Putting the 'mental' in 'environmental'



  • I don't care what you think about climate change - this is patently absurd:

    Sending and receiving email makes up a full percent of a relatively green person’s annual carbon emissions, the equivalent of driving 200 miles.

    Dealing with spam, however, accounts for more than a fifth of the average account holder’s electricity use. Spam makes up a shocking 80 percent of all emails sent, but most people get rid of them as fast as you can say “delete.”

    So how does email stack up to snail mail? The per-message carbon cost of email is just 1/60th of the old-fashioned letter’s. But think about it — you probably send at least 60 times as many emails a year than you ever did letters.

    One way to go greener then is to avoid sending a bunch of short emails and instead build a longer message before you send it.



  • Yes, well, it sort of makes sense.
    I mean, none of us really believe that sending e-mail does not use electricity...

    Stil, there is no way in hell two 12KB e-mails use measurably more than one 24KB e-mail.

    Also, having my monitor on for my entire working day is probably less "green", so I should turn it off during breaks!  That way I can send all the e-mail I want and "Al Gore" it off by turning off the monitor.
    I also have to use Lotus Notes all day, so if I turn off the monitor while waiting for Notes to get done with whatever it's doing behind the scenes for about a half-hour of I/O lock per day I can offset even more e-mails!

    I'm starting to think I can make a bundle on inventing head-tracking device that turns off your monitor when you're not looking at it, and sell it as an "energy saver".



  • I thought it humorous that he tore the environmental guy apart but then lost all respect for him when I read:

    "A charge of even 1/100 cent per email would cost each of us about a penny per day but would cost a 10 million mail spammer $1000, probably higher than his or her expected yield from the spam. "

     Yeah? How are you going to collect that? How are you even going to enforce that? It's just data and I already pay for 250gb data transfer/month (Oh, I mean "unlimited"). No double-dipping. Charging for individual e-mails is one of the most retarded ideas I've had to read about today.



  • @renalexam said:

    I thought it humorous that he tore the environmental guy apart but then lost all respect for him when I read:

    "A charge of even 1/100 cent per email would cost each of us about a penny per day but would cost a 10 million mail spammer $1000, probably higher than his or her expected yield from the spam. "

     Yeah? How are you going to collect that? How are you even going to enforce that? It's just data and I already pay for 250gb data transfer/month (Oh, I mean "unlimited"). No double-dipping. Charging for individual e-mails is one of the most retarded ideas I've had to read about today.

    I don't think it's quite the same. If you know a bit about the practicalities, it turns into a very bad plan, but it's not obvious to a layman that it won't work. The logic is sound, unlike the energy-saving stupidity that wouldn't save energy.



  • @renalexam said:


    I already pay for 250gb data transfer/month (Oh, I mean "unlimited").

    Holy macron, 250GB/month is "unlimited"?!  I got a "could you pretty please not rape us" letter from my ISP when I passed 5TB throughput one month, and even then they included a "We realize you do pay for the right to use this bandwidth" and phrased it as a pollite request!
    Move to Sweden, where the girls are pretty, the bandwidth is cheap, and wookies tear the ears of your gundark!

    @renalexam said:


    Charging for individual e-mails is one of the most retarded ideas I've had to read about today.

    What's fun about it is that it's nowhere near a new idea.  This comes up from time to time in most spam discussions, but die out as soon as someone points their finger at it and brings up the enformcement issue, except when the person suggesting it doesn't have a clue how the internet works and suggests the US government just puts a tax on it, since they own the internet.



  • @Chewbacca said:

    Holy macron, 250GB/month is "unlimited"?!  I got a "could you pretty please not rape us" letter from my ISP when I passed 5TB throughput one month, and even then they included a "We realize you do pay for the right to use this bandwidth" and phrased it as a pollite request!
    Move to Sweden, where the girls are pretty, the bandwidth is cheap, and wookies tear the ears of your gundark!

    Yeah, I got a letter slapping me on the wrist a while back. http://www.comcast.net/terms/network/amendment/. I like that their "median usage" is 2-3GB per month. I find that hard to believe.



  • Plain fucking stupid.

    People will consider or imagine *anything* to avoid changing their "way of life".

    They have two main solutions : 1) the tiny and 2) the friggin' huge.

