ABOUT CLICKED

The modern news consumer ignores Weblogs and online citizen journalism at his own peril. But not everyone has the time to keep track of what's going on the Web. With this blog we hope to track the highlights of what's being discussed online so when news breaks from the Web, we're ready.

Will Femia is a Weblog enthusiast who, through good fortune and dumb luck, was introduced to the form as his position as chat producer for MSNBC.com careered into obsolescence. On any given day, Will can be found having already spent an unhealthy amount of time squinting at a computer screen.

Send a message to Will at spotter@msnbc.com



...With the bulbs you have

Posted: Thursday, January 04, 2007 7:01 PM by Will Femia

How many bloggers does it take to replace all the light bulbs in America?  Seth Godin is leading a blog-wide awareness campaign to boost the use of energy efficient compact fluorescent bulbs - the one Wal-Mart is also helping promote.  Did you know they're only 2 bucks now?  Since the exercise calls for writing a bit about the bulbs here's my contribution:

Godin floats a semi-rhetorical question about the slow adoption of these superior bulbs.  Obviously he feels awareness is a significant obstacle.  I'd offer that the real reason for slow adoption is that no one is going to throw away a bulb that's working, so first all the bulbs that are currently in use have to burn out.  Then we also have to use up all those extra bulbs in the pantry closet.  Then, provided the new CF bulbs actually fit in the lamps we have, we might pick some up next time there's a sale.  Ironically, it's the desire to get our money's worth from the bulbs we've got that keeps us from buying bulbs that get us more for our money.

Silent Star Wars - (It'd be cool to hear a ragtime rendition of some of the soundtrack.)

And of course, speaking of Star Wars, you saw the Rose Bowl parade, right?

I know we've looked at the phenomenon of people accidentally flinging their Wii video game controllers through their TV sets, but I don't remember if I pointed out that the name for someone who does this is called by the unfortunate pun "wiitard" as in, "Your mom's a wiitard."  Apologies to the mentally challenged, that's just what they call it and kids are cruel.

I keep bumping into this link on New York City blogs, but really it doesn't require you be a New Yorker.  The photographer asked people how they feel about their faces and put the copy along with the portrait he took.  Obviously he picked the interesting ones.  I wonder how many boring ones he rejected.  I'd love to see this as a Flickr pool or something on a mass scale that everyone can contribute to.

In a similar vein, a reader named Dr. Charles wrote to me today about a fledgling project he's started.  "It's a project that aims to creatively examine the human scar."  Here's the link.  It's not as gross as it sounds.

Remember that Dove video of the normal woman who undergoes all manner of manipulation before the image is posted on a billboard?  Here's a funny twist on that idea.

TV ban on adverts for cheese, the latest 'junk food' - It's hard to argue with the "high salt, high fat" point.  I wonder if this seems absurd because of all the Dairy Council propaganda we've consumed as Americans or if it's because cheese is such an obvious dietary stable anyway.

God inc. - "A comedy about life in the corporate offices of God." - This is episode one.  Episode 2 came out the other day.  It's a little like "The Office" but just a little.

Speaking of not taking God seriously, Digg and YouTube Powering Atheism 2.0 - I was glad to see this headline because it's certainly been my anecdotal experience that there's a rising tide of atheism online.  I don't know if there's any study that is actually keeping track of the actual number of atheists in the world, but this piece does a good job of rounding up links that support the impression of growing ranks.  Also pointed out is the surprising prevalence of Richard Dawkins and his writings among social sites.  It's certainly interesting that the guy is a bona fide celebrity online but I'm pretty sure most people in the mainstream would think you were talking about the Family Feud guy.

Speaking of Richard Dawkins, here's the latest from him receiving wide online attention:  Executing Saddam Hussein was an act of vandalism - Here's his point:  "I want to add another and less obvious reason why we should not have executed Saddam Hussein.  His mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars."  The Hannibal Lecter theory.

Speaking of giving serious thought to religion, I'm informed by mail that, "FYI: The thirteenth Biblical Studies Carnival has been posted at Codex: Biblical Studies Blogspot. This Carnival highlights over 70 posts relating to academic biblical studies in the blogosphere for the month of December 2006.  There is also a “Biblical Studies Carnival: Best of 2006” post coming in the next day or two."

