Evidently, your eyes don't form properly unless they are exposed to bright enough light: http://www.nytimes.com/2011...
This fact seems to explain the modern epidemic of nearsightedness. Just one more reason the future should be bright, and why children should not be kept indoors all day.
I wonder too. When I originally wrote http://www.gwern.net/Melato... , a lot of LessWrongers dinged me for not making a solid case that melatonin was safe to supplement with.
I recently went looking for some more safety data, and was surprised to find that if anything, it may be unsafe *not* to take melatonin, because modern adoption of TVs and computers late at night cause a severe fall in melatonin secretion, and lack of melatonin is correlated with 'shift work sleep disorder' and nasty things like cancer. (See links in last paragraph of http://www.gwern.net/Melato... )
If these projections are right, it looks like we can expect the problem to get *much* worse. It may still be a net benefit, but there are going to be negative consequences to lighting up the night in suppressing melatonin secretion and the sleep cycle onset triggered by redder dimmer light.
Right now, use of blue-blocking glasses, Redshift/f.lux, & melatonin is confined mostly to a few techies who use electronics a lot, but we can predict that they're going to be increasingly popular. And worse, since so much of the damage of sleep deprivation is invisible (your self-monitoring doesn't work well for chronic damage), the solutions won't be popular enough.
The hidden problem with the move to LEDs is that it's taking place faster than our understanding of the effects of light on physiology. Take one health example of many candidates. Melatonin is a fundamental and pervasive hormone (it crosses the cell nucleus and regulates genes), and some researchers are following the possibility that one important contributor to "metabolic syndrome" (a huge health care issue) is simply that our melatonin cycles are messed up. So-called "full-spectrum" lights deliver mere dribs and drabs of the full palette of frequencies that the sun delivers (example: little or no UVA in any manmade lighting, but UVA may be a relevant frequency for retinal changes that manipulate melatonin).
The time of a lighting technology transition (e.g., to LEDs) would be an ideal time to incorporate design changes that potentially have huge economic effects on health. But we simply don't know enough yet to know what design changes are needed. It's certainly clear that brighter light (but which frequencies are most relevant? should older people with yellowed lenses get more green instead of blue?) is a Good Thing during the day, but at what time is it important to decrease the intensity (and does that really have to be keyed to the individual's melatonin cycle rise). And how dark does it have to be to keep from affecting people's nocturnal melatonin surge? Some studies claim to detect hormonal effects merely from the usual pollution of clock LEDs in the bedroom.
It's not that LEDs can be presumed to be any worse for our health than the lighting systems today, it's that a little bit of funds siphoned from silicon technology into physiological research might save us much, much more money than the efficiencies of just moving to LEDs offer. But the fast, twitchy market economics we live in today is unlikely to respond to that. Penny wise, pound foolish is fine when people make enough pennies fast enough that they can bail and leave someone else with the cost of foolish pounds.
Of course, this can be viewed as an individual example of the general problem of technological acceleration: technology is changing faster than we can adapt to it.
Do you think so? I like being in the daylight, but I would not want to work or light my home at that level. I keep my office lights off because I have a window that receives almost all reflected light off other buildings. It is pretty "dark" in comparison to daylight.
Maybe that's just me, but there is certainly a diminishing return to lighting.
Good post! Another point is that this is one of those technologies thatis getting reasonably close to theoretically optimal results. As theSpectrum article that you link to notes, LEDs are now close to 100lumens/watt, while the theoretical maximum is 683 lumens/watt(and that is for
Photopic luminous efficacy of radiation has a maximum possible value of 683 lm/W, for the case of monochromatic light at a wavelength of 555 nm (green).
We used what Porter paints called a jet white. I was told that was the glossiest they had in normal interior latex. It worked great but I could see your point in that light would maybe warp too much and kill the extension effect. Ours worked so well perhaps because we were painting regular ceiling drop tiles and they really drank up the paint.
Less global warming than pollution from generating the electricity, even natural gas. Siting new plants is so difficult it is easier to build out of state and transmit it even with the losses, which adversely affects reliability as well.
When I have had to winter over houseplants in interior rooms, I used the almost blue-white grow-bulbs (4 foot tubes). Once I got used to the color difference, I liked it a lot better than the conventional warmer lights. The whole room seemed larger and visually sharper.
From samples I have seen in stores, LEDs can already beat smaller (<40 watt) CFLs in many ways - the big problem is that they cost 10x as much, or more.
Lighting continues to increase: https://gizmodo.com/the-swi...
Evidently, your eyes don't form properly unless they are exposed to bright enough light: http://www.nytimes.com/2011...
This fact seems to explain the modern epidemic of nearsightedness. Just one more reason the future should be bright, and why children should not be kept indoors all day.
