Anders Hoveland

DOES THE SINGULARITY AT THE BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE & THE SINGULARITY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE HAS A NON-SPATIAL EXISTENCE ? Your thoughts ?

No, the singularity exists in space, it is just that the size of the space-time (assuming space is finite and closes back in on itself) has shrunk down to the same size also.

I suspect the size of such a singularity may have something to do with the Planck constant...

Remember, "empty" space is actually composed of energy too. If and when the entire universe collapses on itself, it will carry all that space with it.

There cannot actually be any true singularity, in the sense of an infinitesimally small point. Remember, when all the mass collapses onto itself, matter will be converted into energy - energy which is equal to, and will oppose, the gravitational force. Some physicists have the false idea that all the energy will be radiated out into infinity and the core of the universe will suffer death by entropy. But this just is not possible when space-time collapses as well, along with all that matter.

As for what form of energy "space" is actually composed of, I say just plain energy. It is in an equilibrium of course, and to understand why it can pervade matter with seemingly no irreversible interaction, I would suggest that the wave description - ultra long wavelength, ultra high intensity) of this vacuum energy gives it its defining characteristics. Even the portion of the energy in equilibrium with higher frequency energy (or even subatomic particle pairs) is still coupled to the rest of the energy, so these "vacuum particles" can only transiently interract with matter. By "vaccum" particles, I give as an example the W boson.

Affirmative Action = Racism against Asians

Here is what "affirmative" action has meant for Asian Americans:

If all other credentials are equal, Asian-Americans need to score 270 points higher than Hispanics, and 450 points above African-Americans out of a maximum 1600 on the math and reading SAT to have the same chance of admission to a private college, according to "No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal", a 2009 book co-written by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade.

Budget-strapped state schools such as the University of California at San Diego are reducing enrollment of Asian-Americans to make room for international students from China and elsewhere who pay almost twice the tuition of in-state residents, Bloomberg News reported December 28, 2002. Why is the enrollment of Asian-Americans being reduced? Because there would be "too many" Asians otherwise, and that would exceed the university's allocated racial quotas!

Hiding their race

by Rich Lowry, New York Post 12/16/11

To check or not to check the Asian box? That's the choice faced by Asian-American students applying to what are supposed to be the most tolerant places on Earth: the nation's colleges

Ward Connerly, a former University of California regent, explained to the newspaper The Sacramento Bee about what Asians faced trying to get accepted into the state's university system:

"In an unguarded moment, [a fellow regent] told me that unless the university took steps to 'guide' admissions decisions, UC would be dominated by Asians. When I asked, 'What would be wrong with that?' I got an answer that speaks volumes about the underlying philosophy at many universities with regard to Asian enrollment. The UC administrator told me that Asians are 'too dull – they study, study, study.' He then said, 'If you ever say I said this, I will have to deny it.' I won't betray the individual's anonymity because to do so would put him in a world of trouble."

I can't believe anyone clicked "yes" for that poll. Don't you understand? Affirmative action is racism!

What exactly does "pay equality" mean?

Because to me, it sounds just like a way to expose employers to more pointless and expensive lawsuits.

If an employer wants to pay men more than women, what is wrong with that? If women are willing to work for less, won't there be other employers that want to hire all women because they can save money and get a better value? If I, as a private business owner, want to give a cash gift to one of my male friends, but not a female friend, is that wrong too?

You want to focus on "equality" and "fairness" ? Take a look in the government sector and the schools. There is plenty of unfairness there. People at the top giving themselves all the pay raises and funding for new buildings and office equipment. A hierarchy of seniority, with little mobility, while those on the bottom must endure much smaller salaries and lack of benefits.

I do not see what is so wrong with this guy's beliefs.

I think most of the members in this thread are just unable to look outside your own little intellectual world to understand beliefs that are different from your own.

You accuse Republicans of being intolerant and close-minded. From some of the comments I have seen in this thread, I can't help but see the irony.

While I believe in evolution, I don't go around ridiculing people just because they hold a religious belief that humans and dinosaurs co-existed. If some parents feel so strongly about creationism, what is the big deal about having the teacher quickly mention that "Some people believe that God created all the plants and animals in seven days" ? Are you afraid that your child might be "converted" by this?

