Missio, Cross’d worship, and why I’m not a recluse

What is a ‘mis­sion’? How do you rec­on­cile the mean­ing you asso­ciate with that and its Latin root, mis­sio, to send, and actual use of the term? Why do we talk about a “mis­sion to do x” and here­after refer to “mis­sion” as though it encom­passed “to do x” itself, rather than the act of sending?

What on earth is a life cen­tred on two bits of wood hur­riedly nailed together and stained crim­son? Do peo­ple wor­ship sym­bols on par­tic­u­larly sug­ary buns?

I think this web­site is a mea­sure of dis­con­tent­ment. I rarely post when there is noth­ing to grum­ble about, because good news is appar­ently bor­ing. This web­site makes me feel guilty. It’s one big occasionally-ugly mir­ror. I don’t look into it when things are good, and pour the bad into it the rest of the time inter­spersed with geeky things… a slightly acquis­i­tive load of rub­bish designed to obfus­cate and cre­ate a false set of val­ues that improve (in the eye of the beholder, for a time) the reflec­tion. It’s easy to for­get these things.

At any rate, blogs are a use­less jour­nal medium. Too much hap­pens in any given day. Yes­ter­day, I installed Quick­Books and realised that absolute morons are able to run their own busi­nesses with good rea­son and it needn’t be so hard after­all. *insert rant about software*

Tax is pre­dictably bor­ing stuff, though, so when Claud sug­gested we go see Becom­ing Jane (con­trary to rumours I dragged her along — though if she hadn’t, I would have done… we enjoyed it for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, I main­tain!) I was there in a mat­ter of… well, about an hour. Some­where in the mid­dle we went shop­ping for food & ate lunch. *insert rant about the film, about the won­der­ful speed-distraction medium that IM is, and maybe others*

Spent a lazy-enough after­noon at her house until a phone call promised poker and food of the bar­be­cued vari­ety at Gareth’s place, which ended in two par­tic­u­larly dim-witted hands, and some inter­est­ing read­ing of Time magazine’s global warm­ing issue. Some of the 51 ideas printed were on the mark, oth­ers seemed a lit­tle less so (energy effi­cient light­ing was one I know enough about to take issue with, hybrid cars were thank­fully nowhere that I could see). *insert rant about global warm­ing bandwagon*

Later, I started con­tribut­ing more car­bon by try­ing to drive Budd’s car (a man­ual, I’d only drive a man­ual lawn­mower in the past) as he lis­tened to his clutch slowly being torn to shreds. *insert rant about manual/auto trans­mis­sion and licens­ing and the like*

There are other funny sto­ries to be shared within that, but each of those com­prises an entire post of its own. I have no inter­est in chron­i­cling my life with that degree of detail. Per­haps if I were a Dick­in­son–esque recluse I’d have time enough to write and lit­tle enough to write about that I might write more. But thank­fully I’m not.

# by Josh on April 12th, 2007 Tags: , , ,
| 2 Comments »

Greenhouses still need light

I was doing some research today and came across this spec­tac­u­larly bad green­house infor­ma­tion resource from the Aus­tralian Green­house Office (part of our Commonwealth’s Depart­ment of the Envi­ron­ment and Her­itage). It (mostly sen­si­bly) advo­cates ways to save energy in the expen­sive “install energy-efficient light­ing” bit, but then pro­ceeds to soundly shoot itself in the foot under “Use lights efficiently”.

Update: I dis­cov­ered a resource on the same Green­house site that explains things much more accurately/clearly. Or maybe just more geek­ily. Any­way, I found it help­ful. Down the bot­tom of that page it’s basi­cally point by point the same just using dif­fer­ent words and being gen­er­ally less stu­pid. Now all they gotta do is amal­ga­mate resources/rewrite the “brief” copy.

“Buy and use com­pact flu­o­ros instead of incan­des­cent light­ing” (sen­si­ble) ver­sus “Mod­ern dim­mer con­trols reduce green­house gas emis­sions as they reduce light out­put. They also extend lamp life.” (ridicu­lous — and incom­pat­i­ble with CF lighting)

“Fit lower-wattage globes or com­pact flu­o­res­cents in bright lights, espe­cially down­lights and spot­lights; save up to 50% of green­house gas.“
Poten­tially ridicu­lous: As increas­ing num­bers of downlights/spots are using halo­gen bulbs, more are being installed to com­pen­sate for stu­pidly nar­row beams. This doesn’t have to be the case, but peo­ple seem to opt for nar­row beam lights for some rea­son. Replace one 80W@240V (3A) fix­ture with six 30° 50W@12V (1.5A) + trans­former power con­sump­tion (varies) — you’re really not sav­ing much. ALSO, there is no CF alter­na­tive to halo­gens so far as I know. There ARE some LED prod­ucts on the mar­ket, but they’re prob­a­bly a gar­ish blue (or at least a fair way from the 3000K tem­per­a­ture we gen­er­ally expect from domes­tic light­ing) and still cost upwards of $AU25/unit, ver­sus about $5 for a reg­u­lar halo­gen. The obvi­ous advan­tage here is that they don’t require reflec­tors and will thus auto­mat­i­cally have a wider cov­er­age, along with rub­bish total cost of own­er­ship stuff that no-one really cares enough about to pay attention.)

