"Have you been replacing all your light bulbs with those things that look like melting Dairy Queen ice cream?" asks Michael Hawley. "Well stop, it!" Hawley was a keynote speaker at the recently held Pro/ENGINEER users meeting in Tampa He is founder of Friendly Planet, and more*. Those light bulb replacements contain mercury. Not very ecological at all, he says. Besides, you're just adapting Thomas Edison's archaic invention. What is the answer? LEDs, he says. They may not be commercially available now, but buy stock in LED companies. They're riding Moore's Law. Did you know 1/4 of our countries energy is spent on lighting?
As Michael Hawley is a MIT professor, I guess I ought to take him seriously.
Some other highlights of his talk.
- Switzerland is a depressing place. Every problem has been solved. If you blow your nose, there will be a trash can within 5 feet. It has a high rate of suicide.
- "When you are finished changing, you're finished," Ben Franklin
- "If you are going through hell, keep going," Winston Churchill
- "The future may require not so much having a new idea as stopping with old ideas," Edwin Land (inventor of the Polaroid camera).
- Marketing is what you do when your product sucks
- Last year there were more people in cities than in rural areas.
- Bhutan measures Gross National Happiness and has made smoking illegal. His picture book on Bhutan measures 5 ft by 7 ft and is the largest book sold by Amazon.
*More information on Michael Hawley on his home page at http://web.media.mit.edu/~mike/
This guy -- what was his name again? -- is playing the American's natural ignorance of the world outside of the borders of continental USA.
>Switzerland is a depressing place.
Um, no. In contrast, I find it a joyous place. Perhaps you might too, on your next trip there.
>If you blow your nose, there will be a trash can within 5 feet.
He may be confused wiht some USA-based, no-gum-allowed, "happiest"-place-on-earth Disney theme park.
Posted by: ralphg | June 10, 2007 at 08:57 PM