago Alley Lighting Project? In 1998, Chicago attempted to test this very theory: that increasing lighting of dark places would reduce crimes like rape and muggings. They took two eight-square-block areas, one for study and one as a control, and tripled the lighting in the study area. Guess what happened? Crime went *UP* in the test area, in all categories -- 77% for property crime, 32% for violent crime, etc -- an overall increase of 40%. The daytime crime rate in the study area dropped 23%. In the control area, nighttime crime only went up 19%, while daytime went down 21%.
Overlighting an area makes the shadows appear darker and makes it easier for criminals to see what they're doing. Extra lighting makes people *feel* safer, but it usually doesn't make them any safer. For public safety, the goal should be not to make as much illumination as possible, but to even out illumination -- not too bright in the bright places, not to dim in the dark places.
Red lights are used by people with telescopes. This page has a good bit of detail on the biology behind night vision and different colors. The basic summary? If you want fast dark adaptation, use blue-green. If you want to see detail and can afford to lose peripheral vision, use very low level deep red. For general walking-around light. blue-green with enough red to get rid of the night blind spot (or dim white). If you need to see color, dim white.
getting out into the middle of nowhere makes. On a clear night out in Yellowstone, for example, there are so many stars in the sky it can be hard to find constellations you're used to seeing in the city. Really beautiful.
People need to get past the idea that you have to try to illuminate every shadow. All you're doing is ruining people's night vision, and thus making the remaining shadows "darker".
In "The Zen of Graphics Programming", Michael Abrash (a co-author of Quake and inventor of Mode X) wrote:
------------- Our world is changing, and I'm concerned. By way of explanation, three anecdotes.
Anecdote the first: In one of his books, Frank Herbert, author of Dune, told me how he had once been approached by a friend who claimed he (the friend) had a killer idea for a SF story, and offered to tell it to Herbert. In return, Herbert had to agree that if he used the idea in a story, he'd split the money from the story with this fellow. Herbert's response was that ideas were a dime a dozen; he had more story ideas than he could ever write in a lifetime. The hard part was the writing, not the ideas.
Anecdote the second: I've been programming micros for 15 years, and been writing about them for more than a decade and, until about a year ago, I had never-not once!- had anyone offer to sell me a technical idea. In the last year, it's happened multiple times, generally via unsolicited email along the lines of Herbert's tale.
This trend toward selling ideas is one symptom of an attitude that I've noticed more and more among programmers over the past few years-an attitude of which software patents are the most obvious manifestation-a desire to think something up without breaking a sweat, then let someone else?s hard work make you money. Its an attitude that says, "I'm so smart that my ideas alone set me apart." Sorry, it doesn't work that way in the real world. Ideas are a dime a dozen in programming, too; I have a lifetime's worth of article and software ideas written neatly in a notebook, and I know several truly original thinkers who have far more yet. Folks, it's not the ideas; it's design, implementation, and especially hard work that make the difference.
Virtually every idea I've encountered in 3-D graphics was invented decades ago. You think you have a clever graphics idea? Sutherland, Sproull, Schumacker, Catmull, Smith, Blinn, Glassner, Kajiya, Heckbert, or Teller probably thought of your idea years ago. (I'm serious-spend a few weeks reading through the literature on 3-D graphics, and you'll be amazed at what's already been invented and published.) If they thought it was important enough, they wrote a paper about it, or tried to commercialize it, but what they didn't do was try to charge people for the idea itself.
A closely related point is the astonishing lack of gratitude some programmers show for the hard work and sense of community that went into building the knowledge base with which they work. How about this? Anyone who thinks they have a unique idea that they want to "own" and milk for money can do so-but first they have to track down and appropriately compensate all the people who made possible the compilers, algorithms, programming courses, books, hardware, and so forth that put them in a position to have their brainstorm.
Put that way, it sounds like a silly idea, but the idea behind software patents is precisely that eventually everyone will own parts of our communal knowledge base, and that programming will become in large part a process of properly identifylng and compensating each and every owner of the techniques you use. All I can say is that if we do go down that path, I guarantee that it will be a poorer profession for all of us - except the patent attorneys, I guess.
