Yet another geek blog

13 January 2009

Fluorescent with Rage about CFL Bulbs

Incandescent light bulbs increase your heating bill.

My New Years resolution was to stop getting would up about idiotic science stories in the press. But if I read one more time that incandescent light bulbs reduce your heating bills then they will be able to plug me into the national grid.

The Daily Mail has declared war on energy efficient light bulbs and this bizarre myth seems to be everywhere:

• John Wright
• Cleverchileboy
• Mike Moyle
• Pcoleman
• Steve Glenne Smith
• Andystopps

It was even reported as a fact in a pro-CFL article in the Guardian, although here it was only thought to be true if no lampshades were used.

So Here Comes the Science Bit

• Incandescent bulbs are energy inefficient.
• Therefore they are hot.
• Therefore they heat your room.
• Therefore your heating system needs to do less work.
• Therefore, (if we ignore the cost of running the bulb), your bills are lower.

The bit in brackets you will only read here.

What does 'Efficiency' Actually Mean?

It can mean many things. In this context, it is a measure of how much of what you want you get for your money. So, I have a bar-heater and a light-bulb and I measure how much heat and light they give me for every pound I put in to the meter. My bar-heat gives me 10 units of heat and 1 unit of light and my light bulb that gives me 1 unit of heat and 10 units of light.

What is the cheapest way for me to heat my room to 20°C? Obviously the bar-heater is 10 times cheaper. So, for the very lowest bill possible, 100% of my heat must be bought from the cheapest source. If any of my 20°C is bought from anything but the cheapest source then the cost will be higher. The hotter my bulb becomes, the more of my 20°C will be provided by it and the higher my bill will be.

I need to spell this out:

Heat from anything but the cheapest source can only increase the cost.

So Why the Confusion?

I can only imagine that people somehow believe that the heat from a bulb comes free with the light.

The lamp shade idea is presumably caused by the fact that you cannot directly feel heat being radiated through a shade. But the bulb is heating the shade and the shade is heating the air so all the heat is still there.

Labels: technology

3 October 2008

The War Machines are Here

As the war on Afghanistan gets messier, the boundaries of who is fighting who become harder to define and the tactics used, on both sides, become more and more desperate. In the middle of all this, stories like this flare up and are then forgotten.

• Suspected US drone kills six in Pakistan hit (www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/02/pakistan.usforeignpolicy)
• US drone strike kills eight militants in Pakistan: officials (http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5g5k6lGPAZTdG4hdOkCLQ-L79WCLg)

A Robot has killed a Man

Yet again, we have crossed a line without even noticing. I admit that it might not seem to be much of a line. Booby traps and landmines have been killing people for centuries. And attacks have been ordered on the basis of information provided by machines.

Nevertheless, we need to stop and think about the fact that the point of decision has moved. A human being is dead because a machine decided to kill him. The robot/drone was allowed to kill by human decision and deployed by human decision but the actual decision to kill an actual human was made by software.

I am not even going to get in to the fact that was done in a country that is not even part of the battlefield against an enemy that is not an army but an ill-defined mass of tribal, political and religeous affiliations.

The Future

What of the future? More of the same. Sending in machines rather than people is an irresistible idea so the machines will become more and more autonomous. For symmetrical warfare this will result in battles being fought between machines. Possibly with helpless locals trapped in between.

But symmetrical warfare seems to have been left behind in the 20^th Century. What will be the effect on asymmetrical warfare? In short, more terrorism. These machines will be attacked where they are most vulnerable and that means taking advantage of the difficulty in distinguishing friend from foe. More attacks will take place on civilian populations and in civilian areas.

The Three Laws of Robotics

So much for the Three Laws of Robotics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_laws_of_robotics). These were created in 1942 by Isaac Asimov because he was irrated by the fact that so many science fiction stories were lazy re-tellings of the Frankenstein myth. To him, it seemed nothing but common sense that a machine capable of making a deadly decision must be prevented from doing so. Knives have handles he said.

But for the foreseeable future, our relationship to robots will be this:

It is also worth remembering that a lazy re-telling of Frankenstein is still the most popular science fiction plot. So nobody can say that we were not warned.

