Archive for 2010
Lights Use More Energy While Turning On
By Chad Upton | Editor
There is a belief that it takes more energy to turn a light bulb on than it does to leave it running. That is true.
But, in some cases it’s still more energy efficient to turn the lights off when you leave the room.
That’s because the spike of additional electricity that is used to turn on a light bulb, is very short lived. That extra energy varies depending on the type of light bulb.
For most bulb types, the extra energy is equivalent to less than one second of energy that is consumed while the light is on. That means, you’d have to leave the room and return within one second to save energy by leaving the light turned on.
The one exception is fluorescent tubes (not compact fluorescents), they require a lot more energy to turn on than they consume while running normally.
Depending on the source of the information, fluorescents use energy equivalent to 5 to 24 seconds of regular use, just to power up. Therefore, if you use fluorescent tubes, there would be times when it would be more efficient to leave them on than turn them off.
If you have a large room that is lit with fluorescent tubes and you were going to leave the room for a few minutes or less, it would be more efficient to leave them on instead of turning them off and then back on when you return. But, if you’re leaving for more than that, you should shut them off.
That said, turning lights on and off does cause wear and tear on the bulbs. LED “bulbs”, which are now available at most hardware stores, are most resilient to this type of wear and tear.
Incandescent bulbs are extremely cheap, so the cost of replacing these bulbs isn’t an important consideration, although the environmental impact may be. But, it is important to consider this wear and tear for more expensive bulbs such as compact fluorescents. It is for this reason that the EPA recommends that compact fluorescent lights are used in areas where they will usually be turned on for at least 15 minutes at a time. This will contribute to bulb lifespan.
Although I used a couple other sources for this post, Mythbusters did some great experiments on this subject and I’ve embedded the video if you’d like to watch it.
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Sources: Mythbusters, EPA, EnergyStar (PDF)
How to Save 25% on Medical Bills
By Kaye Nemec | Contributor
If you’ve recently undergone some sort of medical procedure and are nervous about the number of digits when the bill arrives, relax. Medical bills aren’t necessarily black and white; some frugal patients have discovered a secret.
According to a recent New York Times article, most hospitals and doctor’s offices are willing to negotiate price if it means at least part of their bill actually gets paid. In a time when the economy isn’t exactly booming and some people can’t afford health care, more and more medical bills are left untouched. If you’re looking to steer clear of collection agencies and maintain your credit, you may be able to benefit from other people’s “dine & ditch” version of medical procedures.
So what’s the trick? Haggle.
Call your doctor, hospital, dentist etc. and ask them to give you a discount if you pay your entire bill immediately over the phone. Angie’s List recently performed a consumer survey about this topic and found that 74% of people received a discount on medical bills simply by asking for it.
If you’re the planning ahead type, check out the website HealthCareBlueBook.com before scheduling a medical procedure. They’ll give you an estimate of what some of the most common procedures should cost, that way you can shop around and see how much various providers are charging. Once you find the best deal, schedule the appointment, then call afterward to haggle your discount. Check out their section on How to Negotiate Healthcare Prices for even more tips on lowering your bill.
Even if you’ve never used the salesperson of the month parking spot, it’s easy to ask for a discount. The worst that can happen is: they say, “no”
Your request can be as simple as, “Hello. I have a labor and delivery bill from your hospital for $1,700.00 and I heard that if I pay it in full over the phone I can get a 25% discount. I’d like to go ahead and do that today.”
I’m wondering, could this also work at the vet? If you thought medical bills for humans were outrageous, try having a puppy and you’ll soon learn what astronomical looks like.
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Sources: NYT, CBSNews.com, Angie’s List, HealthCareBlueBook.com
Photo: Maxios (cc)
Drinking and Driving is Legal in Mississippi
By Chad Upton
Ever since I can remember, “Don’t Drink and Drive” has been drilled into my head.
But, the range of acceptable blood alcohol content varies from 0.01% in Albania, Guyana and a few other countries, to 0.08% in Canada, Ireland, Italy, United Kingdom, United States and many others.
It’s obviously dangerous to be drunk while driving. But, it’s arguable when alcohol consumption becomes dangerous.
Some countries have lower limits for drivers who are new or have other special circumstances and more strict penalties for blood alcohol readings at other levels above the legal limit. In some cases: state and provincial laws are more strict than federal laws or county and city laws are more strict than state and provincial laws.
Countries, such as Brazil and the Czech Republic, have a zero tolerance policy for blood alcohol content. In those countries, and a few others, you cannot have alcohol in your bloodstream when you drive. Other countries, permit up to 0.08% blood alcohol content.
