Early yesterday, The Tracker vowed to post on a nifty story in the NYTimes’s Home section on the gradual, oft-reluctant conversion by homeowners to high efficiency light bulbs. Reporter Julie Scelfo talked with an impressive number of people about their thoughts on compact fluorescents mostly, but also touches on newer, less-developed, or even more expensive bulbs. That induction bulb looks intriguing – expensive, but I gotta buy at least one.

It was nicely done and certainly illustrates how issues once relegated to the geekier corners of Popular Mechanics and to the science pages and op-eds on energy policy have seeped into everyday life — and into the shelter magazines and their newspaper equivalents.

Plus, the Times put together a superb illus, hi res here, with a gaggle of assorted bulbs hanging on bare sockets. The Tracker, being a man of little taste caring only if a bulb went on without a few seconds of hiccuping, had never noticed the color of “warm” CFLs being so different one brand to the next. The story also had an ambitious chart — but could it really be that every single bulb’s color temp. rated out at 2700 Kelvin on the nose?

The post didn’t get done because another (stem cell) news rush was so messy to sort out it took a big part of the morning. But it’s worth the wait. Only now do I notice that Times science writer Andrew C. Revkin provides an intriguing back story to the published piece on his Dot Earth blog. The package thus provides a revealing profile of collegial cooperation in the evolution of a newspaper story.

-CP

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 10:50 am and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.