Lewis Black deconstructed Earth Day children’s programming on last night’s The Daily Show, including a great jab at actor / MTV Cribs balla’ Wilmer Valderrama. Enjoy. 

The following is a segment from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s program "Marketplace," back in 1978. To repeat: Nineteen. Seventy. Eight.

According to the AP, Wal-Mart concluded that their middle-American consumer base was not hip to the gPC’s Linux-based operating system. However, seeing the appeal of the computer to a more geeky clientele, Wal-Mart will continue to sell it on their website.

Why should anyone care? Far as I know, this was the first mass production of consumer electronics with some green features (low power consumption — not enough to make it completely green, but a start).

I know what you’re thinking: “If it’s just the OS they didn’t like, why not slap Microsoft Windows on it?” Trust me on this: putting Windows on a green computer is not a good idea.

Outside of the coolness factor, the ramifications of this project — creating autonomous, renewable-energy-powered, zero-emission systems from vehicles to robotics — just blows my mind. I look forward to seeing something like this in person one day.

The tech news world has been buzzy about gPC’s popularity, in particular questioning what the "g" stands for. It could stand for "green," thanks to the environmental friendliness of its low-power CPU (average 2W, 20W maximum). However, that seems to be its only green credential; nothing on its website or in its reviews touts any other green features, like recycled/recyclable parts, sustainable manufacturing processes, certifications, etc.

"G" could stand for Google, whose software (gmail, google docs, etc.) is peppered all over the thing, thanks to the gPC’s Linux-based operating system, conveniently called gOS.

Anyway, the popularity of a low-cost, web-reliant, Linux-based computer has sort of caught all the tech reporters and pundits by surprise, and you’ll hear more about this hot gift item bubble up to the mainstream press. Perhaps then we’ll all know what type of "g" the gPC is, green or otherwise.

I woke up this morning and ate some baozi. They were disgusting! I’m sure I they were made of cardboard.

To get rid of the strange taste I brushed my teeth. Unfortunately the toothpaste contained diethylene glycol, which can cause nausea, abdominal pain, dizziness, urinary problems, kidney failure, breathing problems, lethargy, convulsions, coma and even death, so I spat it out and rinsed with clean water from my water cooler.

Unfortunately I had read in the Beijing Times that water in water coolers is probably just ordinary tap water. Officials say tap water is now clean, but the problem is that the pipes carrying it are old and dirty, making the final product risky.

I therefore skipped the water and had some fruit juice. What bad luck I was having! It just so happened that the fruit juice I had purchased was in the small 20% group of fruit juice products that are substandard.

Bored with beverages I had a light snack to take my mind off things. I ate a sweet but it was horrendously sweet, so I then had a prawn. Unfortunately the prawn was clearly contaminated with antibiotic residues and carcinogens so I had to throw it away.

My dog was looking hungry as I discarded foodstuff after foodstuff, and I realized it must be his dinner time. He tucked into his pet food, but I was shocked when he suddenly keeled over and died.

I felt very sad at the death of my dog so I decided to take a walk in the fresh air. Unfortunately it wasn’t a blue sky day, so the air was heavy with suspended particulates, carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide. Better give that a miss, I thought, and instead I resolved to drown my sorrows in booze.

It was at this juncture that my run of terrible luck changed.

It just so happened that the beer I had purchased was from the 5% of Chinese beers that don’t contain cancer-causing formaldehyde.

I’ll drink to that!

Domestic biofuel production has always been difficult in land-lacking Japan, which in the past had to consider importing biofuel from countries like Brazil as its primary means of obtaining ethanol.

However, Japanese researchers at Mitsubishi and The University of Tokyo are now experimenting with ways to extract ethanol from seaweed.

Researchers from Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, Mitsubishi Research Institute, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and several other private-sector firms envision a 10,000-square-kilometer (3,860-square-mile) seaweed farm at Yamatotai, a shallow fishing area in the middle of the Sea of Japan. They claim a farm of this scale could produce about 20 million kiloliters (5.3 billion gallons) of bioethanol per year, which is equivalent to one-third the 60 million kiloliters (16 billion gallons) of gasoline that Japan consumes each year.

The process of creating, processing, and transporting the seaweed biofuel would all be done offshore, and if the technology is viable, could be considered the first major "offshore" biofuel operation.

Another clever biofuel process being considered down in Japan exploits another resource Japan has in bulk: scrap wood.

Bio Ethanol Japan Kansai is testing a new technology that may provide another option. The company succeeded last January in operating the world’s first plant to produce bioethanol out of scrap wood. The plant uses a genetically modified bacteria called KO11 to ferment wood into ethanol. It is designed for an annual capacity of 370,000 gallons of bioethanol through processing 48,000 tons of scrap wood.

Man that’s cool. I wish we had one of Chip standing on his head.

Like the integrated search rolled out a while back, “topics” is meant to give you another tool to find current and archived articles.

Some features will be helpful for everyone — the “read more about” tool embedded in articles and posts, or basic browsing in the “topic results” page. But we also created some advanced features that will more likely be embraced by “power users” — the topic cloud being one of them.

Also note that that you can access articles pertaining to a topic directly by pointing your browser to an address like http://www.grist.org/topic/coal. You can also narrow down results by adding more than one topic using the “+” sign between topics (e.g., http://www.grist.org/topic/coal+carbon_sequestration). Also, RSS feeds are generated for each topic or combination of topics (e.g., http://www.grist.org/topic/rss/coal).

Other advanced tools are in the works and will be added soon. Like our search feature, topics are “beta” — email us if you have any questions and/or see something buggy.

Finally, I’d like to give a massive shout out to our Dave, Skray, and the editorial team who created the taxonomy for this feature and gave Chris and myself tons of feedback, Chris for pushing me to the limit but giving me great advice, Tom for helping me with the look of the Topic Cloud, Dean, Corey and the rest of the tech/production team, the Open Source community that provided the technology to make this possible, my girlfriend for putting up with me while I was working on this [music starts], OK, OK! my boys Quez, Jackson, Steve, Avie, my family, little Neeshia, little DeeDee [music plays louder], and my mom, I LOVE YOU!!!