(Video Further down the page, but read this first)
In the UK today Google has turned the entire homepage black to remind people about "earth hour" - when the public are encouraged to switch all their lights off for an hour. It's a great idea, and I hope it will work better than the E-Day did.
E-Day was a day when the British public were encouraged to switch off their lights and electronic equipment, to see how much effect it could have on the electricity usage. Unfortunately for them, when the day came energy usage increased by 0.1 percent
Google's message today did remind me of some adverts I had seen a couple of months ago that I just thought were taking "Green' a little too far, I've been meaning to post them, so here is the first one:
This ad for a "living water vortex jug" offers to "make living water at home to improve your health"
In Case you cannot read this, this text says:
The Living Water Vortex Jug
Make Living Water at home and improve your Health! Viktor Schauberger's
technology transforms tap, filtered or bottled water into biologically active living water, replicating the self cleansing spirals and vortices of a lively mountain stream.
£59.50[+p and p] free brochure
Great!
First, let's go back over why we treat water to begin with. The idea is that we take river water, which is full of living things and poisons, filter it to remove contaminates such as traces of metals from the rocks, excess nitrogen etc. and kill all living organisms within the water (normally by using Ultra-Violet).
Why do we kill all the living organisms? We're not talking about fish here, we're talking about bacteria, fungus, parasites and viruses. The organisms commonly found in river water are known to cause Amoebiasis, Cryptosporidiosis, Cyclosporiasis, Giardiasis, and in some cases Aids.
The idea of the "Living Water Vortex Jug", though, is to take this filtered, safe water from your tap and to encourage these organisms to grow in it again. This is not only pointless, and a waste of power, but It's highly dangerous.
While writing up this post, I looked into this product more to check that I wasn't missing anything, and it seems I was - but not in a good way. Not only are they actually encouraging you to increase the amount of potentially deadly organisms you eat in the name of increasing your health, but companies selling this product make other claims.
Here is a video I found showing you how to use the Living water Vortex Jug - notice the suggested importance of playing the correct music to the water in order to give the water nice memories ;-). I don't know if this is all that you do, or if you leave it for a long time to allow organisms to grow, but please don't encourage your children to drink anything that you have inserted contaminate into.
Here is a great quote from a site that sells these:
"Typically, ...[water is] recycled as many as 20 times. Even if the physical contaminants have been removed, their vibrations "imprint" is still carried in the water in it's memory according to researchers such as Jacques Beneveniste [sic] and others*, no matter how many times it is recycles. ... [the vibrations] can transmit negative or destructive imprints that can cause disharmony or disease."
Firstly I would like to point out that, to my knowledge, there was only ever one study performed that is in any way related to their claims, and this was in fact performed under the supervision of Jacques Benveniste. However, this study was found to be completely unscientific, inconclusive, and possibly falsified, and it resulted in Jacques Benveniste being fired from his position at France's research body (Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale) in 1990. ( Ref).
You see, on an molecular scale there are only two kinds of water - H2O (two hydrogen atoms, and one Oxygen), and 'Heavy Water' - where one of the Hydrogen atoms is replaced with a Deuterium atom - which is used in nuclear reactors. There is absolutely no way in which these molecules could possibly "remember" anything or have a "memory".
On a sub-atomic scale (within the atoms), people often get confused. At this scale, the atoms' energy is in the form of "vibrations" (a wave property). However, a process called Decoherence ensures that this form is lost as an atom interacts with other atoms (and in a single gram of water there are about 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms). This is a fact that is shown thousands of times each day in research labs over the world.
All in all, I seem to have gone off on a bit of a rant on this one - but I know from experience that the kind of people who believe in this always say there is something else to explain it, and I wanted to close off my argument as much as possible. (Although if you do have any kind of argument that you think justifies wasting this much power and putting yourself at risk to have a drink of water then feel free to comment - but please justify any comments with provable facts)
Last week, released a video of their new flexible display, with a total width of 0.3mm. After scouring the official sony site (where I can't find any mention of the device) I found the following video on Youtube
The display uses a mixture of OLED and TFT technology (according to news sources) - Basically this means that the display is a large matrix of printed dots made from an organic chemicals which show Electro-luminescence (i.e. they glow when a voltage difference is created aross them). This is very different from LCD technology, where the display is backlit separately while a layer of Liquid Crystal is used to change the properties of the light for each pixel.
Groups of red, green and blue dots form one pixel, and they are addressed using the TFT technology, which uses a tiny transistor connected to each dot to drive the electro-luminescence. This means they can be addressed by what is effectively a continuous potential across sections of the display, rather than by running individual connections to each dot. This enables much faster and cheaper switching of pixels.
It is noted that this research is still far from the bistable paper-like devices that many companies are still researching, which would hold an image even when the power is disconnected. The display is 2.5 inches wide (a fairly standard size for prototypes), and allows video playback(see video).
