Skyline Goes Dark

5% usage drop isn't great to be sure. BUT what was the usage drop in other US cities? Sydney was 8.4% below their usage a week ago. How much of a drop did Sydney see last year, the first time they did Earth Hour?

I'm guessing most people didn't unplug their phantom load.

Personally, I went out last night and unplugged everything before I left at 5. I got home at midnight and didn't plug anything but the essentials (clock and beside lamp) back in until this morning. And even today, I haven't plugged most things back in. I've decided to use this as a personal experiment to see just how much stuff I really need plugged in daily.

Also 5% is pretty good, IMO. Imagine the millions this city could save with 5% less energy being used per day.

IMO, the picture is a bit misleading. The actual effect was nowhere near as dramatic. I have a high-floor city-view apartment in the Gold Coast, and I can assure you that the buildings around me looked entirely normal.

Many buildings turned off their decorative lighting, which is great (and should happen every night, say after 2:00am or something), but other than that, it looked to be business as usual.

It was neat for sure, but I felt it a bit underwhelming. Not sure what I was expecting though.

I went dark this weekend too.

Unfortunately, I'm a lighthouse operator.

Twelve died crashing into the rocks.

/My Bad

@Joseph: No, the navigation lights stayed on. And I don't think anyone took the buildings off the nav charts. The crash you referenced involved circumstances totally different to this (and, um, happened during the day); please read before analogizing.

But yeah, it was basically pointless and the photo was very misleading (or deliberately adjusted?)

"IMO, the picture is a bit misleading. The actual effect was nowhere near as dramatic. I have a high-floor city-view apartment in the Gold Coast, and I can assure you that the buildings around me looked entirely normal."

Good to hear. So, basically somebody dropped the contrast when running that image through Adobe, I take it?

"and with those night, precise specifications of where everything is,"

Poor proofreading on my part. That should read "and with those nice, precise specifications of where everything is,"

I agree with the decorative lighting thing. To rally against this for transportaion purposes is grasping at straws. The group states that somethings can't be turned off - they have no problem with that. And that includes airspace and car traffic lighting - which didn't go off!

@Joseph:

If you sat back and thought about it, you'd realize that you just answered your own "question". But instead you prove that the loudest critic is generally the person who understands the situation the least. Kudos on the rhetorical skillz, though!

lol @prescott

so we're really against saving electricity here? geezus.

also, for all you people pissing and moaning about this sensible exercise, why don't you identify yourselves as what you really are: a bunch of corporate apologists and global warming denying jerks. god, even frank clark said that this did some good. (see today's trib - i'm too lazy to do an h ref)

i have no idea why people are taking issue with this.

@Celerysalt:

I think the above analogy of a "fat guy eating salad once a year and saying he's going healthy" is the best I've heard so far why this stupid.

I'm not denying global warming exists, and I strongly feel we as a country need to do a lot more to conserve energy and find other sources, but this is a pointless, meaningless gesture designed to make people feel like they're "making a difference".

If they really wanted to do something worthwhile, they could have handed out free Compact Florescent bulbs downtown or bricks to put in your toilet tank so you save more fresh water with every flush. Maybe standing around downtown office buildings on a monday and handing coupons for free crap to everyone they see commuting to work by bike. Or even better, take all the money they spent on bus ads and various marketing hype and donate it to organizations developing cleaner sources of energy.

Any number of things could have been done to make a greater impact that flipping a bunch of switches and getting a warm, fuzzy feeling.

But maybe I'm just a pragmatic asshole.

Lighting up buildings like the Sears Tower and the Hancock isn't to prevent planes from flying into them. It's called "decorative lighting" for a reason.

And all of that lighting we see out on the runways, every time we fly in at night? I suppose that's all for decoration, too?

Downtown Chicago is Class B airspace, meaning all flights in the area maintain radio contact with Chicago control. Those individuals are unlikely to navigate aircraft into any danger.

Except that aircraft low enough to be in danger of hitting a building will have dropped off the air traffic controllers' screens, meaning that they won't know exactly where it is, either. But then, we have a group affirmation thing happening, don't we?

I agree with the decorative lighting thing. To rally against this for transportaion purposes is grasping at straws."

Wake up, Matty, you've been played for a rube. Our boy Ontology / Tarkin dropped by Wikipedia and picked up a few terms for name dropping purposes. False expertise has been generated this way since before the Web was invented. BTW, did you notice that Tarkin's "supporter" posted so infrequently that one could still see his posts from last august in his 20 most recent? Can you say "sock puppet"?

Not that I suppose that reality matters at this point.

@Plumbum

They have handed out light bulbs downtown (I actually lit my entire apartment with them.) and they have offered things to people who bike to work. If you didn't get them, sorry I guess.

