Re:how'bout u first prove beyond doubt that its sa
on
Vermont Bans Fracking
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· Score: 2
Can you try not being an innumerate dumbass? Relative to electrical production and transportation, the amount of CO2 produced by human breathing is a blip. People are not arguing about 300 vs 301ppm CO2; they're arguing about how nice it would be to back off to 350 and stay there, versus hitting 400, 500, or 600ppm.
It appears to me that the problem is more in the construction of the well itself than in the fracking. Those wells are deep, and stuff is just not that mobile. Florida's built on piles of porous limestone and sand, and the aquifer there stratifies nicely into various layers that don't mix much (including a stinky one full of sulfides), all in the space of only a few hundred feet. These gas wells are thousands of feet deep, and the rock is dense shale, not naturally porous limestone and sand. They fracture that rock, but only locally.
But if they cheap out on the well itself, it can leak out anywhere on the way up, much closer to the surface. And somewhere, don't recall well, I saw a discussion with an industry rep along the lines of:
"Fracking is safe, we proved that it is."
"What about the well casing?"
"We're talking about fracking. Fracking is safe, we proved that it is."
From which I infer that the problem is in the well casing.
Wouldn't surprise me if the relevant climatologists were willing to testify pro bono on this one, and the perhaps all the necessary scientific studies have been done. There's been a lot of studies, the predicted outcomes are still a pretty wide range -- if there's a 5% chance of a not-that-bad outcome, does the suit go forward? What if there's a 5% chance of a really terrible outcome? Whether those studies convince the court is another matter, and our legal system seems to underperform in the face of statistical arguments (hell, our entire political system seems to underperform in the face of statistical arguments).
I think the success of this stunt mostly depends on matters of law (standing, standards for potential future harm, US govt consenting to be sued, US fault vs rest-of-world fault, possibility of mitigating geoengineering, etc). If I were making bets (as opposed to judging cases), I would bet on continued global warming, I would bet on increasingly unpleasant consequences (droughts in the middle of the US, Mediterranean), I would bet on rising sea levels. I would also bet that the US teenagers would not suffer consequences as severe as Bangladeshi teenagers (just to pick an example).
Sigh. I'm not going to pony up for expensive equipment, so I think the best I could do (next time I'm in the mood to play with diffraction gratings) is to try a black background. What the camera shows is also what my eyes saw; not sure what the dynamic range on eyes in a single image is.
I'm not sure this is all consistent. I agree that it's possible, but I know what a mercury arc (old street lamps) looks like, and it's pretty cruddy. If all I see are the spikes because they are so bright, doesn't that imply that they should also dominate in the un-diffracted appearance of the CFL (and thus it would look more like a mercury arc than it does?) And how does the LED manage to not blot out its spectrum with its relatively powerful blue light?
The physicist who explained this to me said that phosphors were wavelength multipliers, and that is what the CFL image looks like to me, since the raw output of the tube is something ugly-looking like ionized mercury or sodium.
Furthermore, if the phosphors in white LEDs were NOT wavelength multipliers and instead emitted discrete frequencies, the diffraction grating would show a blue blob (the range centered around blue) plus a sequence of dots (the discrete frequencies that you say are emitted by the phosphor). Since I don't see that, I assume that they must be wavelength multipliers, especially since that is what the expert told me. The non-dotting effect is evident even in the higher-order diffracted images in that photo -- just as skinny, but spread further, and no openings in the spectrum.
However, looking further, I don't see specific mention of "wavelength multiplier", but I do see terms like "broad yellow phosphor". Apparently, shifted, not multiplied. But shift of a smear, results in a smear, and shift of a point results in a point.
The actual, real-live employed-as-a-physicist who explained this to me said that the phosphors were wavelength multipliers, not spike emitters. Ionized gasses are spike emitters. LEDs are not spike emitters either; most "white" LEDs on the market are blue or UV (not single wavelength, but spread tightly around a center wavelength) fed to a phosphor.
The pictures in the post show (1) diffracted incandescent smears, (2) single displaced mono-frequency images of a CFL light and (3) diffracted LED smears. The raw LED (no phosphor) would only show blue; if the phosphors made spikes, you would see them in all the other colors, because there is no source of non-blue other than the phosphor. You can also see this looking at the spectra from the LED manufacturers; "white" LEDs typically include a spike for the raw emitter.
