An article in the Washington Post gave a unique perspective on why compact fluorescent bulb sales make up only 6% of the US bulb market: they don’t always pass “the wife test.”

 ”I have heard time and again that a husband goes out and puts the bulb into the house, thinking he is doing a good thing,” Reed said. “Then, the CFL bulb is changed back out by the women. It seems that women are much more concerned with how things look.”

I still can’t tell the difference between light produced by a CFL and light produced by an incandescent bulb.  Nor do I care that they take a second to turn on.  But I guess some people notice (or there is a placebo effect).  But even if there is a subtle difference in light quality - come on - the tradeoff is sooooo worth it!

Of course, it isn’t always the wife preventing the husband from putting the bulb in.  Sometimes men won’t use them because they think the bulbs look bad, and women are the ones trying to put them into the sockets.  One of my professors says she’s been having a very hard time getting her fiance to switch over to CFLs.

According to a recent article in the LA Times, a fungus might be the bee killer that has wiped out the 2.4 million commercial bee colonies that have been lost since this past fall.

Researchers have been struggling for months to explain the disorder, and the new findings provide the first solid evidence pointing to a potential cause.

But the results are “highly preliminary” and are from only a few hives from Le Grand in Merced County, UCSF biochemist Joe DeRisi said. “We don’t want to give anybody the impression that this thing has been solved.”

Other researchers said Wednesday that they too had found the fungus, a single-celled parasite called Nosema ceranae, in affected hives from around the country — as well as in some hives where bees had survived. Those researchers have also found two other fungi and half a dozen viruses in the dead bees.

This still looks very preliminary.  Stay tuned.

So maybe cell phone electromagnetic radiation isn’t killing the bees… that was just misinterpretation of data by the media:

“We cannot explain the CCD-phenomenon itself and want to keep from speculation in this case,” Jochen Kuhn, a professor in the physics department at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany who co-authored the bee study, wrote in an e-mail message. “Our studies cannot indicate that electromagnetic radiation is a cause of CCD.”

How embarrassing to the authors that jumped all over that one and didn’t read the study for themselves… oh, wait…

… that’s me.

*hangs head in shame*

My roommates and I are trying to conserve energy.  We haven’t turned on our air conditioner all year, and only had our heat on for a total of about a month.  It was really hot today… probably 95 degrees in Williamsburg this afternoon.  But keeping the windows open and running fans, combined with occasionally splashing water on my face and taking a cold shower made things pretty bearable.

I do feel less productive in the heat, though.  I’ve been sitting here working on homework, but it’s moving very slowly.  I don’t know how someone living in Florida could do this.  Oh well… anybody else ever voluntarily turn off the A/C?

Link:

Now I’m handed a clipboard. On it is consent to basically give my wife an abortion and kill our future child. And it is all on me, my decision, mine alone. Something I never thought I’d ever face, ever have to deal with. Made worse by being a decision of either kill the baby or potentially watch both my wife and the baby die.

Yipes.  Obviously, this is not the norm when it comes to abortions, but just something to think about.