Speaking of studying the Bible.  It took me a minute for me to figure out how to use the Bible Map, but try something like Acts 13 and you'll see some hyperlinked text.  It's slow to load, but it'll zoom the map.  Cool mash-up.

Speaking of cool maps, the map of happiness asks you if you're happy and then color codes your response on a map based (I'm guessing) on your IP.

Five Hackers Who Left a Mark on 2006 - Includes one female for those of you with daughters looking for impressive, non-bikini wearing figures in computer sciences.

Web pilots and their unruly passengers - NOTE:  This is a great story that includes some Web culture history and a mention of "The September that never ended" that you don't hear often in day to day online chatter, so I'm including the link.  If you just read the text of the story, all is well and you'll be satisfied with a tale of justice exacted on the sloppily incompetent.  The story has to do with someone linking directly to one of this fellow's images without his permission and putting a huge strain on his bandwidth.  To punish them, he replaced the image with the most unholy awful obscene terrible psyche scarring image known to mankind.  More foul than even the most advanced science could match.  So NOTE:  In this story, after some warning from the author, are the words, " See what I replaced the Grim Reaper with."  You should not click these words under any circumstances.  If you understand that it's a terrible image, that's enough to understand the rest of the story.  I'm not winkingly telling you to click it.  Take my words at face value.  If you're worried you might get these instructions wrong, just skip this one.  OK, here's the link to the story.

Alan hits another one out of the park with his coverage of Blue Origin.  That's the name of the space tourism venture undertaken by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

Speaking of turning our eyes toward space, on the heel's of yesterday's focus on the Chicago UFO sightings comes this story of an unidentified piece of space lump falling through someone's roof.

And speaking of stuff from space crashing to Earth, a UFO reportedly crashed in South Africa on Saturday.

And before we stop speaking about strangeness from space, how about the mystery of Planet X?  (Should I have "speaking of" segued these to the religion links above?)

Wow, here's one for the water cooler or a long car ride:  Parents defend decision to keep girl a child - The crux of the matter:

The reason for the controversy is this: three years ago, when Ashley began to display early signs of puberty, her parents instructed doctors to remove her uterus, appendix and still-forming breasts, then treat her with high doses of oestrogen to stunt her growth.

In other words, Ashley was sterilised and frozen in time, for ever to remain a child. She was only 6.

The reason is that Ashley has a severe brain impairment and her parents didn't want to have to deal with her condition in an adult.  Obviously I'm simplifying something much more complicated.  Here's the blog of her parents if you're interested.

My colleagues in the health section ran this story back in November before the Ashley's identity was known.  Note that there's a message board on that story if there's no one hanging around your water cooler.  UPDATE:  Oops, looks like they picked it up again.  Here's the new story and some medical ethicist commentary.  They're calling it "Peter Pan" surgery.

Plastic Logic raises $100 million to enable the first “take anywhere, read anywhere” electronic reader products - This is a press release, not a news story, but the exciting part is that they're ready to begin manufacturing on a commercial scale.  I'm not sure what that means in terms of when it'll be in your local Best Buy, but at least it's that much closer to being a real product and not some futuristic tech show prototype.

How to beat the claw game - Can this really be true?  I'm skeptical that there'd be an actual knob that says how often to allow a winning grab.  Isn't that fraud?

The first 12 issues of Thrasher Magazine - that's 1981.

I don't know if you've seen one of those new Tickle Me Elmos, but they're really freaky to see on fire.

Petri Dish art

Nielsen BuzzMetrics' Top Blog Posts of the Year - Remarkably lacking in diversity.

Speaking of Nielsen BuzzMetrics, I'm going put up these links so far and then read through this one before chasing down some of today's other hot links: Nielsen BuzzMetrics Tries to Measure Buzz in Social Media

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Comments

I actually ran out of the "old bulbs" right around the time ComEd here in Chicago sent out coupons for free flourescent bulbs (there's a lot more to that story, if you get bored and decide t oresearch). The bulbs were out of stock everywhere due to the fervor surrounding them. About a month later, they are comfortably in stock almost everywhere, and we have replaced all of our bulbs with the new ones except one - my son's room's lamp has lampshade that holds onto the bulb. The curly ones don't cut it here. Doomed to innefficency by design, we are.

