My first post! (aka plastic bottle lightbulbs)

Oh my gawddddd

Ahem.

My friend shared a video on Facebook*, and it’s actually educational – which would be suprising if you knew him. (Most of his videos involve Lady Gaga.) It’s about the lack of lighting in Filipino slums, and how a bottle of water – with some bleach mixed in – can make a big difference.

Okay go watch it, then come back.

Done?

That so-called “Solar Bottle Bulb” was designed at MIT. It can provide 55 watts of power (compare to 60 watts for a standard incandescent) by just refracting sunlight. The affliation was somewhat surprising to me, at least; I guess I expected MIT people to come up with highy complicated, technical solutions that require 4 PhDs to comprehend.  (But they have done a lot of Appropriate Technology work, so I really should get rid of that misconception.)

How many MIT students does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Ha. Funny.

Some musings: I wonder what the little of bleach does. It probably kills off anything that might grow in there, but does it actually do anything to disperse the light? I feel like a normal bottle of water wouldn’t glow that much. (What if you put food colouring? Or use differently-shaped bottles? Or use glass bottles? Can you change bottles easily if yours break? Wait, what if they break? You’d get diluted bleach dripping/pouring into the house – hardly safe. Then again, plastic bottles outlive human beings; you’d probably have to intentionally poke a hole in it.)

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*I’ve been trying to find a version of the clip which I can embed here, but that’s not working out. Apparently Scientific Curiosities, the group that produced it, exists only on Facebook. (Is that… is that wise? Existing in only one place in the web? Aren’t you supposed to maximize your online presence or whatever? Eh.)

Here’s the link again if the previous one was too subtle. I believe you can view it without a Facebook account – but of course you have Facebook! Right? (Fact: if you don’t have a Facebook you don’t exist.)