The wikipedia you cite contains no information about LED spectra.
The LEDs themselves can only get so hot, otherwise both their efficiency and lifetime both drop off (so does the lifetime of any electrolytic capacitors in their power supply). A 50W LED light needs more heat sink than will fit in/around/near your 100W fixture.
The killer app is under-cabinet counter lighting; the LEDs can be spread out on their own individual heat sinks, which all together have a low profile.
I have an investment proposal for you that will pay you back 16.8% annual interest for 5 years in constant monthly payments (like a mortgage). Buy that $60 23W LED bulb and use it to replace a cheap 100W incandescent that you run 5 hours per day (and I assume you pay $0.12/kWH for electricity). It comes with a warranty, right? This investment is nearly risk free. (other assumptions: 1500 hour life for incandescent, $1/bulb replacement cost)
Can you find any other investment right now that will pay you anything like this? Why would you make fun of this before checking the actual costs and returns?
Not true (as in, completely wrong). I have seen it with my own eyes using a diffraction grating comparing LED and fluorescent. Phosphors are wavelength multipliers, and CFLs start with a small collection of single frequencies, and the phosphors make more single frequencies. LEDs start with a (tight) continuous range of frequencies centered around a frequency, and the phosphor makes copies of the range, which overlap.
Heating with incandescent light bulbs is an appalling waste of energy; better to use a heat pump, or a furnace. And the energy costs of running those incandescent bulbs is substantial (compared to LEDs) unless you use them hardly at all.
I am also pretty sure that LED longevity is as good as claimed; there are some in my kitchen that already have over 10,000 hours on them (they're on most of the time, and I installed them back in 2010). I also use LEDs in homemade bicycle lights, and they have survived both several years of Boston weather (and winter road slime) and thousands of miles of vibration.
The supplies I've seen are not that bad; 11W at the socket for over 9W of LEDs. Power factor is kinda meh (60), but no line harmonics that I could notice.
I think that 208/watt is in the lab. What I see for sale is about 139 lumens for 3V and 350mA. That LED will handle a full amp, but the efficiency declines somewhat.
And the LED bulb that I bought has CREE elements, though it is not a CREE bulb.
I assume you are looking at "EarthLED ZetaLux 2 Pro 7-Watt Warm White LED Light Bulb". In the specs, I read "Luminous flux: 400". A 60 watt bulb is supposed to put out 850 lumens. Caveat emptor.
There may be a reason you report such disappointment with your previous purchases.
CFLs may produce less heat, but they may also tolerate less heat. I have one in my basement that, while still running, has managed to leak some weird wax out of its electronics, presumably because it got hot enough to melt the wax. Incandescent bulbs, of course, can run hot enough (at the glass bulb) to set things on fire.
You speak of this "personal responsibility" as if it exists in fact, instead of as a talking point. The world is filled with bad drivers who think they are "better than average", which leads to unintentional irresponsibility, and when bad things happen, the reaction is often to blame the victim instead of their own overoptimistic selves.
And speaking as someone who was once left unconscious in a ditch by a hit-and-run driver, it HAS affected me. Given personal experience with this alleged "responsibility", I find that talk is cheap -- when responsibility matters, it is often lacking.
Can't decide if I agree or disagree. We are generally in the same insurance pools, it will generally save us money (and cut down on the societal awfulness of car crash deaths) if more people wore seat belts.
Probably the best plan for saving lives would be mandatory helmet laws for car drivers and passengers. Head injuries from car crashes are a significant cause of death and disability, so this is not an outlandish thing to do. Australian researchers have even developed a prototype helmet for just this purpose that is less expensive and less cumbersome than your average motorcycle helmet. What makes this plan "best" is not that it is necessarily super-effective at reducing car deaths, but that encouraging just a fraction of car drivers to use some healthier form of transit will save many lives through their improved cardiovascular health (if we believe the 20:1 figure for bicycling rewards:risks, and assume that bicycles and cars have the same risk of crash death, diverting 5% to cycling would save about as many lives as are lost to car crashes in total. Similar ratios probably also apply for walking).
And yeah, I know this is an inflammatory proposal, that's why I included all the links to back up my argument.
The more plausible knock on metric is its use of case-sensitive multipliers -- mm vs Mm.
