I am by no means a warmonger and I think our armed forces is bloated and needs to be drastically reduced. That said- many veterans volunteered to put their lives on the line, often just so they could afford college. I think they deserve a leg up for that. Not to mention the ones that were drafted. Plenty of Vietnam vets are still alive and they didn’t even choose to be in the military in the first place. They’ve been dealing with long-term physical and psychological damage for decades.
He likely wasn’t responsible for shortening it, Washington post did it automatically when sharing the article. Everything does this nowadays Google maps adds trackers to the url when sharing as well. I agree it’s annoying but not many good ways around it.
Quick counter: lower kelvin lights are terrible for color reproduction. Pure sunlight is around 5000K, and has a CRI (color rendering index) of 100. Switching to warmer (lower kelvin) lights is going to also alter your CRI, and will change the way that you perceive colors. If you need high color discrimination, that's going to be bad.
For outdoor lights, in most cases that's not a problem.
Usually. In most cases, you aren't going to notice just how much the colors have shifted, because your brain automatically adjusts. Youre perception of color is usually how colors appear relative to other things; you will see a red as red because your brain is comparing it to other objects with a known color. OTOH, if you're taking photos under poor lighting conditions, you'll see a significant shift in color. If you've ever taken film photos under fluorescent lights, you'd see that everything looked sharply green, when you don't perceive them as being green at that moment. (Digital cameras often make color adjustments, and the sensors are often not as sensitive as film can be.)
Going to an extreme, if you use a red filter on a light source, all colors are going to end up looking brown and grey; switching to red lights does the best at minimizing light pollution and loss of night vision, but at the cost of most color information. That's not bad, just a thing to consider.
Not really, CRI is not dependent on color temperature; 2400K and 2700K incandescent bulbs all have CRI of 100. And, as you said, human brain is incredibly good at adopting to light color temperature. While I would not do color-critical work in candlelight, 2700K and 2400K bulbs are perfect for general late evening lighting and 3000K...3500K is very good for task lights. Higher than 4000K lights should not be a thing in domestic or public outdoor lighting, it's just too harsh and uncozy.
You don't need high lumens, either. As an extreme example, I've done plenty hiking (and patrolling during my military training) in starlight with no artificial light source—the eye is quite remarkable at adopting to darkness. The cities today are overly bright at nights, you could easily halve (or more) the lumen output and be absolutely fine. Even light distribution with no shadowy dark spots is way more useful than overly bright lights. Another personal anecdote, I live on 9th floor and I don't need to turn on any lights when visiting bathroom at night; the light pollution from outside through curtains is enough to navigate around in my apartment.
Senator Tuberville, previously a football coach, has focused on veterans as one of his key issues. He currently opposes a Defense Department policy regarding abortion expenses for military personnel, stalling the confirmation of over 250 senior military officers. Despite his focus on veterans, there is no evidence supporting his campaign pledge three years ago to donate his senatorial salary to Alabama veterans.
A U.S. senator earns $174,000 annually, and Tuberville has served for 2½ years, amounting to a potential $437,000 in donations.
Tuberville established the Tommy Tuberville Foundation in 2014, which is aimed at “assisting our military and veterans.” However, recent IRS filings show little spending on charitable causes since Tuberville became a senator.
The foundation’s revenue in 2021 was $74,101, of which only 12% was spent on charity, with much of the rest going to administrative costs.
Charity Watch’s executive director, Laurie Styron, mentioned a lack of clarity due to the limited data provided in the foundation’s filings, noting that it received only $218k in contributions over the past five years.
The Fact Checker contacted several veterans’ organizations in Alabama, most of which stated they received no donations from Tuberville or his foundation.
Tuberville’s staff confirmed that he has not yet fulfilled his donation pledge but highlighted issues and an audit of the foundation that led to a halt in its activities. They reassured that the senator will keep his promise to the veterans of Alabama.
If Tuberville maintains his pledge, he would owe over $1 million in donations over a six-year senatorial term.
There is nothing wrong with LED lights. There is just a big problem with cheap, poorly designed LEDs. You can use proper optics and control the light exceptionally well and put it exactly where its needed with very little spill over or reflections up. You can also chose whatever color and color rendering index (CRI) you like but all of this costs more money and municipal bean counters are drunk on the lowest bidder. So we get glare bomb blue light shows. I used to design this stuff so feel free to ask questions.
So I’m a wedding photographer and in the past 3 years I have noticed an increased amount of the lights at venues strobe or have really bad banding when I set my shutter speed to higher than 120. My assumption is that the new LED lights are flickering at a consistent rate to save energy but at the cost of the photos I take. Is this the case? That cheaper LED lights will flicker like that?
Not sure why, but the high power LEDs you see in cars do this if they’re cheap or done poorly. Mine came with like an ant-flicker ballast or something.
You’re seeing the 60Hz sinusoid caused by using AC electricity. 60 peaks, 60 troughs – but the like is actually turning on and off 120 times per second when on AC, unless it’s first converted to DC. Cheap LEDs just feed AC.