But they're not designed for that. In fact, they're designed for maximum shrapnel and damage.

Armor piecing anti-tank rockets are not particularly designed to produce shrapnel, and if desired, they could be designed to minimise shrapnel. Whenever an explosive goes off in contact with metal, there is going to be a danger of shrapnel, but anti-tank ammunition is not specifically designed to damage/kill personnel.

You seem to be under the misconception that all anti-tank weapons produce a huge explosive cloud. That is not the case.

Do you forsee the need for individual civilians to shoot tanks anytime before the Zombie apocalypse?

There might not be any immediately pressing reason for them now, but what about in the distant future? How do we know the situation will not change?

You might argue that we could always change the law if and when the need arrises, but will we actually be able to react fast enough? Laws are not changed overnight. And if the central government did ever become malignant, chances are it would put up much resistance to this type of change. So even though there might not be a need for it just now, now might still be a good time to allow it. Another idea might be just to make a law now that would specifically allow individual local governments to allow rocket launchers at a moments notice, if they so choose.

Although it may be difficult to imagine now, unexpected things could happen in the distant future. If we look at all the other ancient kingdoms and Empires in history, none of them lasted forever.

So if the explosives were sold on the side to be purchased in the next store, that solves the issue?

There are already regulations against explosives. In a rocket launcher, it is the explosives that do the damage, so there is not so much reason to ban the rocket launcher itself. I suppose one could argue for banning the propellant also, but such an argument would be based more on the grounds of preventing a fire hazard.

By what you're saying, these guns should be illegal. And yet your conclusion is that they shouldn't be..

Your logic is a bit choppy here.

The rocket rocket launchers containing explosives could be illegal, but not the rocket launcher itself. This is not such is dissimilar situation from the gun laws in several highly restrictive cities. In such cities, it is legal to own a gun and ammunition, but illegal to discharge your firearm. Some cities have made it illegal to have a firearm loaded, either in ones car or in public. This does not matter as much, because the fact remains that you can at least have a gun available if an emergency presents itself.

There's a reason they're called "amendments": they were added in after the Constitution had already gone into effect.

Actually, the first ten ammendments (sometimes known as "The Bill of Rights") were made to the Constitution before it was ratified by all of the States that existed at that time. North Carolina, Vermount, and Rhode Island, refused to ratify the Constitution until after the ammendments were made. So in a way, the first ten ammendments are "special" and carry the same weight as the Constitution itself. There was never really a United States of America without a second ammendment; the Constitution may have been accepted by some states, but a Constitutional government had not been elected yet.

As for the notion that you can "undo" the second ammendment, good luck with that. It is nearly impossible to change or make a new ammendment to the Constitution. There is a good chance it would trigger a civil war if you tried. But on a somewhat bright side for gun control proponents, the Supreme Court interrpreted that the second ammendment only bars the federal government from infringing on the right to have guns, not necessarily the States.

I know many of you who dream of a one world government don't like the idea of separation of powers, or checks and balances. But that is the way it is, and you are going to encounter plenty of deep seated resistance (including from me) if you try to change it.

My understanding of those photonic crystals is that, because of the spacing of the gaps in the lattice, only light that has a shorter wavelength than the gap length can escape. Most of the energy will be radiated from within as light before it has a chance to migrate to the surface and radiate as longer wavelength infrared. The problem, of course, is actually constructing these photonic crystals, since the spacing must be at such a small scale.

About visible light produced by any other material, alas... Any decent efficiency for thermal emission in the visible spectrum demands a temperature such that only tungsten works. Any other material has a bigger vapour pressure (even refractive ceramics that melt at a higher temperature than tungsten, alas again) so it can't attain the temperature of tungsten, because of evaporation.

