Light Bulb of the Future?

I was completely baffled when the power company in my city mailed me 2 free CFL bulbs. Why am I baffled? Those are supposed to be good right? Save energy - longer lasting - better for the environment...right? Sure - whatever. Along with the CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lamp) - in the "free" box from the power company (for which I will surely pay somewhere in my monthly bill) came two green plastic bags for use in the disposal of the CFLs when they burn out. It turns out these "green" bulbs pollute the environment with mercury when they break! So I am supposed to hang on to these plastic bags for several years so that I can safely dispose of these "environmentally friendly" bulbs - these "green" bulbs??!

Oh - that's the other thing - I should not have put green in quotes there. The color temp of these CFLs is no different than that of any other fluorescent bulb (think library, bleak hallway, prison, school, place of 1000 cubicles) - literally GREEN. Ugh. It is the ugliest quality of light imaginable. Give it a coating like a Reveal Bulb to closer resemble daylight and perhaps we're getting somewhere but that still hasn't happened and certainly doesn't change that little mercury issue.

So what options do we really have if we're not supposed to use incandescent bulbs and these CFLs BLOW? A friend of mine brought up the idea that LEDs should be the standard. I agree with that - for now. They last longer, give off less heat, and save money and resources across the board. For the time being, LEDs make the most sense of anything widely available on the market.



However, I recently stumbled upon Luxim's new technology - the plasma light bulb. It is the size of a Tic Tac, has the color temp of daylight, lasts far longer than anything else - and apparently can be powered wirelessly! It is a brand new technology and cannot be expected to be in every one's home overnight but if the public can move to LED technology and then to plasma technology, skipping the fluorescent stage altogether, we shall see some real progress in energy efficiency and quality as we venture further into the new century.

Haiku Christmas Night

Hope you partied well...
Musicians, read Byrne's Wired.
"Storming the Castle":

People Are Cyborgs

One day...
People will be constantly entertained by implanting an entertainment unit. No one will ever be "bored." Ever.

People will telecommunicate with others without the need of external devices, such as computers or telephones. No one will ever be "lonely." Ever.

People will be able to change their faces whenever they want. No one will ever be "Rick Astley." Ever.

YOU'VE BEEN RICK ROLLED!!!

iPod photo credit: kosabe.
Bluetooth photo credit: idiotboy.
Cyborg photo credit: mize2oo5.

How's This for Some Extra Hard Drive Storage?

So you think your 500 gigabyte hard drive is pretty cool? Thinking about upgrading to a terabyte? Well, if you think that these storage solutions are pretty high up on the information storage food chain, think again. One byte consists of 8 bits of information. For example, Final Cut Pro (on normal settings) renders 8 bits (or one byte) of information at a time. The old Sega Genesis could process 16 bits (2 bytes) of graphic info. at a time. Most computers these days are using either 32 or if you're really on top of it - 64 bit processors. And as far as storage - well - we all know those media files are large - often hundreds of megabytes or even a few gigabytes large - so we have our external hard drives that eventually fill up. Now just try to comprehend the following. Be sure to click on the title of this blog when you're through reading this to see where your hard drive falls in on the charts of available defined storage space for information. The yobibyte is the largest one on the list. I don't know who is using a capacity this immense but I would love to find out. Perhaps in 40 years, everyone will be walking around with 500 yobibyte mph - hologram players...or perhaps, it is simply some unattainable single figure that could only apply to collective data. Either way, gigabyte or yobibyte, I just want to know - does Yoda bite?

From Wikipedia:

A yobibyte (a contraction of yotta binary byte) is a unit of information or computer storage, commonly abbreviated YiB.

1 yobibyte = 280 bytes = 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes = 1,024 zebibytes

The yobibyte is closely related to the yottabyte, which can either be a synonym for yobibyte, or refer to 1024 bytes = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, depending on context (see binary prefix).

The zebi and yobi prefixes were originally not part of the system of binary prefixes, but were added by the International Electrotechnical Commission in August 2005.

You can click the title of this blog to find out more about the levels of information storage.