Compact Flourescent Lamps: A Study in Complexity

In 2005, my father and I became obsessed with CFLs. I do not remember where we first heard about them, but after reading a few of the bold claims made we were infatuated with the idea of reducing power consumption while greatly increasing the lifespan of our lights. Though they were several times as expensive as incandescent bulbs, they promised to last about ten times as long, while saving 75% of power consumption. This, we told each other, was innovation at its finest: a technology that benefits consumers in multiple ways without requiring so much as a lifestyle change. He set out on a quest to replace every incandescent bulb in our house with a CFL.

Shortly after installing the first CFL, we noticed that the quality of light was significantly different. A room lit by a single CFL took on a sickly greenish or yellowish tint, depending on the specific lamp. A little disappointed, but not daunted, we continued replacing lights until, about 6 months after we installed the first CFLs in the house, one of them failed. It burned out. It died. Weren't these lamps supposed to last for several years? Maybe it was a fluke, we told ourselves. But it wasn't. Several more lamps failed within a year of installation.

If their lifespan wasn't significantly better than that of an incandescent lamp, suddenly the high installation cost looks a little more off-putting. With one of the lamps costing about $3, replacing them every year (or more frequently) could get quite expensive. My dad was upset, and basically gave up on the technology, switching back to incandescent lamps. I couldn't stop asking the question, "why?"

I knew that our experience must be somewhat atypical. If these lamps really had such a short lifespan, it would be common knowledge and the Australian government would think twice before passing legislation banning incandescent bulbs. No one seemed to be talking about this lifespan problem, however. I did a little bit of digging, and found out a few simple facts about the lifespan of flourescent lamps. First, their lifespan is greatly reduced if they are cycled on and off frequently. In our domestic setting, I expect that our lights went through a lot more power cycles than those of most businesses or even most houses. We had several young children living at home at the time who were constantly moving from room to room and had been taught to turn off the lights when they left a room - good advice regarding incandescent lamps. Flourescent lamps are also sensitive to temperature and humidity. Living in south Louisiana, our temperature and humidity were certainly above average. In addition, nearly all of our lights were in a base-up configuration common to overhead fixtures. This configuration has been demonstrated to decrease the lifespan of the lamps by increasing the operating temperature of the ballast. The conclusion I came to was that the combination of frequent power cycles, high temperature, and high humidity combined to reduce the average lifespan of our lamps just enough to cause a few outlying failures after a year. As far as I know, some of the CFLs we installed over 4 years ago are still fully functional, but the handful of early failures were enough to turn my dad off of the technology. He has since moved on to an infatuation with LEDs, which is probably a story for another post.

The experience of the CFLs taught me a number of valuable lessons:

First, it taught me the fundamentals of technology marketing. People want a better product, which usually means a cheaper product. More importantly, they don't want to put a lot of effort into getting their new product; they've been getting along just fine without it and can keeping going that way if adopting it is too difficult. We wouldn't have dreamed of replacing all of our light fixtures with tubular flourescent lamps, but since we could install CFLs as easily as incandescent lamps, we were willing to try them.

Second, it taught me about statistics, and human interpretation of statistics. The handful of early-failing lamps, while representing a significant deviation from our expectations, did not prove that the lamps were not economically feasible. They did destroy my dad's faith in them. If you're going to make promises, you'd better be able to live up to them.

Third, it taught me about innate complexity. George Whitesides (who I got to see at last year's ACS National Meeting) defined simplicity as "it's impossible to f**k it up" (at the end of this talk) which sounds to me like a good working definition. Applying that criterion to CFLs and incandescent lamps, what do we find? In an incandescent lamp, a current is passed through a filament, where ohmic resistance causes it to heat up and emit radiation. Bring in a materials scientist (or Thomas Edison with a lot of time on his hands) to choose a material that emits the right frequencies of radiation at an appropriate voltage. Seal the whole thing in a vacuum, and it's ready for use. Flourescent lamps are a bit more complicated. Not only does the radiation have to be converted from ultraviolet to visible by flourescent phosphor, the flow of electricity through the mercury vapor requires a ballast to regulate the current; not the most complex circuit ever designed, but a lot more complicated than the ohmic contacts needed for an incandescent lamp. In the final analysis, it is this complexity that stops flourescent lamps from pushing their incandescent competitors from the market. Their complexity increases their price, and though their lifespan is officially longer they have more failure modes, which makes them easier to f**k up.

