The latest offering from Wiley's series of books on sustainable design just arrived on my desk: Sustainable Healthcare Architecture by Robin Guenther and Gail Vittori. The book is wide-ranging, with plenty of case studies and essays from green building luminaries.

"Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost." —James Thurber

We talk a lot about energy efficiency here at Environmental Building News. If we follow Thurber's lead and add environmental humor to our concerns, what do we get? The green building light bulb joke, of course. I wrote these for your enjoyment. Feel free to add yours below!

• How many daylighting consultants does it take to change a light bulb? None—the sun will be back up in exactly 10 hours.

Frank and I are going to tag-team on this post. We attended a presentation at Keene State College in New Hampshire yesterday about solar-hydronic radiant space heating, given by Jack Mann of Nobis.

I'd like to call your attention to the "Editorial Radar" box on the right-hand navigation column—that brown stripe next to these posts. You may have to scroll down (or up) a little. The editors of Environmental Building News use del.icio.us social bookmarking to share links to interesting articles and other information on the internet with each other.

Over lunch today I was reading the current issue of one of my favorite publications: The Owner Builder—"The Australasian Home Builders Magazine." You can get a taste of the magazine (which is much better looking than its website) from their Sample Articles page. In publication since 1982, the first 25 issues have just been released on CD.

As the editor who collects all of the press releases, rumors, news tidbits, and blog posts for the editorial team to consider for the EBN news section, I tend to have a broad picture of what's going on in the green building world. In the last several months, green schools have been everywhere.

It's not all about magnets. Two other nonchemical water treatment systems that have exhibited at Greenbuild for at least the last couple years are worth noting...

So, this is it. The shoe has dropped. The Fourth (and final) Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is out, and people seem to be paying attention.

Sometimes it's hard to suspend disbelief enough to make an unbiased judgement about a product, particularly when it's from an industry with a history of charlatanry, if not outright chicanery. For instance, chemical-free water treatment—which most people associate with sticking a speaker magnet on a pipe under the kitchen sink. The systems I'm talking about, though, are industrial-sized...