This is not necessarily true. Who said the incandescent conductor has to be a solid ? Of course, this would create technical challenges. Magnetic confinement might not be out of the question, since Lorentz forces induced by a strong current could keep the molten metal in the shape of a narrow filament. Or magnetic induction could be used to both simultaneously heat the molten metal to incandescence and to levitate it. Such a design would not be too complicated. Here is video of a homemade induction coil levitating a piece of aluminum until it becomes molten:

There are ways to deal with vapor pressure. Any metal that vapourises out could be allowed to condense back to a liquid and be passively reintroduced again, either through gravity or some other means. This would be similar to a refluxing flask in chemistry. We can see how a halogen bulb deals with vapour pressure problems also. Tungsten bromide decomposes back into its constituent elements at high temperatures, allowing the tungsten to crystallise back onto the filament. For more information about this type of chemistry: http://en.wikipedia....tal_bar_process

temperature won't achieve the population inversion needed to achieve gain at stimulated emission.

This is not necessarily true. If the conductor is transparent. Have you never seen the picture of a heat-insulating ceramic material that has been heated to white hot in a furnace, then allowed to cool. A researcher is holding the cube of this material by two corners with his unprotected fingers, while light is coming out of the sides of the cube. The inside of the ceramic cube is still glowing hot, and the light is making its way out the sides.

If the conductor is transparent, and the light generated from incandescence, then the conductor will not absorb at any particular frequency.

Also, not all types of lasers need to achieve population inversion. In some cases, the absorbing atom immediately decays to a lower excited state, and it is this lower excited state that undergoes the stimulated emission. An example of such a laser is the Nd:YAG that is used in common green laser pointers to create an infrared beam before it is frequency doubled to green.

I wouldn't use metal for the mirrors since such thin layers evaporate so quickly,

The mirrors do not have to actually be attached to the glowing transparent conductor. There could be some small space, so the mirrors would not get too hot. The mirrors would also probably be wider than the glowing material. Again, this does not have to have the precision of a laser, just some general directionality. Something like this:

..ll........................ll

..ll........................ll

..ll........................ll

..ll....lllllllllllllllllllllll...ll

..ll....lllllllllllllllllllllll...ll

..ll....llllllllllllllllllllll...ll

..ll........................ll

..ll........................ll

..ll........................ll

if you try to suggest that shoulder mounted grenade launchers and armor piercing bullets are needed to hunt for dinner or to protect your apartment.

I would support armor-piercing shoulder mounted rocket launchers, provided they were designed to minimise scrapnel (so they would not be very effective against people) and provided that they were not sold containing any explosives.

One of the arguments for gun ownership is preventing the government from monopolising the means of force, and thus securing liberty against potential tyranny in the future. Allowing armor-piercing rocket launchers - even ones that did not actually contain the explosives - would go a long way towards that aim. If, hypothetically, the citizens ever had to defend themselves from a government that took away all their freedom, they could always make the explosives to put inside the rocket launcher. But at the same time, for a terrorist that wanted to kill innocent civilians, such a designed rocket launcher would be a very ineffective way to deliver the explosives he had managed to obtain - such a rocket launcher would be even less effective than a gun for such purposes.

My only real concern about such an idea would be that some red neck would try to fill his rocket launcher with some dangerously sensitive makeshift explosive and blow himself to bits.

But then again I am sure there are many people in this forum who believe it is the government's job to protect people from their own irresponsible actions.

Well I have commenced replacing incandescent light sources with LEDs.

Well again, let's not forget how much electrical power it takes to make these LEDs in China.

One big environmental consideration for LED lighting is the aluminum used in the cooling fins.

Some of these heat sinks / cooling fins can be quite heavy, especially for higher output LED lights.

This aluminum heat sink is for an 80 Watt LED chip, and weighs 1.8 kg:

This aluminum heat sink for a 100-120 Watt LED chip weighs 3.8 kg:

http://www.made-in-china.com/showroom/ledredsun/product-detailWqRnuQekYvUo/China-LED-Heat-Sink-Cooler-MG-S-100W-120W-1-.html

while this one (100 Watts) weighs 3.4 kg:

http://www.made-in-china.com/showroom/ledredsun/product-detailsqHJEecMbSrR/China-LED-Heat-Sink-Radiator-MG-F-100W-B-4-.html

So how much energy does it take to produce the aluminum for these heat sinks?

