Increase in LED Lighting 'Risks Harming Human and Animal Health' (theguardian.com) 201
Blue light from artificial sources is on the rise, which may have negative consequences for human health and the wider environment, according to a study. From a report: Academics at the University of Exeter have identified a shift in the kind of lighting technologies European countries are using at night to brighten streets and buildings. Using images produced by the International Space Station (ISS), they have found that the orange-coloured emissions from older sodium lights are rapidly being replaced by white-coloured emissions produced by LEDs. While LED lighting is more energy-efficient and costs less to run, the researchers say the increased blue light radiation associated with it is causing "substantial biological impacts" across the continent. The study also claims that previous research into the effects of light pollution have underestimated the impacts of blue light radiation.
Chief among the health consequences of blue light is its ability to suppress the production of melatonin, the hormone that regulates sleep patterns in humans and other organisms. Numerous scientific studies have warned that increased exposure to artificial blue light can worsen people's sleeping habits, which in turn can lead to a variety of chronic health conditions over time. The increase in blue light radiation in Europe has also reduced the visibility of stars in the night sky, which the study says "may have impacts on people's sense of nature." Blue light can also alter the behavioural patterns of animals including bats and moths, as it can change their movements towards or away from light sources.
Chief among the health consequences of blue light is its ability to suppress the production of melatonin, the hormone that regulates sleep patterns in humans and other organisms. Numerous scientific studies have warned that increased exposure to artificial blue light can worsen people's sleeping habits, which in turn can lead to a variety of chronic health conditions over time. The increase in blue light radiation in Europe has also reduced the visibility of stars in the night sky, which the study says "may have impacts on people's sense of nature." Blue light can also alter the behavioural patterns of animals including bats and moths, as it can change their movements towards or away from light sources.
Sodium has it's own problems. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sodium has it's own problems. (Score:5, Interesting)
Could have been the bulbs failing, or maybe the day night sensor was failing. But another reason lights turned off by themselves was because they were on a timer. Cities found years ago they could save a lot of money turning off each light for a certain amount of time every night without losing much light coverage.
Personally I like the monochromatic tone of the sodium bulbs. Now that I'm getting older, they are way easier on my eyes. And from a distance they are not nearly so glaring or bright-looking. I find LED street lamps to be glaring (my eyes think they are bright) but in reality they aren't that bright. I think it has something to do with lots of little chips emitting light vs one strong point-source filament. Also even the more expensive LED yard lights seem to have a subtle strobe effect to them that I can notice when I scan my eyes rapidly across something I'm looking at. Not sure why that is because the voltage is smooth DC.
Here in the house I love my warm white LED lights. However the bulb shaped lights have a very high failure rate for me. From what I hear on BigClive's youtube channel, I'm not the only one noticing the high failure rate, and they are designed to fail fairly quickly. They overdrive the LEDs and power supply components which leads to inevitable failure. Too bad the famed "Dubai" LED bulb isn't available here, although I understand it has a poor color index. BigClive regularly takes bulbs apart and modifies them to operate at a lower wattage (and dimmer), prolonging their life.
Re:Sodium has it's own problems. (Score:4, Informative)
Here in the house I love my warm white LED lights. However the bulb shaped lights have a very high failure rate for me. From what I hear on BigClive's youtube channel, I'm not the only one noticing the high failure rate, and they are designed to fail fairly quickly. They overdrive the LEDs and power supply components which leads to inevitable failure.
This has not been my experience. we've got our house full of those inexpensive Feit brand bulbs you can get at Costco... I think over the past decade or so I've only had to replace two of them. And we also have three three-way bulbs I bought on Amazon back in February 2015 - they've been in some torchiere lamps, working just fine since then.
Now compact florescents were another story - those died on me all the bloody time.
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Feit's absolute garbage. I took one of their UV party bulbs apart. Three spots of thermal compound, each no bigger than a pencil, on a fucking 40mm metal PCB.
Half of the LEDs had suffered thermal damage.
