Revelations in Cutting Edge Lighting Technology

One of our beeswax candles made with stearic acid, showing a typical amount of dripping. Double this for a beeswax/tallow candle, and triple it for pure beeswax.

A few years back, the book Lights Out opened my eyes to the side effects of ubiquitous electric lighting. Much like any other animal or plant, the human body is quite sensitive to photo-period, which in large part controls the hormones that run our bodies. The ability to sleep, control your appetite, and even your immune function (particularly with relation to cancer) are all dependent upon the amount and type of lighting your body detects. With abundant electric light, televisions, computer monitors, and smartphones, there's little wonder why so many Americans are overweight, sleep deprived, diabetic, riddled with cancer, or beset with depression. Other factors undoubtedly play a role, but light clearly influences us in ways most have never considered.

Electric everything relies upon a grid fueled by fracked gas, mountaintop-removal coal, uranium (ever wonder why Trump was so hot to get rid of Bear's Ears Monument?), and a host of other nasties. Suffice it to say that electricity production has contaminated much of the planet now to the point where the biosphere is crumbling before our eyes, and our best chance for survival depends on getting rid of it wherever we can.

As the book explains, it's not necessary to sleep for 12 hours a day because you can't have electric lights on all the time, but it is important to average at least 9.5 hours of very low or no light. It's quite possible to exist on dimmer light than we're used to, and it benefits us considerably when we do.

My own lighting goals are 1) can be fueled from a homestead without purchased inputs, 2) provides usable quantities of light, 3) doesn't stink up the home or significantly damage the indoor air quality.

A center-draft, round-wick Rayo lamp

Oil lamps work well in the absence of electricity, but require significant quantities of kerosene (a fossil fuel), and give off quite a bit of heat (not always a plus). Their indoor emissions are also pretty nasty, and the kerosene is constantly evaporating into the home even when they're not in use. Their flame has a tendency to grow as they warm up, requiring constant supervision to adjust the wick during this period unless you want a house filled with soot.

With that said, in a non-electric environment, oil lamps do have a place. They can give off quite a bit of light, particularly the Aladdin mantle lamps (which are equivalent to a 30 watt bulb). The downside to these is that the light can be quite harsh, and the mantles are slightly radioactive, as well as being fragile and short lived.

Oil lamps do have some benefits over electric lights. Their light is typically much dimmer, and thus provides the benefits noted above. An overlooked benefit is that they're fairly expensive to operate. The downside to greater efficiency (as noted in Jevon's Paradox) means there's an upside to lower efficiency, which is clearly the case with this lighting option. You'll find that you keep one oil lamp burning with you as you move from room to room, instead of leaving multiple lights going throughout the house, and may very well use less energy as a result.

My preference in oil lamps is for the standard round-wick center-draft lamps of the sort historically produced by Bradley and Hubbard or Rayo. These produce plenty of light, with a softer appearance than the mantle lamps, and are cheaper and easier to maintain and keep well tuned.

Candles, though now relegated to purely decorative or "mood" uses nowadays in

Aladdin lamp with the chimney removed. It uses a burner nearly identical to the Rayo but with the addition of a mantle for increased light

most homes, deserve a second look. Though it's a significant change for anyone accustomed to electric lighting, the 13 lumens from a single candle can sufficiently light a room (particularly if the walls are painted white). It's enough to read by when placed close to your book, and doesn't appear to be enough to delay your sleep or encourage a late night snack.

I'm not a fan of paraffin candles, as paraffin is a coal derivative and thus has little to recommend it over oil lamps. I have a similar opinion of soy candles, which are effectively a product of Monsanto and Exxon. A homestead with a few beehives, however, can supply a significant amount of beeswax.  It makes an excellent lighting fuel, smells great, and is also useful for everything from treating leather to lubricating black-powder rifle patches.

Pure beeswax candles, as we've discovered, do have some shortcomings. Beeswax has a relatively low melting point, which causes the candles to dribble and make a mess. This melting can be reduced through addition of tallow in a 50/50 mix, but there will still be significant dripping. The addition of a small amount of stearic acid (as used in commercial candles) considerably reduces the dripping. It's relatively inexpensive and not much is needed, but it must be purchased. So far as I can tell, it cannot be easily produced at home, and I haven't found any substitutes.

Though we have yet to make our own wicks, I do think it would be relatively simple with the use of flax (aka linen), which we've grown in our garden. I see some candles are now sold with a wooden wick, which would also be worth experimenting with.

Our tin candle mold

We make our own candles in a mold, which seems much easier and faster than dipping them. Old style tin molds are readily available, and work well with a little practice. You'll find people recommending various sprays for helping to release the candles from the mold, but we've found something much simpler and cheaper that works better. Just take hot water from your tea-kettle and pour it over the outside of the mold. The candles will all but fall right out on their own.