    The above post shows an example of the first. The second solution require an absolute faith in science. You know ? Blow up the clouds, build a planet-size shield, ... yeah of course guys, why not just replace the sun with an artificial one ? This should be even greener !

    And the same people say that old-fashionned environnementalists are *unrealistic* ... wtf ?!



  • One way to go greener then is to avoid sending a bunch of short emails and instead build a longer message before you send it.

     

    Everybody knows that most of the energy consumed by sending email is in overcoming inertia.   Makes sense to me. 

    In fact, I'll take it one step further.  I propose that you should send one email a day.  Address it to everyone you need to correspond with.  The just use twitter-style @ notation to address each individual within the body of the email.



  •  Most of the energy in sending an email goes to disk thrashing because Thunderbird is updating its search index.

     

    So yeah, I'm glad about my brand new WD Caviar Green data drive.



  • @Chewbacca said:

    I'm starting to think I can make a bundle on inventing head-tracking device that turns off your monitor when you're not looking at it, and sell it as an "energy saver".
    That idea sounds familiar to me. I think someone might have tried that already.

    Anyway, we could all start saving energy now by using Blackle instead of Google! (nevermind that I have to turn my monitor's brightness high up so I can read what's on that page)



  • @renalexam said:

    Yeah, I got a letter slapping me on the wrist a while back. http://www.comcast.net/terms/network/amendment/. I like that their "median usage" is 2-3GB per month. I find that hard to believe.
     

    Not if you know what the median of a sample really is. It's basically the least truthful statistic in common usage.

    The median is defined as the value that separates the upper half of your sample from the lower half. Consider the case where you have 100 users who use 200 GB a month, and 101 users who use 3 GB a month. What's your sample median? 3 GB/month. What's your sample average? 101 GB/month. 

    Even worse: let's say you're Comcast, and want to lie to people without saying anything that's actually untrue. So when you say "median monthly data usage", you give a very, very large population - "residential customers". Who's a residential customer? Grandma, who uses a total of 200 MB/month because all she does is check e-mail (and nowadays, Facebook). Joe out in the country, who has a shitty dial-up equivalent connection, and couldn't get 3 GB/month if he maxed out his bandwidth. 

    When you calculate the media, each and every one of those low-usage people has a far greater effect on the sample median than is warranted; for instance, let's assume that Comcasts' userbase is characteristically separated into three tiers: super low (~100-200 MB), low(2-3 GB), and high(~100-200 GB), with relatively even populations. The sample median will never tell you about the highs or super lows, assuming that all populations grow equally.

    Basically, whenever someone tells you a median, they're trying to hide the upper and/or lower extremities of their sample.



  • @Zecc said:

    Anyway, we could all start saving energy now by using Blackle instead of Google!

    Is that site serious? I really can't tell...



  • @Chewbacca said:

    Filed under: DO NOT PRINT THIS MESSAGE!

    We had a crazy "do not print this email" lady at our office for awhile. She would lecture us if we printed 4-5 copies of a 2-page document to have available at a meeting, even though half the people in the department didn't have laptops (at the time) and the conference room didn't have a projector.

    Of course, the worst part was that she flew *all the time*. Seattle to New York. Then on to Brazil. Then to San Fran. Then back to Brazil. Then London. Then Philly. Then Seattle again. In the course of like 3 months. I actually tried to explain to her once that:
    1) Paper trees are farmed now, and recycling is required by law. Using paper doesn't contribute to deforestation anymore, and hasn't for about 20 years now.
    2) A single one of her flights used up more carbon than all the paper production for our entire office for an entire year. And she flew at least 25-30 times a year. Apparently she thinks airliners are magical machines powered by good intentions... what a hypocrite.

    She got fired, er, "suddenly resigned." She was as incompetent at everything else as she was at environmentalism.



  • @toth said:

    @Zecc said:
    Anyway, we could all start saving energy now by using Blackle instead of Google!
    Is that site serious? I really can't tell...

     

    Serious or not, the joke's on them.  Most monitors nowadays emit black light when rendering the color black.  Of course, everyone knows that black light == UV, which is higher energy than visible light.  So much for saving enegy. 



  • @toth said:

    @Zecc said:
    Anyway, we could all start saving energy now by using Blackle instead of Google!

    Is that site serious? I really can't tell...