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Glad you're having good luck. My luck was opposite of yours. I still have CFs running in my house and have had them for years. In fact recently I got so fed up with LED bubs failing that I went online and bought a pack of compact flourescents (new old stock perhaps?). So I'm trying them next to the LEDs and will see what lasts longer. One difference between you and me might be the wattage I prefer. I find the 60-watt replacements too dim, so I like to use 100-watt replacements. I think they are 12 watt
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Also it seems to be that the oldest bulbs are still going strong. Back before they cheapened them. Used more LEDs, drove them at spec.
That's a possibility - I switched most of our lights over to LEDs pretty quickly, mainly because I disliked the CFs so much. I should probably have put the date on the base so I could track which ones are newer... the Costco boxes are in the cupboard and mostly full.
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Personally I like the monochromatic tone of the sodium bulbs.
The high pressure sodium ones had a nice broad orange color when you looked at it’s spectrum, but the low pressure ones, which were even more efficient, were truly monochrome with a fluorescent yellow/brown color to them. Quite distinctive with just two ultra narrow peaks (589 and 589.5nm), the way they render to my eyes always reminded me of old time sepia.
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Quite distinctive with just two ultra narrow peaks (589 and 589.5nm)
It's also nice because it's trivial to filter out such narrowband light for astronomers in light-polluted areas..
Re:Sodium has it's own problems. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sodium has it's own problems. (Score:5, Insightful)
BigClive regularly takes bulbs apart and modifies them to operate at a lower wattage (and dimmer), prolonging their life.
Great YouTube channel, and it introduced me to the Hopi watt meter which I hadn’t seen before. It’s sad that LED bulbs are designed to fail as quickly as their older filament counterparts, they shave off the last $0.03 undervaluing the voltage rating for series capacitance and still overcurrent the LEDs both of which keep the cost down and shorten lifespan doubly increasing profits. Many have terrible thermal management. I’ve taken apart every led bulb in my home that has failed since they became popular, maybe 30 in all, and zero have had the LED element burn out as the point of failure. Breaks in the wiring sure, but not the actual die element.
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I assume you have a larger home than me, but 30 seems high
Switched to energy saving bulbs when I bought my first place end of last millennium, and by mid 2000-and-naughts went with LEDs as they became available. All I've had fail was 1 in kid's room where the line is unstable (seems to be shaken lose by the nearby metro line), while I've replaced perhaps 4 IKEA (decade old) bulbs due their low output and slow power-up
Even my (1st gen) LIFX lights are still going, tho the networking in them are long-since de
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"Not sure why that is because the voltage is smooth DC."
Are you sure? An old trick is to blink LEDs very fast to make them brighter, they can handle a higher current in a short pulse than as a steady current. But at 5kHz you shouldn't be able to see artifacts of that.
On the other hand if they were running a half wave rectifier then you definitely would see the 30 Hz flicker under some conditions. And since an LED is a half wave rectifier by definition of the diode, then you could make a really cheap light w
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Good point. I know the power supply does some smoothing, but there could still be noise in it. Also the lights I have on my shop are dimmable (0-10v dc external control input), so they do have PWM mosfets in the driver, but I assumed that if the dimmer wires were unused, it would just go full on. Given the dimming capabilities, I would guess the power supply is better than half wave rectification.
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EE and tech here. You got me curious. I've taken a few broken LED bulbs apart and they all have some kind of switching circuit. One I just tried- put 'scope probe near it- I could see ~50 KHz oscillation, which is pretty reasonable / average for switching supplies. There is a filter cap, but I'm not sure (yet) if the LEDs are being pulsed or are getting filtered (capacitor) DC. I'll do some checking and report back in a few days- pretty booked up day and night for a few days coming up.
Standard dimmers
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I agree with you that the sodium lights gives a milder light that's easier on the eyes. And I think it's better also when you have astigmatism or don't have the correct glasses.
Too much blue light during night can actually harm night vision quite a bit. There's a reason why red light is used in some situations - it don't hurt the night vision as much.
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I have started building my own lights based on LED strips with proper power bricks.
I'm fed up with bulbs dying from heat all the time. The bulbs are all hot to the touch and the strips are not. Granted, they make for bigger light fixtures but then I can better light a room that way and also minimize shadows.