Traditional units get substantially more annoying when you move to areas and volumes -- how many cubic yards of fill to cover an acre 1 inch deep? Versus, how many cubic meters to fill a hectare one cm deep? (Hectare = 10^4 m^2, so 10^4 m^2* 10^-2 m = 10^2 m^3)
You are correct, one mission. My use of the plural is clearly outrageous and misleading hyperbole.
And of course conversion is trivial. A miscommunication about which units are used IS a screwup, is it not? That's the whole point of using one system, to reduce the opportunity for stupid mistakes.
Raising objections in the form of new, unaddressed plausible counter theories is valid science.
What I often see is the same-old-same-old, popping up for yet another game of zombie whack-a-mole. Water vapor, not a new issue. Sunspots, not a new issue. Has changed in the past, not a new issue. Medieval Warm Period, not a new issue. Someone, somewhere, predicted a future ice age back in the 1970s, not a new issue. Unable to do a controlled experiment, not a new issue. Uncertainty in the models, not a new issue. Urban heat islands, not a new issue.
It has its uses. The subject seems to provoke some people to spew various crazy conspiracy theories, and it's possible to note who those people are and discount their opinion in the future on other topics. Think of it as a canary in a mental coal mine.
Would be interesting to keep (and provide) statistics like "number of AC responses". I am guessing that climate change topics would rank relatively high.
Best reason I know to be un-hopeful has been the utter non-success of the metric system in this country. Obvious wins if we convert (we've lost space missions because of metric/archaic screwups), minor costs, yet we continue to drag our feet. Compared to that, the alleged inconvenience of dealing with GHG emissions looms very very large. Of course, the size of that inconvenience is marketed very effectively by industries that stand to lose inconvenient shares of their business.
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Can you try not being an innumerate dumbass? Relative to electrical production and transportation, the amount of CO2 produced by human breathing is a blip. People are not arguing about 300 vs 301ppm CO2; they're arguing about how nice it would be to back off to 350 and stay there, versus hitting 400, 500, or 600ppm.
It appears to me that the problem is more in the construction of the well itself than in the fracking. Those wells are deep, and stuff is just not that mobile. Florida's built on piles of porous limestone and sand, and the aquifer there stratifies nicely into various layers that don't mix much (including a stinky one full of sulfides), all in the space of only a few hundred feet. These gas wells are thousands of feet deep, and the rock is dense shale, not naturally porous limestone and sand. They fracture that rock, but only locally.
But if they cheap out on the well itself, it can leak out anywhere on the way up, much closer to the surface. And somewhere, don't recall well, I saw a discussion with an industry rep along the lines of:
"Fracking is safe, we proved that it is."
"What about the well casing?"
"We're talking about fracking. Fracking is safe, we proved that it is."
From which I infer that the problem is in the well casing.
Wouldn't surprise me if the relevant climatologists were willing to testify pro bono on this one, and the perhaps all the necessary scientific studies have been done. There's been a lot of studies, the predicted outcomes are still a pretty wide range -- if there's a 5% chance of a not-that-bad outcome, does the suit go forward? What if there's a 5% chance of a really terrible outcome? Whether those studies convince the court is another matter, and our legal system seems to underperform in the face of statistical arguments (hell, our entire political system seems to underperform in the face of statistical arguments).
I think the success of this stunt mostly depends on matters of law (standing, standards for potential future harm, US govt consenting to be sued, US fault vs rest-of-world fault, possibility of mitigating geoengineering, etc). If I were making bets (as opposed to judging cases), I would bet on continued global warming, I would bet on increasingly unpleasant consequences (droughts in the middle of the US, Mediterranean), I would bet on rising sea levels. I would also bet that the US teenagers would not suffer consequences as severe as Bangladeshi teenagers (just to pick an example).
Sigh. I'm not going to pony up for expensive equipment, so I think the best I could do (next time I'm in the mood to play with diffraction gratings) is to try a black background. What the camera shows is also what my eyes saw; not sure what the dynamic range on eyes in a single image is.
I'm not sure this is all consistent. I agree that it's possible, but I know what a mercury arc (old street lamps) looks like, and it's pretty cruddy. If all I see are the spikes because they are so bright, doesn't that imply that they should also dominate in the un-diffracted appearance of the CFL (and thus it would look more like a mercury arc than it does?) And how does the LED manage to not blot out its spectrum with its relatively powerful blue light?