     

    Well they do mention in their FAQ (sort of) that the site does dick all for a standard backlit LCD.  This is the most rediculous idea I've seen today.  These are the same people that unplug their microwaves at night to save on the cost of the LED display and unplug their TV shit to save on the standby LEDs.



  • @pauly said:

    These are the same people that unplug their microwaves at night to save on the cost of the LED display and unplug their TV shit to save on the standby LEDs.
    I'm a layman in this area, but I think this standby-mode electricity consumption may well be a real issue.



  • @frits said:

    Serious or not, the joke's on them.  Most monitors nowadays emit black light when rendering the color black.  Of course, everyone knows that black light == UV, which is higher energy than visible light.  So much for saving enegy.
    Yeah, but it's at a lower intensity, so it kind of evens out.  (This is why you can't get a tan from monitors -- believe me, otherwise I'd be Brazilian by now.)  If I recall what I've read from Popular Science correctly, the color magenta -- Argeby's scientific color coordinate number 16711935 under hierarchical decimal conversion -- uses up the most energy to display.  That's why you'll sometimes here magenta being called anti-green in physics.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    We had a crazy "do not print this email" lady at our office for awhile. She would lecture us if we printed 4-5 copies of a 2-page document to have available at a meeting, even though half the people in the department didn't have laptops (at the time) and the conference room didn't have a projector.
    I used to work for an enviro-nutter who insisted on re-using paper if it only had printing on one side - to the extent of de-stapling letters that came in, smoothing out crumpled sheets, etc. This eco-friendly approach cost him a new printer every six months or so, not to mention regular maintenance visits by diesel-fume-belching white van man. Some people just will not be told.



  • @pauly said:

    These are the same people that unplug their microwaves at night to save on the cost of the LED display and unplug their TV shit to save on the standby LEDs.
     

    Standby consumption is a real concern and has nothing to do with LEDs.



  • @dhromed said:

    @pauly said:

    These are the same people that unplug their microwaves at night to save on the cost of the LED display and unplug their TV shit to save on the standby LEDs.
     

    Standby consumption is a real concern and has nothing to do with LEDs.

     

    On some things, sure.  I was referring to electronics that don't power much more than a standby LED, infrared sensor, and switch circuit.  I'm not versed in the art, but I assume this can't be more than a few hundred milliwatts of power.  To me that's just not worth unplugging things.

    When I wrote that, I was thinking of my friend's wife who unplugs all of this stuff religiously each night.  She claims enormous savings.  I've not been told any numbers, but I can't imagine it's more than a few dollars considering it's things like a microwave, television, receiver, and coffee maker.


  • BINNED

    @dhromed said:

    Most of the energy in sending an email goes to disk thrashing because Thunderbird is updating its search index.
     

    If you think Thunderbird is slow, I'll refer you to this:

     

    @Chewbacca said:


    I also have to use Lotus Notes all day, so if I turn off the monitor while waiting for Notes to get done with whatever it's doing behind the scenes for about a half-hour of I/O lock per day I can offset even more e-mails!

    Seriously, use Notes once and Thunderbird will feel like FTL-bird.



  •  A standard cheap-ass coffee maker's switch is wired directly in-line with the power cord. It draws no power when not making or warming coffee. Only a timer-equipped model should be drawing any power, which won't work if you unplug it. If you don't use the timer function, then why did you buy a coffee maker with a timer?



  • On the OP - it seems to me that with the cost of overhead, it is indeed cheaper on electricity to send the data as one set (so sending one 24KB e-mail instead of 2x12KB) (Similar to how your disk is generally faster writing one big file than lots of smaller files, even if not at all related).  If this is true, of course, it still doesn't offset the cost of just turning off your monitor or computer, and the savings are very, very low.



  • @pauly said:

    When I wrote that, I was thinking of my friend's wife who unplugs all of this stuff religiously each night.  She claims enormous savings.
     

    Oh that's total crackpot, yes.




  • @topspin said:

    @dhromed said:

    Most of the energy in sending an email goes to disk thrashing because Thunderbird is updating its search index.
     

    If you think Thunderbird is slow, I'll refer you to this:

     

    @Chewbacca said:


    I also have to use Lotus Notes all day, so
    if I turn off the monitor while waiting for Notes to get done with
    whatever it's doing behind the scenes for about a half-hour of I/O lock
    per day I can offset even more e-mails!