I notice it's easier on the eyes especially when doing things like soldering, knitting or other kinds of fine work when there's less shadows. I achieve that in the living room with a chandelier with spo
Re:Sodium has it's own problems. (Score:5, Informative)
this is not about discomfort but about certain type of light messing with your endocrine system, which in turn messes up your sleep behavior, which in turn screws up your brain and your behavior.
don't look at me, that's what the article you didn't bother to read says right in paragraph #2, i assume you were too excited about immediately sharing your completely unrelated personal experience and preferences. are you sleepless by any chance?
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FWIW, the blue hue is pretty much expected to screw with melatonin; research has been done on that for decades. High color temperatures ("cooler") make your body think it is daytime. I wish streetlights had been mandated to be monochromatic amber; I know one city that mandated it due to astronomy and boy it was such an improvement.
I wish the morons that design consumer electronics for bedrooms would wake up and switch to red or green (don't care which one... the LEDs look the same to me).
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I think amber/orange would be a better choice, I find it less harsh than red.
Re:Sodium has it's own problems. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sodium has it's own problems. (Score:5, Informative)
The light cycling is a failure mode common for the high pressure sodium lamps. They are designed to be run at high voltage, with a high internal temperature for the sodium gas, as they are most efficient when run this way. The problem they have is that as the bulb ages, it slowly loses some of the sodium, and as the amount of sodium gas slowly decreases, the voltage required to for it to continue to work slowly increases. At some point, the operating voltage exceeds what the ballast can put out, and the lamp shuts off.
The reason they cycle on/off is that a cold bulb requires less voltage (but more current), so a bad bulb will still light up when cold. As the sodium gas heats up, the voltage required to keep it operating creeps up until it hits the limit for the ballast, at which point the ballast shuts off. The bulb then cools down, allowing for the cycle to start over again. Smarter fixtures/ballasts can detect this cycling and will kill the power to the bulb until it is replaced.
Sodium lamps can also cycle on/off due to a bad ballast too, but chances are if you see a sodium lamp doing this it's the bulb.
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My only real problem with LED lights is that they are frequently much brighter than they actually need to be, i.e. my LED headlights seem to piss off other drivers.
That's actually partly once again due to the color spectrum. The bluer the LED, the brighter it appears to the human eye, which is why cheap flashlights and "High power super LED" car headlights are never warm-white. Unfortunately, the colder (bluer) the light, the more painful it is for oncoming traffic in the relative darkness.
The fact that they're also overly bright doesn't help things, of course.
I'm still driving one of the last generations that came with actual halogen headlights and even for me as the
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Re:Sodium has it's own problems. (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there such thing as "too bright" when it comes to your safety at night?
Obviously. There's a reason your headlights come equipped with a dimmer switch.
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Selecting the low beam setting also directs your lights downward and away from opposing traffic. Also, some cars have steerable headlights that direct the beam left and right when you are turning.
The brightness and color problem accelerated with the "Ultra" halogen replacement bulbs that Sylvania and other companies started producing years ago. The new Infrastructure act signed last November finally starts to address this issue. It states "Not later than 2 years after the date of enactment of this Act, t
Re:Sodium has it's own problems. (Score:4, Interesting)
Now lets see if they apply some legal muscle to regulating emergency vehicle lights. The ultra-bright LEDs are great for helping make police cars, ambulances, etc. visible during the day, but those lights are absolutely dazzling at night - FAR brighter than necessary. You'd think they'd dim them down a bit based on the ambient light.
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Or make improperly adjusted headlights illegal, and enforced (unlike, say, tailgating)
News Flash! (Score:2, Insightful)
LEDs can be used to generate any dang color in the rainbow
Sure, blue light bad, we get it, as if MH hasn't been in the blue end of the spectrum for decades
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Much nicer than the old fluorescent ones.
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That's way too bright of a color for me. I much prefer the 3000k range, 3000k ideally.
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For home I want about 1800K with amber spikes. For work 2700-3000K is acceptable. No idea why they even make 6000K LED replacement bulbs, as 99% of them end up in residential applications.
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Many years ago an Osram publication had a chart of color temperature vs light intensity.
Low light intensity "feels better" if the light is warm.
High light intensity feels better if thelight is cool. Osram even made 8000K tubes for this reason, "SKYWHITE" line.
