Wal-Mart has committed to selling 100 million compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs in the next 12 months. Specifically their aim is for each of their regular customers to buy at least one of these bulbs, and they want to make it the one bulb to change the world. CFL bulbs consume around a quarter of the energy of traditional incandescent bulbs. They should also appeal to the laziness within everyone; CFL bulbs can last up to a decade.

So at this point it feels like a ‘cute’ idea. Use less electricity and replace the bulbs in my house—yippee. Well half of the electricity in the United States is generated from coal-burning power plants, which are therefore the single largest source of greenhouse gases. Wal-Mart’s decision to aggressively sell these bulbs could have a significant effect on the global warming crisis.

I love it when the market forces evolution. To me it’s one of the most beautiful byproducts of our capitalist system, and it happens so infrequently that it’s like a techie aurora borealis. Some people will be boring and quibble about the quality of light and the higher cost of CFL bulbs. To the first point, I say either you put more lights in your room if you want it brighter (or just go outside already). Cost is probably the most short-sighted of any argument here. If you aren’t willing to put your money into something that will ultimately save you cash and benefit the environment then I’ve got two words for you…

via Treehugger

Sounds like some of us are waking up from the coma that is the last twenty years of personal computing. The files and folders metaphor took off like wildfire because it represented a total departure from the command line user interface. The introduction of a GUI allowed a larger percentage of humanity to adopt technology, which in turn made the tech community much more exciting and diverse.

Today our desktops are all interconnected, and a slew of different devices have evolved from the desktop and grown into our backpacks, our cars, and our pockets. Most of the popular uses of these machines no longer involve organizing all our files into folders. All of our memos, timesheets, photos, movies have been left in a petri dish with Email, IM, WiFi, and GPS–It’s all merged together but hasn’t quite gotten the entreprenurial rubdown it needs.

Jeremy Zawodny has talked about three problems that need solving, so he’s certainly clued in. Applications need to be built for the web and the desktop equally, the archipeligo of devices need interoperability, and someone needs to build and support an OS that accepts the networked reality of personal computing.

In more particular terms, Ross Rubin is calling it PC 3.0: the social computer. It would leverage all the bleeding edge technologies to create a more natural interaction method. He reminds us of the double decade old promise of Apple’s Knowledge Navigator concept video (Where did you want to go yesterday?)

Qua?! Last week Veronica published Prizefight: Apple iPod vs. Toshiba Gigabeat S, wherein she concluded that Toshiba is making the more appealing DAP. Yesterday [fake]Steve called out Veronica as nothing but a cute, oratory-impaired journalist.

V’s conclusion would under normal circumstances get me right hungry for a debate on her decision, as the mental tag-cloud of my childhood features Steve’s name fairly prominently. Here however, the more exciting question is this: Are we one step closer to discovering the true identity of the greatest Apple fan site yet?

UPDATE: V has quoted and responded over at Music and Medicine.

To be specific, I’ve misplaced the myopenid credentials I need to log into my Zooomr account. The ‘Contact’ link in the Zooomr about page hasn’t been lit up yet (not the sort of thing you want to neglect if you’re out to win hearts and minds), and the myopenid help hasn’t repsonded yet.

Anyone know how I can get some resolution here? If I can’t figure this out by tomorrow I may have to get on the horn and get Thomas Hawk to help me out!

I got this in my inbox this morning. My favorite new travel tool Farecast has added RSS support. Using this simple form, I can generate a feed that will push their cost predictions to me as they change. Tres cool!

Well that was a nice rest. Spending a week in Paris does a lot for one’s sense of Americana; the lack of smoking, good coffee, and malaise. I really bit down hard on the euro lifestyle, as it’s taken me another three weeks to truly get my mind back in gear. Maybe when I go back next year (bet your ass) I won’t be so wide-eyed as to neglect my inner geek.

Thirty days without blogging has certainly given me ample time to find things to talk about. Here are just a couple that came out of catching up with my beloved Slate:

From last week’s Sinister and Rich: The Evidence that Lefties Earn More:

Learning and working in a world of machines designed for majority righties, lefties are at a disadvantage. Tools like the screwdriver work well for both. But others, like the scissors and the standard classroom writing desk and the electric food slicer and the band saw—not to mention writing from left to right, with all the smudges and blackened fingers that entails—are explicitly designed for righties. This ought to make lefties less productive. (Hence the basis for Ned Flanders’ Leftorium, the fictional store for left-handed people on The Simpsons.)

I don’t grant the premise that because scissors were designed to be used with the right hand it was harder for me to learn to cut construction paper, or that my handwriting took longer to develop because I smudged the ink. I smudged some of my writing early on, but you know what? I learned very quickly how I had angle the paper and my hand in order to avoid it. I wasn’t measuring myself against the other kids and thinking, “Why do they hold their pens differently than I do?” I was too busy learning how to hold the pen for fuck’s sake.

Also I don’t like the grammar in that Simpsons reference. Is it the store that’s fictional, thereby inferring that show may not be? And if you haven’t figured out that the Simpsons isn’t real, then using the awesome power of the Internet you should be able to deduce from one picture of those yellow-5 freaks that there isn’t a Leftorium.

And from this morning’s The CEO Real Estate Scame: The Newest Infuriating Perk for Corporate Executives:

Since the beginning of this summer, at least a half-dozen companies, including eBay and Nike, have disclosed in their routine Securities and Exchange Commission filings that they’re now protecting their executives from real estate market forces. The terms in the filings vary—”protection against loss”; “loss protection”; and “price protection”—but the meaning is the same: They are essentially guaranteeing that executives’ homes will sell for a good price. In other words, companies that depend on free markets are making sure their own executives are safeguarded from them.

Are we really foolish enough to argue logic in the face of human greed? I’d love to live in a world where we all understood that you don’t get your employer to pay for things that aren’t a legitimate cost of doing business, but at that point I might as well wait around for Elizabeth Shue to show up at my door with the keys to an LP640 between her teeth.

America’s corporate elite, for the most part, got to their towers of power (YEA!) by being greedy bloodsucking bastards. If they can figure out how to expense the sleep necessary to be concious in the office the following morning, then by fuck they’re going to do it.