    Seriously, use Notes once and Thunderbird will feel like FTL-bird.

    No kidding



  • @Sutherlands said:

    If this is true, of course, it still doesn't offset the cost of just turning off your monitor or computer, and the savings are very, very low.
     

    If you really want to put a dent in electricity consumption,  I'm afraid one is going to have to give up the following:

    • food 
    • computer gaming
    • tea & coffee
    • music
    • television

    Fridges, computers, TVs, amplifiers and %$#! water cookers are absolutely awesome at sucking up loads of power.

    That's why I sigh the sigh of the informed when I watch all that effort to demonize the incandescent bulb.


  • Re: Putting the 'GREEN' in 'CAPS LOCK INDICATOR'

     

    MORE LIKE CRUISE CONTROL FOR POWER SAVING B)

     

    (23% LESS BITS)



  • @dhromed said:

    That's why I sigh the sigh of the informed when I watch all that effort to demonize the incandescent bulb.
    To be fair, the incandescent light does seem a bit rubbish in this day and age. How should we make light? By heating up a bit of wire until it's so hot it glows, that's an elegant solution - obviously the same level of tech as the flat-panel screens and wifi...


  • BINNED

    @Lingerance said:

    @topspin said:
    [Lotus Notes rant]
    No kidding
     

    Wow, great read.



  • @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

    To be fair, the incandescent light does seem a bit rubbish in this day and age.
     

    Agreed, though I should note that reality doesn't  usually care about our romantic notions of tech level.

    Filament bulbs are cheap. Everything else is not. Result: bulbs.



  • Not to mention, light from a hot glowing piece of wire is our best approximation of light from hot glowing things. Show me a fluorescent that doesn't look like ass, and I'll show you some overpriced lighting!


  • Garbage Person

    @renalexam said:

    Yeah, I got a letter slapping me on the wrist a while back. http://www.comcast.net/terms/network/amendment/. I like that their "median usage" is 2-3GB per month. I find that hard to believe.
    "Median usage" - as measured in a retirement community circa 1999. However, if they update that policy every year or two with a new number based on *CURRENT* median usage (multiplied by 100, as they've done here) I'll consider it a "fair" system



  • @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

    @dhromed said:
    That's why I sigh the sigh of the informed when I watch all that effort to demonize the incandescent bulb.
    To be fair, the incandescent light does seem a bit rubbish in this day and age. How should we make light? By heating up a bit of wire until it's so hot it glows, that's an elegant solution - obviously the same level of tech as the flat-panel screens and wifi...

    Until LED light bulbs become reasonably priced (a dimmable, 100W equivalent must be under $20) there is still no reasonable alternative to incandescent. "Energy saving" light bulbs take ages to warm up (and once you get used to this you don't turn them off when you leave the room), produce poorer quality light (less spectrum, resulting in eyestrain) and have a slower degradation (which means that you don't immediately notice the terrible lighting as the bulb gets old).

    TRWTF is that my government banned decent light bulbs before a reasonable replacement entered the market.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @mallard said:

    TRWTF is that my government banned decent light bulbs before a reasonable replacement entered the market.
    German "heatball" wheeze outwits EU light bulb ban
    Rotthaeuser studied EU legislation and realized that because the inefficient old bulbs produce more warmth than light -- he calculated heat makes up 95 percent of their output, and light just 5 percent -- they could be sold legally as heaters.



  • @PJH said:

    German "heatball" wheeze outwits EU light bulb ban
     

    Awesome.

    And yet, I don't htink this will fly for very long.



  • @mallard said:

    TRWTF is that my government banned decent light bulbs before a reasonable replacement entered the market.
     

    THIS²



  • @pauly said:

    Well they do mention in their FAQ (sort of) that the site does dick all for a standard backlit LCD.
    Does it? Don't most cheap LCDs do dynamic contrast nowadays, which dims the backlight when the picture is dark? (not that I'm endorsing the site)



  • @mallard said:

    @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
    @dhromed said:
    That's why I sigh the sigh of the informed when I watch all that effort to demonize the incandescent bulb.
    To be fair, the incandescent light does seem a bit rubbish in this day and age. How should we make light? By heating up a bit of wire until it's so hot it glows, that's an elegant solution - obviously the same level of tech as the flat-panel screens and wifi...