You're also supposed to have specific levels of lighting depending on the application. 250 lux is acceptable for a bedroom, but upwards of 1500 is required for a workbench or even a kitchen.
At home all my bulbs are 2700-3000K, but my workbench has 4x18
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"I've been in an office where they used tons of 2700K lights and it looked simply awful."
2700K at 70CRI looks awful period, no matter how much or little one utilizes.
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I have bathroom with a skylight. Those >5k bulbs might be horrid in the living room, but they're absolutely perfect for that bathroom.
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Much nicer than the old fluorescent ones.
White LEDs are actually fluorescent too, but excited by blue instead of UV. That's how they get the broad spectrum.
You can buy good fluorescent tubes in any colour-temp you want, warm or cool.
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LEDs can be used to generate any dang color in the rainbow
Sure, blue light bad, we get it, as if MH hasn't been in the blue end of the spectrum for decades
Metal Halide has a very good Color Rendition Index, as do bluish LEDs. Sodium and mercury vapor lamps OTOH are quite bad. I personally prefer my artificial light to have as high a CRI as possible, though I can absolutely see how lighting that closely mimics daylight during night hours would be more disruptive to things like plants and insects than light that is more unnatural looking.
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*Ceramic* Metal Halide has good CRI; standard Metal Halide not so much. GP likely was referring to Mercury Vapor which had the worst of both worlds... high color temperature and miserable CRI.
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I personally prefer my artificial light to have as high a CRI as possible
At night you care less about the specific colour quality and more about being able to see obstacles and people. Higher CRI compared to sodium (low or high pressure) is more blue light. The other problem with that is blue scatters more, and bright point like sources have much more glare/halos on windscreens glasses and eyeballs compared to more orange sources.
The problem isn't LEDs per se of course, it's the specific colour output of th
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CRI numbers make a huge difference in the light quality. See https://www.flexfireleds.com/c... [flexfireleds.com]
One of my favorite YouTube channels does a great explanation too https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:News Flash! (Score:5, Informative)
LEDs can be used to generate any dang color in the rainbow
Yes... but that only applies if you're using LED light to create ADDITIVE color by projecting it through a lens onto a white screen.
Subtractive color is an ENTIRELY different beast. Light that appears "yellow" because you're mixing red and green is NOT the same thing as spectrally-yellow light. A room illuminated with only red, green, and blue light might "look" perfectly white when viewed from afar, but would look ghastly up close, because colors would all look "weirdly wrong". A "bright yellow" shirt might look muddy brown or gray. Human skin would have a weird, grayish pallor and look "dead". And that's just the start.
Now... that said... it certainly IS possible to make LED light that almost perfectly replicates the spectra of 3k halogen light. The problem is, to nail down that final bit of red and get it exactly right, you have to fortify the light with superbright near-infrared... which totally nukes its energy-efficiency. Deep red doesn't contribute much to "visibility" (compared to, say, green), and doesn't get much weight in government lumen calculations... but it affects the "vividness" of a scene's illumination, and how you perceive hues (particularly, things like skin tones) within it. Oh, sure, you can try to hack and slash your way to "better red" by simply adding more "normal" red... but THEN you give the light a "pink" cast. Only superbright near-infrared can "fortify" red without leaking down into blue and green territory and giving the scene a pink hue.
The long and short is, a LED bulb that outputs light that's indistinguishable (to both humans and measuring instruments) from a 100-watt halogen bulb is going to consume about 60-85 watts... roughly half of which goes to the "R9" fortification from superbright near-infrared LEDs. To get hundred-watt "equivalence" from less than ~30 watts, you have to lower your standards & settle for 98 CRI (and poor R9 fidelity). To get power consumption down below ~20 watts, you have to completely take a shit on not only R9, but overall CRI as well.
Put another way, there's no free lunch. A LED bulb that perfectly replicates the visible illumination of a halogen bulb doesn't use quite as much power as an incandescent bulb, because it's not outputting much deliberate HEAT (the way a blackbody radiator does), but the closer you get to perfectly replicating that halogen incandescent bulb with a LED, the more the LED's power consumption is going to become indistinguishable from the incandescent bulb's.
Re:News Flash! (Score:5, Informative)
>>the LED's power consumption is going to become indistinguishable from the incandescent bulb's.
