brucine (broo'-seen), 1) n. Pharm., Chem. a bitter, poisonous alkaloid, C23H26N2O4, obtained from the nux vomica tree; 2) n. Bruce Bortin's 'low-impact' weblog

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Low-Flow Lightbulb


Low-Flow Lightbulb, originally uploaded by dumbeast.

I just don't see the ecological advantage here.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

All fluorescent bulbs contain mercury - like the thousands of them you see in dumpsters all the time.

Bruce Bortin said...

Okay, this is all from memory, and it's from, like, high school science class, but not what they were teaching me, no, this is what I was reading outside of class to like, learn something. So inside the fluorescent tube, there's this vacuum, right, and a drop of mercury, and when there's a sufficient potential across the electrodes, the mercury gets excited to a higher energy state, and then when it relaxes, it emits a UV photon, which strikes the fluorescent coating of the tube and gets down-converted to a visible photon or two. These visible photons bounce off of shit and eventually hit your retina, and oh my goodness, you perceive light.

Yeah, I get that. I'm just saying, mercury?

And the thousands of fluorescent bulbs that I see in dumpsters all the time? They produce shit light (Scheisse-licht), too.

Anonymous said...

I agree with dumbeast. Shouldn't we be using LEDs instead of pouring mercury into the waste-stream? I think those squiggly bulbs are a crock.

My Blog List

Followers

Blog Archive