Gene Moreau dot com

Concept: LED light bulb from frog design

Great idea. I remember just after we bought the house in 2005 and I was replacing all the bulbs in the house with CFLs I thought this was great, but I can’t dim them and they suck outside when it’s -30C. I went looking around the web for LED light bulbs, but there was nothing that was really of any practical use yet.

There are a few problems though. One is that a lot of energy companies have invested a lot of money is advertising, etc for CFL bulbs. I hope they don’t burry it. Another is that I will be replacing 4 year old light bulbs that were supposed to last 20 years. What is going to happen to all those mercury laden CFL bulbs that will get replaced? How many of them will just end up in land fill?

(Via TED | TEDBlog.)

I hopped into a taxi today while going to between sites at work.  It happened to be a Toyota Prius.  Being the geek that I am I spent most of the trip watching the little screen to see how often it actually ran off the battery and didn’t use the gasoline engine.  I was quite surprised to see that it spent about 80% of it’s time getting energy from the gasoline engine.  The only time the engine seemed to be disenageged was when it was stopped or slowing down and the energy flowed back to the battery.  Some times it seemed to take energy from both the engine and battery, but most of the it seemed to be running off the gasoline engine.

It was stop and go city driving and I have no idea how it was suposed to work, but it didn’t seem all that efficient to me.  In my mind this begs the question, exactly how green are these cars after all?