Because aluminum smelting involves passing an electric current through a molten electrolyte, it requires large amounts of electrical energy. On average, production of 2 lb (1 kg) of aluminum requires 15 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy. Just the cost of electricity represents about one-third of the cost of smelting aluminum. All these heat sinks are made in China, where most of the electricity comes from dirty coal fired powerplants.

The other major ingredient used in the smelting operation is carbon. Carbon electrodes transmit the electric current through the electrolyte. During the smelting operation, some of the carbon is consumed as it combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide. In fact, about half a pound (0.2 kg) of carbon is used for every pound (2.2 kg) of aluminum produced. This carbon is released as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. For every one pound of carbon consumed, 3.6 pounds of carbond dioxide is created.

This is why it would be so important to recycle the aluminum heat sinks for LED lighting. If these aluminum is not getting recycled, that is a lot of wasted energy the LED is going to have to make up for over its life time.

What about in Mexico? Guns are virtually illegal there, yet there is still plenty of gun violence. How do all those Mexican criminals get all those automatic guns that are even illegal in the USA ?

Unlike what many members seem to think in this forum, more government regulation is not the solution to all of our social problems.

I believe that gun ownership is a right, not merely a privilege, and there is a good reason the founders of the United States were unable to obtain ratification of the Constitution without first ammending it to include "the right to bear arms". If certain "liberal" cities want to make all sorts of crazy gun regulations though, I don't have a problem. I generally support the idea of like-minded people coming together to form a community where they can live under whatever type of laws they want.

Many of the gun control freaks also have no idea what things are actually like in rural areas, where it is just not practical or feasible to be entirely reliant on a professional police force for protection.

Yes, there will occasionally be deranged gun men going on shooting sprees. But this is just a fact of life we are going to have to accept. It is not worth sacrificing our freedom for. I don't really have a problem with making automatic guns illegal though.

you seem to be assumed that as one non-white teenager was capable of a brutal murder then all non-white teenagers should be treated as such. This strikes me as racial stereotyping of the worst sort.

 

The case of Officer Molina ... has nothing whatsoever to do with the death of Trayvon Martin; the only connexion seems to be based upon the bigoted assumption that all black and hispanic teenagers are uniformly violent.

Race? Race has nothing to do with it. You are the one bringing up race here.

“With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan’s premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society.” — Ann Coulter

Photonic crystals do not obey the Planck Black body curve:

http://www.sciencene.../id/4290/title/

Guo Chunlei, associate professor of optics at the University of Rochester and his assistant, Anatoliy Vorobyev, used high powered lasers to create nano- and micro-scale structures on the surface of a regular tungsten filament. The tungsten filament is the small thin wire inside the light bulb. In doing this scientists can make the incandescent radiator 40 percent more efficient. The laser can also be used to make the light bulbs brighter and possibly even change their colors.

http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3385

Halogen IR (or halogen infrared) bulbs increase efficiency by using a coating applied to the inside of the halogen capsule. This coating is designed to redirect some of the infrared energy back to the filament, which results in less additional energy being required to keep the filament hot and producing visible light

click link for diagram of how it works:

http://www.bulbs.com...n-IR-Bulbs.aspx

This commercially available IR halogen capsule, while currently more expensive, achieves an efficiency of 26 lumens per Watt.

I had a third idea. What about using a transparent conductor (such as indium tin oxide) and heat it to indandescence. It could then act as a sort of laser. By putting semi-reflective coatings on both ends to reflect back the vissible light, rather than the infrared, it would act as an amplifier, increasing the gain in the vissible light radiation, and shifting the Planck black body curve. The transparent conductor would still have to be very hot, but it might not have to be as hot as a tungsten filament because of this shift. The concept would be similar to a tunable laser. By putting reflective coatings on just two sides of the transparent conductor, the light source could even be made directional like LEDs.

The advantage of incandescent light is that it puts out a pleasing continuous full spectrum, which so far LEDs have not been able to match.

Texas Officer Brutally Attacked By Teen Dies

An El Paso (Texas) Police officer who caught three teenagers vandalizing his car died Friday from injuries sustained when one of the teens brutally assaulted him.