The Sorry State of Science Reporting

I've been reading the news almost religiously for most of the summer, from three sources: National Public Radio, British Broadcasting Company, and Al Jazeera. Yes, I realize this makes me sound incredibly liberal. Contrary to my expectations, I do not feel like a more responsible global citizen than I was before. While I enjoy reading about what is happening in the world, it has not brought any greater sense of connectedness. If anything, it makes me feel less connected with my surroundings. However, that is not the point of this post.

Every day on NPR's site, if not also on BBC's, I look through the Science and Technology categories hoping to find something that catches my interest. After all, I am very interested in both science and technology. However, all of the stories filed under the science category are about
a) Swine Flu
b) Climate Change
c) the dubious findings of some pyschological or, at best, neurological study that show humans behave like X because of gene Y that evolved to help our ancestors do Z.

All of the posts filed under Technology are about the iPhone.

The Discovery Channel's lineup reveals similar trends: Animals, The Environment, People vs. the Environment (or is that Man and Wild?), Mythbusters, etc.

The Science Channel (run by the same company) isn't much different, with more focus on Space and manufacturing/construction.

I happen to know that huge, exciting discoveries are being made in the worlds of particle physics, chemistry, nanotechnology, robotics, computing, etc. Why are none of these being documented by the popular media? Surely the same people that figured out how to make popular tv out of the manufacturing processes of everything from chocolate bars to safety pins can make a thrilling show about molecular cars or parallel computing.

The difference between the way I use a pc and the way my grandfather, a retired electrical engineer who spent his career designing and programming computerized test systems, uses a pc is significant. I get things done faster and more efficiently. He knows far more about the inner workings of the computer. He's written programs at the assembler level on punch cards. But I grew up with mouse-based user interfaces and file systems, and they're as natural to me as riding a bike.

If the next generation of children in this country could grow up seeing simulations of molecular structures, interacting with them in games and educational programs, they could develop an innate understanding of nanomechanics. Just as gravity and magnetism are fairly intuitive to beginning physics students, so Van der Waals interactions or very-low-Reynolds number fluid flows could be intuitive for the next generation of engineers and scientists.

Right now, no one is talking about these topics. When nanotechnology is brought up in the news at all, it is usually with either a vague sense of foreboding or an undefined promise of amazing things: "Now with nanotechnology!" We need science journalists who break the trend of reporting on psychology and medicine for the sake of human interest. We need science journalists who will act as translators between scientists and citizens without dumbing down the science of talking over the collective head of society.

Drive-Through National Parks: Cars as Interfaces Between Humans and the Built Environment

On Friday AJ and I were in Vicksburg, MS looking for a scenic grassy area, possibly with an interesting history, as a venue for our picnic. She had a vague memory of the battlefield (National Military Park) from an elementary school field trip, so we decided to check it out. We found the entrance, paid the $8 entrance fee, and followed the sign that said, "picnicking only at Tour Stop #12 and Cairo Museum." About four miles later, we realized we were stuck in a nightmare of '50s car-culture-meets-'00s -SUV-culture: a drive-through national park being appreciated by aging baby boomers who remembered the park from their childhood and suburban parents trying to introduce their kids to the nation's (south's) history without ever leaving the comfort of their car.

I'll spare you the agony of being stuck behind 2 mph crawlers reading about the exploits of the 108th Infantry Division and Logan's Farthest Advance. In my ire (magnified by hunger as our picnic sat untouched in our trunk), I began thinking of cars as an interface between humans and the built environment. They were invented as a means of transportation, which became a lifestyle, and an environment was built to accomodate this lifestyle. The environment was built with the expectation that its users would n0t only have cars, but prefer to stay in their cars as much as possible. What started as an empowering tool soon became a necessity, as car-culture and auto-centric design created a positive feedback loop.

