Brienne, my consort, is currently in Santiago, Chile because I didn’t want to see her go through the wintertime of her Seasonal Affective Disorder. While she’s doing that, I’m waiting for the load of 25 cheap 15-watt 4500K LED spotlight bulbs I ordered from China via DHgate, so I can wire them into my 25-string of light sockets, aim them at her ceiling, and try to make her an artificial sky. She’s coming back the middle of February, one month before the equinox, so we can give that part a fair test.
I don’t think I would have done either of these things if I didn’t have that strange concept of responsibility. Empirically, despite there being huge numbers of people with SAD, I don’t observe them flying to another continent for the winter, or trying to build their own high-powered lighting systems after they discover that the sad little 60-watt off-the-shelf light-boxes don’t work sufficiently for them. I recently confirmed in conversation that a certain very wealthy person (who will not be on the list of the first 10 people you think I might be referring to) with SAD, someone who was creative enough to go to the Southern Hemisphere for a few weeks to try to interrupt the dark momentum, still had not built their own high-powered lighting system. Some part of their brain thought they’d done enough, I suppose, when they tried the existing ‘lightboxes’.
But no, you can’t make a heroic effort to save everyone, as Dumbledore notes:
There can only be one king upon a chessboard, Harry Potter, only one piece that you will sacrifice any other piece to save. And Hermione Granger is not that piece.
This is a tangent, but to light up the whole environment just to get a few more photons to the retina is a strange approach, even if it seems to be the go-to treatment (light boxes etc.). Why not just light up the retina with a portable device, say glasses with some LED lights tacked on. That way you can take your enlightenment with you! Could be polarised to reflect indirectly off of the glasses into your eye, with little stray radiation.
Not saying that you should McGyver that yourself, but I was surprised that such a solution did not seem to exist.
But, it’s hard to have a truly original thought, so when I googled it I found this. Seems like a good idea, no? Same principle as your artificial sky, if one would work, so should the other.
Also, as an aside to the tangent, tangent is a strange phrase, since it doesn’t actually touch the main point. Should be polar line or somesuch.
Considered the light glasses earlier, but Brienne did not expect to like them, we need morning light, and they also looked too weaksauce for serious SAD.
Also, as an aside to the tangent, tangent is a strange phrase, since it doesn’t actually touch the main point. Should be polar line or somesuch.
“Tangent” is perfectly appropriate—it touches a point somewhere on the curve of the main argument, and then diverges. There is something that made the association with the tangent.
And, to further overextend this metaphor, this implies that if someone’s argument is rough enough (i.e. not differentiable), then it’s not even possible to go off it on a tangent.
If this doesn’t work you should experiment with other frequencies of light . I have been using a heat lamp to play with near infrared light therapy, and use changing color light strips to expose myself to red light in the morning and night, and blue light in the early afternoon.
Indeed—I don’t know what kind of spectrum “white” LEDs give off, but I seem to have gotten the impression somewhere that most lightbulbs don’t emit the same spectrum as the sun, which contributes to “sunlight deprivation” conditions such as SAD.
Incandescent bulbs have a blackbody spectrum, usually somewhat redder than the sun’s (which is also close to blackbody radiation, modulo a few absorption lines). White LEDs have a much spikier spectrum, usually with two to maybe a half-dozen peaks at different wavelengths, which come from the band gaps of their component diodes (a “single” white LED usually includes two to four) or from the fluorescent qualities of phosphor coatings on them. High-quality LED bulbs use a variety of methods to tune the locations of these peaks and their relative intensities such that they’re visually close to sun or incandescent light; lower-quality ones tend to have them in weird places dictated by availability or ease of manufacture, which gives their light odd visual qualities and leads to poor color rendering. There are also tradeoffs involving the number of emitting diodes per unit. Information theory considerations mean that colors are never going to have quite the same fidelity under LED lights that they would under incandescent, but some can get damn close.
The same’s true in varying degrees for most other non-incandescent lights. The most extreme example in common use is probably low-pressure sodium lamps (those intense yellow-orange streetlights), which emit almost exclusively at two very close wavelengths, 589.0 and 589.6 nm.
