The OA does not specify the latitude at which he(? assuming the OA is the site owner's work) is living.
I live at a similar latitude (except in the Southern Hemisphere) and have never considered that it would be a thing outside of essentially polar latitudes.
Over the past couple of winters (I moved further south a few years back) I've had some atrocious winters in terms of mental space. Maybe this is something I should look into.
My current solution is to take a 1 hour walk outside every day around noon. Also, I've stopped sitting in front of my computer or TV 3 hours within bedtime. Instead I usually spend my late evenings reading paper books.
This has solved the longer-than-24-hour-cycles and most of the SAD (it also seems to have completely cleared up my acne). However, on days when it's overcast and kinda dark, I still notice some SAD. On those dark days, the kind of lamp that he built probably would have been nice.
Seems to conclude latitude doesn't make any difference, which is surprising. But there are other papers with the opposite conclusion.
This is a perfectly usable (and subjectively bright) LED strip, but beware, the specified lumens are a lie. My power meter reports a draw of 33W and another reviewer reports ~38.6W. The maximum efficiency of a 5730 SMD LED is ~110 lumens/watt, so this strip is outputting at most ~3630 lumens. Seller's description of "45-50LM" per LED would lead you to believe this can output 15000 lumens or ~454 lumens/watt. This is far outside the world record 200 lumens/watt bulbs and even outside the theoretical physical limit of 250–370 lm/W.
> http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/51778/ suggests that these LED strips have to be overvolted and powered at multiple points, which might bring them closer to ~7000 lumens.
> I'm also going to try comparing the hkbayi Super Bright to LEDMO's strip with 600 LEDs: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013C2U09S/
Stage lighting fixtures use the halogen metal iodide bulbs that he salivates over at the end, and already solve all of the issues he outlined. They provide their own ballasts, are metal shielded, use a lens that acts as a UV shield, have built-in cooling.
In fact the only issues with stage lighting:
1) The cooling wasn't designed to be silent (it isn't expected to be near someone in a near-silent environment)
2) The lamp casing wasn't designed to be near anything flammable (they get very hot)
3) The lens and casing is designed to throw the beam in a very small angle of spread over a reasonably long distance (they're not designed to point at your face from a few feet)
But given that, it seems reasonable that one could put it farther away and reflect it into the space you want lit.
And if he really wanted to go crazy whilst staying with LEDs, then he could just get a few of these: http://pulsarlight.com/products/chroma-range/chromaflood200/ which are used in architectural lighting and each one produces 10k lumens, and they are safe for indoor and outdoor use, are waterproof, and can be driven from standard mains power.
I did a bit of googling and found this...
http://www.ccfg.org.uk/conferences/downloads/P_Burgess.pdf
... which looks relevant and interesting.
http://www.cochrane.org/CD011269/DEPRESSN_light-therapy-prev...
It's not clear to me why light therapy is considered as a well-researched treatment.
Regardless, a good reminder. Fish has also other health benefits. I'd still take some vitamin D supplement on top of that.
I live at 59°N 18°E so the opposite hemisphere would mean I currently would have daylight between 02:29 and 19:31. While 0, 0 gives you roughly 06:00 - 18:00.
Yeah, I know, tanning beds are imported directly from Hell to give us skin cancer and stuff. But a sunny day in LA or Barcelona summer will give you much more UV than that. And it really helps with the aforementioned SAD.
As a result of all this care about light I haven't had a SAD winter for most of a decade. I feel "cured" of it enough that spending time in even more northerly places in the winter does not trigger unpleasant depression. That said, us northern peoples should slow down in the winter. Thousands of years of selection has driven this home, and it is nothing to be upset about. We will make up for the slowness of the winter in the long days of summer.
> 85–108 lumens per watt of electricity.
Sounds pretty good!
