Strange New World: Picks of the Week

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This week, we give you a very special Mother's Day edition of our column. Apparently, gadget retailers believe that your mom is quite a geek and in fact no longer wants flowers for her holiday, but actually wants expensive electronics. There is also big news in computer circuitry (bear with us, it's actually pretty cool) and Sam's Club is going green! Here are our picks of the week.

(ABC News Photo Illustration)

Forget the Flowers: Mom Wants Flash Memory

Mother's Day is happening during a nasty recession and gadget vendors are not only falling over themselves offering discounts, they're almost illogically packaging everything from iPods to digital cameras for mom.

Discounting is nothing new for Mother's Day. But the sheer volume of packaging and the lengths some are going to in order to tie together merchandise to play off the annual celebration of moms is unprecedented in our memory.

Sure, you expect Best Buy and Radio Shack to be pushing cameras and phones for Mother's Day. But these outfits are pushing credibility to the max. Best Buy is offering nothing less than the EOS Digital Rebel for $629. That's about $70 off the list price. It's a nice deal, but exactly why would a sensible person consider Mother's Day the moment to pick up higher-end digital photography?

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And phone companies are equally shameless. Sprint is pushing a whole bunch of phones ostensibly for mom. Again, a phone is a nice present, but why on earth are they including the multimedia Rumor by LG for $49? How many moms are really going to use a multimedia phone? One of our moms still can't figure out how to retrieve her voice mail.

Even some smaller stores are taking on the same twisted view of the day: Camera Wholesalers in Stamford, Conn., is pushing a $100 instant savings on a Nikon D40. Again, this is a top-of-the-line amateur camera.

HP Discovers a New Circuit

OK, it's about to get really dorky in here, but this is big news. HP has discovered a new circuit and it only took them 40 years! In electronics, there are three fundamental elements in a passive circuit: resistors, capacitors, and inductors. In the 1970s, University of California at Berkeley scientist Leon Chua theorized there should be a fourth called a memory resistor, or memristor. And HP has finally proven his theories correct.