And as far as Earth Hour just telling people to turn off lights for an hour, that's not true. If you actually visited the Earth Hour website, you'd find multiple pages devoted to what people can do to reduce their energy consumption. http://www.earthhour.org/earth-hour-every-day

And I don't know why people are so upset about this either. It's the one "awareness" campaign that I've seen in recent times that actually has asked something of the people rather than just slapping a damn ribbon on their jacket or signing a stupid petition. My entire office was talking about it this morning, and saying how they had actually realized some of their own bad habits this weekend (leaving lights on throughout the house, not unplugging cell phone chargers, etc.). So I hardly think people should be bitching that this was just a symbolic gesture.

@peacebaby:

Down where I work, they just handed out fliers before the event. And they turned off the Ferris Wheel lights. Whoopde freakin' do.

And all they pretty much did was advertise turning off lights. For an hour. How about an ad campaign similar to what Tylenol is doing about really simple things people could ALWAYS do, rather than a one time shot?

Also, Shelties are gay.

"Wake up, Matty, you've been played for a rube. "

Oh have I? I've been played for a rube for supporting a safe social awareness event?

WOW

No, which is why it wasn't turned off. For fuck's sake, what's so fucking hard about this for you?

The fact that groupthink took control so easily this time around, resulting in a massed, thoroughly out of line clusterfucking of a user who was behaving reasonably? Take a good look at messages 4 and 11. User sees photo of loop attached to news commentary about something that took place while he was out of town. Reasonably, he concludes that what he is seeing is what the Loop looked like. Note the caption

The Chicago Skyline during Earth Hour at the top, and with the lights on at the bottom, which was taken earlier in the week.

implying that what we're seeing is documentary photography, not creative art work. In message 9. one of the clusterfuckers claims that the photo was misleading, and the target accepts this. Yet we have people acting as if he did not, all of the way up until now.

But, to get to your personal difficulty, I will now overexplain something. We have the vague suggestion that because of all of those wonderful instruments on board those planes manned by those wonderful professionals who are backed up by their equally wonderfully professional colleagues in the control towers, that pilots couldn't possibly have a use for something so boring and 20th century as actually being able to see the landscape that they're passing at such high speed, and had better keep passing very quickly if they don't want to stall out. Vague, because when the target tried to pin down our trolling friend tarkin doctrine / ontology and get him to specify exactly what he was saying, he saw no support in this, but we've seen that position echoed, in the same vague manner in which it was advanced.

If that is so, then what are the runway lights for? Supposedly, visual contact or no, the pilot with his vast support network always, unfailingly knows where he and everything in the landscape is, down to the inch, so much so that we could have him fly without sight through a forest of buildings without real worry. Yet, all of a sudden, as he approaches the airport - making him easier to see and his position that much easier to pinpoint, all of a sudden, that argument breaks down? Why won't that pinpoint accuracy guide him in, with no need or room for fear, to that perfect three point landing? Do the controllers and airlines not know where the runways are with at least as much precision as they bring to their knowledge of where every building in the Loop is? I find that I am asked to accept an argument when the plane is over buildings, and then completely forget that it was ever made when the plane is elsewhere, based of nothing more than the fact that you and a few of your friends are willing to posture.

"Reasonable" is not a synonym for "suggestible".

@ tarkin doctrine

If you sat back and thought about it, you'd realize that you just answered your own "question"

I notice that you didn't answer it yourself. It seems a simple enough question: are you saying that there would be no reasonable safety concerns with the practice of completely darkening the buildings at night - yes or no?

@ you dont say

I'm an IFR rated private pilot. I think I might know more about this than you give me credit for. The decorative lighting that makes skyscrapers visible at night has nothing to do with aircraft safety. That's what the beacons atop the buildings are for - and those are never turned off.

Oh, and I might add, even if you were telling the truth about that certification, which I'm seriously doubting, you'd be offering a flimsy basis for claiming expertise for a backup of a claim that runs contrary to basic common sense. Which is easier to see: the little red light atop an antenna, or a whole lit up building?

Pilots are to aerospace what bus drivers are automative technology - grunt labor. You arguing with an electrical engineer about what radar can and can not do for you (as you did in message 14) is like a CTA driver telling a mechanical engineer how to improve the muffler. Very cute, it might win you some pissing match points in the bar, but very stupid, all the same. You just aren't qualified to be in the discussion.

@ you dont say

Please refrain from the ad hominems - that helps no one.

As for the question about what's easier to see, beacons or lit-up buildings: beacons work just fine, even if a lit-up building is easier to see. Think about it this way: out in the boondocks there are massive radio antennae, much taller than any building in Chicago. Moreover, they are in uncontrolled airspace, meaning there are no ATCs to say, "hey, watch out for tall structures around this area." Yet those antennae rely on flashing beacons to warn pilots - they aren't lit up with splash lighting. That would be a waste of resources. A pilot only needs to know where the top of the structure is so he can fly higher.

As for the beacons being turned off - I'd point out you can't see them in the picture from earlier in the week either. Are we to believe they are never turned on? Or that they are on all the time but not visible in either picture? The latter seems more logical.

So the point I've been trying to make remains - provided the beacons atop the buildings remain on, turning off skyscrapers' decorative lighting poses no threat to air traffic in the area.