I couldn’t find a country with more internal disagreement than the United States. In most states, it is illegal to have a blood alcohol level higher than 0.08%. The rules are even more strict for drivers under the age of 21. In most states, you can’t have open containers in the passenger compartment of a vehicle — that is a container where the seal has been broken.
Conversely, there are a number of states where passengers are allowed to consume alcohol while the vehicle is moving. These states are Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Mississippi, Missouri, Virginia, and West Virginia. Actually, Mississippi allows drivers to consume alcohol as long as they do not exceed the blood alcohol limit of 0.08%.
States that do not conform to federal open container laws are financially penalized. But, that doesn’t stop them, in fact, drive thru restaurants in some states serve alcoholic beverages too.
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Sources: Wikipedia (US Open Container Laws, Drunk Driving by Country), Open Container Laws, The Monitor, State Line
Relevant:
An alcohol abuse program makes use of various methods, all designed to help an alcohol abuser get the all that drinking off his system.
Disney World has Many Legal Powers of a City
By Chad Upton
Disney World is the size of a small city, make that two small cities.
Many people believe that Walt Disney World Resort is in Orlando Florida, but that’s not exactly correct. While it is near Orlando, The City of Bay Lake and the City of Reedy Creek (now the City of Lake Buena Vista) are incorporated into the lands of Walt Disney World Resort.
When the Disney World was announced, Walt Disney explained that a special district would need to be created for it to succeed. Due to the massive construction effort to build Disney World, Walt believed the park would need to have powers similar to a city in order to manage construction efficiently and secure control over its future.
On May 12, 1967, legislation forming the Reedy Creek Improvement District was formed. This legislation provides Disney World with immunity from county and state land-use laws, giving them eminent domain and ultimate control over what they build inside the park. Property taxes and elevator inspections are the only items that the district submits to the county and state.
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Sources: Wikipedia (Walt Disney World Resort)
Photo: Stuck in Customs (cc)
Alcohol Does Not Completely Burn Off in Cooking
By Chad Upton
Whether you marinade steaks in beer or use Vanilla extract in your baking, you’re probably left with more alcohol in your food than you realize.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it can infuse wonderful flavors. And yes, Vanilla extract has alcohol in it. Actually, it’s mandated by law in the US.
In many cultures, alcohol and food go hand in hand. Fancy wine bars pair meals or selected cheese and chocolate with wine.
Before modern cough medicines, Doctors prescribed a tablespoon of brandy to calm children’s coughs. Even some existing cough medicines, such as NyQuil, contain alcohol (except the childrens remedy). Monks have been known to brew and drink beer since the middle ages.
The USDA’s Nutrition Data Lab used gas-liquid chromatography to determine how much alcohol remained in food after various cooking scenarios.
| Cooking Method | Alcohol Remaining |
| Flambé | 75% |
| Left Overnight (no heat) | 70% |
| baked 25 mins (alcohol not stirred in) | 45% |
| baked 15 mins (alcohol stirred in) | 40% |
| baked 30 mins (alcohol stirred in) | 35% |
| baked 60 mins (alcohol stirred in) | 25% |
| baked 90 mins (alcohol stirred in) | 20% |
| baked 120 mins (alcohol stirred in) | 10% |
| baked 150 mins (alcohol stirred in) | 5% |
Even after 2.5 hours, 5% of the alcohol remains. I don’t think it’s anything to be too alarmed about. Grandma’s have been serving cookies laced with Vanilla extract to children for many years and most of us turned out just fine. That said, it’s still pretty surprising.
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Sources: Wikipedia, O Chef , Trappist Beer, NyQuil
Photo: 5volt (cc)
Sarcastic Secret: Signal Lights
By Chad Upton
Tickers, blinkers, indicators and flashers. They have many names, but only one purpose: to let people know your car is about to change course.
In most vehicles, a lever on the steering column moves up or down to activate flashing lights on either side of the car.
I suspect a lot of people don’t even know their car has such lights, but they’ve been standard on cars since cars.
Maybe it’s a confusing concept, so I’ll try to explain it in a straight forward manner: if you’re about to turn your steering wheel, put these lights on first.
I find that some people use signal lights like the horn. They know they’re there, but they only use them when they need you to move.
Most vehicles also have a way to put all four blinkers on at the same time. The vehicle manual may refer to these as “four way flashers” or “hazard lights” but a lot of people know these as “park anywhere lights.” Their understanding of this feature is, when you want to double park, park in a fire lane or any other no parking zone, these flashing lights give you temporary immunity from parking regulations.
In all seriousness, signal lights first appeared on cars in 1907, but weren’t patented until 1938. Some cars from the 1920s to 1950s used solid (non-blinking) retractable lights on the sides of the car, called a trafficators.