    Until LED light bulbs become reasonably priced (a dimmable, 100W equivalent must be under $20) there is still no reasonable alternative to incandescent. "Energy saving" light bulbs take ages to warm up (and once you get used to this you don't turn them off when you leave the room), produce poorer quality light (less spectrum, resulting in eyestrain) and have a slower degradation (which means that you don't immediately notice the terrible lighting as the bulb gets old).

    TRWTF is that my government banned decent light bulbs before a reasonable replacement entered the market.

    Hey, I'm not saying we should get rid of all incandescent bulbs now - just that there are certain technologies we use that are, frankly, a bit embarrassing. Two prime candidates are the incandescent bulb and the internal combustion engine, because in both cases they're horrible (if highly developed) kludges with ridiculously low efficiency. I mean, the idea that my car has a damn radiator on it, to deliberately throw away a large portion of the energy in the burnt petrol - offends the engineer in me.

    For me, it comes down to whether an invention basically just uses brute force for cost reasons to achieve its aim. If it does, then it's not an admirable long-term solution, generally. So I wouldn't replace incandescents with CFLs at the moment, but I think an adequate replacement is something worth working towards.



  • @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

    Hey, I'm not saying we should get rid of all incandescent bulbs now - just that there are certain technologies we use that are, frankly, a bit embarrassing. Two prime candidates are the incandescent bulb and the internal combustion engine, because in both cases they're horrible (if highly developed) kludges with ridiculously low efficiency. I mean, the idea that my car has a damn radiator on it, to deliberately throw away a large portion of the energy in the burnt petrol - offends the engineer in me.

    For me, it comes down to whether an invention basically just uses brute force for cost reasons to achieve its aim. If it does, then it's not an admirable long-term solution, generally. So I wouldn't replace incandescents with CFLs at the moment, but I think an adequate replacement is something worth working towards.

     

    I wholeheartedly subscribe to your idealistic notion of technology.



  • @ender said:

    Does it? Don't most cheap LCDs do dynamic contrast nowadays, which dims the backlight when the picture is dark? (not that I'm endorsing the site)

    I'm sure that works great if there's nothing else bright on your screen, like that obnoxious browser chrome.

    I suppose if you full-screen your browser and only visit Blackle, though, you'll be making a difference!



  • Hmmm..  Paper Towels vs. Electric "Hand Dryers" 

    Discuss Hygiene vs. Ecological Impact



  • "The Chinese use 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks every year, which adds up to 1.7 million cubic metres of timber or 25 million full-grown trees, which means badly depleted forests." [1][2]

    Then again, the Chinese population is at about 1,3 billion, so presumably they only eat with chopsticks about 35 times per year?




  • @Zecc said:

    "The Chinese use 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks every year,
    which adds up to 1.7 million cubic metres of timber or 25 million
    full-grown trees, which means badly depleted forests." [1][2]

    Then again, the Chinese population is at about 1,3 billion, so presumably they only eat with chopsticks about 35 times per year?

    No; they make the rest of their disposable chopsticks out of ivory. I'll leave it to you to imagine the effect this has on the Chinese elephant population.



  • @Zecc said:

    "The Chinese use 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks every year,
    which adds up to 1.7 million cubic metres of timber or 25 million
    full-grown trees, which means badly depleted forests." [1][2]

    Then again, the Chinese population is at about 1,3 billion, so presumably they only eat with chopsticks about 35 times per year?


    Ahem. Chopsticks are made out of bamboo, which is grass, not timber or trees. And an incredibly fast growing grass, at that.

    Let's be conservative, and assume you can only get 100 pairs of chopsticks out of each foot of bamboo, that bamboo only grows ten feet per year, and that each bamboo plant requires a whole square meter to itself. Even with those ridiculously conservative estimates, you're looking at just 50 square kilometres - ~20 sq miles - to grow all the bamboo needed.



  • @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

    Ahem. Chopsticks are made out of bamboo, which is grass, not timber or trees. And an incredibly fast growing grass, at that.

    Let's be conservative, and assume you can only get 100 pairs of chopsticks out of each foot of bamboo, that bamboo only grows ten feet per year, and that each bamboo plant requires a whole square meter to itself. Even with those ridiculously conservative estimates, you're looking at just 50 square kilometres - ~20 sq miles - to grow all the bamboo needed.

