“I find it really appalling and hypocritical . . . that you favor a woman’s right to an abortion but you don’t favor a woman or a man’s right to choose what kind of light bulb,” Paul said. “I really find it troubling, this busybody nature.”
Bulb In, Bulb Out - NYTimes.com: "The notion of light as a thoughtless commodity would have seemed fanciful to our distant ancestors. Before electricity, light was expensive, a product of exhaustible sources like whale oil. It was Edison who finally took it to the masses in limitless quantities. On Dec. 31, 1879, the inventor invited a crowd of thousands to his laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J., to witness a demonstration of his fantastic innovation, described in a patent as an “electric lamp for giving light by incandescence.”"
“I don’t think it’s cultural; I think it’s much deeper than that, that our reaction to long-wavelength light is warm and short-wavelength light is cold,” David DiLaura says. Humans don’t see all wavelengths equally well; DiLaura says the eye’s “sensitivity curve” is adapted to the spectral composition of light on the African savanna. The light that surrounds us can have psychological and physical effects. Research has suggested that altering wavelengths can affect students’ attention and that patients on the south side of a hospital, which gets more light, recover more quickly than those on the north. So it’s hardly surprising that the incandescent phaseout has prompted a visceral reaction.
“This is the world’s greatest marketing scheme,” he said. “You get the government to ban the competition.” A slight man with an air of gray-bearded grandiloquence, Brandston contends that his root objection to the law, which he calls “immoral,” is connected to his professional appreciation of incandescence, which mimics the natural spectrum. “It’s what we grew up with — it’s sunlight,” Brandston told me earlier on the phone.
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