I agree, pretty much. The environmental angle with the mercury is indisputably an outright scandal, and I'm positive that the money that'll have to be spent in order to deal with the consequences of profligate disposal will prove a truly grievous societal burden two generations (and probably less) down the road. Oops.

I'm suspending judgement on the quality of the illumination for now, however. First off, there's the Rotwang's-lab aspect of that Deco-ish spiral -- Fritz Lang woulda killed to get a few hundred of those for _Metropolis_. That aside, I've noticed distinct variations in the hue of various bulbs -- some icily blue and painful; others, particularly when glowing through the right kind of shade, as welcomingly yellow as a tallow candle in de la Tour. Given that it's virtually a done deal that we're going to be stuck with these things for the foreseeable future, I'm just going to hope that manufacturers continue to seek out means of cozening human neurology's comfort resonances while we wait for either the Jovian hydrogen mining operations to kick in (get cracking, Sir Richard!) or LEDs to take off. Either of which, I make so bold to suggest, would be a good thing were it to come speedily to pass.

And the LEDs will be COOL. (Literally, of course, although that's not the cool-with-a-"k" part.) I've got some LED Christmas lights that blind like little lasers if they hit your eye at the right angle: insufferably neat. The trick with them is going to be diffusion -- the right kind of frosted shade or cover has the capacity of producing all manner of interesting effects, but megahours in the design labs lie ahead before a commercially viable array of those effects is ready for the marketplace -- and, perhaps more critical, cost: apparently, it's as of of now just too damned expensive to do up your pied-à-terre's mood-lighting scheme with the fetching little diodes (although two batches of those not-killingly-pricey tree lights in white would tidily illuminate a good-sized bedchamber, so I don't really know what's up there).

So sing out, world green consumer, and agitate for the more-rapid development of the LED for domestic lighting. It's not incandescence, but it's flickerless, energy-efficient to a fault, and potentially capable of shedding light whose character will be as (to use Aubrey's quaint term) romancy as you want it. All aesthetic considerations aside, incandescence is, taken in the aggregate, a wildly wasteful means of lighting up the Scrabble board, and one that needs to be supplanted along with lots of other survivors from the technology of the past century and a quarter. (Now if my capitalist media masters will only let me telecommute instead of driving that 34 miles round-trip every day ... )