True, it was bending unless they screwed up and blew too hard. 'Glass blower' was just a sexier job description than 'glass bender'. I liked the one where you heat the middle and pull the tube apart to make pipettes.
The fun part was when we got into quartz glass. Soda-lime glass can be worked with an oxyacetylene flame but quartz needs hydrogen. For industrial use the supplier just drops a tube trailer:
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You pay demurrage on the trailer and when it's close to empty they just swap another one out. But you need a permit to have the trailer on the premises. For some reason when you go to a local government office and say 'hydrogen' they finish the sentence with 'bomb'. They should have been more worried about the liquid oxygen tanks but that's government for you.
There's hope. They learned not to mix melamine with the dog food and kill Fifi. The difference is in China when they figure out who had the bright idea they shoot him. In the US the company is fined 5% of one day's profits and the beat goes on.
I'll bet the have healthy lungs from blowing all day. Glass, that is.
(-: Those twisty spirals are what will kill CFLs. When both bulbs hit commodity pricing (and they're close) it will still take more effort to build a CFL so they'll be just slightly more expensive. Besides, the design is poor in that screwing them in puts in inordinate amount of stress on the two places where the tube enters the electronics pods. And then there's the ever-lengthening time it takes for the older ones to come up to full brightness.
The irony is that after having paid $10 or more per CFL in the beginning, I am now reluctant to stock up on $2 LED bulbs because I think they'll go much lower. Under a buck in just a year or two.
I've got Maxwell's Demon locked up in the liquor cabinet because he refused to keep sort hot molecules for cooler ones in my perpetual motion machine.
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I am on the edge about it. I like the diffuse light but the newer higher-efficiency ones really do flicker.
Sounds like a plan. I am still enamored of the LED tube replacement even it if means rewiring the cord and disconnecting the ballast.
I hear you. It's a conundrum.
Ditto. )-;
For some odd reason in addition to the walkway lamps burning out frequently for some odd reason the scorpions seemed to like them, too.
Yes, I believe bioluminescence is quite cool but also quite dim, usually very green and obviously not easily rechargeable. But I think it points towards a future technology where heat won't be as much of a problem and almost all of the power a bulb consumes is emitted as visible light. We've been slowly walking down that path for the last 100 years so it seems almost inevitable.
Agreed. I have been using swing arm clamp lamps with both a circular fluorescent and a regular bulb socket forever. Got some circular bulb magnifier units, too. As I get older, I need more directly light on the subject. I've been told that bluish colored light is better for aging eyes since the eye's tissue yellows as you age. I was disappointed to discover that a replacement "showerhead" 100 LED flashlight I bought was using yellowish LEDs instead of the blue ones. Really makes a difference for me.
Actually, glass blowing supposedly fries your lungs! Not just the super heated air but, also, the chemicals and particulate matter that inevitably get inhaled in the process.
I keep a circular-fluorescent-with-A19 lamp on one side of my work area (with a 60W "Reveal" bulb installed) and a large magnifier with a halogen bulb on the other. Beneath the circular lamp, I keep a ~30X stereomicroscope for really fine work. A gooseneck camera allows anything placed in front of my middle monitor to be displayed on that monitor (effectively providing magnification). Finally, I have an autofocus camera that feeds a set of "electronic eyeglasses" so I can explore small or hard to access objects without having to keep a monitor in view. E.g., looking at the connections on the back side of a computer without having to drag the computer out from under the workbench!
Ditto. I need it to see finer detail *and* more accurately resolve fine distinctions in color.
But, I've always needed more light than most folks -- despite no pathological problems. In college, my roommate would turn off the overhead light when he came into the room during the day -- he felt the four-bay window provided adequate light. But, not for me!
I tried some *very* blue LED floodlights in the up-lights in my office. Really strong color bias! Looking at the illuminated windows from the outside of the house made the difference between these and the 'regular" lights very obvious! ("Don, what's wrong with the light in that room?")
But, they weren't bright enough so I swapped them back out.
I tried that approach, initially. But, the little bugger kept trying to extort money from me! Kept threatening to kill Schrodinger's cat! I never got up the nerve to peek in the box to see if he carried out his twisted threats!! Sick little bugger! :-/
Electronic ballast?
I'm very sensitive to light, shadow, reflection, etc. E.g., when I installed the overhead lighting in the kitchen, I very carefully considered where I would be standing when *needing* the light most (e.g., food prep, cooking, etc.) to ensure their placement wouldn't end up casting shadows (*MY* shadow!) in my work area!
(!!) Hmm, I haven't noticed that. I rarely have to "service" the fixtures so, for all I know, they could be *packed* with scorpions! The incandescent bulbs we've used in these places haven't lasted long at all. But, then again, I was using 20W units so they might naturally be short-lived.
Off the edge of my memory, I think California deregulated half the equation (supply price but not the consumer price, was it?) and the power companies all starved and went out of business.
I suspect in Montana, there wasn't really a free market. Many places have a monopoly provider, and no competition.
Ah, the deflationary spiral :) I'll defer my purchase because the item will be cheaper next Tuesday.
I'll have to admit I've been impressed by the advances in LED technology. I have an old Black Diamond headlamp with two LEDs that put out enough light to navigate a well maintained trail. Next to it is the $20 Duracell 1000 CP flashlight that lets me see what that deer 100 yards away is up to.
