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Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

bethmathews.substack.com

161–170 of 218 posts

Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

#161
post #124

Growing up in Los Alamos, it's not just the lab that adhered to this color standard. Everything that had any vague connection to government, be it the post office, hospital, county council building, public access TV station, and schools were all colored in these various colors. And many things that weren't connected directly still used them, likely because they bought paint as surplus. One of a few elevators in town,…

Not even just Los Alamos. It was a very common color for schools and hospitals

The old forniture in my Elementary school (the whole 90's) had that green tone until ~1998-1999.

Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

#162
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The goal should be to not affect people's level of dark adaptation. Wouldn't that be red light? But night scenes illuminated in red light have the side effect of looking nightmarish..

That's not necessarily a downside for traffic safety, though. Though I imagine someone must have studied the effects of various wavelengths on drivers...

Advertisers definitely did - there's (some) money in billboards, but only as long as you don't kill your prospective customers.

Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure tons of people along the way "noticed" but if you're selling LEDs or you're paid by the LED people to create marketing to convince people that LEDs are gonna save the planet, you're not gonna bring that up.

IDK if you've noticed but we are all lighting our house with bulbs that use 1/10th the amount of electricity as incandescents did. I like the color spectrum of a real lightbulb better, too, but not enough to pay 10x in power. I make up for it by using all kinds of random bulbs all over the place so that the aggregate light in the room fills more of the spectrum than if I coordinated them all to be the same.

I hate incandescents and am glad they're gone. People chronically under light their homes at the best of times.

My whole house is neutral white LEDs except the bathrooms where we go to cool white to make it easier to clean and be sure it's clean (even if it's not spotless, there's a huge psychological benefit to not feeling like dim light is masking even more grime).

Oddly enough I'm otherwise pretty light sensitive - my current office at work has been a nightmare of trying to manage glare from badly places overheads and windows.

Going from 500w for my living room to 80w also helps a lot (and way more light and a lot less heat).

Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sodium lamps were deemed dangerous for driving” because they made it difficult for drivers to distinguish shapes, since they were different from day shapes. A kid in bright 1980ies colors (Little Red Hood) would look black under those lights. LED was presented as a sharp improvement because of the large spectrum of white light.

The sodium lamps are in fact safer for driving, because they preserve drivers' night vision, which improves visibility into the shadows, and because they cause less glare. What they aren't good for is LED manufacturers' bottom line, and the lighting industry spent a lot of lobbying money to entice friendly politicians to heavily subsidize them with public infrastructure budgets, with those subsidies then misleadingly…

That would make sense. Otherwise I have no idea how people wouldn't have noticed how much more difficult it makes seeing anything outside of the sharp cutoff of the light cone (or, of course, for the person being dazzled on the other side).

Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you try using high CRI LEDs with color remperature of 2700K–3000K? When I switched from halogen to LED I did just that and the difference is not noticeable, you'll have the same yellowish tint and very natural looking colours. Even with expensive bulbs, extra longevity covers for higher cost.

2700 is really cool. To the GP, if you're looking for something more like daylight but not noticeably yellow, try 3600k or thereabouts. The actual temperature of the sun is over 5000k (yes, the k in lightbulb temperature corresponds to the Kelvin scale of temperature) but after being scattered by our atmosphere it appears cooler. And where did all that extra light go? It was scattered around, making the sky blue!

Personally I find 2700k-rated LED to not even be low-k enough to match incandescent.

Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK if you've noticed but we are all lighting our house with bulbs that use 1/10th the amount of electricity as incandescents did. I like the color spectrum of a real lightbulb better, too, but not enough to pay 10x in power. I make up for it by using all kinds of random bulbs all over the place so that the aggregate light in the room fills more of the spectrum than if I coordinated them all to be the same.

How many life forms do we have to kill before cost savings aren't worth it? Besides, we can have LEDs in better spectrums for under 1/5th the costs of incandescents. We just hired stingy motherfuckers and don't care about the repercussions of our decisions.

I question the cost/energy savings. Seems to me for the most part any efficiency gains are being spent on making everything 5x as bright and expansive.

Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

#169
post #3

Reminds me of Go Away Green - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green

Go Away reads to me as a command to the viewer to go away rather than the intended "we want the object to go away from the viewer's thoughts". If they were okay with a phrase like Go Away Green, why not something like Hidden View Green, Irrelevant Green, Don't Look Here Green, etc. Some PR department would have a field day

"Move Along Green"
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