Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-seven. Sunrise is 6:34 AM and sunset 7:06 PM, for 12h 31m 51s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the one thousand fortieth day.
On this day in 1812, a surprise awaits when Napoleon enters Moscow:
he was surprised to have received no delegation from the city. At the approach of a victorious general, the civil authorities customarily presented themselves at the gates of the city with the keys to the city in an attempt to safeguard the population and their property. As nobody received Napoleon he sent his aides into the city, seeking out officials with whom the arrangements for the occupation could be made. When none could be found, it became clear that the Russians had left the city unconditionally. In a normal surrender, the city officials would be forced to find billets and make arrangements for the feeding of the soldiers, but the situation caused a free-for-all in which every man was forced to find lodgings and sustenance for himself. Napoleon was secretly disappointed by the lack of custom as he felt it robbed him of a traditional victory over the Russians, especially in taking such a historically significant city. To make matters worse, Moscow had been stripped of all supplies by its governor, Feodor Rostopchin, who had also ordered the prisons to be opened.
Recommended for reading in full:
Shamane Mills reports Wisconsin’s Obesity Rate Remains Unchanged (‘Report By Trust For America’s Health Shows Nearly A Third Of Residents Are Obese’):
Federal health data shows obesity rates went up in 33 states last year. Wisconsin remained stable with 32 percent of the state’s residents qualifying as obese — a number above the national average of nearly 31 percent.
“These latest data shout that our national obesity crisis is getting worse,” said John Auerbach, president and CEO of Trust for America’s Health which compiled a report using the federal statistics.
Nine states had obesity rates above 35 percent: Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota and West Virginia.
A number of health providers and advocacy groups in Wisconsin have put out recommendations to curb obesity which increases risk for Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke and many types of cancers.
It Was Easier to Be Skinny in the ’80s:
A 2015 study revealed that people today are 10 percent heavier than they were in the 1980s—even with the same diets and exercise regimens. A new episode of The Idea File investigates the plethora of complex factors that may be contributing to our increasing BMI, including a changing microbiome and toxic chemicals in the environment.
(The EU has banned certain chemicals that might lead to obesity, but people in a free society can and should manage their choices of cosmetics, for example, without government intervention.)
Trump Claims That Energy-Efficient Light Bulbs Make Him Look Orange:
Comet Borisov May Be Insterstellar – Orbit Animation:
See Astronomers May Have Found an Interstellar Comet. Here’s Why That Matters.
Oddly enuf, Trump may be correct about it tinting his visage.
White LED lamps are not really white-LED powered, as there are no white LEDs. The original white LED lamps were classic Red-Green-Blue mixes of 3 different colored LEDs, which were combined to make white light. This was spendy, and the LED currents had to be carefully controlled to get the color mix right, lest your president get a ghoulish green, or perhaps a morbid blue, tint. In addition, the three LEDs tended to age differentially, so the color shifted with time.
All commodity LED lamps now consist of just one LED. It turns out that if you put a blue LED in a yellow-colored filter encapsulant, you can make pretty decent white light. If the encapsulant/filter is more yellow, the color temperature is lower, and vice versa if the encapuslant is less yellow. There is a lot to be said for this technique, as is is way cheaper to build and more resistant to age-related color-shifting.
The down-side of this is that the color spectrum of the emitted light has a big bump at the blue end of the spectrum, and a big yellow bump at the other. Red and green emissions are not there to balance the spectrum. (As an aside…theater lighting companies use a computer-controlled mix of seven different LED colors to make “true” white light.)
There is a measure of spectral evenness called the Color Rendering Index (CRI). A CRI of 100 is pure sunlight. Incandescent lights get pretty close to perfect CRI. White LED lights tend to be about 80 CRI, or less, so they really do make you look different. Not better, in the case of Trump, who is looking more jaundiced by day, but just different.
So Trump is correct, but if that counterbalances the necessity to build more power plants to cover the additional incandescent lighting load that his vanity demands, is debatable.
My brother, a dedicated “conservative, regularly rails about being forced to give up his incandescent lights as an affront to his freedom . When I point out that every lamp in his house is either LED or CFL, and he, or his wife did that voluntarily, he just fulminates more about creeping socialism. LED lights are a really big deal to the right. I guess if we convert to them the “tree-huggers” have won, and that is simply unacceptable…
Wow, thanks for this – good science is good science, and good reasoning is good reasoning. Here, in the House of Dissenting Opinion, we have LED lights as a conservation measure, but without any knowledgeable understanding of LED technology. Earlier on we used a different technology (CFL, I think) that took a bit to come to full illumination. When LED lights became available, we moved to that type of bulb.
As with recycling or fuel-efficient cars, the use of these lights was for us a general conservation measure rather than a particular matter of household economy (we’ve never tried to estimate actual savings). It simply seemed right to us, as one tiny part of a nationwide effort to conserve energy usage. LED lights were a choice both because they used less power and they reached (so far as we could tell) full illumination quickly (if not immediately).
I’ve no feel for how this seems to the right, and so the recent push for a return to incandescent bulbs has looked odd, almost anachronistic, to me. (Your explanation of conservatives’ views helps – I had no idea that the topic genuinely resonated with them.)
Much appreciated!
Incandescent light bans are another tyranny imposed by that evil black president. The absolute goal of the right is to repeal every policy/law/idea that the black guy had.
What we suspected was the driving force behind the right wing agenda has been made spectacularly clear by the actions of Yertle and Trump and their hench-haters: The right is completely and unalterably racist, and no merkin can disguise that any more. All of that frothy prattle about fiscal sanity, family values, and patriotic purity was just bullshit. It always was, but it is undeniable, now.
We can blame Obama for Trump being president. If had had the simple courtesy to have been born white, we would not be where we are now…