At 11:04 PM 4/10/2007, Robert wrote:
I will caution that applying this pdf to the bulb burnout is an act of faith: bulbs usually burn out when they are switched on (my previous message). In any case, the "experiment" of bulb burn-out depends on the conditions: are they run continuously until they burn out, or are they subjected to vibrations during use or disuse, or are they switched on and off frequently, etc.? It is not at all clear that the exponential random variable will adequately model they empirical data of bulb burn-out for all the experiments.
Quite some years ago I read, in the WSJ, of a theater in Chicago that had a light bulb that had been constantly illuminated for about a century. It was an old Edison carbon filament bulb, and was very dim. This probably means that the bulb was grossly overbuilt, like running a 130 volt bulb at 120 volts, so that it lasts longer but uses less electricity.
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