Charles Curley's Weblog

The standard view of energy saving devices such as LED lighting is that they will save energy. Well, sure. If I can replace a 30 watt incandescent bulb with a source of equivalent light that draws only two watts, I'll save energy, right?

It ain't necessarily so. I might use that light source more. I might use more of them and light things up more. I might use entirely new applications, like the little solar cell and battery driven LED lights that people put in their yards and gardens.

A new study suggests that if we extrapolate historical and pre-historical trends, we arrive at, not great energy savings, but rather greater use of light sources. And that will mean greater human productivity and greater human enjoyment of life.

In this paper, we provide new projections of the consumption of light and associated energy. Rather than assuming that consumption of light is insensitive to the cost of light, we assume a sensitivity consistent with simple extrapolations of past behaviour into the future. In addition, we analyse the interplay between lighting, human productivity and energy consumption. After all, lighting is consumed not to waste energy, but to increase human productivity—energy consumption is simply the cost of that increased productivity. That this has been so in the past is self-evident; that it will be so in the future is not unlikely.

Which means that new lighting technologies won't necessarily lead to energy savings, less carbon, etc. So all the puritans who want us to live in some fantastic pseudo-primitive ascetic idyll are pushing technologies that will lead to increased and more conspicuous consumption.

Sick of robots calling you up to waste your time to tell you why you should vote for Senator Porcine?

A group of young environmentalists is helping voters turn the tables on politicians.

The Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) has set up a website that allows voters to deliver an automated telephone message to their local federal MP.

The messages, known as robocalls, are more commonly associated with presidential campaigns in the United States.

Robocalls to give MPs taste of own medicine

I don't suppose it calls their home phones? Or their mobiles? At three in the morning?

Vivien Kellems would likely approve.

In the 1970s, Connecticut Republican governor Thomas Meskill made a back-room deal with the Democrats that he would sign a state income tax into law if they would give him some other things he wanted. On the last day of the session, the legislature, dominated by the Democrats, passed the income tax and Meskill signed it. Kellems, already disenchanted with the federal income tax, went into high gear. She started calling people, who called people, etc. And they called their state legislators. At 3:00 AM. (Recall, this was before caller ID and before answering machines became ubiquitous.) They snail mailed their legislators used teabags.

Gov. Meskill called an emergency session of the legislature, and they repealed the state income tax. Thanks to Vivien Kellems, her tea bags and her phone calls. To add ignominy to insult, Meskill did not seek the Republican nomination for re-election because of the income tax and the back room deal that brought it in. Meskill later admitted that the income tax was the greatest political mistake of his career.

There is an elegance to the universe. Computer security researchers cracked the computers that control a botnet. Apparently the botnet operators were sloppy in their security. "Ain't nobody gonna crack us, mate."

You don't suppose the botnet controllers were running Windows, do you?

Users of Firefox on Windows should note that the botnet code has hooks for Firefox. So maybe Firefox on Windows isn't all that much more secure than Internet Exploder on Windows?