“Reflector-back lamps of lower wattage pro­vide more use­ful light in down­lights or spot­lights while gen­er­at­ing less green­house gas.“
Poten­tially ridicu­lous: what did I just say? Yes, this is help­ful, no, it’s not the best option. Think of it as reduc­ing the evils of halo­gens (except for where you need/don’t mind 270°+ ver­ti­cal light cov­er­age, which is sometimes).

“Low volt­age halo­gen lamps are not nec­es­sar­ily low energy lamps: each one gen­er­ates one kilo­gram of green­house gas every 15 hours – about the same as an ordi­nary 60-watt globe – although they do pro­duce more light.“
Poten­tially faulty maths I don’t know how they arrived at that fig­ure. But then again I’m an Eng­lish major so there we go. They must have really pumped the trans­former fig­ure, OR they’re talk­ing about the myth­i­cal 240V halo­gen — a crea­ture rarely found in the wild, but rumoured to exist. Hardly ever in use.

“Use light fit­tings which allow max­i­mum light to pass through – coloured glass often cuts light out­put by half, cre­at­ing a need for higher-wattage lamps.“
Good call. Com­pletely irrel­e­vant to domes­tic set­tings. Well, kinda. Unless they’re expect­ing peo­ple to rip apart their lamp-shades today. Maybe in twenty years when we’re out of fuel and are strug­gling to start a fire hud­dled in a cave… yeah, right.

“A 20-watt com­pact flu­o­res­cent pro­vides as much light as a 100-watt incan­des­cent.“
Sure. Which is all fun and games until you’ve been conned into pur­chas­ing them by above dis­in­for­ma­tion think­ing they’ll cope okay with your crappy vari­able pot dim­mer. Then, out go the incan­des­cents when Joe Con­sumer thinks they break too quickly.

“A 20-watt com­pact flu­o­res­cent pro­vides as much light as a 100-watt incan­des­cent.“
Yup.

“Timer con­trols and day­light or move­ment sen­sors are now avail­able to switch off lights auto­mat­i­cally.“
They sure can. Great for keep­ing your house dark, not so great for cut­ting emis­sions. Insert vague sta­tis­tics about the amount of unnec­es­sary power con­sumed by devices on standby in the aver­age domes­tic set­ting each year. Some small ben­e­fit might be realised, but you’d be bet­ter just cul­ti­vat­ing a habit of turn­ing off lights when leav­ing rooms.

“Use light-coloured paint inside your house. Dark wall colours absorb light, increas­ing the amount of light­ing needed.“
Rev­o­lu­tion­ary. Sorry, I shouldn’t be so sar­cas­tic… this is a good point. I’m not sure whether the wall colours mag­i­cally absorb light or sim­ply fail to reflect it. Or if there’s even a dif­fer­ence between the two. I’m all out of smart-arse ammo on this point.

“Mod­ern dim­mer con­trols reduce green­house gas emis­sions as they reduce light out­put. They also extend lamp life.“
Debunked above. Stu­pid con­sumers aside, I think there’s prob­a­bly a decent-sized ques­tion of effi­ciency here, also. How about you just buy lower wattage globes to start with?

“Use desk lamps or stan­dard lamps where light is most needed, so less light­ing is required in the rest of the room.“
Huh? What, the desk lamps you can’t buy CF fit­tings for? Peo­ple use too-high wattage incan­des­cent globes (60W-ish) or still-too-high wattage halo­gens (20W), and then pro­ceed to have two or three on to com­pen­sate. I’ve seen it hap­pen. You can get some appro­pri­ate low-wattage fit­tings for this pur­pose (stan­dard flu­o­ros or, some­times, screw/bayonet CFs if the lamp sup­ports it) but I’m still doubt­ing the prac­ti­cal help­ful­ness of this one.

“Keep lamps and fit­tings clean: dirt build-up will reduce light out­put over time.“
Good call. Espe­cially with really high wattage fix­tures (the­atre lumi­naires can often do with a good wip­ing down!) Equally, this applies to win­dows. Seri­ously. If you’re stuck in an old, musty church build­ing and are hav­ing trou­ble see­ing, go clean a few stained-glass win­dows. You don’t notice the grime as read­ily as you would with clear win­dows, but it will def­i­nitely make a dif­fer­ence if they ever get hit by sun­light (and even if they don’t). Par­tic­u­larly this applies if you’re near any major roads.

“Use day­light instead of arti­fi­cial lights – but do not overdo it. Large win­dows and sky­lights add to sum­mer heat and win­ter cold.“
Yup. This ties in to my last point.

So, take gov­ern­ment fact sheets with a grain of salt. I don’t know whether the doc­u­ment was writ­ten by well-intentioned pub­lic ser­vants or mis­in­formed, wildly-optimistic hip­pies, but the fact remains it seems to miss a fair few key problems/misrepresents a hand­ful of things. And yes, I’ve prob­a­bly mis­rep­re­sented things, too… I can get away with it because I’m just an opin­ion­ated blogger/Arts stu­dent — they’re sup­pos­edly the author­ity. So if I’ve got any­thing wrong be gentle ;-)

# by Josh on August 14th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| 5 Comments »