The most extreme example in common use is probably low-pressure sodium lamps (those intense yellow-orange streetlights), which emit almost exclusively at two very close wavelengths, 589.0 and 589.6 nm.
Yep—if you take photographs under these lights (e.g. night street scenes), you essentially get tinted monochrome photographs. Under an almost-single-wavelength source of light there are no colors, only illumination intensities.
And you don’t get true full spectrum white out of LEDs either, as they’re generally a combination of 3 different narrow band LEDs that look white to the eyes, but give a spiked spectrum instead of a full spectrum. There are phosphor coated LEDs that give broader spectrum, but still nothing like the sun’s spectrum.
Empirically, despite there being huge numbers of people with SAD, I don’t observe them flying to another continent for the winter
I learned from family who live in Alaska about “snowbirds),” who live in the North during the summer and the South during the winter. I suspect this is primarily for weather reasons, but no doubt those with SAD are more likely to be snowbirds than those without.
Santiago does have 13 hours of sunlight to Austin or Berkeley’s 11 or Juneau’s 9 (now; the differences will increase as we approach the solstice), so the change is larger, but the other changes are larger as well- having to switch from speaking English outside the house to speaking Spanish outside the house every six months seems costly to me. (New Zealand solves that problem, but adds a time zone problem.)
trying to build their own high-powered lighting systems after they discover that the sad little 60-watt off-the-shelf light-boxes don’t work sufficiently for them.
My off the shelf light lamp is 100W, and seems pretty dang bright to me- but I don’t have SAD and used it as a soft alarm, so I can’t speak to how effective or ineffective it is for SAD.
I recently confirmed in conversation that a certain very wealthy person
It really grates on me when people with more money than God don’t put it to any particularly good use in their lives, especially when it’s a health related issue. Maybe this will encourage me to use the not so much I have to more effect.
Anyone try that Valkee for SAD? $300 for a couple of LEDs to stick in my ears grates as well. Supposedly having the training to wire up LEDs together, but not the follow through, doesn’t help either.
And yes, fraud, scam, placebo controlled, blah blah blah. The proposed mechanism of photoreceptors distributed in the brain and elsewhere seemed interesting and worth checking out.
Brienne, my consort, is currently in Santiago, Chile because I didn’t want to see her go through the wintertime of her Seasonal Affective Disorder. While she’s doing that, I’m waiting for the load of 25 cheap 15-watt 4500K LED spotlight bulbs I ordered from China via DHgate, so I can wire them into my 25-string of light sockets, aim them at her ceiling, and try to make her an artificial sky. She’s coming back the middle of February, one month before the equinox, so we can give that part a fair test.
I don’t think I would have done either of these things if I didn’t have that strange concept of responsibility. Empirically, despite there being huge numbers of people with SAD, I don’t observe them flying to another continent for the winter, or trying to build their own high-powered lighting systems after they discover that the sad little 60-watt off-the-shelf light-boxes don’t work sufficiently for them. I recently confirmed in conversation that a certain very wealthy person (who will not be on the list of the first 10 people you think I might be referring to) with SAD, someone who was creative enough to go to the Southern Hemisphere for a few weeks to try to interrupt the dark momentum, still had not built their own high-powered lighting system. Some part of their brain thought they’d done enough, I suppose, when they tried the existing ‘lightboxes’.
But no, you can’t make a heroic effort to save everyone, as Dumbledore notes:
Painting my ceiling light blue (a suggestion I got from a sleep researcher at a top university) was a low cost solution that basically “cured” my SAD.
This is a tangent, but to light up the whole environment just to get a few more photons to the retina is a strange approach, even if it seems to be the go-to treatment (light boxes etc.). Why not just light up the retina with a portable device, say glasses with some LED lights tacked on. That way you can take your enlightenment with you! Could be polarised to reflect indirectly off of the glasses into your eye, with little stray radiation.
Not saying that you should McGyver that yourself, but I was surprised that such a solution did not seem to exist.