This does not seem to be the case for 3000k LED t-8 replacements [1000bulbs.com] and that is comparing to flourescents that are more efficient than incandescent
Maybe you are too hung up on this "perfect" replication, but you don't need anything like that for light that is not blue enough to disturb sleep patterns
Here is an interesting article from people who also care about the night sky [darksky.org]
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This is great information. However, I think we are missing the point - we are not trying to replicate hallogen or any other incandescant bulbs. These did not try to replicate the "best" lighting. What we should be after is a lighting that is best for users, humans and animals.
Or are we saying the hallogen producing the "best" spectrum?
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To get hundred-watt "equivalence" from less than ~30 watts, you have to lower your standards & settle for 98 CRI (and poor R9 fidelity). To get power consumption down below ~20 watts, you have to completely take a shit on not only R9, but overall CRI as well.
Umm, what. I have long used daylight bulbs, started with Vivalite's CFLs and later their LEDs, that supposedly had continuous spectrum with around 5500 K temperature. These supposedly do have the full spectrum with perhaps some extra on the blue sid
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But that's not how LED light bulbs work. They use blue LEDs and a phosphor that glows when excited by the blue light. The colour is dependent on the phosphor. It's not a mixture of RGB LEDs.
High CRI bulbs use a mixture of phosphors to improve their coverage of the spectrum, but none of those phosphors have a spectrum so narrow that you would experience the issues you mention.
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The OP is correct. You can make any colour you want with LED lights. You can combine a red, green and blue ones in an additive way, which might look funny when they light up particular types of pigment. You can also use a high frequency LED to illuminate a phosphor, which then glows with a broad spectrum. Most of the white LED lights, including street lights, use the latter method.
Re: News Flash! (Score:2)
And just about everyone is old enough to remember when 5G towers supposedly caused people to get Covid. And so many people believed this that they were setting cell towers on fire :(
Re: News Flash! (Score:2)
What's odd is that the "cell phones give you cancer" crowd never think of the various radio and TV stations around them that were pumping hundreds of thousands of watts into the air all their lives.
But the tiny little radio inside a cell phone which does not send out nearly as much power as a typical walkie talkie is a threat
Stay in the basement. (Score:2)
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"according to a study" (Score:3, Insightful)
According to a single study that anyone sensible will ignore until it has been replicated, you mean ?
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100 quatloo's says the study will never be replicated or even peer reviewed.
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Re:"according to a study" (Score:4, Interesting)
And keep in mind the claim they're relying on that blue light causes effects in humans is having a lot of trouble being replicated. Such as https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com]
Don't people sleep in the dark? (Score:4)
Re:Don't people sleep in the dark? (Score:5, Informative)
Depending upon the street lights, it may come through even light-blocking curtains quite a bit. I had that problem as a child, the street light outside shined into my bedroom, and even bouncing it was quite bright.
Otherwise, well, it can be a problem because of too much blue light *before* you go to bed. Which drops melatonin production, making it harder for you to sleep when it is actually time to do so.
The obvious answer would be to simply start putting LED lighting in that is more "warm" than "cold", with less blue light in it.
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it can be a problem because of too much blue light *before* you go to bed. Which drops melatonin production, making it harder for you to sleep
It should be noted that this mechanism has not been actually demonstrated in humans, and studies that attempted to do so have failed to do so. The best evidence so far is a correlation in sleep patters in some nocturnal mammals and mice. But they didn't cite a cause. Also, the same study had trouble finding the same correlation in humans.
However, subsequent studies like this one: https://www.cell.com/current-b... [cell.com] found that yellow light was actually more disruptive to sleep than blue light when the inten
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The implication is that if you have white/blue LEDs available, that any time you're near them, the 'blue' in the light will disrupt your melatonin generation, making you less likely to sleep (well). They also appear much brighter (or harsher) because blue is higher-energy than red or orange and our eyes pick up on that. They don't emit anything outside of their relatively narrow light-emitting band. Even incandescent lights emit a wider-range of light (i.e. infrared).
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It's the exposure to that light during the time you should be calming down to sleep. Say you are driving or walking back in the evening to relax. This light is supposedly stimulating the nervious system in an inappropriate time.