    I thought as much. But the articles I linked to speak of the need for government to apply measures to counter an environmental disaster.

    Who should I believe? I'm not that interested so as to spend any more time researching, so I guess I'll drop the issue and go worry about something else.



  • @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

    I mean, the idea that my car has a damn radiator on it, to deliberately throw away a large portion of the energy in the burnt petrol - offends the engineer in me.

    Then your engineer needs to go back to school to learn a little more about thermodynamics.



  • @Qwerty said:

    @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

    I mean, the idea that my car has a damn radiator on it, to deliberately throw away a large portion of the energy in the burnt petrol - offends the engineer in me.

    Then your engineer needs to go back to school to learn a little more about thermodynamics.

    You've lost me. Are you saying that the heat in the radiator isn't just wasted? Heat is an unwanted byproduct of an IC engine*. It would appear that by dissipating it into the atmosphere without using it to do work, it's being wasted - and that conversely, if we were, say, able to directly convert heat to electricity, we could harness it and use it to improve performance. Am I missing something obvious?

    *With caveats about diesels in particular, and warm-running efficiencies in general.



  • @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

    You've lost me. Are you saying that the heat in the radiator isn't just wasted? Heat is an unwanted byproduct of an IC engine*. It would appear that by dissipating it into the atmosphere without using it to do work, it's being wasted - and that conversely, if we were, say, able to directly convert heat to electricity, we could harness it and use it to improve performance. Am I missing something obvious?
    I don't know what it's like in your country, but here we have have mandatory hobo purging going on 7 months of the year and that excess heat shields us from it.



  • @mallard said:

    @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
    @dhromed said:
    That's why I sigh the sigh of the informed when I watch all that effort to demonize the incandescent bulb.
    To be fair, the incandescent light does seem a bit rubbish in this day and age. How should we make light? By heating up a bit of wire until it's so hot it glows, that's an elegant solution - obviously the same level of tech as the flat-panel screens and wifi...
    Until LED light bulbs become reasonably priced (a dimmable, 100W equivalent must be under $20) there is still no reasonable alternative to incandescent. "Energy saving" light bulbs take ages to warm up (and once you get used to this you don't turn them off when you leave the room), produce poorer quality light (less spectrum, resulting in eyestrain) and have a slower degradation (which means that you don't immediately notice the terrible lighting as the bulb gets old). TRWTF is that my government banned decent light bulbs before a reasonable replacement entered the market.

    I sometimes wonder if everyone's buying shitty CFLs, or if I just got really lucky with my batch of CFLs. The ones I have at my apartment, which have completely replaced incandescents, turn on instantly. No warm-up period; no "it's getting bright enough to see stuff" interval... it simply turns on. The last CFL I remember having the warm-up issues is the one my mom uses at her living room, and that one must be like 10 years old now.

    Of course, I would love to have the LED variants, mostly because I would like to have a dimming light in my room, something that I can't get with CFLs.

    By the way ... I hate disconnecting stuff because of the "standby drain", so I simply switch off the UPS/regulators for that effect.



  • @danixdefcon5 said:

    I sometimes wonder if everyone's buying shitty CFLs, or if I just got really lucky with my batch of CFLs. The ones I have at my apartment, which have completely replaced incandescents, turn on instantly. No warm-up period; no "it's getting bright enough to see stuff" interval... it simply turns on. The last CFL I remember having the warm-up issues is the one my mom uses at her living room, and that one must be like 10 years old now.

    You're in Mexico, it says, and Wikipedia says that Mexico has 60Hz mains electricity. Unless I misunderstand how fluorescents work, they flicker at the mains frequency. Most countries have lower frequencies - 50Hz is common - which might be what causes the difference in perception.

    Also, the first gen energy savers were dire, which gave them a bad name. I suspect there's also a difference in quality related to price, and at least here in the UK, it's only the cheapest bulbs that are subsidised. I bought a bagful for 10p each a while ago, when the decent quality ones were £3-4 - but the unsubsidised price for the ones I got would be about £1.50. They're not woeful once they warm up, but they have a noticeable dimness at first, and even go through a period where they buzz quite loudly before they settle down.

    If you want to get into the realms of pure speculation, I'd hypothesise that humans can actually detect infra-red radiation to some extent, so incandescent bulbs may really give a 'warmer' light because they emit heat.


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