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Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

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Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#141

Post by herf »

cracker_jacks wrote: post #137
herf wrote: post #134

(Michael from f.lux): this kind of thing is necessary for most buildings, because otherwise people don't get a "day" signal when they spend time indoors. Most of us spend >90% of our time inside. However, we shouldn't mess with light levels like these (or even somewhat lower ones) without some limits, and the main one is some automatic timing to turn things down after it gets too late. Otherwise you will find yoursel…

> cancer progresses much faster in summer than in winter Can you point me to a reference for this? This pattern is surprising and I would like to learn more about this.

I think the seasonality data may be mixed, with more diagnoses in the fall and spring in human subjects studies.

This particular claim was a hypothesis from Richard Stevens, with some experimental work that shows rapid cancer growth under constant light (in human tumors implanted in mice) by Blask (2002, 2005): http://www.nel.edu/userfiles/articlesnew/NEL230802A03.pdf

The main mechanism in the Blask work is thought to be suppression of melatonin.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#143

Post by Wowfunhappy »

herf wrote: post #134

(Michael from f.lux): this kind of thing is necessary for most buildings, because otherwise people don't get a "day" signal when they spend time indoors. Most of us spend >90% of our time inside. However, we shouldn't mess with light levels like these (or even somewhat lower ones) without some limits, and the main one is some automatic timing to turn things down after it gets too late. Otherwise you will find yoursel…

Do people in e.g. the arctic have these problems during the summer, when the sun never sets?

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#144

Post by wheels »

osrec wrote: post #133
wheels wrote: post #51

I usually eschew labels, preferring simply "sleep weirdo", but I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals. The result is that I'm often awake through the night. (This week I'm going to bed around 9:00 a.m.) Even with that, I've noticed some pretty big productivity swings based on the season. Interestingly, this hit me very h…

I'm going through this currently. It doesn't help that my inspiration for work can sometimes make me work through the night, which 'messes up' the following day. I'm my own boss, so can do this without repercussions, but I sometimes think I'd be more productive if I stuck to a more regimented sleep schedule. I did have a normal-ish sleep schedule when I had my job in finance, but I remember feeling exhausted all the…

It sounds like we're similar. My personal, entirely unscientific self-diagnosis is that I have a well-defined circadian rhythm like most people, but it's easier for me to override by obsessive interest than for most people. Even sans coffee (which I'm pretty careful about as I near 40), if I'm really interested in something, I can work on it in a block of time up to and over 24 hours. Naturally that futzes with my sleep. My "tired-impulse" is relatively weak compared to my "this is exciting" or "people are waiting on this" impulse.

Before I ran a company (about 1/3 of my career), I mostly managed to hold things down on a "normal" schedule, but I was always tired and frequently had performance reviews where the only complaint was my tardiness.

There are some interesting data points: while camping (which I do a lot of -- several weeks per year), I do tend to sync up with the sun, even though in northern Europe that means waking up before 5:00 a.m. There's also limited screen time. (Though I did work from tent on a remote beach in Crete for a month this year.)

I picked up some melatonin tablets in my wife's home country (where it doesn't require a prescription), and will experiment with that in the near future for I-really-need-to-sleep-now times, but as much as my sleep is weird, it's so intertwined with my personality now that I'm hesitant to medicate it away even given the chance.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#145

Post by herf »

keenmaster wrote: post #139
herf wrote: post #134

(Michael from f.lux): this kind of thing is necessary for most buildings, because otherwise people don't get a "day" signal when they spend time indoors. Most of us spend >90% of our time inside. However, we shouldn't mess with light levels like these (or even somewhat lower ones) without some limits, and the main one is some automatic timing to turn things down after it gets too late. Otherwise you will find yoursel…

Hey Michael, first off I love f.lux and use it every day. I have a question relating to your comment: is there any reason not to have an extremely high lumen smart light fixture which progressively dims throughout the day and syncs with the solar cycle in the user’s area? That seems like the holy grail, and is simply a combination of Philip’s Hue/LIFX tech and the bulb in the OP.

Yes, I think that's right - we have 20,000 lumens in our office and it is pretty cool, except you can't see your screen when it's up all the way. I still prefer daylighting, because it changes the angle of the light and everything else through the day.

A couple things: I don't think you necessarily need more light in the morning if you have a well-defined (artificial or real) sunset, and if you've reduced light at night to a lower level.

We add light to the morning so that we can add as much light as we want at night - the two cancel out. But I think it would be better to really try to design the evening to look different than the workday. Lights should change, and they mostly don't.

