Re: LED lighting instead of fluorescent 'haz mat'
>I *like* the cooler, more natural white light of good LED lamps, much better than the sickly yellow light produced >by incandescent lamps. Guess people just don't like daylight, preferring instead something that is basically an >industrial artifact from a time when proper light wasn't practical.
The power-efficient LEDs do not replicate the shape of natural daylight perfectly, they have their own bias. What people 'prefer' depends upon the time of day and the task in hand, and our circadian rhythms.The effect of different colour temperatures upon us is still being researched, but we know that, for example, fitting a 24 hour police control room boosts the concentration of the officers in the early hours of the morning. We also know that working night shifts under artificial lighting has been linked to rises in some cancers.
We associate red light with full bellies, sat around the embers of a camp fire, soon time to sleep zzz. I use a piece of freeware called 'f.lux', which changes the white balance of my monitor according to the time of day (by world location and calender, of course) so that 'white' on my monitor closer resembles a sheet of white paper that is held next to it- bluer during daylight hours, warmer when the room is artificially lit.
A local publican has replaced the hideous 12v halogen down-lighters above his bar (hideous because halogen bulbs were never designed to sit in enclosed spaces for thermal reasons... they prefer being suspended in space between two LV cables) with RGB LED units, which can cycle through a range of colours. Curiously, under their impression of an incandescent bulb, I can't tell a blue Rizla packet from a green one.
Second product plug: Tescos have a home-branded 2xAA flashlight with a CREE LED for £10. Brighter than anyone needs to walk to the pub across the fields, its fits in your pocket, and you can be more philosophical about losing it than you would a pricier branded model. I wish more cyclists on a budget would use them in place of the flashing white LED units that project next-to-no light and make it harder for a motorist to judge their speed and distance (the movement of a constant cone is easier to judge than that of an intermittent point light, duh). I use them with nickel metal hydride batteries, which are so much better than rechargeables were when I was a child.