Re: Fluorescent Bulbs Are Known to Zap Domestic Tranquillity; Energy-Savers a Turnoff for Wives

[Marc_F_Hult <MFHult@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 3 Jun 2007 10:58:31 -0400, "Robert Green"
<ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
<d_OdncoAp-qBSv_bnZ2dnUVZ_jidnZ2d@xxxxxxx>:


>"The problem" up until your last paragraph has been:  Is it a good idea
>to fight mercury with mercury?   If you want to consider collateral
>issues there are certainly lots of problems with using coal for power.
>Yet we can all be assured that it's going to continue for decades, so we
>had better get to work, and quickly, to solve as many of those problems
>as we can as directly as we can.  That's bound to produce better results,
>in the long run, than 6% of the population using CFL bulbs in half the

Where on Green's Gawdawful Earth does " 6% " come from? Please don't make
stuff up or confuse apples with cows if you want what you write to be
considered seriously.

>fixtures in their homes hoping that small number of bulbs is somehow
>going to reduce huge quantities of mercury from entering the air, the
>ground, the water and the food chain.

Straw man Alert: Nobody -- even BobbyG it seems -- is "hoping" this.

Have you ever had differential equations? This is a classic application of
simultaneous differential equations. Matrices of the coefficients (Did you
check out the "Leopoldville matrix" I wrote about?) of the various
different equations can be used to solve this sort of problem
mathematically.

A simple example is a bucket with a hole in it out of which water is
leaking, and a supply of water being poured into it.

The rate at which water comes out the hole depends on the pressure head at
the bottom of the bucket. Clear so far ? (Lots of water--> big drip.
Little water --> small drip. You've seen this many times.)

The level of the water in bucket (and so the pressure head at the bottom
of the bucket) depends on how much water there is to begin with, how fast
the water is being poured in, and the initial rate of the leak.

Now image a bucket with multiple sized holes at different heights.

And then imagine multiple buckets at different levels above and below one
another and water dripping from some into others.

This is akin to the mercury problem (where we have different amounts
representing the inflow of water to the bucket):

	Mercury from US sources from coal,
	Mercury from foreign sources such as South American
		gold processing
	Mercury from existing glass plating operations (in the Ohio
		River, today, as we speak! )
	Mercury from thermostats,
	Mercury from Conventional fluorescents and mercury vapor lamps
	Mercury from thermometers
	Mercury from labs
	Mercury from Scientific instrumentation (including
		stream gaging equipment
	Mercury from Spills
	Mercury from Natural Sources and yes,
	Mercury from CFLs

And there are different buckets

	The US atmosphere
	The Hemispheric atmosphere
	Sealed flasks in storage under lock and key
	Thermostats in millions of houses
	Thermometers all over creation
	Conventional fluorescents
	Dumps and landfills
	High School basements with old chem sets
	And yes, CFLs

And each of these buckets has a various different sized holes,
	for example, for  dumps and landfills there  are:

	Old town dumps in quarries (yikes!) 	leak more than
	Old sanitary landfills 			which leak more than
	Modern, monitored sanitary landfills	which leak more than
	Hazardous waste repositories		and so on

The challenge  is to keep someone (you, me or your granddaughter) that is
sitting on a chair beneath all these buckets as dry as *you* can.

Don't tell me that you are going to put a plug in the holes because:

1) you don't have enough fingers
2)  that will just cause the bucket to (eventually) overflow.

and yes you can catch some of the drip in a bucket you hold for a while,
but that bucket also has holes in it.

The optimum strategy involves timing and knowing the pathways that cause
the water to drip on your granddaughter, and getting to what's most
important first..

You, BobbyG, apparently claim to know best how to keep your granddaughter
dry. But I disagree based on years of trying to keep *you* dry.

Now imagine that we also have whole SETS of buckets for

	carbon
	soil erosion
	deforestation/ oxygen
	heat
	electricity

and etc.

And you have to optimize *all* of those _simultaneously_  but they are all
interconnected in complex ways.

HTH ... Marc
Marc_F_Hult
www.ECOntrol.org