I wonder too. When I originally wrote http://www.gwern.net/Melato... , a lot of LessWrongers dinged me for not making a solid case that melatonin was safe to supplement with.
I recently went looking for some more safety data, and was surprised to find that if anything, it may be unsafe *not* to take melatonin, because modern adoption of TVs and computers late at night cause a severe fall in melatonin secretion, and lack of melatonin is correlated with 'shift work sleep disorder' and nasty things like cancer. (See links in last paragraph of http://www.gwern.net/Melato... )
If these projections are right, it looks like we can expect the problem to get *much* worse. It may still be a net benefit, but there are going to be negative consequences to lighting up the night in suppressing melatonin secretion and the sleep cycle onset triggered by redder dimmer light.
Right now, use of blue-blocking glasses, Redshift/f.lux, & melatonin is confined mostly to a few techies who use electronics a lot, but we can predict that they're going to be increasingly popular. And worse, since so much of the damage of sleep deprivation is invisible (your self-monitoring doesn't work well for chronic damage), the solutions won't be popular enough.
The hidden problem with the move to LEDs is that it's taking place faster than our understanding of the effects of light on physiology. Take one health example of many candidates. Melatonin is a fundamental and pervasive hormone (it crosses the cell nucleus and regulates genes), and some researchers are following the possibility that one important contributor to "metabolic syndrome" (a huge health care issue) is simply that our melatonin cycles are messed up. So-called "full-spectrum" lights deliver mere dribs and drabs of the full palette of frequencies that the sun delivers (example: little or no UVA in any manmade lighting, but UVA may be a relevant frequency for retinal changes that manipulate melatonin).
The time of a lighting technology transition (e.g., to LEDs) would be an ideal time to incorporate design changes that potentially have huge economic effects on health. But we simply don't know enough yet to know what design changes are needed. It's certainly clear that brighter light (but which frequencies are most relevant? should older people with yellowed lenses get more green instead of blue?) is a Good Thing during the day, but at what time is it important to decrease the intensity (and does that really have to be keyed to the individual's melatonin cycle rise). And how dark does it have to be to keep from affecting people's nocturnal melatonin surge? Some studies claim to detect hormonal effects merely from the usual pollution of clock LEDs in the bedroom.
It's not that LEDs can be presumed to be any worse for our health than the lighting systems today, it's that a little bit of funds siphoned from silicon technology into physiological research might save us much, much more money than the efficiencies of just moving to LEDs offer. But the fast, twitchy market economics we live in today is unlikely to respond to that. Penny wise, pound foolish is fine when people make enough pennies fast enough that they can bail and leave someone else with the cost of foolish pounds.
Of course, this can be viewed as an individual example of the general problem of technological acceleration: technology is changing faster than we can adapt to it.
Which why a lot of people wear sunglasses I guess.
Do you think so? I like being in the daylight, but I would not want to work or light my home at that level. I keep my office lights off because I have a window that receives almost all reflected light off other buildings. It is pretty "dark" in comparison to daylight.
Maybe that's just me, but there is certainly a diminishing return to lighting.
Even the indoor marijuana growers are starting to use LED lights! Apparently they're still expensive in that market, though.
Good post! Another point is that this is one of those technologies thatis getting reasonably close to theoretically optimal results. As theSpectrum article that you link to notes, LEDs are now close to 100lumens/watt, while the theoretical maximum is 683 lumens/watt(and that is for
Photopic luminous efficacy of radiation has a maximum possible value of 683 lm/W, for the case of monochromatic light at a wavelength of 555 nm (green).
We used what Porter paints called a jet white. I was told that was the glossiest they had in normal interior latex. It worked great but I could see your point in that light would maybe warp too much and kill the extension effect. Ours worked so well perhaps because we were painting regular ceiling drop tiles and they really drank up the paint.
Less global warming than pollution from generating the electricity, even natural gas. Siting new plants is so difficult it is easier to build out of state and transmit it even with the losses, which adversely affects reliability as well.
The cap will be pretty high. Ordinary daylight can be tens or hundreds of times brighter than ordinary indoor lighting, without seeming too bright.
When I have had to winter over houseplants in interior rooms, I used the almost blue-white grow-bulbs (4 foot tubes). Once I got used to the color difference, I liked it a lot better than the conventional warmer lights. The whole room seemed larger and visually sharper.
Actually, flat white is better than gloss for that. The reflections, and especially glare from lights, tends to kill the illusion.
From samples I have seen in stores, LEDs can already beat smaller (<40 watt) CFLs in many ways - the big problem is that they cost 10x as much, or more.
One way the energy may be more efficiently used is that less light may be wasted to space, so it could be darker from the outside.
Without the cost of incandescents going up?