Again from Wired News (inspirational day). With engineer E. Fred Schubert, talking about a new era of “smart” light sources.
LED there be light, and God saw that the light was good
LEDs offer energy savings when compared to standard lighting, but Schubert is more excited about some other properties. One is that LEDs can be made to blink so fast that a person doesn’t notice, but a receiving device can. And that, Schubert says, opens the door to using lights for electronic communication as well as illumination.
- brake lights that tell a closely following car to stop, even if the driver doesn’t notice.
- headlights that tell a red stop light to turn green, if it’s safe.road signs that communicate warnings to specific cars.
- room lights that link your computer to the Internet, avoiding Wi-Fi signals that can be pirated.
- room lights that transmit messages to devices worn by only certain people, like particular doctors or nurses in a hospital, rather than speakers that spew announcements for everybody to hear.
Schubert said such uses depend on overcoming some basic technical barriers, like making LEDs more powerful and energy-efficient. “I think we’re looking at maybe a time frame of the next five to 20 years,” he said.
[↑ inspirational | doom talk ↓]
Let’s hope it doesn’t take 20 years. And that we are much more innovative. We are on our way creating enough ppm CO2 in the atmosphere to recreate the conditions of the great dying of the Perm era (70% of land-creatures and 90% of the sea-creatures). A temperature rise of 30 degrees Celsius across the Globe.
And while we’re doing that we are also exhausting our natural resources and destroying and polluting the shit out of it.
What a great time to grow up in for my two boys, enormous promise and amazing challenges. The mind has a lot to cope with on a Wednesday and then I’m not counting the natural and unnatural disasters of August 31 2005.
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