Scare mongering (Score:5, Interesting)
Notice the difference in labeling:
"blue light radiation"
vs
"orange-coloured emissions"
All photons are radiation, be they visible light or any other frequency.
Yet here they intentionally throw the term into a layman article, multiple times, and only with the color they are against.
They go out of their way to not label orange light as radiation, inconsistently using "emissions"
Then proceeding to call blue light artificial, implying sodium light bulbs are all natural.
Completely neglecting to label sunlight as all natural.
Being intentionally directed at the laymen, there is next to no chance this fear mongering was an accident.
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What do you think the odds are they own stock in some companies that make non-LED lighting solutions?
yes, yes yes (Score:2)
if you are going to fund a study, can you at the very least make it on something we have not heard a million times before...
"These new fangled Mercury Vapor lamps people are starting to use for street lights will destroy humanity,due to their hard blue light disturbing sleep patterns of Men and Horses, by the mid 1930's! "
But the EU just banned all normal lightbulbs (Score:3)
They must know better what is good for us than the researchers of this University of Exsomething.
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You can get LED lights in a number of different spectra. Traffic lights are usually "cold" (more blue) to make you more alert and to reduce accidents. I use warm spectrum at home and I did not notice any difference to before.
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I come to slashdot for the mind crushingly stupid comments like this one.
Home on the range (Score:2)
No do not give me a home on the range. I want the skies to be cloudy all day.
Blue sky bad, right?
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Blue sky bad, yes - but only at night.
If you have blue skies at night, you have more urgent problems than melatonin and sleeping patterns.
LED highway lights are dangerous (Score:5, Insightful)
The best example of the danger presented by LED highway lights is the rest area near mile marker 39 on I-75/Alligator Alley, approx. 15 miles from Fort Lauderdale's western edge.
Picture this... you're driving down a road through the middle of the Florida Everglades, and everything around you besides oncoming headlights has been pitch-black for the past 15 minutes (since passing the exit at the Indian reservation near the Broward-Collier county line). Then, suddenly, you're driving through an area that's lit up with blue-white LED light to stadium brightness levels. In fact, the illuminated area is a couple of miles long, and it takes about 3 minutes to pass through. Your eyes see bright blue light, and de-adapt to darkness. Then... a few hundred feet past the point where the onramp from the rest area merges into the road... it's pitch black again. Except now, your eyes have gone back into "daylight" mode, and re-adapting to darkness takes a LOT longer than decompensating for bright light. So... for the next 10 miles or so, you're practically night-blind... all courtesy of the stupid blue-white stadium-brightness LED lights FDOT installed around the rest area a few years ago for the sake of "being green and trendy" (replacing the sodium-vapor bulbs that probably used LESS power, and had the added advantage of not completely destroying your night vision).
More people need to scream about blue-white LED light in the middle of rural interstate stretches. It's not just unpleasant to drive through, it literally makes the next 10-20 miles of road past it less safe by ruining your night vision.
Even on urban stretches, I've found LED illumination to be "tedious". Driving south on I-95 from Jacksonville to Miami, you get to see the whole range of lighting... a few stretches that still have sodium-vapor lights, many with various LED lights, and a few godawful stretches with defective LED lights that are now fucking PURPLE (and have BEEN that way for more than a year at this point). The sodium-vapor stretches are, IMHO, more pleasant to drive through. The LED-illuminated stretches just seem "harsh", with horrific glare.
Environmentalists might have bitched about "light pollution", but some stray light illuminating the areas adjacent to the road made it more pleasant to drive along. Now, it feels like you're driving down a stadium-brightness tunnel with pitch black nothingness on either side. I wish to god they'd bring back the old lights, even though I know they never will.
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to be fair the damn thing was lit like a football stadium when they were still using metal halide bulbs
In short, humans == bad. (Score:5, Interesting)
The story goes on and on about how streetlights are bad for everything. This is after we put in considerable effort to put in these lights because it means less air pollution and CO2 emissions from energy production to power them. Then at the very very end the story says, "Never mind." That's because we have new lights that don't produce this awful blue light that they complained about up to that point. I believe that should have been put up front so people aren't left with humans == bad if they didn't read to the end.