So what I heard a long time ago is that all LED lights essentially strobe on and off constantly, faster than the human eye can detect, though i’m willing to bet the better ones are constructed in a way that you wouldn’t notice at all (whether with the naked eye, or through a high shutter speed camera, as you mentioned), but the shittier ones strobe more frequently and not at a rate that’s as smooth/consistent as the better ones. As a little anecdote, I bought a lower quality light-tablet for tracing a while back, and was getting crazy headaches after using it for maybe an hour or so. Had to stop using it, and I think it must be an example of what poor quality LEDs are like.
So LEDs can either be strobed or powered consistently with no blinking at all. It’s a design choice and it depends on how you convert the power from AC to DC and how you want to control the brightness of the LED. It’s cheaper to feed an LED power that is modulated/strobes so all the cheap vendors do that. You can also get away with strobing the LED to achieve a brightness assuming you do it at a very high frequency so our eyes don’t perceive it. If you buy a quality LED light fixture there should be no strobing effect what so ever.
So LEDs are generally very bright by default, and there’s a limit to how much you can really dim that. The solution used is often to flicker the LED at high speed, imperceptible to human eyes, called Pulse Width Modulation (PWM). Basically, by changing the percentage of time the LED is on (the width of the ON pulse) you change the perceived brightness off the light.
Cheap LED designs do this slower, cause the hardware and LEDs are cheaper. It’s not really to save energy, but to adjust brightness and manage heat.
Also, probably more importantly, cheap LED bulb designs just don’t deal with AC current as well, so you get the 60Hz flicker from the electrical line cause that doesn’t get regulated out correctly when converting to DC.
The strobing is due to the way they’re powered. When converting AC power to DC power, you can either convert the positive half of the AC sine wave (half rectified) or both positive and negative sides of the AC wave (full rectified). Cheap lights use half rectifiers so as the AC feeds in, the light is only getting powered half the time and off the other half of the time. This happens so rapidly that we don’t really see it with our eyes, but with a camera it’s very noticeable. AC cycles at 60 cycles per second (in the US), so it makes sense that you’re seeing it at 120 shutter speed as this equates to 60fps.
I’d consider talking to some of these venues about it as I assume they’re typically used for events that’ll be filmed, so using shitty lighting is ruining it for everyone same as if they had the toilets sitting in the middle of the dance floor.
I’ve read that just adding hoods to the lights to keep light pointing downwards would help a lot with light pollution. I’m not sure why we don’t do that more
This is just weird to me, i don’t expect to see stars in a city, even before the lights were LED. They’re saying the blue light scatters more and that’s a problem but if the entire point of the street light is public safety then more light information is a good thing. The cities probably need new studies and information about lumens per square foot though because they’re probably working off of old studies with redder light and they could probably lower the intensity and still get the same amount of light information.
The park can not be protected from global warming. It's better to get clean energy. Though I wonder if this is a true binary choice - the decision to expand US mineral protection seems to speak of and to more isolationist views. Maybe the US could go clean using minerals from friendly foreign countries only.
That said, I wonder if we're not being creative enough here. The english channel is 560 km long, so could it be possible to bore a series of tunnels for truckers to use to get access to the minerals without ruining the park?
It's a shame that the mine isn't closer to the ocean, otherwise maybe shipping the minerals on cargo ships could have been a more park friendly alternative.
The cost to bore tunnels would be extreme, and likely would deter investors. On top of that, where do you put the waste rock, which can be metal leaching or acid generating.
The cost to bore tunnels would be extreme, and likely would deter investors.
I don't have an obvious solution for that, but no one said park preservation and tackling global warming would come cheap.
On top of that, where do you put the waste rock, which can be metal leaching or acid generating.
I don't know much about this, but as the tunnel is built, use it to truck out the waste rock, which can then be shipped outside of Alaska to be processed and handled in the usual processing plants in the US (or even pay to handle it overseas). Again, costs, but same answer as above.
Re: waste rock. Usually waste rock is placed in piles. During operations, they have a series of collection ditches to manage contact water and pump it to the tailings pond or an exhausted pit, until an impermeable cover and growth media are placed over top. The cover prevents aeration, which causes the ML/ARD issues I mentioned in the other post. 211 km of waste rock is a lot of additional cost and env risk, and work to offset that risk. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do this, but I’m saying it isn’t likely unless they are mandated to do it and have a well developed plan to do so (more time delays and cost)
They are doing underground hauling of waste rock at one mine I know about, but it’s because the mine is already underground and they have the route established, and the mine itself is expanding.
There is so much to consider in mining if you want to do it the right way
It’s a shame that the mine isn’t closer to the ocean, otherwise maybe shipping the minerals on cargo ships could have been a more park friendly alternative.
There are rivers and you would only need the roads around the mine and two ports. One inland to move cargo from the truck to the ship and one at the coast, which needs to be built anyway. Obviously the rivers need to be navigable, which is propably not the case.
Hmm. Could the rivers be made navigable without hurting the surrounding ecosystem too much? Or maybe an artificial canal .. but I suppose a new canal has many of the same problems that a new road (or roads) would entail..
This is not at all a LED problem. It is just very poor execution. When we switched to LED in our and neighboring cities the light pollution went down very noticably. The switch should be used to use light smarter, not just blast more with higher efficiency. We now have some streets that even have motion sensing and dim to 5% power when not in use.
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