Officer Jonathan Molina, 29, had spent 10 days at University Medical Center in critical condition following the Sept. 25 attack in Central El Paso, the agency announced.

Officer Molina had confronted the teens and identified himself as an officer. That's when Juan Gonzalez, 17, slammed him headfirst into the concrete knocking him unconscious. Gonzalez continued to beat Molina, until witnesses came to help.

Gonzalez was charged with capital murder and remains in custody with bail set at $5 million.

http://www.policemag...ium=Enewsletter

This is why George Zimmerman was forced to kill Trayvon Martin. This is what the media commentators said couldn't happen. I remember all the names they called Zimmerman for not taking a sustained beating. This is why. This is real life.

I was browsing the comment section of another site and found this interesting rant:

" I'm not buying into the CFL thing either

Or rather I've bought a lot of CFLs in varying price ranges and color temps and been disappointed every time. I'im still buying them if I see a new brand, source or promotion. I keep trying them because I really want them to work.

But they don't last very long - scarcely a year of not full time use. They also don't survive power outages very well - a frequent occurence in my rural area. I can lose every single CFL lamp that happens to be switched on during a single event (and that's a lot of bulbs in my 10 buildings), but we never lose any of the remaining reg. incandescent in the same outages.

The CFL light is awful to my eyes. I have tried all kinds of color temps and filtering globes. Nothing pleases my eyes as well as the full-spectrum incandescents.

And the slow-start thing is very vexing: I had thought to put the ugly-light-but-energy-saving bulbs in all the fixtures in my 9 farm buildings. I made a complete change over in the summer of 2009. Yes, they were slow-starting on cool fall mornings and evenings, (modest bummer) but in below-freezing winter temps it's unacceptable to standard around in the dark while the bulbs take 60 secs, or more, to even begin to glow, weakly. If I'm going out to the barn when it's that cold, I want to get on with it not stand around shivering in the dark waiting for the light to turn on.

I've tried LEDs (once) and they gave off awful light, too. Luckily the store where I bought them took them back for full credit.

I'm still hoping for improvement in CFLs or better LEDs. I have a stockpile of my favorite full-spectrum incandescents, JIC.

We are transitioning to a 100% PV system on the farm right now, which will assuage some of my guilt for not using the wretched CFLs."

by Araguato on Mon Feb 13, 2012 at 03:12:29 PM PST

(left in comment section of http://www.dailykos....tbulbs#comments)

If you really want to learn about advanced aqua regia chemistry, you might be interested in this:

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/60327-different-type-of-aqua-regia/

I get sick and tired of people who do not know what they are talking about refer to "color temperature" and CRI. Different technologies of light sources put out completely different spectrums, so illuminated colors in a room will appear differently. And even if two light sources have the same "correlated color temperature", they can still put out very different colors of light if they are not the same technology (incandescent, fluorescent, LED).

Many of the consumer testers who actually have been testing out the new "energy efficent" bulbs and doing comparisons have been left very dissatisfied with the available options:

My life in the past several years has been a living lightbulb joke. I’ve changed, re-changed and re-re-changed the bulbs in my house trying to find replacements that save money but don’t make our skin look like zombie flesh. Compact fluorescents and LED lamps save energy, last longer, and emit less heat than incandescent bulbs. But their light is ickier, versions advertised as "dimmable" often dim only over a limited range, and CFLs take maddeningly long to come to full brightness. No single type works everywhere. LEDs are great for desk lamps, but their narrow beams fail to fill larger spaces. In darkly painted rooms, I went with cold-cathode fluorescents with a low brightness temperature. I’ve filled a big box in the basement with all the bulbs I’ve tried and rejected. So much for saving money.

- George Musser

I, for one, am dreading the day when incandescent bulbs are no longer sold in the U.S. In fact, I'm thinking about buying a closet full of them. Why? Well, currently the most feasible alternatives to "regular" lightbulbs are compact flourescent lightbulbs (CFLs) and light-emitting diode lightbulbs (LEDs). The thought of having to light my home with CFLs and LEDs for the rest of my days (and nights) makes me shudder.