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Source: Wikipeda (Signal Lights)
Photo: Wikimedia (gnu free)
How They Make Burgers Look Perfect In Ads
By Chad Upton
It’s rhetorical and cliche, but why doesn’t the food you order ever look like the food in the picture?
I’ll bite — it’s because your food took a few minutes to make and the food in the picture took a few hours to style. Yes, style.
I’ve rounded up some videos that show you some of the secrets of food advertising. The first video is about burgers and it’s pretty old, but still relevant.
The next video is about pizza and it’s part of a current Domino’s promotion to send in pictures of your pizza for everyone to see.
It’s a pretty well known fact that what you see is not what you’re going to get. But, Burger King recently canceled an advertisement where they misled viewers about the size of the burger. After watching these videos, it’s no surprise how they do it.
If you want to see a nice set of side-by-side photos of what they advertise and what you get, click here.
If you are reading this post on a device that does not support videos, I’ll tell you a bit about what they contain.
The burgers are cooked very little. To make them look grilled, they are brand them with thin skewers. Then they apply food dye for color. A layer of cardboard is placed on the bottom bun so the bun doesn’t get soft. The burger patty is split on the back side, so it can be widened from the front view — this makes the burger look larger. Vegetables are piled on top of the bun and pinned in place so they don’t move. A small shot of condiments are added on the front of the burger (the side the camera is on).
The second video is all about making perfect cheese strings when a slice of pizza is removed from a pizza pie. They go through all of the cheese to make sure every piece is perfect and use a heat gun to perfectly melt the cheese around the star slice, this makes it very stringy when the slice is lifted. The rest of the pizza is screwed down, except for one slice, so the pizza doesn’t move when the one slice is lifted.
There you have it, secrets from fast food advertising.
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Photo: jasonlam (cc)
Tires Do Not Protect You During a Vehicle Lightning Strike
By Chad Upton
I’ve always heard that a car is one of the safest places to be during a lightning strike and that is true.
The tires usually get all the credit. As the story goes, tires are rubber and rubber is an insulator, so you don’t get electrocuted in the car because you’re isolated from the ground like a bird on a wire.
It’s a pretty believable story, but it’s not the truth.
If you think about it, the lightning travels thousands of feet through thin air to reach the car — it could easily continue to travel through thin air to get around a few inches of rubber tires. Compared to the power of lightning, tires don’t really provide any protection.
Trains are struck by lightning and the people inside are fine, even though trains have metal wheels, which are great conductors.
Airplanes are regularly struck by lightning in the air. In fact, the FAA estimates that each plane gets struck about once per year.
So why are people safe in these cases?
It’s all because of a principle discovered by Michael Faraday in 1836.
Faraday demonstrated that an electrical charge exists only on the exterior of a hollow conductor and not the interior. He built a wire cage, that is now know as a Faraday cage, to demonstrate that an electrical current flowing through the cage did not produce an electrical current inside the cage. When you’re in a vehicle, with a conductive exterior shell, you’re inside a Faraday cage and the electrical charge is carried around you.
Faraday cages can also be used to shield against electromagnetic radiation. Coaxial cables are common in most households for carrying TV signals. These cables are design with what amounts to be a built in Faraday cage to protect the inner copper wire from electrical noise.
Microwave ovens are also a good example of a Faraday cage. This principle protects you from exposure to microwaves by turning the inside of the oven into a Faraday cage. The mesh you see on the inside of the door is part of that cage and explains why the glass isn’t perfectly transparent.
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Sources: Wikipedia (Ground, Faraday Cage), Weather Imagery (Cars, Airplanes), Faraday Cage
Photo: jonathan mcintosh (cc)
ID is Not Required to Buy Cooking Wine
By Chad Upton
The laws and store policies around the products that require ID and the ones that don’t, are sometimes confusing.
I was in Target a while back and bought a can of compressed air to clean my dusty laptop. I was surprised when they asked for ID at the checkout.
Apparently some people like to get high from the propellant in canned air. It’s unfortunate, these are not recreational drugs, these are asphyxiates that displace the oxygen in the air, reducing the oxygen that reaches your brain and eventually causes death. The solution is to require ID for purchase, although even a 42 year old man died from “huffing” canned air.
Even when you’re using these products as intended, you should avoid inhaling the fumes and ensure adequate ventilation.
I was at Target a few weeks later, looking for ramekins to make Crème brûlée. I also needed a butane blowtorch to caramelize the top of the custard. It turns out that you can buy butane torches and fuel without ID. Thinking back to my teenage years, a blowtorch would have been much more fun than a can of air.
But, cooking wine has the most interesting story.