I'm not the first person to notice this by any means. But I'm not trying to publish original research, I'm just writing a blog. My question is this: if this is a desirable architecture (relying on cars as an interface), is the interface designed properly for human interaction? The ipod taught us the value of ergonomic interfaces. Do cars meet the requirements of human-centered design? How about this: are you comfortable interfacing with the world through a car? In practice, most of us are because it's what we know. But in theory, do you like that idea? I don't.

Americans aren't going to stop using cars in the next 10 years. They will continue to interface with their surroundings through them, but I propose that the built environment should offer its users a choice of interfaces. Make them car-, bike-, and pedestrian-friendly (not to mention wheelchairs) . It's been done before, including by Randy Brown at Village Point East, where he put a parking lot in front and a sidewalk leading to the back (or perhaps the other front) from a nearby residential neighborhood. It can be done, and it has been done, and it is being done. I just wish it was a lot more common.

Conceptual Calculus

When I was in high school, roughly a senior, it came to my attention that there was a set of ideas known as calculus that was somehow related to change over time (until then, I had always thought of calculus as an intimidating and far-off college class that made sure only intelligent, hardworking people became engineers and scientists). While reading Feynman's Six Not-So-Easy Pieces I encountered dy/dx notation for the first time and was thoroughly stumped in my attempt to follow his derivations. I made it my goal to learn calculus by whatever means possible, and set off to the library. I read through a variety of textbooks, David Berlinski's A Tour of the Calculus, and part of an OCW calculus course, but in the end my attempts to teach myself calculus were stymied. I learned the power rule, encountered the quotient rule, learned more than I ever wanted to know about the inner personalities of functions (thank you, Mr. Berlinski), and learned that derivatives could be used to describe how things change, but I was still no closer to understanding what a derivative was.

This breakthrough wouldn't come until I was a freshman in college, taking Calculus I: Differential Calculus with a math teacher who had retired several years before. He spent the first lecture explaining how far the Greeks had gone without ever figuring out how to a) find the slope of a curve at any point and b)find the area inside any shape. He then explained how the Cartesian coordinate system enabled mathematical representations of the shapes with which the Greeks had been fascinated, and then digressed to the topic of limits. Within three or four lectures, we had a secant line of a curve described mathematically, then found the limit as the section of the curve marked off by the secant line approached zero. Before I knew what was happening, we had found what the Greeks in all of the glory only dreamed about. We had taken a derivative! I became so obsessed with the limit definition of a derivative that I wrote it constantly on chalkboards in random classrooms, on every page of my notebook, and possibly on a bathroom stall. . .

The rules that applied to derivatives and made them easy to compute didn't interest me much (except for the chain rule - I was fascinated by the chain rule), but the limit definition opened up the whole world to me. I could now understand Feynman, and the rest of the world. Anything that changed, really. Of course, it takes the fundamental theorem to really put it all together, but that came soon enough.

Now I'm coming to my point. You've already impressed me with your patience, so hold on a little longer. It is my opinion, based on my experience with Feynman, that a truly well-educated person needs an understanding of calculus, at least of differentiation and integration and how they relate to each other. Conventional wisdom says, "most college students can't even pass algebra; if you add calculus to the general education requirements no one will ever graduate." The real difficulty in learning calculus, though, is in remembering the rules and knowing how and when to apply them. Differentiating isn't too bad, but when you get to integration and all of the glorious guesswork involved there, it becomes taxing on even the most intrepid math student. My rebuttal is this: there is no reason for the average well-educated person to be proficient at integrating and differentiating (what one of my math teachers referred to as "computational ability"). In fact, due to the prevalence of computer algebra systems, I would argue it's hardly necessary for engineers to be proficient at any of this, including solving DEs. So, what's left? Merely the concepts.

Conventional wisdom would then say, "you can't learn math without solving problems." Can't you? How many engineering students truly come to an understanding of the Wronskian after finding a dozen pairs of linearly independent solutions to a DE? They merely learn to apply algorithms efficiently, something a computer will always do far better than them. I'm not arguing that engineers shouldn't solve problems, but I'm arguing that business majors, social scientists and the like should be introduced to the concepts of calculus without being expected to solve many problems.

