Earlier quoted context omitted.
SAD, as in being “very sad”?
Seasonal Affective Disorder probably.
Which also makes you very sad.
Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
281–290 of 294 posts
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Money laundering is useful but that doesn't mean it's good. A Ponzi scheme can generate wealth but it can't generate value. Wealth without value is maybe not wasteful, but it is harmful. > Where it can be socially harmful is when energy consumers don't pay for the cost of the negative externalities that the energy they purchase created in its generation, but that applies to all energy usage, not just that used in gen…
1. There is no evidence that cryptocurrency is widely used to launder money 2. Money laundering can improve economic efficiency when the crimes that generate the illicit revenue are socially beneficial, as is the case when people in China escape the Communist government's capital controls, or when people in Venezuela escape their Communist government's steep inflation tax via mandates to use the state's fiat currency…
It generates zero dollars. Every dollar in all cryptocurrency markets comes directly from someone buying in. Claiming otherwise is basically a blatant lie.
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. There is no evidence that cryptocurrency is widely used to launder money 2. Money laundering can improve economic efficiency when the crimes that generate the illicit revenue are socially beneficial, as is the case when people in China escape the Communist government's capital controls, or when people in Venezuela escape their Communist government's steep inflation tax via mandates to use the state's fiat currency…
It generates zero dollars. Every dollar in all cryptocurrency markets comes directly from someone buying in. Claiming otherwise is basically a blatant lie.
It's not generating dollars. It's generating a digital asset that is worth something. Of course the value of any commodity is based on what people are willing to buy it for, so your observation in no way discredits the point, that Bitcoin mining is generating something that objectively, based on what the market is paying, has value.
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how much the traditional British pessimism has to do with the fact our winters are an SAD magnet if there ever was one, very short days due to the high latitude and the kind of grey soul-penetrating dampness of it being just cold enough to make you miserable but not cold enough for the ground to ever properly freeze for long. I definitely found taking vitamin D supplements helps with the seasonal blues, I'd…
Would you tell us a little about your photophobia, I've never heard of anyone having that before. Thank you.
I have a neurological disorder called visual snow syndrome that's the root cause, nobody really understands where it comes from but the current theory is a dysfunction of metabolism in part of the visual cortex. It causes all sorts of weird visual stuff like the eponymous 'tv snow' and other distortions as well as intractable headaches, apparently it has similarities with certain kinds of migraine. As for the photophobia it's quite a difficult sensation to describe but for me its acute form is an unusual sensation that's in the same category as pain without being pain itself - it's like the sensation of looking directly at the sun but with ordinary light sources that don't bother other people. The chronic form is less intense, it basically just makes concentrating in a bright environment exhausting after a while and it trashes my focus, making me headachy and irritable. As a result I never have strong lights on even at night, and I also don't drive in the dark because the glare from the headlights can mess up my vision for minutes at a time which is obviously not safe.
Fluorescent tubes are among the worst offenders for messing with my concentration, though anything with a pronounced 50 Hz flicker or too high a colour temperature isn't great for me. The kind of cheap lights offices traditionally use are particularly bad which is part of why I'm full time WFH now!
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#285When I lived in Seattle, my solution was a 2’ square fluorescent panel I got from a gardening supply place called “The Indoor Sun Shop”. I grew up in the South and got real bad seasonal depression up there; it probably saved my life. I paid all of $300 for it. Plus like twenty bucks for a mechanical timer, because I discovered that there were a lot of mornings where I was too depressed and mopey to turn it on myself.…
there was a post a day or two ago about vitamin D3, as well as academic literature finally catching up to medical science vis a vis vitamin D3. I won't cite, but only because i don't have a way to index my personal PDF repository, but the common consensus among people who study such things is that anyone living above the 20th parallel (or below, technically) absolutely must supplement vitamin D3, as even a full day i…
I was taking a lot of vitamin D in Seattle! That took some of the edge off the depression but I still started wanting to kill myself all the time after a couple months of endless grey skies and drizzle, and it came earlier every winter.
The lamp helped for a while but the suicidal urges kept creeping back over the years, until I finally moved back south. The urge to kill myself has pretty much entirely vanished now.
There is, I suspect, no one single cure for seasonal depression. Lights help, massive D3 doses help, vacations in sunnier places help, and there’s probably a ton of other biological factors helped by me living in the sunny place I grew up in versus Seattle.
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#286> Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company Such a thing already exists. Its called a lighting design company. People need to admit that lighting (like cryptography) is hard, and that if you're serious about "doing it right" you need to bring in a suitably skilled professional. Each house/apartment is different and every room within it is different, you'll never be able to magically buy good lighti…
I am an EE but at University part of the degree was sufficient units to be eligible for membership of the national illumination engineers society.
One point that stood out is that effective and safe lighting is as much, or more, about contrast than any absolute spot lighting levels.
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#287Yeah, definitely not the first to consider this. I remember my Dad experimenting with proper lightning (brightness and spectrum) in the early to mid 2000s, and to him that was not really that novel. In my office room (32m²/340sqft), I use a commercial rail lightning system with three channels/phases (controlled via a Sonoff 4CH WiFi switch). Those are commonly used in stores, and I got my rails cheap via the local cr…
Metal halide lose efficacy quite quickly but you can't see it by eye, check the rated hours.
Also, the Lumiere usually has a glass pane it, this blocks the UV - extended exposure to the bulb direct without these panes of glass is definately harmful, eg cataracts, melanoma etc
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you thinking about the cost of the physical lights? Because what is being discussed is the cost of energy.
Watt-hours are energy. If cost of energy is decreasing and you get more lumens per watt with LEDs then the benefits stack, they do not cancel.
If energy price is going down, then even more watts are being bought (since spending is fixed).
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#289So... has anyone actually started a company to do this? I'd be a very interested customer. (Comment written from a basement office lit unsatisfactorily by cheap photography studio lights)
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#290Coelux - mentioned in the article - has built a very expensive ($30k) but also very realistic product. Wondering if it can get to mass production and maybe cost $3k?