So candles can be messy, which is why I've found that antique candle-holders with a wide-dish base are perfect for collecting melted wax (which can be melted down into new candles). My favorite type has a knob on the side which makes removing the old candle stump a simple task. With these, you just wait until the candle has burned down far enough to warm the metal base (usually brass), at which point the candle stump slides up easily and is replaced with a fresh candle. These bases all seem to be antique, from the era when candles were standard equipment in any home.  They're all over Ebay.

Back in the day when I was an involuntary churchgoer, I remember seeing metal "caps" on the top of some of the candles. Just another way for the church to impress the peasants with fancy finery, I thought. I was wrong! These metal caps are called "candle followers", and do serve a useful purpose. They're quite effective at controlling drips, as it turns out. On our beeswax-stearic acid candles, they've completely eliminated dripping. I haven't tested it yet, but I suspect that they may even work with pure beeswax candles, or even beeswax/tallow candles, which would both eliminate the need for stearic acid as well as allow us to significantly extend our beeswax supplies (tallow is easy to produce if you have any sheep, deer, or cows to butcher).

The one shortcoming of candles which remained is that of snuffing. The typical user nowadays just blows out a candle, which leaves a smoldering wick that gives off smoke for a minute, filling a room with stinky partially burned hydrocarbons. Blow a little too hard and you'll spray wax all over too.

Bell style snuffer

Another thing I remember from church is the bell-type candle snuffer on a stick. I bought a small version of that, which eliminates the need to blow a candle out. It worked to put out the flame, but the candle still smoldered. I wasn't impressed.

Scissor style snuffer

Next in line was one of the scissor-type snuffers, often referred to as a wick trimmer.  This worked much better, and did in fact eliminate the smoldering. The downside was that it got waxy, and needs a place to be stored where it won't get wax on everything. Eventually, it needs to be cleaned up. These aren't sharpened as scissors are;  they merely squeeze the wick between the dull blades and push any crumbly end into the cavity atop one of the blades.

My favorite candle holder, with the cone-type snuffer that stores on the handle, also showing one of our candle followers.  Note the lack of drips!

Finally, I think I've found the best candle snuffer, which came with (not surprisingly) on a pair of antique push-up candle holders purchased on Ebay for $8 each. This little cone-type snuffer is similar to the bell-on-a-stick snuffer I tried earlier, but with one important difference -- you can leave it on top of the candle. This allows it to not only snuff the flame, but to contain the smoke from any smoldering wick. It's just as effective as the scissor type snuffer, but is less prone to wax-buildup and easier to store. When it does get a little wax built up on the inside, just hold it over the candle flame for a few seconds and it'll drip out into the candle.

For future experiments, we'll try making up some pure beeswax candles and see if the follower eliminates drips on those. Another thing I'd like to try is a "rush light". These are relatively fast burning (about 15 minutes), made by soaking the foamy-pith of a rush stem with tallow. While I suspect that a candle is still nicer, they seem as if they would be easier to make, particularly if you don't have beeswax.

Our Little Frankenstein Problem

I think we're all aware of tobacco companies such as RJ Reynolds, and their history of pretending that their product was perfectly harmless when anyone with an IQ above 50 could clearly see that it was not.  More recently, fossil fuel corporations have told us there's no such thing as climate change, that it isn't man-made, that we'll adapt to it, that the climate has always changed so we can't and shouldn't do a thing about it.

As was clearly demonstrated in the movie "The Corporation", large publicly owned corporate entities lack many human traits (such as empathy) which effectively cause them to function as a psychopath (and in fact, they meet the clinical definition of a psychopath). This is largely due to their legal design, which places maximization of shareholder return as the primary objective. The fact that we've given such entities legal personhood, and allowed them unlimited "free speech" through the supreme court Citizens United decision essentially sealed our fate at their hands.

The construct of public corporations invites socio and psychopaths (which together comprise about 5% of our population) into their executive ranks, as demonstrated below. In fact, criminal psychologist Robert Hare has said, “you’re four times more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the corporate ladder than you are walking around the janitor’s office.”

This behavior can clearly be seen in the actions of both Turing and Mylan Pharmaceuticals, both of whom had recently decided to raise prices on very old but important drugs (by 5,500% in the case of Turing). Hey -- want to live? What's it worth to you? Neither you nor I would do that to someone in need, because we're not psychopaths. But a corporation would, and does exactly that on a regular basis.

As Ian Welsh points out, such actions do in fact kill people, but they're not illegal (in large part because corporations now write our laws).  One gentleman, who pleaded for donations to help him afford his required insulin, is now dead.  From 2003 to 2013, insulin prices tripled.

In what would seem to be a good thing, Martin Shkreli (the former head of Turing Pharmaceuticals) was recently indicted and will spend 7 years in prison. However -- his conviction isn't for his clearly deadly behavior -- but is instead for securities fraud. Screwing and killing regular people, as it turns out, is a-okay and perfectly legal. Screwing rich people out of their money is not.  Heather Bresch, the equally abhorrent head of Mylan, who only killed normal people, is not going to jail.