Humans are not bad. I believe people need to be told more often that they are not bad, because all we get from the tree-huggers are how humans are destroying the planet. The planet exists for humans, we can't be bad for living on it. I realize that's a religiously loaded statement, but then the statement that humans are bad for the planet is also religious. If we tell children that humans can do nothing right then we get children that grow up to be mentally ill adults. That's assuming they aren't driven to suicide before they become adults.
We got this. It says so in the fine article if read to the end. But I guess doom and gloom gets more clicks than articles on technological solutions to our problems. For a website that is "news for nerds" I'd expect articles on technological solutions to our problems to be more popular. We are doing a great job in improving our lives. If we keep feeding children and young adults news on how their future will suck then that's a self fulfilling prophecy. Telling them things will be great in the future is also self fulfilling.
We will get some new street lights and this will no longer be an issue. Good job, everyone! Keep it up!
Dark Skies Initiative (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.darkskyinitiative.o... [darkskyinitiative.org]
I approve. Some towns around here (but sadly, not my own) use LED streetlamps at a very warm 2700-ish kelvin - very warm. With shields on top. Lovely. Exactly what I like.
My own town uses a demented blue-to-purple streetlamp LED that changes all the colors. Can't wait 'til the night-time car wrecks go up. It's distracting. And they strobe too!
For me it's all about color temperature and CRI. Make it golden, and I'm in. Oh and no strobing puh-leeze.
The only time I accept 6500k is for kitchen work. And even then I find it artificially harsh.
I love tungsten. Hate the current draw and heat, but love the look. My bathroom remains 100% tungsten as is the home cinema. Everything else is 2700k LED.
I estimate I went from 500w lighting draw to 50w just by going from tungsten to LED. But again, I kept the 2700k look. I can't stand blue light. Ugh.
Funny, considering my favorite color *is* blue, in its many shades.
Re: Dark Skies Initiative (Score:2)
Compared to the sodium street lamps that displaced the mercury vapor lamps some decades ago, the LED lamps don't seem so bad.
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Compared to the sodium street lamps that displaced the mercury vapor lamps some decades ago, the LED lamps don't seem so bad.
..I dunno, man. The LEDs my town got are *worse* than sodium-arc, if you can believe that. I grew up with sodium arc street lighting, and it color-shifted blue to very dark blue (my grandma's '72 Cutlass, for example, shifted badly when lit by streetlight).. but these LED lamps my town got are worse by far. They turn the road blueish / purplish.. and it's supposed to be black tar! My car's pepper white, and it gets turned to a sickly pale blue. Total fail.
Not all LEDs are like this. Just the ones my t
Re: Dark Skies Initiative (Score:2)
"
My own town uses a demented blue-to-purple streetlamp LED that changes all the colors. Can't wait 'til the night-time car wrecks go up. It's distracting. And they strobe too"
It sounds like they took the circuitry from some cheap tourist toy and slapped it into their street lighting system. "and they strobe too" like those cheap toys? They have to be violating numerous federal laws by doing this. Totally unacceptable!
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I don't know the specifics, but to my eye they look like they have two rows of four large round LEDs per side. Can't tell if they're retrofitted into older housings. Maybe I should photograph and investigate, because it is obnoxious.
The strobing isn't like a disco strobe, it only happens when you flick your eyes across the scenery -- kinda like the old DLP projectors color wheels did a long time ago.
They would be quite well suited to a disco actually. Make everything triptastic. But not for street lamps
Re: Dark Skies Initiative (Score:2)
"The strobing isn't like a disco strobe, it only happens when you flick your eyes across the scenery -- kinda like the old DLP projectors color wheels did a long time ago"
It seems like you are seeing the 60 or 50hz AC line frequency ad there are no capacitors in these lamps to smooth out/eliminate the flickering.
Fun fact: They have to be careful on what type of lighting is used in industrial settings because this strobe effect can cause the moving machinery to appear still
There have been studies that blue light doesn't... (Score:3)
https://time.com/5752454/blue-... [time.com]
It turns out the original study showed a correlation between blue light exposure in mice, nocturnal creatures, and a weak correlation in humans. But correlation isn't causation.