Dave, Chicago, IL (Sent Friday, January 05, 2007 10:05 AM)

One thing you may want to check out is if the Wal-Mart flourescent bulbs are silent. I recently bought some spiral CF bulbs that made an annoying buzzing when turned on and the color wasn't very natural. Later I found that bulbs that are EnergyStar certified are supposed to be silent and the color is supposed to be "warm". Hopefully Wal-Mart's bulbs are certified... It might not sound like a big deal, but buying a poor quality CF bulb could certainly turn people off of them.

Frank, Harmony, PA (Sent Friday, January 05, 2007 12:22 PM)

Having moved to CFLs all over the house (both the regular bulb type and the PAR recessed and outside floods), there are some issues. One problem is that many start dim and get brighter over a minute or two. This can be a pain when you switch on a light in a room and it is not very bright at 1st. The trade-off seems to be between taking 1-3 seconds to actually come on vs. coming on instantly but dimmer. There are dimmable ones as well, but they do not work very well in my opinion (cut off too soon, flicker when dimmed, do not get bright enough, etc). We use dimmers for many of our lights, so this is an issue (fortunately, dimmed incandescent bulbs use far less energy). Finally, watch for "color". Offices use 4000K (very white, even blueish). CFLs are normally 2700K or 3000K. An incandescent is supposed to be 3000K, but I find the 2700K CFLs look more like the warmth of incandescents.

Paul K, Alamo, CA (Sent Friday, January 05, 2007 1:23 PM)

I like to think of myself as "green". I do my best to recycle and to conserve. I bought some bulbs at Home Depot at a considerable amount of cost. Short story, they were awful. The lighting was very unnatural and the floodlights I bought for the kitchen (which were supposed to be 65w equivalent) were like using candles. I haven't yet taken them back. I may try getting some from Wal-Mart that are energy star rated and testing them, but the ones I got at HD were the type of thing I had always been told about compact flouresents.

Jason; Pittsburgh, PA (Sent Friday, January 05, 2007 1:46 PM)

Darn right, Frank/Harmony,PA! These bulbs , and reading all the gushing endorsements of these bulbs, has got my undies in a bundle (as granny used to say). My personal experience is that they are dim, and worse, slow to turn on. But worst is THEY DO NOT LAST! I've never recorded installation dates on any bulb, regular or CF, so I have no scientific data, but my husband and I have been saying time and time again: But didn't we just replace that a few weeks ago?

B-Jane, Yardley,PA (Sent Friday, January 05, 2007 2:47 PM)

Regarding the bulbs...my roommate has replaced most of our bulbs with the fluorescent ones without asking me, and I hate them. They take forever to turn on, so in the hallway or laundry room where I need light immediately and for a short period of time, they're worthless to me. They're too dim too long for many rooms, and really only work if you turn a light on ten to fifteen minutes before you want to make full use of it. It may be more energy-efficient, but that really only matters in rooms where the lights are on for a long time. Meanwhile, I have no idea what she did with the normal bulbs so I can re-replace the ones in the hallway and laundry room.

LV (Sent Friday, January 05, 2007 2:53 PM)

I tried to get my parents to convert to the spiral CF bulbs but mom resisted because of the short delay between flicking the switch and the actual emission of light. Apparently mom thinks something critical happens in the dark during the .2 seconds and she doesn't want to miss it!

Alex, Lawrence, KS (Sent Friday, January 05, 2007 3:36 PM)

Hey Will, Love your column - read every day and miss t when it's on vacation. I just wondered why someone in your business wouldn't use a spell checker. (Ashley has a severe brain impairment) Roger

Roger Asher, Dallas, TX (Sent Friday, January 05, 2007 6:51 PM)

I'm surprised at the number of complaints, maybe some people are using older style CFL or cheap brands? I replaced all the bulbs in my house over 2 years ago and they are instant-on and I can't tell a difference between them and the old incandescents. I wonder if there is a site that compares CFL's so people can make sure to get the best ones? It's a shame if bad CFL's turn people off of them when there really are excellent ones to be had.

Sean (Sent Friday, January 05, 2007 9:18 PM)

Roger, thanks, I do use a spell check but it doesn't come in the blogware. So I copy the text out into a Word doc and run spell check there, then go back and make the fixes. In this case, the spell check did catch it, but I blew the fix. The original was "imprement" (missed the a, hit the e by mistake when I hit the r) and my eye got hung up on the missing a as I rushed through.

