https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzcdopwq7ok
It actually worked really well, I couldn't perceive the room being dark at all.
> The operating life of CFLs is more affected by the number of times they are switched on and off. You can generally extend the life of a CFL bulb more by switching it on and off less frequently than if you simply use it less.
> In any case, the relatively higher "inrush" current required lasts for half a cycle, or 1/120th of a second. The amount of electricity consumed to supply the inrush current is equal to a few seconds or less of normal light operation. Turning off fluorescent lights for more than 5 seconds will save more energy than will be consumed in turning them back on again.
For this specific discussion about turning lights off while you blink, yes, you do actually burn more electricity in addition to wearing the bulb out if you're cycling it off for just 200ms.
But for real world use by normal people, turning off for 5 seconds will save energy, and turning it off for 15 minutes will save money.
But the other factor is dealing with the delayed response of the phosphor. Can you actually turn the light output off and on fast enough?
Of course this idea is awful for other reasons. But it is very funny.
Some fundamental questions, but we'll never be able to find an answer.
The state of an individual person’s consciousness has no bearing on whether the sun is shining or not.
Refrigerator lights turn off when the door closes. It’s usually easy to find the mechanism that handles this and manually trigger the light to switch off.
Regarding God, I assume you mean the Abrahamic god. There are many culturally specific deities and superstitions and there doesn’t seem to be any verifiable reason why one would be “realer” than any other.
There is no possible experiment you could in principle do to verify that the universe stays the same when you're not looking. We can say that the universe behaves consistently as though it does, and I'm not saying that doesn't matter, but it's not quite the same thing. Furthermore we can't tell whether the universe is tricking us some of the time, or all of the time, or never.
And then people invented video cameras to trick the universe to stay the same when they go to sleep
You make reasonable assumptions, but proving them is hard, because any attempt you make to prove them still end up being filtered through your potentially unreliable senses.
In practice we decide to just accept that a material world with semireliable senses exists, because the alternative is no certainty at all.
"The Simple Truth" addresses this from a different angle: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X3HpE8tMXz4m4w6Rz/the-simple...
Proof demanded.
We sentient beings are fortunately capable of discussing abstract thought, things not known to exist, and even things known not to exist; we can give them names without requiring that they 'are', and we can discuss what it means 'to be' anyway, and whether those things 'are' after all merely by virtue of our discussion.
And did you even read the rest of that sentence? Other commenter is basically 'on your side'.
It's atheism like this that makes me describe myself (dissociatively) as agnostic, frankly.
One diety with many names or facets.
There are an infinite number of these types of logically pendantic questions that are immensely uninteresting to think about.
Also, I don’t know what it says about you that you went from effectively “trees falling in the forest” to the Hacker News infrastructure to defend your point about fun, thought-provoking idioms, but I do know it’s remarkably uninteresting.
That seems like a tautology. If I'm not on Hacker News, then of course the server must be down. Why else would I not be on HN?
=> (Stratoscope is on Hackernews) is false.
=> (Stratoscope and Hackernews) is false.
=> Stratoscope is true.
______________________________________________________
Hackernews is false.
A lot of discoveries of interesting stuff resulted from something uninteresting being considered interesting and deeply contemplated. Others look and say "what an idiot, spending such time on such uninteresting x", I say, "you're only my self-imagined disagreeable other, I'm your god, your consciousness is my consciousness, what say you now?" and they would say nothing since the puppeteer has been revealed and there is nothing left to say. I guess this is why God will never prove he exists.
But your eyes are just another set of equipment, similar to a light meter. Just because your eyes are attached to the rest of your body, it doesn't make them inherently more trustworthy than equipment that's not part of your body.
I don’t remember which manufacturer it was but their ad was hilarious “think of what you can do with that extra time you would have used to turn on your wipers”
I still have to turn the wipers on, but otherwise it's completely automatic.
I never would have thought a feature like this mattered until I actually had it. Now I wouldn't want a car without it.
FWIW, this feature in my BMW works great. The same feature on my Ford Expedition doesn't work nearly as well.
https://www.consumerreports.org/automotive-technology/rain-s...
This tells the system to *activate the wipers*, as well as adjust wiper speed and frequency based on the intensity of the precipitation combined with the vehicle’s speed.
That's been around for quite a while. My car from 2006 does it.
He thought it was so cool. When he first got the car, he was like, "Watch this!" and squirted a whole water bottle at the windshield just to make them come on.
Sixteen-year-old me recorded this as peak dorky daddom in my memory.
Compare this to my old Toyota that just had low-med-high. Low was still moving constantly, the only intermittent was a manual "mist". This meant my wipers were running way too much even on low or I had to hit the mist every 10-20 seconds.
An automatic wiper speed seems a lot safer.
Also I honestly can’t think of a worst way to try to save money, especially after you factor in the power it might take to do the facial recognition. There would be a good chance that you actually lose money unless you are in a hanger full of Na lights.
Edit: 5 bulbs in a room that each consume 10 watts (fairly generous), people blink up to 20k times a day, an average blink is 100 ms. So that’s 2000 seconds of blink time or just about 33 minutes. 33*5*10 is 28 Watt-hours saved per day or about 0.84 kWh per month. At the rate of $0.20 per kWh you just saved $0.16 a month.
But wait you have latency to detect the blink so let’s cut that figure by 15%. And since we don’t know how long a blink will last (some are shorter) you also need to reduce the off time by one standard deviation of a blink so to be safe let’s make the off period after detection last only 60 ms. So now we are at $0.096 per month. And now we also need to run multiple cameras and facial detection which has to run continuously. Unless you can do that under 28*0.6=16.8 Wh per day you are losing money.
I would assume that they just have kids.
> they just have kids
Is there a difference?
Thinking back, maybe I was just annoying my mom by playing with the light switch.
because of the supernatural events taking place inside!
I haven't heard a lot about it, but anecdotally have heard of it outside of HN.
Only circumstance I can imagine is if someone is kidnapped and they flash lights in an SOS pattern? Seems pretty unlikely they'd be by a street-facing room in the first place though.
Sounds more likely to me, than someone getting a webcam and writing a computer program that switches off the lights when eyelids closed because he he blinks! :-)
Especially if follows the international SOS code
> This project has received too many requests, please try again later.
If you could detect saccades and dim/turn off the lights, I wonder what the perceptual experience would be!
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade#Saccadic_masking
Assuming you didn't install sensors in your eyelids, it's probably something processing the feed of the camera?
If you were doing it on a smart light switch that was feeding 120V to the ballasts I do imagine it would impart some additional wear and tear to the bulbs. I'm not sure how much additional wear and tear it would be on an LED, I know the main thing that wears out on a florescent is the starting circuit which needs to bring the energy of the bulb enough to start the arc which wears out over time.
Can you invert it so the light only turns on when your eyes are closed?
* For small values of true.
From the video, it seems there is quite a bit of latency between your blink and the lights blink. But it's an interesting project nonetheless!
How would it work if two people are in the same room?