Anecdote the third: A while back, I had the good fortune to have lunch down by Seattle's waterfront with Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (one of the best SF books I've come across in a long time). As he talked about the nature of networked technology and what he hoped to see emerge, he mentioned that a couple of blocks down the street was the pawn shop where Jimi Hendrix bought his first guitar. His point was that if a cheap guitar hadn't been available, Hendrix's unique talent would never have emerged. Similarly, he views the networking of society as a way to get affordable creative tools to many people, so as much talent as possible can be unearthe
Yep. Major rhyolitic, non-huge-caldera-forming eruptions have a far more statistically significant record than anything you could call "supervolcanic", and are only once every ten thousand years or so on average. Far more common. And most earthquake swarms at Yellowstone have nothing to with upcoming volcanic eruptions.
How about a paper from a NASA department head? No, it wasn't rocket fuel. No, rocket fuel doesn't burn like that anyways. No, it was not a significant contributor to the burn. Just use a basic logic check here: surface area increases proportional to radius squared. Volume increases proportional to volume cubed. Increase to the size of the Hindenburg and the mass of the skin becomes essentially irrelevant in comparison to the mass of the hydrogen in no time flat.
Even the Mythbusters busted this one. To even be able to get a burn at all, rather than just a hydrogen explosion, they had to inject the hydrogen slowly. When they tried having all the hydrogen in at once, it simply exploded. Hydrogen burns in mixtures with air from under 10% to over 75%. Yes, the skin can burn and spark. No, it doesn't burn unusually quickly. Even in a small scale model (i.e., way lower hydrogen/skin ratio) with hydrogen injected slowly, the hydrogen burn still dominated.
Exactly. Our water is polluted from using *coal to generate electricity*. CFLs save electricity. Just considering mercury alone (there are tons of other pollutants from coal), you'd cause less mercury emission by taking the bulb, using it, then vaporizing its contents directly into the jet stream than by using incandescents. A modern CFL only uses a couple milligrams of mercury, while a coal plant will release around a dozen milligrams over the lifespan of a CFL used to produce the extra power to light an incandescent instead.
And not like all of the mercury in a CFL escapes into the environment, anyways. Even incinerated trash, most doesn't. In recycling or burial, it's just a couple percent, and in hazardous waste handling, a small fraction of one percent.
It's even more ridiculous than that. They're talking about burning *diesel* to save $10 (actually a lot more) in *electricity*, which is mainly produced from *coal*, which is far cheaper than diesel per unit energy.
That article repeats a bunch of CFL myths. I find it amazing to watch some in the geek crowd glob onto any "science" related conspiracy ("global warming is fake", "the Hindenburg didn't burn from hydrogen", etc) the same way tin-foil hat people glob onto the "moon hoax" or "there was no plane crash at the Pentagon on 9/11".
We even were treated to one in the header of this article:
"CFLs made in China that are shipped to the US using a lot more fossil fuels than they save."
Oh, really, is that so? Shipping cargo takes about one gallon of gas per ton of cargo per 500 miles. Shanghai is ~6500 miles from LA. Thus, 154 pounds can cross the Pacific per gallon of diesel. A gallon of diesel contains 130MJ. A CFL weighs perhaps a quarter pound. Therefore, it takes 211kJ of fuel energy per bulb. If we assume the big diesel engine is roughly as efficient as a power plant's electricity generation, we can compare them directly. 211 kilojoules is 0.05 kilowatt hours. If usage that bulb reduces 60 watts down to 15, thus saving 45 watts, it'd take barely over an hour to pay off the energy used in shipping it.
Of course, you also need to include train shipping energy consumption to get it to and from the ports, which is more like one gallon per ton per 300 miles, but that too is trivial to pay off.
Slashdot Mirror
Using a blackberry and checking email doesn't make you a nerd.
Nice pick and choose there. To sum up:
* One of the first things Barack Obama did when he became president-elect was to post his own Web site
* At the Al Smith dinner, Obama made a relatively obscure joke about Superman, cracking that his real father's name was Jor-El.
* Not only did Obama pose for a photo in front of a statue of Superman in Metropolis, Illinois, he went even geekier and posted the photo at his Senate Web site (since deactivated).
* Appointed nerds to key cabinet posts, including the appointment of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist to be secretary of energy.
* Obama was supported by nerd icon Leonard Nimoy during his campaign, getting donation money (in Quatloos, no doubt) from Mr. Spock himself. According to some reports, he's been known to flash the Vulcan salute.
* At a campaign rally, Obama joked that John McCain was Kato to George W. Bush's Green Lantern.
* According to Newsweek, after a campaign event Obama and his wife Michelle were making jokes about one another's wardrobe. Barack leaned close to Michelle's belt and tapped it, saying, "It's the (di)lithium crystals! Beam me up, Scotty!"
