by Jim On Light | Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

Sunday JimOnLight.com Flickr Group Photo Pool

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• Sunday JimOnLight.com Flickr Photo Pool
• Sunday JimOnLight.com Flickr Group Pool

It is stunning to watch this man in the video work with the glass tube – it is truly an art.  I learned to work with glass in undergraduate school at a glassblowing studio in rural Illinois – a pool of glass in its molten state is one of the most beautiful things in the world.

Check out the video – very cool!

by Jim On Light | Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

How It’s Made – Neon Signs (She’s Always Buzzing Just Like…)

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by Jim On Light | Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

How It’s Made – Photovoltaic Panels (That’s Solar, Holmes)

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Wow.  This news is about a week and a half old or so, but have you heard what the Republican Senate candidate Ron Johnson (also celebrated by the Tea Baggers) thinks the source of all of our climate change is in the world?

Sunspots.

Johnson thinks that there’s no way that man-made causes are to blame for climate change.  I mean, after all, he is supported by the party is named after something people do with balls.  He must be right on.  Here’s his quote from the Milwaukee Sentinel about the subject:

If you take a look at geologic time, we’ve had huge climate swings. We’re sitting here in Wisconsin. Had it not been for climate swings, we’d be sitting on a two or three hundred foot thick glacier. Man wasn’t around back then. So no, I absolutely do not believe that the science of man-caused climate change is proven. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I think it’s far more likely that it’s just sunspot activity, or something just in the geologic eons of time where we have changes in the climate.

The Middle Ages was an extremely warm period of time, too. It wasn’t like there were tons of cars on the road. So it always strikes me as a little absurd for anybody to think, Okay, this is the sweet spot in geologic time for climate. And it’s such a good place, that we have spent trillions of dollars, and do great harm to our economy, on a fool’s errand. I don’t think we can do anything about controlling what the climate is.

Amazing. I feel so much better about politicians now. The fact that he relates our economy to global climate change just kinda blows my mind.  If stupidity was a crime, this moron would be doing life in prison.

Here’s a couple of videos that you should watch to get a scoop on this craziness:

Also:

Damn.  If I were the Sun, I’d be horribly offended.  Seriously now – are we, as a collective population, REALLY stupid enough to be swayed by ridiculance like this?  Gosh, I sure hope not.

Thanks, Duke.

by Jim On Light | Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

GOP Senate Tea Bagger Ron Johnson Thinks Sunspots Explain Climate Change

Yes.  Get ready to learn how fiberglass composite street lamp poles are made – I had no idea about this until just a few moments ago.  The process of wrapping, heating, cooling, and curing these crazy street lamp poles is pretty interesting!  I’m all about these freaking How It’s Made videos this week!

How do you feel after learning something so completely random about a bit of the lighting industry?

by Jim On Light | Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

How It’s Made – Composite Street Lamp Poles

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I saw a random article on Huffington Post about my absolute favorite artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat last week, and I just could not, in my right mind, not share this with you all.  Do you know who Jean-Michel Basquiat is?  He was callled a “graffiti artist” for a long time, but call him what you want – his work is moving and awesome to me.  Unfortunately he had this intimate relationship with heroin, and lost his life to the beast at 27 – but his work lives on.

I always wonder what the world would be like if people like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, and other artists dead before their times were up were still here to change the world of art and music.  From the HuffPost article:

Basquiat jumped into Manhattan’s fertile downtown art & club scene in the late 1970s, at first surviving by selling his images on postcards and T-shirts. Meanwhile he conjured a droll and recognizable street identity, SAMO, that raised the dialogue of street artists from I Was Here to the kind of ongoing piss-on-authority satire that made Banksy and his ilk possible. Meeting Warhol was almost unavoidable in that hothouse moment, and their friendship grew into collaboration (one more appreciated in retrospect than at the time). The meteoric fame and the inevitable drugs finally made Basquiat a poster child for the toll of premature success, but Davis’ film covers every aspect of his life and work along the way: music, black identity, class-shifting, love life, club culture, his child-like nature, his premonitions of death. It is a loving tribute to a raucous time and an indelible talent.

You have to take a few minutes to watch this video – Tamra Davis apparently had some Jean-Michel Basquiat footage in a drawer somewhere and drug it out – and it’s pretty excellent:

Tamra Davis talks about THE RADIANT CHILD from Michael Kurcfeld on Vimeo.

by Jim On Light | Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

Not Quite Light, But I Still Love Jean-Michel Basquiat

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It’s three parts, and it’s quite amazing.  I’ve linked the three videos here, but you HAVE to check out the video posting page here.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

JimOnLight.com digs your artist brain, Jeff.  Great work.

by Jim On Light | Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

Jefferson Waful of Umphrey’s McGee Directs “The Tabernacle”

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Yes, residential load centers.

Um – uh – yeah.

Cool video, check it:

by Jim On Light | Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

How It’s Made – Residential Load Centers (or Electrical Panels for the, uh, Normal Person)

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Today is the second birthday of JimOnLight.com!  We’re TWO!  Aren’t we supposed to go to Chuck-E-Cheese or ShowBiz Pizza or something?

Life has been so amazing, horrible, exciting, boring, great, terrible, outstanding, regular, changing, and the same over the last two years – as you will.  The one thing that stays consistent and even grows at a rapid rate is the readership of JimOnLight.com.  I have to say that no matter what happens in my life, the thing I enjoy the most is learning about light and sharing my knowledge with the world.  You all, the readers of JimOnLight.com, have made every day pretty great.  Every time you read the site, every time you load the RSS feed, and every time I get an email from someone with a question, comment, criticism, or praise, it absolutely makes my day.  Together, we have brought people together in our collective lighting industries – and we have changed our industry for the better on many, many occasions.

I promise to keep doing what I’m doing – for me, and for you.  Thank you so much, from the depth of my soul, for reading JimOnLight.com.  It means the world to me that we’re able to share our knowledge and make our place better for everybody.  We’re quickly approaching a lifetime total of 1,500,000 individual readers since I started JimOnLight.com – and together, we’re all making light better for the future.

To show my appreciation, I want to give some stuff away – and I’m gonna do it for the next seven days!  All I ask is that you leave a comment below with your favorite JimOnLight.com article link.  I’ll have the cold, unfeeling finger of the Random Number Generator do the picking, and I’ll post the winners for each day!  I’ll give stuff away until I’m out of stuff to give away – and as always, the shipping is on me!

Thank you, everybody.  Seriously.  Thank you.

by Jim On Light | Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

HAPPY SECOND BIRTHDAY, JIMONLIGHT.COM!

Thanks for the video, Mark – extremely awesome architainment projections!

by Jim On Light | Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

Architainment in The Ukraine (Kharkov, to Be Exact)

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