Re: There have been studies that blue light doesn' (Score:2)
When blue less were all the rage and they put them in everything, I found that it killed my night vision for minutes afterward. The worst was the bright blue LED lighting on dashboards. That was just begging for wrecks to happen
On the other end of the swing, people who needed to read paper maps at night typically used a red light bulb (or filter) in their flashlights as to not disable their ability to see at night.
Re: There have been studies that blue light doesn (Score:2)
"When blue LEDs were all the rage"
Damn autokowreckt
Artificial anything, really (Score:2)
And it shows. Especially with all of the mental illness that is ever increasing across the whole population and the out of control drug use (both legal and illicit) done as a desperate attempt to 'fix' this, but more often than not just makes the mental illness all the much worse.
We need to come to terms with the fact that yes, we too are animals, and we need big green spaces and low demand on our lives. We were never meant to live in a type of society that might as well be a submarine and being mad
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-No one has personality traits anymore, just conditions.
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No one has a "disease" or "condition" that entitles them to anything but suffering. We're just paying more attention to that suffering. We used to call people with ADHD or dyslexia "stupid" in school and flunk them. Now we give them accommodations or treatment and they (mostly) do just fine. No one should be surprised that a disease or a condition needs treatment, though I don't understand why you would call basic medical treatment and justifiable, affordable interventions "special."
If someone is diagnosed
Re: Artificial anything, really (Score:2)
Ok you want to revert back to the era of no technology and no antibiotics. You are free to do so anytime. Go live in the woods. You think getting fucked up by nature and all it's creatures and diseases is cool? Watch how a hyena eats.
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Actually, what's increasing is self-reported mental illness, because stigma is being lowered by awareness efforts and there is greater perceived legitimacy of mental health care. That legitimacy is increased by the fact that the treatments are always getting better. Some of those treatments are "legal" drugs. We have better options now than tranquilizing people who bother us. It's a good thing.
So, yeah, you're hearing about it more now. This is because mental illness is common and we're not ignoring it any
gas lamps? (Score:2)
>> The impacts have been felt much less in countries such as Austria and Germany, which still power much of their night lighting using older gas and fluorescent bulbs.
Really? They do not mean natural or industrial gas? As in burging carbohydrates to produce flame?
LEDs will make any colors you want (Score:2)
They're easy to tailor to taste. Don't like the bluish-white ones? Get different ones. Problem solved.
("Problem" was just that some idiots didn't think hard before buying lights. That's not really a "problem"; it's just a "mistake".)
Good Afternoon Shoppers (Score:2)
BLUE LIGHT SPECIALS ARE ON FOR THE NEXT 30 MINUTES!
Light pollution cleanup on aisle 4, please...
Light pollution is the real problem (Score:3)
Human health? Who remembers the study from China - which had a total epidemic of shortsightedness in kids - that blue light is essential for the proper development of the eye? They instituted a policy that all kids must be outside for something like 2 hours a day.
As for the environment: What is evil is light pollution. Why do streets need to be lit like airport runways? Why are business signs on all night, when the business is closed? Why do sports stadiums have lights that shine across square miles, instead of keeping those lights focused solely within the stadium?
Those are, imho, the real questions. Legislate that lights may not directly shine on anything but their actual target. Regulate the brightness to something reasonable. Then enforce those laws - problem solved.
Your choice (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
is in a country that still has royalty. Maybe we should not expect sufficiently careful thinking from that university..
What the fuck does that have to do with anything?
If ever there was a valid reason to use the "troll" moderation, that is it. Lets not feed it.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I'm pretty sure he was trying to call out someone who was spouting clear and obvious bullshit. If you're going to spout clear and obvious bullshit, the onus is in you to provide backing so we can either be satisfied that you actually have nothing to back your bullshit, or we can laugh at whatever conspiritard trash website you bring to the table.
I was going to say I'm glad that you have nothing better to do than engage with with clearly incorrect trolls, but apparently I don't either. Fuck.
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blah blah blah
tl;dr
He has none
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It seems reasonable to me that the burden of proof is on the proponent of a proposition and that includes not only assertion of a simple matter of fact but accusations of bias, cherry picking etc. What is helpful to the discussion in terms of minimal effort and charitable interpretation is harder to pin down.