* According to the London Telegraph, he's also read every single Harry Potter book
* Obama is a gadget guy, making use of devices like the Blackberry, the iPod, and (by some reports) the Zune. His tech addiction is causing a minor dust-up, as his security personnel are trying to convince him to part with his beloved PDA.
* Not only has the president-elect admitted to collecting Spider-Man comics, he's actually going to play a role in an upcoming comic book starring the noted webslinger.
* There's a secondhand report that Obama, when an intern quipped "All your base are belong to us", he leaned over, cocked an eyebrow, and responded, "What you say?"
Does his appointment know who our base are belong to?
I love having a presidential nerd. ;)
You left out a space, and no, I don't.
For those who aren't familiar with how to encode to base64:
# cat /bin/echo | openssl enc -base64 > encoded_echo ./decoded_echo Test
# tail -n 1 encoded_echo
AAAAAJhHAAAZAQAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAAAAAAAA==
# cat encoded_echo | openssl enc -base64 -d > decoded_echo
# chmod +x decoded_echo
#
Test
That would be an interesting concept, though -- "email tunnel" -- where you set up a local proxy and it communicates with your backend via email. Http tunnel software could be a good starting point for implementation.
When was Wake published? Because that's basically the plot of Serial Experiments Lain.
Meh, there's nothing new under the sun.
In honor of him, we should flood news sites with releases for this subject that redirect readers to a blog.
Slashdot summary summary:
"Scientists discover something and have theories for it, but they're wrong and a pseudoscience is true."
Is anybody else here thinking of Jonathan Coulton's Re: Your Brains?
Heya, Tom' its Bob from the office down the hall
Good to see you, buddy; howve you been?
Thing have been OK for me except that Im a zombie now
I really wish youd let us in
I think I speak for all of us when I say I understand
Why you folks might hesitate to submit to our demand
But heres an FYI: youre all gonna die, screaming
(chorus)
(zombies) "All we want to do is eat your brains!"
Were not unreasonable; I mean, no ones gonna eat your eyes
All we want to do is eat your brains
Were at an impasse here; maybe we should compromise:
If you open up the doors
Well all come inside and eat your brains!
I dont want to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?
To spend your whole life locked inside a mall?
Maybe thats OK for now but someday youll be out of food and guns
And then youll have to make the call
Im not surprised to see you havent thought it through enough
You never had the head for all that bigger picture stuff
But, Tom, thats what I do, and I plan on eating you, slowly
(chorus)
(zombies) "All we want to do is eat your brains!"
Were not unreasonable; I mean, no ones gonna eat your eyes
All we want to do is eat your brains
Were at an impasse here; maybe we should compromise:
If you open up the doors
Well all come inside and eat your brains!
Id like to help you, Tom, in any way I can
I sure appreciate the way youre working with me
Im not a monster, Tom...well, technically, I am
I guess I am
Ive got another meeting, Tom; maybe we could wrap it up
I know well get to common ground somehow
Meanwhile Ill report back to my colleagues who were chewing on the doors
I guess well table this for now
Im glad to see you take constructive criticism well
Thank you for your time; I know were all busy as hell
And well put this thing to bed
When I bash your head open
(chorus)
(zombies)"All we want to do is eat your brains!"
Were not unreasonable; I mean, no ones gonna eat your eyes
All we want to do is eat your brains
Were at an impasse here; maybe we should compromise:
If you open up the doors
Well all come inside and eat your brains!
My stats were from 1991 to 2003. Interestingly enough, it looks like it's slowed since then. Probably people recognizing that it's a dumb idea to go hiking through cougar territory by yourself.
Amen to that. Some day I hope to retire to the Rockies, some place with enough "rugged" around me that there's no area to build big cities so light domes will never encroach too much. My dream bedroom has a big glass dome right over the bed.
Lights also keep dangerous animals like cougars away.
Cougars kill an average of 0.8 people per year in the US, and most attacks are during the daytime. You blind me every time with your d*@! hurricane light, ruining an entire campground (where do you want us to go -- a different campground because you've decided to be a jerk?). Shut it the f*@# off. If you want to deal with wild animals, carry around bear spray, don't travel alone in dangerous areas, and in general practice common sense.
[quote]Near a city, thats easy to do ;)[/quote]
No kidding. When I'm driving around eastern Iowa at night (which you'd think wouldn't be very light polluted... but you'd be sadly mistaken), it's easy to find out where I am: I just look for the light domes on the horizon adding their orange glow to the sky. The bigger the light dome, the bigger the city. "Oh, there's Cedar Rapids, and there's Iowa City....". Even small towns are pretty visible.
