The brightest shop light you linked to is 300 lumens. A 75-watt incandescent bulb produces 1200 lumens.

As for your arguments, (a) is false, (b) is debatable depending on how you define rugged and what failure modes you're considering, for this purpose I'll concede that you're right, and (c) isn't something I care about in most instances.

Notice that nowhere have I complained about the cost of alternatives, merely their performance characteristics. You're right, I can most certainly afford a $30 flashlight, but what I want is a shop light. My criteria for performance are volumetric density, total light output, ruggedness, consequences of failure, and probability of failure. Incandescent bulbs are an excellent fit for the application.

For what it's worth, the LED bulbs work just great in my kitchen.

I bought a ruggedized incandescent bulb for my shop light, but it consumes twice as much power as I wanted and makes my shop light extremely hot. I examined all of the options at the hardware store. Online options are great, but when you're working projects waiting for even overnight shipping is not an option. The good old fashioned 75-watt bulb is perfectly adequate.

The real way to make people save electricity is to tax the thing you want them to consume less of - electricity. I live in California, and per capita, the state uses less electricity than most other places in the country. I can't help but imagine that's partly due to our high utility rates.

My shop light (wire cage lamp on a stick) could be populated with LEDs or CFLs, but I it's a lamp that sees rough use. I drop it, hit it with two-by-fours, and drop my drill on it all the time. LED bulbs are too expensive to justify in a location where they'll get abused, and CFLs contain mercury so it seems irresponsible to put them in a place where I expect to regularly break bulbs.

Fuck you Congress, for thinking you're smarter than I am. For the record, all of my household bulbs are LED and I love them.

I am the previous captain of the Stanford team and will be following the team across the outback again this year as a groupie. Racing itself is arguably the least important part of the overall race effort. While it allows you to choose winners and losers, on its own it doesn't contribute much to the overall solar car team experience. The race is only a few days long, but the effort to get there takes years.

To all of you criticizing the value of solar cars: The point of solar racing isn't to prove that solar cars are a viable mode of transportation. It's to be an extreme engineering exercise for students. Through it they learn project management, budget management, marketing, engineering optimization, teamwork, and real-world design skills. It takes an immense amount of thinking and excellent execution to build a car that weighs a few hundred pounds that can cruise down the freeway at 65 mph all day long on the power of a toaster and that doesn't break after bumping through the desert for thousands of miles.

For what it's worth, Tesla Motors was born out of the Stanford solar car team. Their first battery pack was made in our shop years ago as part of JB's retrofit of his old Porsche. Mission Motors owes quite a bit of its heritage to solar car racing as well, with its founders coming from the Stanford and Yale teams.

If any of you are in the SF bay area, I encourage you to come take a look at one of these cars in person. Our latest entry, Xenith, will be back on campus in January and we enjoy hosting visitors. Just send an email through the form on the Stanford Solar Car Project website.

Wolfram Alpha tells us that the direct path round trip by fiber would take 90 milliseconds. I'm rather impressed that it takes less than twice that to do the trip in reality, what with all of the additional routing delays and non-ideal paths that the data must take.

It's also worth pointing out that direct-democracy frequently produces laws that generate expenditures but rarely generate revenue. Just as people like spending but not paying at the consumer level, they behave the same way at the societal level. California has a lot of individually poorly-funded, but expense-in-aggregate social programs that do not exist elsewhere in the country. The hyper-partisanship that divides agricultural California from urban California also paralyzes the government against accomplishing anything beyond money-sinking feel-good legislation. It would make my day if the governor had the power to delete anything off of any budget at any time - a huge extension beyond the controversial "line-item veto".

It seems that geothermal plants have exploded in the past.

You're drilling holes several kilometers into the earth, pumping water down and expecting to get back superheated steam. You have all of the necessary elements for an explosion. I'm don't claim that geothermal isn't worth the risk, just that there are risks involved, as with any other energy source. Of the environmentally friendlier alternatives, hydro and geothermal seem to have the greatest opportunity for mishaps.