But, it’s hard to have a truly original thought, so when I googled it I found this. Seems like a good idea, no? Same principle as your artificial sky, if one would work, so should the other.
Also, as an aside to the tangent, tangent is a strange phrase, since it doesn’t actually touch the main point. Should be polar line or somesuch.
I think the idea of a tangent is that it touches the discussion at one point and then diverges.
Skin reacts to light, too.
In the visible part of the spectrum (that is, not UV)?
Considered the light glasses earlier, but Brienne did not expect to like them, we need morning light, and they also looked too weaksauce for serious SAD.
“Tangent” is perfectly appropriate—it touches a point somewhere on the curve of the main argument, and then diverges. There is something that made the association with the tangent.
And, to further overextend this metaphor, this implies that if someone’s argument is rough enough (i.e. not differentiable), then it’s not even possible to go off it on a tangent.
If this doesn’t work you should experiment with other frequencies of light . I have been using a heat lamp to play with near infrared light therapy, and use changing color light strips to expose myself to red light in the morning and night, and blue light in the early afternoon.
Indeed—I don’t know what kind of spectrum “white” LEDs give off, but I seem to have gotten the impression somewhere that most lightbulbs don’t emit the same spectrum as the sun, which contributes to “sunlight deprivation” conditions such as SAD.
Incandescent bulbs have a blackbody spectrum, usually somewhat redder than the sun’s (which is also close to blackbody radiation, modulo a few absorption lines). White LEDs have a much spikier spectrum, usually with two to maybe a half-dozen peaks at different wavelengths, which come from the band gaps of their component diodes (a “single” white LED usually includes two to four) or from the fluorescent qualities of phosphor coatings on them. High-quality LED bulbs use a variety of methods to tune the locations of these peaks and their relative intensities such that they’re visually close to sun or incandescent light; lower-quality ones tend to have them in weird places dictated by availability or ease of manufacture, which gives their light odd visual qualities and leads to poor color rendering. There are also tradeoffs involving the number of emitting diodes per unit. Information theory considerations mean that colors are never going to have quite the same fidelity under LED lights that they would under incandescent, but some can get damn close.
The same’s true in varying degrees for most other non-incandescent lights. The most extreme example in common use is probably low-pressure sodium lamps (those intense yellow-orange streetlights), which emit almost exclusively at two very close wavelengths, 589.0 and 589.6 nm.
Yep—if you take photographs under these lights (e.g. night street scenes), you essentially get tinted monochrome photographs. Under an almost-single-wavelength source of light there are no colors, only illumination intensities.
And you don’t get true full spectrum white out of LEDs either, as they’re generally a combination of 3 different narrow band LEDs that look white to the eyes, but give a spiked spectrum instead of a full spectrum. There are phosphor coated LEDs that give broader spectrum, but still nothing like the sun’s spectrum.
I learned from family who live in Alaska about “snowbirds),” who live in the North during the summer and the South during the winter. I suspect this is primarily for weather reasons, but no doubt those with SAD are more likely to be snowbirds than those without.
Santiago does have 13 hours of sunlight to Austin or Berkeley’s 11 or Juneau’s 9 (now; the differences will increase as we approach the solstice), so the change is larger, but the other changes are larger as well- having to switch from speaking English outside the house to speaking Spanish outside the house every six months seems costly to me. (New Zealand solves that problem, but adds a time zone problem.)
My off the shelf light lamp is 100W, and seems pretty dang bright to me- but I don’t have SAD and used it as a soft alarm, so I can’t speak to how effective or ineffective it is for SAD.
It really grates on me when people with more money than God don’t put it to any particularly good use in their lives, especially when it’s a health related issue. Maybe this will encourage me to use the not so much I have to more effect.
Anyone try that Valkee for SAD? $300 for a couple of LEDs to stick in my ears grates as well. Supposedly having the training to wire up LEDs together, but not the follow through, doesn’t help either.
And yes, fraud, scam, placebo controlled, blah blah blah. The proposed mechanism of photoreceptors distributed in the brain and elsewhere seemed interesting and worth checking out.