Random thoughts... - by Tocky
Sulphur on 11/8/2023 at 05:55
Joni Mitchell or Counting Crows?*
I prefer the sickly sodium vapours myself, they've always felt romantic from far off and more and more jaundiced the closer you got, until you were right under one, standing in a circle of honeyed light drenching the wafts of street smoke and your skin with something intangibly warm yet cloying; a perfect marriage, if you ask me.
I've always wanted to live out in the greens, but having always been a city person, I have no doubt I would be felled by a surprise flying snake, the sudden lack of WiFi, or my inability to perform any sort of structural maintenance. A sprawling backyard is a fantastic replacement, though.
*heh
Nicker on 12/8/2023 at 18:50
And then there's the Purple Haze LED street lights infesting many urban centers. This is due to the failure of a phosphorous coating which is failing. If I understand it correctly, the coating boosts the whiteness, allowing for lower electrical consumption.
Quote:
What is the thing that all city people do when they move to the country? They try to make a place look like the sterile landscape they came from.
I hear you, Tocky. The bedroom communities adjacent to Victoria BC, are desperate to expand their populations. They advertise a rural lifestyle with easy access to green space, parks and unspoiled wild vistas. To accommodate the ravenous crowds, they are consuming green space, parks and unspoiled wild vistas at a catastrophic rate, denuding forested hills and even blowing them up to create level ground for industrial parks.
This despite the abundance of previously developed, neglected, marginal land, available for redevelopment. Add to this, zero effort to address the infrastructure needs (water, sewage, electricity, roads, medical services....) and you have a population disaster approaching at breakneck speed.
But hey, Pave Paradise, am eye rite?
Tocky on 12/8/2023 at 19:54
Joni. And hey, this isn't Australia, we don't have flying snakes or venomous butterflies yet, just copperheads who know enough to sneak off while you go get a hoe.
The thing is, I thought I was IN the marginal, neglected land. When farming died, or at least the typical 300 acre family farm, folks moved to bigger towns. That left fields to grow over with wild flowers and trees to claim the fence line. It's like the hedgerows of England but thinner and taller even when there are field cows to graze. All those years I paid the extra gas to go to work (okay work actually paid that) or to shop in order to be away from barren yards with cookie cutter brick houses and now they move out to me. This isn't the first one, it's just the closest, and this guy thinks everyone going by on the main road should see his and because of that now I can see the main road from MY front door. He worked all his life to show off his no imagination two story pointless square footage monster which he will get to live in 10 to 20 years before he dies. I bet the motherfucker puts those faux collums on the front of it.
And he took down so many oaks it breaks my heart. Just ripped them down with a bucket crane. Here I am mowing around purple wild flowers and ferns and there he is balding nature so everyone can see how well off he is for a few years. Fuck me. How the hell did podunk little Toccopola become fashionable? I can't fathom it.
I'm well aware I sound like the couple that wanted the house on the lake in the movie What About Bob. Had they ever been willing to sell it to me or to my neighbor to the other side then it would just have cows in it now. But I like to think I wouldn't cheer if it blows up... at least without knowing whether they got out or not.
Nicker on 13/8/2023 at 00:11
$100. CDN says he'll name his estate "The Oaks" or "Wild Field" or some similar shit.
heywood on 14/8/2023 at 15:42
I very much agree about the trend with street lights. The old high efficiency, low pressure sodium vapour lamps only emit the sodium D lines around 590nm, which are not seen by most wildlife. And the soft, monochromatic light gives environments a different and distinct nighttime character. Switching from low pressure sodium lamps to high pressure sodium lamps gave us some color vision, but at the expense of efficiency, and created more light pollution because they emit a broader spectrum and the peak emission line is yellow-green. Replacing them with full-spectrum LEDs would be totally wrong. Amber LEDs are probably safer for illuminating major roads and intersections, but 590nm LEDs are better for parks and residential areas.
Related to this, one of my pet peeves is people who live in very low crime suburbs and rural areas but insist on lighting up their property like an auto dealer's lot.
mxleader on 15/8/2023 at 02:09
Those new street lights look awful. The apartments I live in upgraded the porch lights a couple of years ago to brighter more efficient ones for "safety" but then had to replace all of them a short time later because they were too bright. You'd come up to your door and you'd have to shield your eyes just to see where to put the key in the lock. I'm in favor of bringing back old inefficient lighting and paying more for electricity and continuing to warm up the globe.
demagogue on 15/8/2023 at 03:17
I remember when I worked in Washington DC, on my walk back to the place I was staying I'd pass what I thought was the perfect alley between two nondescript buildings a little distant from me, with a sidewalk going back into some niche space with some doors and windows, but you couldn't exactly tell if it was just a space or it went farther back. It was dingy, but it was just so perfectly composed with the right kind of hazy dim but oversaturated yellow dirty light pouring out creating a cone coming out while giving this hint of something more back there. I was probably sensitive to it playing with light in level mapping.
Anyway, scenes like that make you appreciate what gives a scene real character and when hamfisted attempts just can't cut it.
heywood on 15/8/2023 at 13:19
Quote Posted by mxleader
Those new street lights look awful. The apartments I live in upgraded the porch lights a couple of years ago to brighter more efficient ones for "safety" but then had to replace all of them a short time later because they were too bright. You'd come up to your door and you'd have to shield your eyes just to see where to put the key in the lock. I'm in favor of bringing back old inefficient lighting and paying more for electricity and continuing to warm up the globe.
Believe it or not, LEDs are no more efficient than the high pressure sodium vapour lamps they are replacing.
LEDs are good for 50-120 lumens per watt, while current HPS lamps deliver about 100 lumens/watt.
Low pressure sodium lamps are up to twice as efficient as LEDs at 200 lumens per watt, but they are monochromatic.
The marketing people are telling municipalities that LEDs can last for 100k hours. Sodium lamps last for 18-24k hours. But the former is just a manufacturer estimate, because LED street lighting hasn't been in service long enough to gather comparable data. Whereas the life span of sodium lighting is well known. The problem is that the manufacturer's life estimates are based on the projected lumen depreciation of the LED chip under steady state conditions only, and don't take into account the electronics and variable environmental conditions. Unlike sodium lamps that just need a ballast, LEDs need a regulated DC power supply, so they have more failure modes.
Azaran on 15/8/2023 at 14:26
I resisted switching from incandescent bulbs to LED's in my home until a couple years ago for the same reason. The standard, harsh white, pasty looking LED's couldn't compare to the warm glow of incandescents. Until nice, filament LED's became cheaper and more available. Aesthetically I now prefer them to incandescents, they emit nearly the same type of light, but the LED's are distinctly warmer. Just make sure to get the 2200k ones:
Inline Image:
https://i.postimg.cc/t4rwfZq3/IMG-20230814-145644-2.jpgthe lower the level, the warmer and softer the light. 2700-3000 k bulbs are still on the warm spectrum but don't compare to 2200k. I think sodium street lamps are around 1800k or so
Pyrian on 15/8/2023 at 20:31
Quote Posted by heywood
...LEDs need a regulated DC power supply, so they have more failure modes.
When we got our house a bit over ten years ago, it had a mixture of mostly incandescent with a few compact fluorescent lights. I immediately replaced the incandescents with a variety of LEDs that were supposed to last ten years. It's been ten years. All the compact fluorescents have failed and been replaced with LEDs. None of the LEDs have failed, nor noticeably dimmed, not even in the high traffic areas.
