On Jun 4, 12:39*am, "John Gilmer" wrote:
From that article:

"The pulse lasts a mere femtosecond, and delivers as much power as the
entire grid of North America into a needle point size spot."

Huh? *I think they left out one of the units or something, and if they
didn't I don't see how using that much energy to modify the filaments
could save energy on a production scale.

It's not all that much "energy" but a small amount of energy put forth in
very (very) short time.

Yep, so it would seem. Trader did the math which I was too lazy to
do, but there was something about that article that bothered me. It
was poorly written and maybe I'm hung up on that, but I don't know, it
seemed to me to read like one of those studies funded by RJ Reynolds
that found you could smoke like a chimney and it wouldn't cause
cancer. You know, bull****.

The number crunching Trader did was based on some assumptions that
were off a bit. How many light bulbs do you think you have in your
house? I'm sure I have well over a hundred. There are 13 in the room
I'm in. There must be many billions of bulbs in the US. Frankly I
wasn't interested enough to do the math, but there are still questions
due to the lame ass writing in that article. "As much power as the
entire NA grid"...does that include nuke, coal, wind, the whole
shebang? Trader used 1 terawatt and said that was certainly more than
the NA grid. I'm not sure what the NA number is, but the worldwide
consumption estimate was 15 terawatts in 2006, with the US consuming
25%.

Anyway, I'm all for efficiency as long as it is real efficiency and
doesn't come with serious "side effects". The mercury in CFLs being
one of them.

R