What I'm waiting for is the LED driving light kits for bikes to come down a little more. When you live with the aforementioned Bambis wandering around at night the more light the better on a bike.
Enron CEO Kenneth Lay mocked the efforts by the California state government to thwart the practices of the energy wholesalers, saying, "In the final analysis, it doesn't matter what you crazy people in California do, because I got smart guys who can always figure out how to make money."
There's always someone who can figure out how to make money. Lay got lucky and died before going to jail for the rest of his life. All that money didn't do him much good.
Only my main shower, I replaced hte head when I first got here. This was
1983 so it wasn't even water-saving, I guess, but I wanted water-wasting. Well, I don't take long showers nor do I put the water on very far.
In Jordan, I'd only had showers for weeks and the hotel room had a bath, but the built-in stopper didn't work. They'd broken it on purpose to prevent people from taking baths. But I really wanted one, so I took the plastic-like wrapper from a candy bar, opened it up and put it over the drain. It worked well.
Well, they've learned more about how to cheat and not get caught. (-: Remember the recent laminated wood/formaldehyde incident? They offered two qualities of flooring. One that could never pass the test and one that could and for the right number of reminbi's they'd somehow manage to mark the failing flooring as A-OK. But they wanted to make sure they had accomplices. (-:
Odd that the socialist Chinese understand the concept of personal responsibility better than we do. Our entire economy crashed and very few people were held responsible. One idiot who led the pack of SOBs that brought on the Crash of 2008 even had the chutzpah to try suing the US for bailing out AIG.
I am pretty sure he would have gotten a bullet in the head had he tried that stunt in China. Then I suspect his family would be summarily stripped of all their wealth, whether or not it came from criminal acts. I don't think the Chinese are as mindful of bills of attainder as were our founding fathers.
Punishing a bad guy's family is very profitable, as the English Tudor kings discovered. Yesterday it was Castle Bowman, today it's castle Green. Tomorrow it's whomever didn't piss the king off's castle. A very powerful motive for not effing with the King. Was it "History of the World" where he says: "Aahhh! It's good to be the king."
I haven't seen Schrodinger's cat since Pavlov's dog starting hanging around. I'm afraid to look in the box.
I really don't know - they are sealed and I just swap them out. I'll look more carefully if I decide to keep them. I just know there are green ended bulbs, narrow tube bulbs, metal ended bulbs. I suppose I should go to Google and figure it all out but the fixtures aren't very well marked so I am not even sure what I would be able to determine what was what.
That's why I am so found of my 100 LED "showerhead" flashlight. The four inch diameter head is broad enough for the LEDs to cast a very eery (but easy to see with) light that doesn't have the harsh shadows of other flashlights with much smaller light sources. Plus the bluish tint really counteracts the aging yellow eyeball problem. They aren't well-made, unfortunately, and many have failed. But they are so well-suited to the task I just keep buying replacements. Harbor Freight sells one that came sealed tight (not a return) with 3 of the 100 LEDs already DOA. I could live with that if the LEDs were bluish, not yellowish and if the battery compartment contacts didn't fall out after the first use.
That's a heart-warming thought. Last month I saw a small paper hornet's nest on the side of the house. By the time I got to it last night it was the size of a human head. I got to use the yellow Tyvek jumpsuit, face mask and respirator I bought as a Halloween costume (Walter White of Breaking Bad).
I forget what sort of bulbs he was using but I do recall they soaked up the heat all day long and that he had to use fairly well-sealed (meaning poorly ventilated) units to keep the scorpions and other vermin out. I think it eventually turned out that all the bulbs he bought were from a defective batch. The early adopters get the arrows in the back, just like the Old West pioneers.
It was that way for most states and far worse for others. Providers created artificial blackouts forcing many state electricity providers to then buy extremely high priced juice on the spot market from companies that were fronts for the very same owners.
Where I live as soon as the production of electricity was a "for profit" enterprise rates have soared, maintenance has become the subject of Congressional hearings because it's so bad and they plague me with robot phone calls about degree days. Yeah, I bought central air just to turn it off during the hottest days of the year.
Damn dog... drooling all over the place! And who the hell hung that
**BELL** on his collar???
Until you do, we can, at least, *pretend* all is well!
[I wonder if even *listening* for a tell-tale purr is considered risky?]
I think the replacements make the most sense when you have things like "in-ceiling fixtures" as are common in businesses. For a "shop light hanging on chains", I think you have more options.
I am not fond of HF products. I might buy an *anvil* from them (i.e., just a block of steel!) but the more "involved" the tools get, the less confidence I have in their offerings.
[I used to work for a major US hand-tool manufacturer so I see lots of "issues" in their products that never would have made it through our "quality" screening]
That said, I have several of their disposable DMM's lying around the house. They're small and a lot easier to use than my bulky 6.5 digit DMM :-/
If it was otherwise reliable, you could try (?) replacing the LEDs. IMO, the toughest part of a product is the packaging.
ROTFL! Yeah, critters don't stop working just because you've turned your interest elsewhere!
I cut down a tree some years back. I was slow getting the last of the "cut logs" out of the back yard. When I got around to it, termites had eaten the underside of the log out!
Why keep the critters out? Were they interfering with the light distribution or cosmetics? If they only represent a problem when he has to *open* the enclosure, just do so with gloves on, etc.
Our fixtures are essentially open at the bottom. So, something *could* crawl inside. But, unless they crawled on top of the bulb, we'd never be able to detect that without disassembling the fixture.
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