ReNe: news, quirky

The first two articles were from Spiegel Online, which I've just discovered. It's refreshingly liberal. The third article was from Toronto's Star, which is not so quirky but it was still interesting so I included it. Note that the quoted parts were clipped out from the original articles, and do not constitute the entire article.

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In Germany, a wild black swan fell in love with a big white plastic swan boat one summer and stayed with the boat for a year-and-half, even when the rest of her flock flew south for winter. (How many summer romances last that long?) The local zoo made room for the pair for two winters, until Petra the swan found another swan Paul and ditched the boat. The zoo is giving away her plastic ex-boyfriend.

I found the story really interesting, somehow, and read the entire string of linked articles that dated back to 2006. Especially refreshing after the Spitzergate of last week.

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This article looks at objectophilia, that is the love of things.

Back in 1979, Eklöf tied the knot with the Berlin Wall and legally changed her name to mark the occasion ("Mauer" means "Wall" in German). Ever since she was eight years old, Sandy K. was hopelessly in love with New York's Twin Towers.

"We're by no means just straightforward fetishists," Joachim A. insists, and he immediately explains the difference: "For some people, their car becomes a fetish which they use to put themselves in the limelight. For the objectum-sexual, on the other hand, the car itself -- and nothing else -- is the desired sexual partner, and all sexual fantasies and emotions are focused
on it."

Psychology student Bill Rifka -- who is 35 and in a relationship with an iBook -- admits he has "often flirted with many a sweet laptop on eBay and felt true desire." Like all objectum-sexuals, Rifka also attributes a clear gender to his partner: "To me, my Mac is male. I'm living in a homosexual relationship, so to speak."Bill Rifka shares his homoerotic inclination for objects with 41-year-old Doro B., who fell for a metal processing machine while at work and "immediately sensed a female presence."

And my *favorite* quote from the article:

Sexologist Sigusch doesn't want to classify such odd behavior as pathological. "The objectophiles aren't hurting anyone. They're not abusing or traumatizing other people," he judges. And then he asks mildly: "Who else can you say that about?"

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A study titled "To Switch or Not to Switch: A Critical Analysis of Canada's Ban on Incandescent Light Bulbs" found that CFLs may not always be better. It's an interesting article, given that everyone everywhere these days seems to be advocating that we throw away our incandescents and buy CFLs. But just junking still-usable incandescent bulbs seem extremely wasteful to me (I would rather hold on to those bulbs until it's time to replace them naturally) so the approach suggested by the paper appeals to me.

... between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of the electricity that flows into old-style incandescent bulbs is used to support its primary purpose, which is to produce light. CFLs, on the other hand, are between four and five times more efficient... Electricity that isn't used to produce light is released into the ambient air as heat. In the summer, and in year-round hot spots such as California, this heat energy is truly wasted.

The question is whether that wasted energy is truly "lost" when you've got sub-zero temperatures outside.

"In Canada, the excess heat produced by interior (incandescent bulbs) is not entirely wasted, at least not during the cooler months between fall and spring," the paper argues. When you switch to CFL bulbs, which are more efficient at using the electricity that goes into them, your home heating system needs to work harder to make up for the heat that your new light bulbs are no longer providing.

Given this, and coming at it from the perspective of greenhouse-gas emissions, we have to ask whether it's better to use old inefficient light bulbs to supplement the heat in our homes during cold months or more fuel to run our existing home heating systems.

If you live in Alberta, which relies heavily on fossil fuels for both its power generation and home heating, then switching to CFLs always makes sense. It's simply more efficient to heat your home using, say, a natural gas furnace, rather than using dirty electricity from the grid to power a resistance heater.

In provinces such as Manitoba and Quebec, which rely primarily on emission-free electricity, you can come to the opposite conclusion. Using clean hydropower to light up an incandescent bulb and fill your home with residual heat during the winter will release fewer greenhouse gases than using a natural gas furnace to provide that same amount of heat.

So where does this leave Ontario? The answer is more complex. This province generates its electricity from a diverse mix of low-emission sources, such as nuclear, wind and hydroelectric, and high-emission sources such as coal, natural gas and occasionally oil.

It's reasonable (if not entirely safe) to assume that at night, when we turn on the lights, we're using more low-emission baseload power from our nuclear and hydroelectric plants, and during the day we're relying more on coal and natural gas, which are both significant sources of CO2 emissions.

So switching to CFLs would, for millions of households, mean using less clean electricity and more natural gas to make up for the lost heat. Based on this crude analysis, it would suggest Ontario households should continue to use incandescent bulbs during the coldest winter months if the province is truly interested in lowering its greenhouse gas emissions.

In other words, if you stay in a cold place, you should hold on to your incandescent bulbs for use in winter and switch to CFLs in summer.

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