There are for sure some people with long internal clocks (DSPD/N24) who need very custom lighting schedules to have a normal schedule, but I think if we make the overall signal stronger (more day to night contrast), a lot of the differences between night owls and early birds would become smaller.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#146

Post by seltzered_ »

basilgohar wrote: post #136
seltzered_ wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I keep going back to halogen as the sweet-spot between black-body radiation and energy efficiency." Permies put out an article arguing for incandescent if your goal is light AND warmth: From https://richsoil.com/electric-heat.jsp - "This last one was the most important. A standard incandescent light bulb heats something to the point that it glows white hot. So I used this to heat myself and it doubled as a light sou…

But incandescent light bulbs are a terrible heat source from an efficiency perspective. You're losing an incredible amount from the power plant, to the transmission, and pretty much everything else. Once it arrives, yes, the energy gets converted nearly 100% to heat eventually, mostly in your proximity. But a heat pump or even gas heating is far more efficient if the goal is to get heat.

If you read the article, the author is focusing on the scenario heating a person while sitting at their desk, not the entire room.

In those cases you could argue the methods he prescribes are more efficient, though not practical for times where you want to heat up a whole room or home.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#147

Post by herf »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #143
herf wrote: post #134

(Michael from f.lux): this kind of thing is necessary for most buildings, because otherwise people don't get a "day" signal when they spend time indoors. Most of us spend >90% of our time inside. However, we shouldn't mess with light levels like these (or even somewhat lower ones) without some limits, and the main one is some automatic timing to turn things down after it gets too late. Otherwise you will find yoursel…

Do people in e.g. the arctic have these problems during the summer, when the sun never sets?

A lot of them have very strict routines about going inside and using super-dark curtains at particular times. I've gotten to email some people above 60N and it is just what they do.

In the old Aschoff "bunker" studies where people allowed to keep the lights on as long as they wished, they concluded the human clock was 25.1 hours. We know this isn't true if you provide a proper light-dark cycle, it's much closer to 24. But I treat this old work as a cautionary tale - we can be 25.1 hour animals if we leave the lights on all the time.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#148

Post by TJSomething »

taneq wrote: post #117
wheels wrote: post #51

I usually eschew labels, preferring simply "sleep weirdo", but I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals. The result is that I'm often awake through the night. (This week I'm going to bed around 9:00 a.m.) Even with that, I've noticed some pretty big productivity swings based on the season. Interestingly, this hit me very h…

> I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals. This is a disorder now? I thought that's just how humans worked. It's how I work, anyway - if nothing else (like work, or children waking up at 5:30am) forces me to get up at a set time, I'll slowly cycle through until I'm going to bed at sun-up and waking up at 3pm.

The most cited paper on this is "Stability, Precision, and Near-24-Hour Period of the Human Circadian Pacemaker" (Czeisler, et al., 1999), which found that their 24 subjects between ages 13 and 65 had a mean circadian rhythm of 24 hours 10 minutes with a standard deviation of 8 minutes. Earlier studies were affected by artificial light lengthening cycles. Non-24 sleep-wake disorder in sighted people is not researched well enough to have accurate rates: there are only about a hundred cases in the existing studies and the disorder is not well known and probably underdiagnosed.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#149

Post by yx827ha »

gligorot wrote: post #68
wheels wrote: post #51

I usually eschew labels, preferring simply "sleep weirdo", but I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals. The result is that I'm often awake through the night. (This week I'm going to bed around 9:00 a.m.) Even with that, I've noticed some pretty big productivity swings based on the season. Interestingly, this hit me very h…

I absolutely hate LEDs. I don't know why, but I just hate them. Especially the white ones. The yellower are similar to a mid summer day and I can cope with them, but there's always this feeling of something being off. I guess it's connected to us humans being used to non-sun light being (similar to) a fire - mainly consisting of yellow/orange tones. Also, I don't exactly remember from where I read this, but when a (t…

It might be the flicker. Most LED lights I've found have pretty bad flicker: https://youtu.be/eWut5Qx6mkM?t=285

Phones are pretty bad too. Check out the Nexus 5x vs Pixel 3: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1f7-ChF4zFiisFdmEZVEz...

I found that Phillips non dimmable bulbs are the cheap and don't flicker.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#150

Post by asdf21 »

derefr wrote: post #65

> Other than “we’ve been doing it for a while,” there seems to be no reason to expect that being in a 100x dimmer environment all day wouldn’t be awful. Indoor darkness seems to be one of those things that we don’t question only because it’s been that way forever. An interesting question is: what average light levels existed in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness for humans, given the types of things our ance…

I mean, I think most of us spent a lot of generations inside caves, didn't we? I think we adapted.
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