It's all about instinct. Humans evolved on the African savannah where our main predators were big cats which had much better night vision than us. We fear the dark. Our first game-changing invention as a species, fire, scared our predators and helped deepen the light = safety, dark = danger concept in our psyche.
Criminals aren't big cats. They have the same eyes that we do.
What "statistics and facts"? Check out the Chicago Alley Lighting Project and its disastrous results from increasing the lighting in a high crime neighborhood (results: crime went *up* significantly compared to the control). And your claim about modern lighting and shadows is easily disproven by me stepping outside every single night where I live, both in my neighborhood, where I work, and everywhere in between.
I'm sure that before they made those claims, they consulted all the sages they could find in yellow pages.
First off, let's not pretend that light pollution is harmless to human health. The circadian system is at least in part regulated by the amount and type of light that our eyes receive. As for safety, there are several types. As far as traffic goes, street lights are generally positively correlated with safety at intersections, but lighting of roadways between intersections shows mixed results in the studies I've seen.
Back to the main point of your post, though: crime. Ever heard of the Chicago Alley Lighting Project? In 1998, Chicago attempted to test this very theory: that increasing lighting of dark places would reduce crimes like rape and muggings. They took two eight-square-block areas, one for study and one as a control, and tripled the lighting in the study area. Guess what happened? Crime went *UP* in the test area, in all categories -- 77% for property crime, 32% for violent crime, etc -- an overall increase of 40%. The daytime crime rate in the study area dropped 23%. In the control area, nighttime crime only went up 19%, while daytime went down 21%.
Overlighting an area makes the shadows appear darker and makes it easier for criminals to see what they're doing. Extra lighting makes people *feel* safer, but it usually doesn't make them any safer. For public safety, the goal should be not to make as much illumination as possible, but to even out illumination -- not too bright in the bright places, not to dim in the dark places.
Red lights are used by people with telescopes. This page has a good bit of detail on the biology behind night vision and different colors. The basic summary? If you want fast dark adaptation, use blue-green. If you want to see detail and can afford to lose peripheral vision, use very low level deep red. For general walking-around light. blue-green with enough red to get rid of the night blind spot (or dim white). If you need to see color, dim white.
getting out into the middle of nowhere makes. On a clear night out in Yellowstone, for example, there are so many stars in the sky it can be hard to find constellations you're used to seeing in the city. Really beautiful.
People need to get past the idea that you have to try to illuminate every shadow. All you're doing is ruining people's night vision, and thus making the remaining shadows "darker".
In "The Zen of Graphics Programming", Michael Abrash (a co-author of Quake and inventor of Mode X) wrote:
-------------
Our world is changing, and I'm concerned. By way of explanation, three anecdotes.
Anecdote the first: In one of his books, Frank Herbert, author of Dune, told me how he had once been approached by a friend who claimed he (the friend) had a killer idea for a SF story, and offered to tell it to Herbert. In return, Herbert had to agree that if he used the idea in a story, he'd split the money from the story with this fellow. Herbert's response was that ideas were a dime a dozen; he had more story ideas than he could ever write in a lifetime. The hard part was the writing, not the ideas.
Anecdote the second: I've been programming micros for 15 years, and been writing about them for more than a decade and, until about a year ago, I had never-not once!- had anyone offer to sell me a technical idea. In the last year, it's happened multiple times, generally via unsolicited email along the lines of Herbert's tale.
This trend toward selling ideas is one symptom of an attitude that I've noticed more and more among programmers over the past few years-an attitude of which software patents are the most obvious manifestation-a desire to think something up without breaking a sweat, then let someone else?s hard work make you money. Its an attitude that says, "I'm so smart that my ideas alone set me apart." Sorry, it doesn't work that way in the real world. Ideas are a dime a dozen in programming, too; I have a lifetime's worth of article and software ideas written neatly in a notebook, and I know several truly original thinkers who have far more yet. Folks, it's not the ideas; it's design, implementation, and especially hard work that make the difference.
Virtually every idea I've encountered in 3-D graphics was invented decades ago. You think you have a clever graphics idea? Sutherland, Sproull, Schumacker, Catmull, Smith, Blinn, Glassner, Kajiya, Heckbert, or Teller probably thought of your idea years ago. (I'm serious-spend a few weeks reading through the literature on 3-D graphics, and you'll be amazed at what's already been invented and published.) If they thought it was important enough, they wrote a paper about it, or tried to commercialize it, but what they didn't do was try to charge people for the idea itself.
