CFL Lighting

So, last winter I decided to buy a floor lamp, this nice silver and white one, and I bought a compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) bulb, also known as swirly bulb, for it. It cost a little more to buy than an incandescent bulb, so one might ask why I bought it. Well, mainly because summers get hot. I've noticed that CFL bulbs produce noticeably less heat than incandescent. Beyond just a more comfortable apartment, this means that the lamp wastes less energy and I don't have to work the air conditioner as hard, which in turn is good news if you have to pay for utilities. Lastly, CFL lasts longer than incandescent. If you own your own building and have an extra dollar or so next time you buy light bulbs, I highly recommend CFL.

NiMH Batteries Revisited

So if you've read my blog before, you might know that 7 or 8 years ago, I bought a Game Boy to play my Pokemon game on the go with. I didn't buy regular batteries, though. I decided to pay $27 to buy a set of four nickel metal hydride batteries and a charger so that I wouldn't get stuck without batteries for my game. Well, since then, I've recharged my batteries hundreds and hundreds of times, saving nearly $100 a year with those batteries. Also, two of the first four batteries have been ruined, but only because they went through the wash. My family's been convinced of the real money-saving benefits of rechargeable batteries and now not a single disposable battery passes through the front door. Paired with free utilities, this means I never spend money on batteries anymore and all those hundreds of potential batteries never went to the dump or wherever trash goes out here. I set out to save time, and I wound up saving money and helping the environment in the process. Does the right choice get any easier?

The X Prize

This one you can donate to or compete in. The X Prize Foundation gives out prizes to teams that develop certain new technologies, the prizes being $10 million or more. I first heard about this at the time of the Ansari X Prize, which was meant to encourage the technology for a viable commercial space plane. The current competitions have to do with a more efficient car, lunar rovers, and medicine and genetics. If you want to help, tell a friend, or even donate money. If you think you've got what it takes, you can consider competing, but if nothing else, it'd be good to take a look at what they're doing.

Fold It

Today's thing you can do is to play another game. Fold It is a puzzle game you can download. The object of the game is to move parts of a protein to increase your score. As you play, you help come up with new, better ways of forming proteins to create better medicines as well as learn something about biochemistry. The download is about 5 megabytes, not that big, and as you get better scores, you may appear on the leaderboard online.

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Donors Choose

Today, I bring you to a charity, Donors Choose. As we all know, schools don't always have enough money. Well, Donors Choose hopes to help with that. Their mission is simple, to raise money to help pay for classroom supplies and field trips to help education become more fun and engaging, and therefore more effective. Their method, though, is different from some other charities. Here, teachers write about the things they need help paying for, and you choose the ones you want to give money to, like if you wanted to help students learn about space, you can choose a trip to the planetarium to donate money for and that's what your money will pay for, rather than new footballs, or vice versa. I think this is a great way to help improve education and urge you to check it out.

BOINC

So, a while back I downloaded a program called BOINC from UC Berkeley. What it is, is after you download it, you sign up with a research project and your computer does math and runs simulations for it in the background while you do other stuff. You only see the icon in the taskbar though. You can choose to help projects that have to do with things like space, medicine, food supplies, superconductors, fusion energy and much more. This is a great way to help advance science and technology with almost no effort at all.

Free Rice

Okay, so I've decided to pick up this blog again with a different strategy. The first thing I'd like to share with you is a site I recently heard about called Free Rice. This site is aimed at doing something to fight world hunger, and all you need to do is play games. How it works is you play a quiz-type game and for each answer you get right, 10 grains of rice get donated to the World Food Program. Free Rice gets the money by selling ad space in the form of a banner at the bottom of each page when a question is answered right, which they then use to buy the rice from farmers near the areas they support, donating it to help feed people in those areas that wouldn't be able to afford enough, if any, food on their own. All in all, if you have nothing to do, why not try it? You have nothing to lose by doing so. You will, however, be learning something, feeding people, and helping farmers and businesses all with minimal effort.