The last time the fires hit my area I was watching the fire progress via Purple Air sensors. If this one sensor was still sending, then my friend’s place up in the mountains was probably OK. Seems … kinda obvious almost?

The hard-to-solve problem with the news is that reporting on suicides causes suicide (as in: more people commit suicide, not just people who were on the ledge decided to go) yet people also want to know things.

I’m unclear if the usual disclaimers added to the article actually help or just are the only sounds-like-it-might-help thing that comes to mind so at least the publisher can feel better about the added deaths that, statistically speaking, they might be causing. I just remember it being covered in one of my college gened classes and the way it was presented was that everybody threw up their hands in frustration and gave up.

An acquaintance who screwed up her leg really bad and went through a whole process of getting bolted back together et al decided that she wasn’t going to tell people what happened. Because everybody always asks “how’d you do it?” as if it was some curse that she had personally triggered that they could avoid. And I thought about how the first question in my mind was “how’d you do it?” and I guess it made me think about the inanity of making sure to check for flying herring while traveling backwards hanging out the window of a train going between Albuquerque and Phoenix after having signed up for a triple indemnity life insurance plan… or something like that.

The only exception, of course, is you are doing something that the news orgs consider “wrong” like doing drugs or being certain categories of mentally ill or riding a bicycle for transportation.

More to the point, the company using shady means to collect the data does not need to care if the data is useful, just that it’s marketable.

You need to control the current going through the LED, either by wasting it as heat (resistor or linear controller) or via switching power supply mechanisms.

Non-intelligent LED strips (where the whole strip is the same color, as opposed to the intelligent kind where each LED can be a different color) are generally not using a resistor per LED because you can use a row of LEDs in series with a single resistor. Generally there’s a marking to designate where you can cut such that they’ve got several LEDs per resistor because each LED is going to be somewhere in the 2-3V range, depending on color.

Strips are a design compromise built around convenience, of course. But there’s a lot of engineering compromises here because the switching power supply is going to burn up some energy running things as well.

Manufacturers of finished LED products do make bright LEDs frequently by making a series-parallel array of LED chips on a single substrate such that they’ve pre-selected similar LEDs. But if you are building your own strips, you can use a constant-current switching supply to run a series of LEDs off of a relatively high voltage, somewhere in the 24v to 48v range, where you’d want to select for a relatively bright individual LED so you don’t need to make a bunch of the constant-current switching power supplies.