Then why don't I see a smear when I look at the diffracted output of a CFL? I see crisp copies of the bulb, in different colors.
The physicist who explained this to me said that phosphors were wavelength multipliers, and that is what the CFL image looks like to me, since the raw output of the tube is something ugly-looking like ionized mercury or sodium.
Furthermore, if the phosphors in white LEDs were NOT wavelength multipliers and instead emitted discrete frequencies, the diffraction grating would show a blue blob (the range centered around blue) plus a sequence of dots (the discrete frequencies that you say are emitted by the phosphor). Since I don't see that, I assume that they must be wavelength multipliers, especially since that is what the expert told me. The non-dotting effect is evident even in the higher-order diffracted images in that photo -- just as skinny, but spread further, and no openings in the spectrum.
However, looking further, I don't see specific mention of "wavelength multiplier", but I do see terms like "broad yellow phosphor".
Apparently, shifted, not multiplied. But shift of a smear, results in a smear, and shift of a point results in a point.
The actual, real-live employed-as-a-physicist who explained this to me said that the phosphors were wavelength multipliers, not spike emitters. Ionized gasses are spike emitters. LEDs are not spike emitters either; most "white" LEDs on the market are blue or UV (not single wavelength, but spread tightly around a center wavelength) fed to a phosphor.
The pictures in the post show (1) diffracted incandescent smears, (2) single displaced mono-frequency images of a CFL light and (3) diffracted LED smears. The raw LED (no phosphor) would only show blue; if the phosphors made spikes, you would see them in all the other colors, because there is no source of non-blue other than the phosphor. You can also see this looking at the spectra from the LED manufacturers; "white" LEDs typically include a spike for the raw emitter.
The wikipedia you cite contains no information about LED spectra.
The LEDs themselves can only get so hot, otherwise both their efficiency and lifetime both drop off (so does the lifetime of any electrolytic capacitors in their power supply). A 50W LED light needs more heat sink than will fit in/around/near your 100W fixture.
The killer app is under-cabinet counter lighting; the LEDs can be spread out on their own individual heat sinks, which all together have a low profile.
I have an investment proposal for you that will pay you back 16.8% annual interest for 5 years in constant monthly payments (like a mortgage).
Buy that $60 23W LED bulb and use it to replace a cheap 100W incandescent that you run 5 hours per day (and I assume you pay $0.12/kWH for electricity).
It comes with a warranty, right? This investment is nearly risk free.
(other assumptions: 1500 hour life for incandescent, $1/bulb replacement cost)
Can you find any other investment right now that will pay you anything like this? Why would you make fun of this before checking the actual costs and returns?
Not true (as in, completely wrong). I have seen it with my own eyes using a diffraction grating comparing LED and fluorescent. Phosphors are wavelength multipliers, and CFLs start with a small collection of single frequencies, and the phosphors make more single frequencies. LEDs start with a (tight) continuous range of frequencies centered around a frequency, and the phosphor makes copies of the range, which overlap.
Heating with incandescent light bulbs is an appalling waste of energy; better to use a heat pump, or a furnace.
And the energy costs of running those incandescent bulbs is substantial (compared to LEDs) unless you use them hardly at all.
I am also pretty sure that LED longevity is as good as claimed; there are some in my kitchen that already have over 10,000 hours on them (they're on most of the time, and I installed them back in 2010). I also use LEDs in homemade bicycle lights, and they have survived both several years of Boston weather (and winter road slime) and thousands of miles of vibration.
The supplies I've seen are not that bad; 11W at the socket for over 9W of LEDs.
Power factor is kinda meh (60), but no line harmonics that I could notice.
I think that 208/watt is in the lab. What I see for sale is about 139 lumens for 3V and 350mA. That LED will handle a full amp, but the efficiency declines somewhat.
And the LED bulb that I bought has CREE elements, though it is not a CREE bulb.
I assume you are looking at "EarthLED ZetaLux 2 Pro 7-Watt Warm White LED Light Bulb".
In the specs, I read "Luminous flux: 400". A 60 watt bulb is supposed to put out 850 lumens.
Caveat emptor.
There may be a reason you report such disappointment with your previous purchases.
