If you know where to shop, you can get high (90+) CRI fluorescent tubes in just about any color temperature. A lot of the manufacturers seem to have standardized on a three digit code to describe the lights, with the first digit giving the approximate CRI and the final two giving the color temperature. So a 927 tube would be 2700K with a 90+ CRI and a 641 would be 4100K with a CRI of about 60. If you buy a cheap tube without a labeled color or CRI, it will probably be a 641, which are the nasty, old fashioned ones that give fluorescent lighting such a bad reputation. 800 series tubes are a bit more expensive but give fairly good light and comparable efficiency to the 600 series. 900 series give really nice light that closely approximates a continuous spectrum, but lose some efficiency compared to the 800 series. I have 950 tubes in my remaining fluorescent tube fixtures, and they look great compared to the 641s I had before; colors really pop, and skin looks natural.

Unfortunately, most CFLs don't include a CRI on the packaging. They have to have a CRI of at least 80 to get an EnergyStar rating, but most of them are barely above that. You can find 90+ CRI in CFLs, but mostly in daylight simulation bulbs that are 5000K and above. It's too bad, because I think a lot of people would pay for higher CRI bulbs in a wider range of colors.

I personally hate the 2700K light because it's grossly blue deficient. Your eyes can adapt to a wide range of color temperatures while maintaining a visual perception that the light is neutral. Any time the light has a visually obvious color cast, it's a sign that it has a lot more of some colors than others. That applies to the notably warm light from incandescent lamps (and fluorescent lights that try to mimic them) as much as it does to 641 fluorescent lights that have a nasty green tint. You may be able to find high CRI 2700K lights, but that just means that they're doing a good job of mimicking blue deficient incandescent light, not that they're giving truly accurate color rendition.

FWIW, high color temperature is typically more efficient because it most closely matches the sensitivity of our eyes, not because it's letting through more raw blue light from the mercury spectrum. Basically, our eyes have evolved to be most sensitive to wavelengths that are strongest in natural daylight (green and yellow) and less sensitive to colors that are weaker in natural daylight (extreme blue and extreme red). Ratings of lighting efficiency take that sensitivity into account, so daylight balanced light is naturally more efficient than warmer light is.

I tried doing that with Fluorescents and realized it gave me headaches.

Make sure you get good quality, high CRI fluorescent lights. A lot of what people don't like about fluorescent lights is the poor quality light, which is sad, because better quality ones are available. You should try for a CRI above 90, and settle for one between 80 and 90. Most linear fluorescents have a CRI rating on the packaging, but CFLs usually don't. You can find high CRI CFLs, but mostly in daylight rather than soft white.

When to comes to offering warm yet visually efficient lighting, LEDs have a long way to go.

Stop right there. Have these people used recent LED lighting? I just upgraded some lights in my house to LEDs, and they're great. They're at least as good as the LED tubes they replaced, and that's at just over 100 lumens/watt. There are a lot of low quality LEDs out there, but the good ones are already very good indeed.

It isn't really the right terms for the auction anyway. The company sending you mail should have to start its bidding at the cost of delivering the mail, which is what the postage covers, while your bidding should start at the price of not delivering the mail (e.g. sorting it into a recycling bin and sending it to the recycling plant), which is the alternative they should be considering. Since not delivering is going to be a lot cheaper than delivering, the target of unwanted mail should have an advantage.

Only first class mail gets forwarded after a change of address, but junk mail companies can and do check the change of address information and update their databases. The last time I moved, a whole bunch of my junk mail followed me. That includes organizations I used to belong to who keep sending me letters about the need to re-join.

No, the Post Office does not get $100 million per year in funding. It is legally required to provide certain services at no cost to the recipients, and Congress appropriates money to make up for the costs. In any case, that's a drop in the bucket compared to the total cost of running the Post Office, not a massive subsidy.

And then there are all the ways that the Post Office is required to subsidize other people. They're required to deliver mail to the whole country at a fixed cost, rather than charging different rates according to the actual cost of delivery or refusing to deliver to out-of-the-way places that aren't cost effective. They have to deliver mail for Congress for free, which many Congresspeople abuse. The Post Office is actually very efficient.

We have set the bar far too low for taking money from someone who has earned it and giving to someone who has done nothing except cry about how they need it.

Great. Let's start by taking businesses away from people who inherited them and give them to the employees. Or was that not what you had in mind?

You do realize that that cost is heavily subsidized by the government?

No, he doesn't realize that because it isn't true. USPS does not receive any tax subsidy. It is currently running an accounting deficit, but only because it's being required by law to pre-fund health and retirement benefits for the next 75 years in the span of a decade. If USPS wasn't being required to fund retirement for employees who haven't been born yet, it would be in fine financial shape.

But the problems with our health spending are not primarily in the public sector. Those other countries that have more efficient healthcare than we do have more of their healthcare run by the government, and there's a fairly strong correlation between cost effectiveness and government control. Within the US, the the government is generally more cost effective than the private sector. Within the government sector, the most efficient provider is the VA, which runs its own hospitals rather than just being a glorified insurance company. There's every reason to think that our healthcare system would be improved by turning more of it over to the government.

Don't neglect the cost of advertising, either. Paying for ads is a non-labor expense, and it can easily make or break a product..

In any case, complaining about marketing costs is often silly. An engineering team is basically a tool to convert money into new products. To stay in business, it has to be connected to another group that converts the new products back into money, which means some kind of marketing. You need both sides to pull their weight for the organization to thrive in the long term. As long as the marketing people are doing a good job of bringing in the money and aren't making promises the engineers can't keep, it shouldn't be a big deal to the engineers exactly how they do it.

It's actually a better comic than you might expect.

You say tomayto, I say tomahto. What else is money laundering but trying to keep your money out of the government's control?

The trick is that the shutter isn't doing the work; the flash is. It's possible to make very short flash pulses; I think you can make them even shorter than the 1/50,000 second mentioned in the article. As long as most of the light for the photograph comes from the brief but intense flash, the ability to freeze action depends on the flash speed rather than the shutter speed. You actually need to make sure the shutter speed is slow enough that the shutter is guaranteed to be all the way open when the flash triggers (X-sync speed or slower), or only the area behind the open part of the shutter will be exposed. Controlling things using the flash also guarantees that the multiple cameras used for 3D photography will all be taking their pictures at exactly the same instant.

Also note that the limitation you're talking about only applies to focal plane shutters (i.e. those right in front of the film or sensor). It's also possible to use a central shutter that's located right next to the iris of the lens. Central shutters open and close like the lens aperture, but block the lens completely when they're closed. Like the lens aperture, they block light to all parts of the focal plane more or less equally as they open and close, so they don't induce any of the motion effects that focal plane shutters do. Central shutters have their own problems- it's hard to make them work for very short shutter speeds, and they have limited efficiency when you use them that way because they're only completely open for part of the time- but they do eliminate focal plane shutter artifacts and allow you to flash sync at any available shutter speed.