- Joe Provey

Artists are getting frustrated at the poor color rendering ability of the light given off by the new "energy efficient" lights:

In the rush to manage carbon emissions, one of the first victims is the incandescent lightbulb. After seeing the green glow of the hardware store CFL, many wince. And some ask, "What is this doing to my artwork?"

 

My wife's an artist and illustrator. One night several years ago, she was up late working on a contest submission. To help her work at night, I gave her a "full-spectrum" Ott-Lite. "Just paint with this. It'll be like sunlight!" After working through the night, Lorna woke up the next morning to find that the painting that had looked good under that light looked quite pink in the light of day. Like many CFL-based sources, this "full-spectrum" light had accentuated the greens in her paint, and she'd managed to compensate by mixing her paint in the opposite direction, a sort of orange/pink color.

 

For many color-sensitive jobs, CFLs, LEDs, and other new light sources are proving difficult to work with. And for others they just don't look right. For the past few years, we wondered how do we do this right? How do we pick the right color temperature? How do we find full-spectrum lights that are actually good enough? And why do even 90CRI lights look a little strange sometimes?

It seems many consumers are rebeling against the poor quality of CFL light:

In a September 18 letter to C.F.L. industry stakeholders, Richard Karney, Energy Star products manager, said that national sales of the CFL bulbs have declined 25 percent from their peak in 2007, with sales in some regions such as Vermont and parts of Massachusetts declining 35 to 50 percent…

 

Despite more than a decade of costly C.F.L. promotions — including giveaways, discounted prices and rebates — the bulbs have failed to capture the hearts (and sockets) of American consumers. Mr. Karney said that in regions where C.F.L. campaigns have been heaviest, 75 percent of screw-based sockets still contain incandescents. Nationally, about 90 percent of residential sockets are still occupied by incandescents, D.O.E. has reported.

The following consumers had this to say:

It's bad enough that I have to spend all day under fluorescent tubes at work. When I come home I just want a place to relax with pleasant lighting. The last thing I want is more fluorescent tubes in my own home. I've been to a friend's house who had switched out all her lighting with CFL's; it looks like a morgue. I hate it. It even makes me a little reluctant to want to go over to her house and visit.

I swtiched all my bulbs out with CFL's. I quickly realized that these new lights made it more difficult for me and my family to concentrate. I got a little headache whenever I had to work on filling out tax paperwork in my home office (I'm an accountant) and it became more frustrating to do all the work I had to do. My daughter began to start having trouble doing her homework. At the end of the day, I like to lay on the couch and read a book. But after changing out the lights in my living room, I found myself just not even wanting to read. It wasn't fun any more, it felt like I had to focus just to read the books I formerly enjoyed so much. I had enough of those new energy efficient lights so I gathered them all up into a big bag, took them back to the store to be recycled, and I haven't had any problems since. My daughter started doing all her homework again.

I think nazi's mistreatment of the jews has to be understood within the context of poverty and war escalating into attrocities.

It was not as if everything was wonderful and then, out of nowhere, everyone suddenly decided to exterminate the jews.

No, people were dying on a large scale, first through poverty, then through war, before the nazis decided to round up the jews. Hitler originally intended to ship the jews out somewhere else (like to Madagascar) at the start of the war.

The American occupation forces did not treat the germans any better than the nazis treated the jews.

One former American soldier, Martin Brech, now a Unitarian-Universalist minister, described what he witnessed during the American occupation of Germany:

I encountered a captain on a hill above the Rhine shooting down at a group of German civilian women with his .45 caliber pistol. When I asked,"Why?" he mumbled, "Target practice," and fired until his pistol was empty. I saw the women running for cover, but, at that distance, couldn't tell if any had been hit. They considered the Germans subhuman and worthy of extermination.

The Allied prison camps of Sinzig and Remagen, which stretched along the Rhine, would have made Auschwitz and Buchenwald seem like vacation resorts in comparison.

Few Americans are aware that such infamous camps as Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz stayed in business after the end of the war, only now packed with German captives, many of whom perished miserably.