Will Femia (Sent Friday, January 05, 2007 10:21 PM)

Mmmmm, salt and fat.

slb159, Blue Bell, Pa (Sent Saturday, January 06, 2007 8:05 PM)

For living in the land of the free it seems there's an awful lot of people out there that want to tell me what to eat and what not to eat. It's getting kind of annoying. Those claw games are just about everywhere here in Austin, TX. Grocery stores and gas stations and just about anywhere else where you'd find a bubble gum machine has them. Frankly, I think it's dishonest to have a game like that settable to different degrees of winning, but then there wouldn't be a point to them otherwise. I'm not sure there's any more or less atheism than there was a few years ago, it's just a matter of how publicized it's become. Also, it's trendy these days. There are also people that can't tell the difference between atheism and agnostic. Personally, I'm not religious but I like the additional holidays. When it comes to Planet X and Nibiru, I always refer to Zecharia Sitchin. Everyone else on the web just appears to copy from his collection of books. Sitchin also comes across as more conservative and less sensationalistic than others. In reference to the bit in the last blog about pictures made out of typeset characters, I had thought it was going to be about those pictures the "nerd" set would print out on dot-matrix and daisy-wheel printers that only used letters and numbers. Of course, that was way back when computers were still magical and taboo.

Austin, Austin, TX (Sent Sunday, January 07, 2007 9:44 AM)

For Frank, you may want to try the ones we were told to buy by ComEd (the local electric company). They have the GE ones we got on their store page (http://www.energyfederation.org/peco/default.php/cPath/2050_25_44_786_1659). I've not noticed any buzz from them, and I would be very picky about that. They take roughly a second to turn on if it's been off for a while, which is fine, in my opinion. There is definately a lesser amount of light at turn on than at full blast, but it's still plenty of light to see well by - not the candle-like light stated. As we only replaced them 6 months ago, I can't give a statement on their durability, but I have high hopes...

Dave, Chicago, IL (Sent Monday, January 08, 2007 10:14 AM)

I have tried the CF bulbs and use them where I can. The problem is, they don't work in every light fixture or lamp. They work in my three newest lamps but in no other lamp in my house. They don't work in my basement ceiling fixture or in the garage. And the CF bulbs are too big to use in my ceiling fans. The CF bulbs that I do use come on instantly and give very nice light. But until they work and/or fit in all fixtures, they won't gain widespread use.

Theresa, Bellevue, NE (Sent Monday, January 08, 2007 11:06 AM)

Dave, the problem is that the 1/2 to 1 second turn-on and 80% brightness at the start is enough to upset people. If one had never had incandescents, one would not have a problem with this (it would be just how lights are). But, we are all used to instant on and full brightness incandescents. So, even with the best CFLs, the startup issue is annoying. Note that brightness is an oddity of how we see: an 80% brightness bulb appears to be about 1/2 brightness to us. So, that startup thing impacts us. As one commenter noted, this is far worse when you are used to switching lights on and off when you pop into a room or hallway. This raises an interesting point. If many of us are trained to constantly turn off lights as we leave rooms/hallways, then CFLs do not offer as much advantage anyway. If we leave them on to avoid this startup issue, we will likely burn more electricity (if the bulb is on for 4x the time or more)!

Paul, Alamo, CA (Sent Monday, January 08, 2007 11:17 AM)

I don't know if you've come across this or not, but it's an interesting way to get a free DVD. http://www.blasphemychallenge.com/

Clicked Again, Seattle, Wash (Sent Wednesday, January 10, 2007 6:01 PM)

This weekend I bought 2 of the GE CFL bulbs from Wal-Mart which are supposed to have similar light output as a 75 watt incandescent. They did not buzz like the Home Depot bulbs did, but they seemed to be a little dimmer than the 75 watt incandescent they replaced and the color still seemed a little blue. I have read about the CFL color specifications but not all of the bulbs seemed to list this. The bulbs I bought seem ok, and I guess I'd be willing to try one more time with bulbs that are rated to replace 100 watt incandescents with a "warmer" less bluish light, but I think the real problem with this is that the average consumer still has to do a fair amount of trial and error at their own cost to find the bulb that suits them best. And not all bulbs seem to carry all of the information necessary for the consumer to pick the proper bulb for them. I don't think bulb cost is the barrier to wider acceptance, I think bulb and light quality is.

Frank, Hamony, PA (Sent Monday, January 15, 2007 12:29 PM)



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