CFLs may produce less heat, but they may also tolerate less heat. I have one in my basement that, while still running, has managed to leak some weird wax out of its electronics, presumably because it got hot enough to melt the wax. Incandescent bulbs, of course, can run hot enough (at the glass bulb) to set things on fire.
You speak of this "personal responsibility" as if it exists in fact, instead of as a talking point.
The world is filled with bad drivers who think they are "better than average", which leads to unintentional irresponsibility, and when bad things happen, the reaction is often to blame the victim instead of their own overoptimistic selves.
We DON'T hold people responsible. Once upon a time, we did. Nowadays, you can "lose control" and escape prosecution, even when your mistake kills people.
And speaking as someone who was once left unconscious in a ditch by a hit-and-run driver, it HAS affected me. Given personal experience with this alleged "responsibility", I find that talk is cheap -- when responsibility matters, it is often lacking.
That's a fine video.
Can't decide if I agree or disagree. We are generally in the same insurance pools, it will generally save us money (and cut down on the societal awfulness of car crash deaths) if more people wore seat belts.
On the other hand, in the grand scheme of causes-and-numbers-of-death, it's just not that big a deal. The simple act of driving the car instead of walking, biking, or even just standing on a subway or bus (just plain sitting turns out to be bad for us) kills more people by far. One estimate of the risks and rewards of bicycling (crashes, vs health benefits) was 20 years of life gained for each year of life lost. Given that bicycles offer little protection from crashes other than their low speed, this suggests that lack of exercise is really bad for you, and that driving cars to excess is one reason for this lack. Another study found a 28% lower mortality rate for bicycle commuters even after adjusting for other cardiovascular risk factors.
Probably the best plan for saving lives would be mandatory helmet laws for car drivers and passengers. Head injuries from car crashes are a significant cause of death and disability, so this is not an outlandish thing to do. Australian researchers have even developed a prototype helmet for just this purpose that is less expensive and less cumbersome than your average motorcycle helmet. What makes this plan "best" is not that it is necessarily super-effective at reducing car deaths, but that encouraging just a fraction of car drivers to use some healthier form of transit will save many lives through their improved cardiovascular health (if we believe the 20:1 figure for bicycling rewards:risks, and assume that bicycles and cars have the same risk of crash death, diverting 5% to cycling would save about as many lives as are lost to car crashes in total. Similar ratios probably also apply for walking).
And yeah, I know this is an inflammatory proposal, that's why I included all the links to back up my argument.
The more plausible knock on metric is its use of case-sensitive multipliers -- mm vs Mm.
Traditional units get substantially more annoying when you move to areas and volumes -- how many cubic yards of fill to cover an acre 1 inch deep? Versus, how many cubic meters to fill a hectare one cm deep?
(Hectare = 10^4 m^2, so 10^4 m^2* 10^-2 m = 10^2 m^3)
You are correct, one mission. My use of the plural is clearly outrageous and misleading hyperbole.
And of course conversion is trivial. A miscommunication about which units are used IS a screwup, is it not? That's the whole point of using one system, to reduce the opportunity for stupid mistakes.
Raising objections in the form of new, unaddressed plausible counter theories is valid science.
What I often see is the same-old-same-old, popping up for yet another game of zombie whack-a-mole. Water vapor, not a new issue. Sunspots, not a new issue. Has changed in the past, not a new issue. Medieval Warm Period, not a new issue. Someone, somewhere, predicted a future ice age back in the 1970s, not a new issue. Unable to do a controlled experiment, not a new issue. Uncertainty in the models, not a new issue. Urban heat islands, not a new issue.
It has its uses. The subject seems to provoke some people to spew various crazy conspiracy theories, and it's possible to note who those people are and discount their opinion in the future on other topics. Think of it as a canary in a mental coal mine.
Would be interesting to keep (and provide) statistics like "number of AC responses". I am guessing that climate change topics would rank relatively high.
Best reason I know to be un-hopeful has been the utter non-success of the metric system in this country. Obvious wins if we convert (we've lost space missions because of metric/archaic screwups), minor costs, yet we continue to drag our feet. Compared to that, the alleged inconvenience of dealing with GHG emissions looms very very large. Of course, the size of that inconvenience is marketed very effectively by industries that stand to lose inconvenient shares of their business.