"After the Reich: The Brutal History of Allied Occupation", Giles MacDonogh

Here are the contents of a trash bag found in a dumster right outside an abortion clinic from the 1960's:

Does it remind you of anything else?

In the United States alone there have been over 52 million unborn babies terminated since Roe versus Wade!

Perhaps the quickest and easiest way to justify murder is to establish the "non-humanity" of the intended victim.

No, as you can clearly see, Hitler's disregard for certain forms of human life was by no means unique.

I to have often wondered how he came to power and how he convinced so many to follow such a dark course.

I hope this post helps to answer your question

Was Hitler intrinsically evil or psychotic?

I don't think he was a particularly unusual individual in any way.

If we want to see his type of thinking still in action today, we have only to look at the pro-abortion lobby.*

He might not actually have been the monster that he is typically made out to be in the media.

did you know Hitler was a vegetarian?

So, they've made a heat pump from a LED?

It is not merely a heat pump. Heat pumps simply concentrate heat by transfering heat from one place to another.

The experiment that the researchers did transfers ambient heat into light. Unlike ambient heat, which is nearly impossible to exploit to do work without a heat differential, light is a form of energy that can be converted into other forms to perform work.

Energy is still conserved, but the device puts out more energy in the form of light than the electric current that powered it. Ambient heat, without any heat differential, would generally be considered a form of "free energy" if it could be harnessed to perform useful work.

http://phys.org/news/2012-03-efficiency.html

Apparently this device actually puts out more energy than it consumes, converting some of the ambient room temperature heat to light in the process.

I also want to mention that many CFL's actually consume 20% more power than their rated wattage, because the little ballast in the base of the tube takes additional energy also. That 14 Watt CFL may actually be consuming 16.8 Watts of power, while still only giving off 14 Watts of fluorescent light.

Not only that but CFL's (like all fluorescent lights) become dimmer and less efficient over time. If low quality phosphors are used, like in most of the inexpensive CFL's that were made in China, this effect can become fairly noticeable after only 8 months. But even higher quality flourescent lights become 70% dimmer towards the end of their useful lives. In other words, that CFL (or the tube by itself at least) may initially have a 50 lumens/watt efficiency, but this can quickly go down to 35 lumens/watt over the course of time.

While LED's also dim over the course of their lives, it happens at a much slower rate, and more importantly does not effect the actual efficiency, as proportionally less power is consumed.

CFL bulbs may cause SKIN DAMAGE

I have been testing a 14 watt LED light fitting in my recently extended utility room.

It is the brightest domestic light I have ever seen, considerably brighter than the 100 tungsten bulb and halogen fitting I used to have in there. Furhter the the new type of fitting distributes the light more evenly.

What brand is it?

It may seem much brighter, when you look at it from the front, but it likely is still giving off less light overall.

Remember, lumens are not a measure of total light output; they are a measure of light intensity at a given angle. LED lights are highly directional. What is the lumen output of your bulb towards the back side? Probably much less.

What really matters is how well a bulb can light a room. Unless it is recessed lighting in the ceiling, a 1000 lumen incandescent bulb will give off much more light than a "1000 lumen" incandescent bulb. The packaging on the LED light I got claimed it was 1200 lumens, yet it did not even put out as much light as a 95 Watt normal light bulb.

I just recently placed an order for an 18 Watt LED bulb, that I calculate will give off as much light as a 72 Watt incandescent bulb. It claims to give out a "neutral white" colored light. It was very difficult to find, I only found two companies on the internet that sell an LED bulb this bright which are not in the form of a highly directional flood light (the other company's light was in the shape of a flat panel with the LED's all on one side of it, obviously this shape would not be suitable to put in normal lamp fixtures). The total cost was 55 € including shipping. It will be interesting to see how it performs.

Scientific research is often politically, socially, and ideologically motivated.

Even a study that is completely unbiased by itself can still be part of the wider bias of selective investigation.

So for example, whereas the nazis selectively funded studies to try to uncover racial differences, the progressive academic institutions today selectively fund studies to try to show how different races are similar, while cutting off funding to studies (or researchers) that uncover inconvenient truths.