Books

• I Robot

Labels: technology

16 February 2008

I am a Web Page

(how I followed Max Headroom into Cyberspace)

At the moment, if you are reading this on a mobile phone, then you are officially a Geek. I can say this because the way to this page is a physical mobile object: me. Sadly, it also means that the rest of the page will be of no interest you you because you already know it.

The Portable Internet

We are currently at a very interesting time in the development of the Internet. Mobile devices with Internet access such as the iPhone are just hitting the mass market.

This does not sound very revolutionary. Compared to a comfy chair in front of a 19″ screen it sounds like a step back.

In fact, the user now has a very interesting property that they never had before- location. And if web pages can also be given a location, or be made to respond to a location, then lots of interesting things become possible.

Think about those handsets you get in museums and art galleries. They give you information about the object you are next to. Imagine if the Internet worked like that.

How Do You Attach a Web Page to a Real Object?

There are lots of ways. The way I did it was with a type of barcode. Like the ones you see on, um, everything. Barcodes hold information which the barcode reader uses to examine a database.

What you need is:

• A web page with information.
• A barcode storing the page's address.
• A physical object to slap the barcode on.
• A barcode reader to get the web address.
• A browser to display the page.

Example: Attaching a Blog to a Blogger

All I needed was a piece of Quick Response (QR) code. QR code is 'big in Japan', which means that either it will be big here, or it will disappear without trace.

Lots of software is available to generate QR codes. I used this one, which gave me this:

My next obvious step was to tattoo this onto my forehead. Unfortunately, the tattoo parlor was shut so to make my deadline I had to make a tee-shirt instead.

The Clever Bit

Now, the clever bit: getting from the tee-shirt to the blog. This is possible because modern mobile phones are small computers that have cameras and browsers. The camera sees the QR code. The computer extracts the web address. The browser displays the page.

Actually, there is a little cheat here. The phone needs software to read the QR code which you need to know about and download. But this is already very common in some parts of the world. In Finland for example, this technology is used to tell people standing at bus stops when the next bus is due.

Is this the Future?

Alas no. Two things will probably happen with mobile phones that will make the solution redundant. The first is that Optical Character Recognition will improve to the point that the phones will be able to read printed text. The second is that the ability of phones to know where they are will improve to the point that they will be able to search the Internet for pages that relate to them. (Postcodes are already appearing in metadate to help with things like this).

But this technology certainly has the power to introduce the potential of the mobile Internet to the masses.

Legal

QR code is trademarked by Denso Wave, inc.

Labels: technology, web design

15 August 2007

The War Machines are Coming

And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer.

The War of the Worlds (1898) H.G. Wells.

The Tripods

The war machines described by H.G. Wells were a vivid foretelling of the tanks that would eventually appear on the real battlefields of the Somme.

They also present an interesting biomechanical problem- how can a tripod walk?

Why should a tripod walk?

A tripod in the simplest stable supported structure. It is also the only supported structure that is still stable if the legs are of uneven length. Walking is the best way of moving over different types of terrain, especially rough terrain. So, in theory, a walking tripod would be a very useful thing.

But in practice this is not so. As soon as a tripod lifts a leg to take a step it becomes a distinctly unstable bipod. It is probably significant that no known living creature has ever walked the Earth on three legs. This contributes to the 'aliennes' of the war machines in The War of the Worlds.

The Problem Solved

The problem has now been solved by researchers at the RoMeLa laboratories in the United States. Their gait uses the the same leg to both push off and advance. This solves the stability problem because the tripod 'falls' in the direction if the walk. They have built an experimental robot called the Self-excited Tripedal Dynamic Experimental Robot (STriDER) to test this gait.

Interestingly, for this to work, the body needs to flip over which is probably not something a biological creature would do.

War Machines?

So, will I ever have one of these in my house pushing the vacuum cleaner? Unlikely. The research is being paid for by the military. The RoMeLa video describes the robot carrying Cameras, for surveillance of antenna for communication. If it can carry a camera, it can carry a gun.

Links

• The War of the Worlds (Wikipedia)
• RoMeLa Labs

Labels: technology

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