My proposal is this: develop a "Conceptual Calculus" course that covers integration, differentiation and the Fundamental Theorem in a non-computationally-intensive way, to be taught in one semester to non-science majors who have a basic understanding of algebra. This course could (should) then be introduced as part of the core curriculum at universities (or liberal arts colleges, more likely) dedicated to producing well-rounded individuals capable of understanding topics across disciplines.

Portfolio of Passions

Today I found a new website called "Academic Earth." As far as I can tell it's a collection of videos from university websites, with some of which I am already familiar (MIT's Open Course Ware, Stanford's eCorner). It's an interesting aggregation, and one I may find myself frequenting. I'm already becoming sucked into the TED phenomenon, as I got sucked into MIT World several years ago.

One of the videos I watched was Randy Komisar talking at Stanford about finding your passion. His main point was that the question "What is my passion?" will paralyze you, as will the question "What's the end goal?" Instead, he said, you should ask yourself about your "portfolio of passions" and your next step.

With that in mind, I made a list today of my passions. It may not be exhaustive, and it's in no particular order.

1. Science - the scientific method, the scientific community, and the process of creating knowledge.

2. Engineering - designing useful things, especially with a human interaction-centered approach.

3. Nanotechnology

4. Architecture/Urban Planning - a similar concept to 2. but on a much larger scale. The way people interact with their surroundings has an even bigger impact on their lives than the way they interact with their "things."

5. Education - I strongly believe the system (US public schools) is far from ideal. I have no idea how to fix it, but Woodie Flowers has some good ideas. Google him.

6. Post-industrialism - The Information Age is only beginning, my friends. I hope to elaborate greatly on this in the future.

Now I just have to figure out how to synthesize these passions into a meaningful direction. Suggestions appreciated.

237th ACS National Meeting, Salt Lake City, UT

Went to ACS nat'l meeting in SLC Sun-Tues. Good meeting. Snowed Mon morning, mountains looked great. Sorry no pictures; no camera.

Angela Belcher (MIT), gave keynote address Sunday pm. Talked about challenges applications of nanoscience, focused on own research engineering nanotubes using bacteriophage viruses as templates. Very straightforward speaker made it clear nanoscale science technology will revolutionize many fields through applications. Nothing we didn't all know, but is nice to hear someone "important" say it. After keynote address, she and Paul Weiss (Penn State, editor-in-chief ACS Nano) participated in panel on careers in chemistry, both spoke of being very satisfied with careers. Dr. Weiss: “I work with some of the smartest people, I choose my own projects, and I get to satisfy my curiosity. This is the best job in the world.” (Forgive errors in quotation from memory, wasn't taking notes). Definitely reminded why I love science. Weiss seems brilliant. Might like to work with him some day.

Heard Nate Lewis give his energy future talk Tues morning, running through energy scenarios quickly analyzing “alternative” solutions, disproving them all. Concludes only solar makes any sense. Brilliant man. Friend Jordan joins his group in summer.

Sat in on Small Chemical Business Symposium Tues pm. Heard George Whitesides (Harvard), Robert Grubbs(Caltech) et al talk about commercializing research. Whitesides talked about local ecosystems supporting entrepreneurship, maybe 6 (Silicon Valley, Hwy 128 in Mass, Austin, Seattle, etc.) I knew they existed, didn't know how important. Should look into. Grubbs, Nobel Laureate, was working on catalyst, commercialized, then commercialized multiple applications of said catalyst. Developed polymer with extraordinary tensile strength, other properties. Should look into. Remembered corollary life goal: join their ranks.

Upcoming: musings on Woodie Flowers, education reform. Maybe more verbose.

Greetings from Salt Lake City

I'm attending the 237th annual ACS national meeting from today until Tuesday evening, so expect a post or two on that. Also coming up: my response to a lecture by Woodie Flowers on a whole range of topics, especially personalized learning through new media.