So sociopaths do bad things. Psychopaths do bad things. Is that really news? Probably not.

The problem is not that we have people with these serious and dangerous mental disorders.  The problem is that we've allowed them to rule us, in large part because of the greed that each and every one of us possess.  What's worse is that this will likely lead to our demise.

Corporations not only express a lack of empathy for others, but in fact display a lack of concern for their own well being, at least in the long term. I see this regularly in our mainstream media, where the demonization of much weaker "enemies" (Russia, Iran, North Korea, Eastasia, etc) seems to be at an ever increasing crescendo.  I find it ironic that we now accuse Russia of "election meddling" (of which I have yet to see any substantial evidence) when the US has been the poster boy of such activity for decades.  Mossadegh? Pinochet?  Ecuador? Hell, we even advertised the fact that we screwed with Russia's elections on the cover of TIME magazine! Yes, even supposedly independent, publicly owned NPR is in on the gig, and regularly refers to Russia's "meddling" as established fact.

Despite promising the Russians that we would not expand NATO to their borders, we've done exactly that. Not only that, but we're arming their border countries with loads of US weapons (hey, more shareholder return!). We even have an artillery division within range of Russia's 2nd largest city (St. Petersburg). Most any American who regularly watches television would think that they're the ones threatening us. It's so pathetic that it's laughable, only it's not a laughing matter.

This push for demonization of weaker countries is meant to increase fear, which increases the already unprecedented theft of cash from our wallets to those of military contractors (currently the majority of the federal budget, and nearly exceeding the military spending of every other country on the planet combined). (Ever wonder why American infrastructure is falling to pieces? I have an idea!) It also greases the skids to war, which seems a-okay to an America that no longer has a memory of what war is like. The latest corporate puppet to occupy our whitehouse even wants to make nuclear weapons more usable. Fantastic!

Because it drives shareholder return and stock prices, many corporations *love* war spending. They well remember what happened as we went in to Iraq under dubya, and did their best through media outlets to convince us of the merit of more war (GE -- one of the world's largest military contractors -- was the majority owner of NBC, where they beat the drums of war as loudly as possible). They've purchased our media and used it to make us hate other countries. They have no problem with such a war becoming nuclear, because corporations are not human.

Our little Frankenstein creation has run amok, and it's time to put it back where it belongs. Fortunately, it has an achilles heel - the stock market.

The Tortoise and the Hare

Working off the winter fat:  Jake and Jasper pulling logs out of the woods

We can never do merely one thing. -- Garrett James Hardin

Here in the heart of the Church of Technology, it goes without saying that all (well... most, anyway) technology is a good thing.

Take, for instance, the tractor.  It is, in large part (along with Mexicans, that is), what has freed the majority of us to give up the horrid drudgery of farming. The tractor has given us the freedom to enjoy our modern industrial lifestyle, where we spend our days buzzing around in little metal boxes on wheels (cousin to the venerable tractor) so that we can stare at screens in climate conditioned comfort. Could our ancestors have imagined a more perfect existence?

And most importantly, the tractor allows us to grow more food.  It would be pure blasphemy to suggest otherwise, of course.

There's little doubt that I and my team of horses would soon lose out on a plowing competition, even if we were up against our own little 1952 Ferguson TO-30. Just imagine how poorly we'd fare against John Deere's biggest, baddest, six hundred and twenty horsepower behemoth.

The horses and I would be happy to get an acre plowed in a day. The John Deere...? I'm not really sure. Lesser tractors can handle 150 acres in a day. 200 acres? Maybe 250 acres?

Now, let's extend the competition out a bit. Not just a day, a week, or even a month. Let's run the competition for a thousand years (we'll have to pretend that plowing is beneficial, but bear with me).

Based upon current trends, we can safely assume that the tractor's fuel will last for perhaps one century. It will emit many tons of CO2, among other gasses and particulates which are less fun to breathe. The manufacturing process will spread mercury throughout the environment, and likely other chemicals as well. Some of these are likely to accumulate in the environment and operator, rendering him sterile, just as we're seeing happen throughout the industrialized world. The accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere ultimately renders the farmland sterile as well, as droughts, storms, and crop failure move from the exception to the norm. Soil heating and drying (from increased CO2) cause the remaining organic matter to oxidize into the atmosphere as well.

So, yes, the tractor makes a most impressive showing, for the short term. But it does not increase food production. Over the long term, in fact, it will result in significantly less food production than the lowly horse, or even a simple peasant with a digging stick.  Like most technology, it's a trade, and not necessarily a good one.

The tractor, of course, is just one example of many. The automobile will ultimately result in less human travel, for the same reasons that the tractor will ultimately result in less food production. The washing machine will result in fewer clothes washed. Computers (like the one I'm typing on), will result in less information shared between people.

How many other examples can you think of?  Are there technologies which provide a net benefit?