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Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

benkuhn.net

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Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#311
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I absolutely hate LEDs. I don't know why, but... I'm really interested in the why . Most people don't seem to care. My in-laws have CFLs in their living room that just feel horrible to me, but they're none the wiser. I'm very curious as to what it is in the light spectrum that seems to matter to some (small) class of people, myself, and it sounds like you, included. The word for "fire-like" light, used in my origin…

psa: you can get this thing, which isn't the most precise ever, but lets you see this spectral information about lights for cheap: https://www.amazon.com/EISCO-Premium-Quantitative-Spectrosco... - I got one and WHEW CFLs' band lines are really obvious. Also, I feel kind of tickled that I saw the band gap on LED lights before seeing a description of what it is in the source for the spectrum plots in this article (the source being https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:White_LED.png ).

I'm a bit miffed it seems so hard to find lights that don't have this problem, though. maybe we can improve it by getting the word out that these cheap little diffraction devices can give you a pretty good approximate reading of the smoothness of the spectrum of a light source. Hmm, I just realized I have yet to take this to home depot...

I'm really curious about those MIT incandescent bulbs. If they worked well and haven't been brought to market, it's possible that contacting the people involved in creating them could have good results in making them happen. Perhaps they could be convinced to prioritize it if a case can be made that it can have a significant positive impact on the world?

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#312
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I absolutely hate LEDs. I don't know why, but... I'm really interested in the why . Most people don't seem to care. My in-laws have CFLs in their living room that just feel horrible to me, but they're none the wiser. I'm very curious as to what it is in the light spectrum that seems to matter to some (small) class of people, myself, and it sounds like you, included. The word for "fire-like" light, used in my origin…

Well, fire does not shine by black-body radiation. Lamps try to emulate a black-body because that's what color standards dictate and labs test against, but fire has a very bad color resolution. (By the way, daylight isn't also like black-body radiation, but it's much closer than fire.) Personally, flickering makes me ill. I am used enough to 120Hz to survive it, but any other frequency is bad. Also, the 6400K LEDs lo…

huh that's really interesting about fire's emission spectrum!

regarding 6400k - even assuming the sun's spectrum matched the black body spectrum of its surface temperature, its surface temperature is closer to 5770k. but even taking that into account, its spectrum doesn't quite match 5770k in space - and the atmosphere changes it even further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_spectrum_en.svg

I really don't know how much of that change us humans can perceive, but my thinking is that 5000k is probably closer to the center, at least. it might be more of a saturated color, though, since the spectrum is more pointed vs the very flat but spikey spectrum in that plot.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the trick is the Rayleigh scattering, I think it's the parallel rays. Notice how all the pictures have well defined shadows of parallel rays?

I started to look into this and from a brief readings of the patents it seems that the magic sauce is Rayleigh scattering by shining an LED light onto a sandwich of two transparent panels and a solid layer of silica aerogel. I couldn't find the thickness of the aerogel layer, which will determine if you get more blue or red light out of the sandwich. It's quite ingenious, the aerogel consists of silica nanoparticles…

hmm, that explains the color, but it doesn't explain the coherence. it is cool though, aerogel makes a lot of sense to use for this.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second this, and I wonder how people who live near the equator respond to seasons and light vs. people closer to the Arctic circle.

Very much this. I live in Norway. While I'm below the Arctic circle, summer nights are bright. I don't need outdoor lighting to read as the sun goes juuuust below the horizon. This time of year, days are short and the light intensity never really gets all that bright. I don't have issues with any of it - and I'm an immigrant.

There are many genetic differences, even within a given ethnicity, concerning sleep. What may impair sleep for one individual may have no effect for another. This variation may have been beneficial from an evolutionary standpoint, because variable sleep schedules meant that someone in a given community could always respond to threats.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#315

The main limitation office workers face when working in sunlit environments is the reflective glare on most, if not all, computer displays. I conjecture if/when e-ink displays match conventional LCDs in response time and resolution there will be a movement towards “outdoor offices”. Imagine being able to work productively in a garden, atrium, sun room, or any other natural outdoor environment. Many of the pitfalls of…

Another limitation is battery technology, but that's changing. I have a 20K mAh USB C power bank and it's made me more mobile. It can almost fully recharge my laptop or recharge my phone 6 times before needing to be recharged.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please briefly explain the way you cam calculate your cycle based on average time sleeping? I have to get up using alarms at times that are not related to how my body is feeling about waking up, so I don't see how tracking that would help. I tend to start sleep later and later until I reach some dynamic equilibrium between sleep deprivation due to fixed wake up times and the tendency to delay sleep onset.

I almost never use an alarm anymore - there's no need to, my body knows exactly when to wake up because of my circadian rhythms (that's the way humans were supposed to work after all - we didn't evolve to use alarm clocks). Of course, the time my body "knows" to wake up is almost an hour later than it should, and that's the whole problem. The way I calculated the length of my circadian rhythm cycle wasn't by tracking…

Seeing this long later, but thank you for the detailed reply.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#317
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 have this disorder as well, it started when I was 11 or 12. I've tried every trick that sleep doctors recommend (literally, everything) but nothing works. The only way I was able to maintain a 24-hour sleep cycle though school was to drink coffee every morning and take sleep medication regularly (from the age of 12). That was enough to make my sleep cycle 24 hours, but it didn't improve my sleep quality, so I spent…

Are you familiar with Piotr Wozniak's writings on sleep? I think you might find them interesting https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Science_of_sleep. DSPS is pretty common and fairly natural considering how we've diverged in habits from our ancestors.
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