A closely related point is the astonishing lack of gratitude some programmers show for the hard work and sense of community that went into building the knowledge base with which they work. How about this? Anyone who thinks they have a unique idea that they want to "own" and milk for money can do so-but first they have to track down and appropriately compensate all the people who made possible the compilers, algorithms, programming courses, books, hardware, and so forth that put them in a position to have their brainstorm.
Put that way, it sounds like a silly idea, but the idea behind software patents is precisely that eventually everyone will own parts of our communal knowledge base, and that programming will become in large part a process of properly identifylng and compensating each and every owner of the techniques you use. All I can say is that if we do go down that path, I guarantee that it will be a poorer profession for all of us - except the patent attorneys, I guess.
Anecdote the third: A while back, I had the good fortune to have lunch down by Seattle's waterfront with Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (one of the best SF books I've come across in a long time). As he talked about the nature of networked technology and what he hoped to see emerge, he mentioned that a couple of blocks down the street was the pawn shop where Jimi Hendrix bought his first guitar. His point was that if a cheap guitar hadn't been available, Hendrix's unique talent would never have emerged. Similarly, he views the networking of society as a way to get affordable creative tools to many people, so as much talent as possible can be unearthe
Yep. Major rhyolitic, non-huge-caldera-forming eruptions have a far more statistically significant record than anything you could call "supervolcanic", and are only once every ten thousand years or so on average. Far more common. And most earthquake swarms at Yellowstone have nothing to with upcoming volcanic eruptions.
Sorry to ruin everyone's doomsday fun. ;)
How about a paper from a NASA department head? No, it wasn't rocket fuel. No, rocket fuel doesn't burn like that anyways. No, it was not a significant contributor to the burn. Just use a basic logic check here: surface area increases proportional to radius squared. Volume increases proportional to volume cubed. Increase to the size of the Hindenburg and the mass of the skin becomes essentially irrelevant in comparison to the mass of the hydrogen in no time flat.
Even the Mythbusters busted this one. To even be able to get a burn at all, rather than just a hydrogen explosion, they had to inject the hydrogen slowly. When they tried having all the hydrogen in at once, it simply exploded. Hydrogen burns in mixtures with air from under 10% to over 75%. Yes, the skin can burn and spark. No, it doesn't burn unusually quickly. Even in a small scale model (i.e., way lower hydrogen/skin ratio) with hydrogen injected slowly, the hydrogen burn still dominated.
Exactly. Our water is polluted from using *coal to generate electricity*. CFLs save electricity. Just considering mercury alone (there are tons of other pollutants from coal), you'd cause less mercury emission by taking the bulb, using it, then vaporizing its contents directly into the jet stream than by using incandescents. A modern CFL only uses a couple milligrams of mercury, while a coal plant will release around a dozen milligrams over the lifespan of a CFL used to produce the extra power to light an incandescent instead.
And not like all of the mercury in a CFL escapes into the environment, anyways. Even incinerated trash, most doesn't. In recycling or burial, it's just a couple percent, and in hazardous waste handling, a small fraction of one percent.
It's even more ridiculous than that. They're talking about burning *diesel* to save $10 (actually a lot more) in *electricity*, which is mainly produced from *coal*, which is far cheaper than diesel per unit energy.
That article repeats a bunch of CFL myths. I find it amazing to watch some in the geek crowd glob onto any "science" related conspiracy ("global warming is fake", "the Hindenburg didn't burn from hydrogen", etc) the same way tin-foil hat people glob onto the "moon hoax" or "there was no plane crash at the Pentagon on 9/11".
We even were treated to one in the header of this article:
"CFLs made in China that are shipped to the US using a lot more fossil fuels than they save."
Oh, really, is that so? Shipping cargo takes about one gallon of gas per ton of cargo per 500 miles. Shanghai is ~6500 miles from LA. Thus, 154 pounds can cross the Pacific per gallon of diesel. A gallon of diesel contains 130MJ. A CFL weighs perhaps a quarter pound. Therefore, it takes 211kJ of fuel energy per bulb. If we assume the big diesel engine is roughly as efficient as a power plant's electricity generation, we can compare them directly. 211 kilojoules is 0.05 kilowatt hours. If usage that bulb reduces 60 watts down to 15, thus saving 45 watts, it'd take barely over an hour to pay off the energy used in shipping it.
Of course, you also need to include train shipping energy consumption to get it to and from the ports, which is more like one gallon per ton per 300 miles, but that too is trivial to pay off.
it was even a bit smaller than a Corbin Sparrow.