It ranges from 10%-13% alcohol and anybody can buy cooking wine at the grocery store. They even sell it in grocery stores in “dry” areas, where no alcoholic drinks are sold. In fact, Safeway requires ID to buy cough syrup, but not for cooking wine. Some cough syrup, such as NyQuil, contains alcohol. Other cough and cold medications contain a drug known as Dextromethorphan, which is a dissociative psychedelic drug.
My friend Molly told me about this cooking wine loophole and gave me a sample of the product. If you’ve ever tasted cooking wine on it’s own, you’ll understand why anyone is allowed to buy it. Nobody would ever consume it on its own, it’s simply awful.
Wine that is sold as “cooking wine” is usually grape or rice wine. It is then adulterated with salt, which makes it less suitable for cooking and even more undrinkable. If you’re making a recipe that calls for wine, use wine that you’d actually drink and use a wine that pairs well with the food you’re cooking.
Cooking wine has a lot of salt for coloring and as a preservative. Because cooking wine is consumed very slowly, the salt prevents acedic acid from forming and turning it into wine vinegar.
Oh, and if you’re going to make Crème brûlée, my friend Mike showed me that you should skip the butane and go with propane — it has a wider flame that heats more evenly, which gives much better results and in less time.
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Sources: Wikipedia (Cooking Wine, Difluoroethane, Dextromethorphan), MSDS, Cooking Wine Without ID (1, 2), Dry Counties, NyQuil
Photo: anitasarkeesian (cc)
The Magic Kingdom is Built on a Series of Tunnels
By Chad Upton
Walt Disney World Resort near Orlando Florida is the largest resort in the world at 100 km squared (39 sq miles).
It started off as mostly swamp land. In fact, there were many people who owned pieces of that land before Walt Disney secretly bought it all up. He didn’t want people to know he was buying the land because he feared prospectors would buy it up and hold out for exorbitant figures.
In order to secretly buy this land without attracting attention, a number of dummy corporations were formed. Some of the company names included M. T. Lott Real Estate Investments (“empty lot”), Ayefour Corporation (“I 4” because the resort is near Interstate 4) and many of them were owned by “Mr. M. Mouse.” In hindsight, it seems pretty obvious. But, nobody caught on until someone leaked the information to the Orlando Sentinel in October of 1965. Many of these names can be found on a window on Main St in the Magic Kingdom.
Walt Disney World Resort includes a number of theme parks, but the oldest and most well known is The Magic Kingdom. It’s crown jewel is Cinderella’s Castle.
The castle is directly across the park from the front gate. In fact, if you look at the castle from inside the front entrance, you can tell the castle is built one story higher than the gate — Main St gradually slopes up to the castle. This gives the castle a grand presence and it also accommodates a big secret below the park.
If you look at the picture of the Magic Kingdom Railroad Station (below) which is just beyond the front gate, you can see that it is one level above ground level. The elevation of the train station and the castle exist because concrete utility corridors (“utilidors”) are built at ground level and the rest of the park is built on top of these tunnels.
The Seven Seas Lagoon, in front of the Magic Kingdom, is a man made lake. 1.5 million square meters (5 million square feet) of dirt was excavated to create the lake — that dirt was used to build up the ground around the utilidors to make the Magic Kingdom seem like it is at ground level. The main tunnel starts just on the other side of the railroad station and runs below Main St, leading directly to Cinderella’s Castle.
There are entrances into the utilidors all over the park (see the attached map). The main entry is behind “It’s a Small World” at the back of the park where there is a large loading area for people and supplies to enter the tunnel system. There are 2.5 km (1.5 miles) of tunnels below the park. They’re not just for moving around, there are many other features built in to the tunnels: break rooms, restrooms, locker rooms, “Kingdom Kutters” (hair cutting), “Mouseketeeria” (cafeteria), makeup room, first aid facility, money room and training rooms.
The tunnels make it efficient for cast members and utility crews to move around the park without disrupting park guests. It prevents guests from seeing characters in parts of the park where they don’t fit in, although visitors can pay for a tour that includes a look behind the scenes of some shows and a trip through the utilidors. This is an all day tour of Walt Disney World Resort called the Backstage Magic Tour and it costs $238 per person. If it’s just the tunnels you want to see, watch this video for free.
Guests under the age of 16 are not allowed in the Utilidors because Disney is worried about ruining the magic if a child sees two of the same character together or two characters from different stories talking together. The walls of the tunnels are labeled and color coded to make navigation easy.
Just like other places, Disney World has it’s own secret language, including terms such as “Protein Spill” (vomit) and “Alpha Crew” (first aid). These codes allow them to communicate on radios without spoiling the magic for guests within earshot.
There are many secrets that make the Magic Kingdom seem so magical — I’ll share more again soon.
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Sources: Hidden Mickeys, Wikipedia, Explore the Magic
Photos: Daryl Mitchell (cc), John Corigliano (cc)
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