> With HMI bulbs, color temperature varies significantly with lamp age. A new bulb generally will output at a color temperature close to 15,000 K during its first few hours. As the bulb ages, the color temperature reaches its nominal value of around 5600 K or 6000 K. With age, the arc length becomes larger as more of the electrodes burn away. This requires greater voltage to sustain the arc, and as voltage increases, color temperature decreases proportionately at a rate of approximately 0.5–1 kelvin for every hour burnt. For this reason, and other safety reasons, HMI bulbs are not recommended to be used past half their lifetime.
Oh.. Then again, burn-in is something all lamps suffer from, right?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrargyrum_medium-arc_iodide_...
What does a kettle need 3000 watts for?
http://www.limelitelighting.co.uk/product.asp?code=PulsarChr...
There seems to be attitional benefits to the sunlight induced vitamin D production, possibly related to the oxidation of cholesterol & sulphur as the cholesterol is converted into Vitamin D.
So, lot-researched but maybe not well-enough researched.
Can someone recommend a ready-made solution?
http://www.arax.de/architektur/preislisten/10_pulsar_leds.pd... (>2500 EUR)
http://www.lightpower.de/fileadmin/user_upload/lightpower/Ho... (1000 EUR, used)
In other words, placebo effect is still an effect. The treatment being chemically vs. psychologicaly responsible for that isn't a concern for the subject, only the researcher.
Standard academic disclaimer applies: This isn't my field of study, and I'm sure there are many subtle mistakes in what I just said.
Seriously, mine boils in almost no time. Needs a lot of power to do that.
3kW isn't a magic number for the kettle, it's just the amount of power you can get away with drawing when you've got a 240V supply rated at 13A. The more power, the faster the water boils.
As I understand it, freestanding kettles are much less popular in North America, presumably because a hob can draw more power?
Ideally your ceiling would be very high for this setup to give space for the light to diffuse from hanging ceiling reflectors, which is unfortunately not the case for most homes. For realistic homes, there is a style of floor lamp termed 'torchiere' that may work, though for best results you're going to want to find one with a large, fully reflective shroud - lights this bright are pretty harsh if they're not diffused well.
Set up something like this on an automatic timer to simulate the sky, and I suspect a lot of our sleep issues would go away fairly quickly.
As silly as that all sounds, it's already a million times better than what this guy did. He took the "if a little is ineffective a LOT will be better" approach and built a damn lighthouse in his living room. And if the goal is a DIY project and a blog post, OF COURSE you'll feel better after "your treatment." It's approaching group therapy at that point. There's a lot of this crap on HN lately.
“According to our analysis, the change in neural activity and heart rate between colored flowers and the grey-scaled flowers was insignificant.”
Not sure if it helps, but it is nicer to wake up to compared to using a regular alarm clock.
Parents bought me a 180W fluorescent (therefore 10800 to 18000 Lumens according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficacy#Examples_2 ) anti-SAD lamp.
Stupidly, I used it as an evening lamp instead of anti-SAD. I had serious troubles getting to sleep for an entire year. Typically took 1-3 hours. Blamed coffee, stress, etc. Got blackout curtains, earplugs, cooled room temp, reduced coffee, etc. When I made the connection b/t falling asleep and the anti-SAD lamp, I stopped using it altogether and almost instantly started falling asleep rapidly.
So I conclude my 10k-18k lumen lamp stimulated my awake cycle by about 1-3 hours. My suggestion therefore is: use the lamp at either end of the day in winter: just before sunrise and just after sunset. And certainly to shut it off 3 hours before bedtime. In practice this is tricky because the "unwanted dark hours" are 4:30pm to 7:30pm which is: at work, my commute home and first hour at home. So I need three lights, including one in the car?!
It's not science. And yes, he very well might feel better just be because he did something he believes in. But I don't see why that warrants a response like yours.
That said, this seems to be right to me, but I could well believe there are people who need 30,000 lumens and therefore have to get more creative.
The article contains no research or sources except for a single Wikipedia link. It contains much hubris, yet no author's name. It does however contain numerous affiliate links. The article warrants a response like mine because the article is bullshit.
I had a similar hypothesis, so I built something like what you describe:
https://github.com/wpietri/sunrise
Currently I'm at only 4000 lumens or so in my main space, and I'd like it brighter. But my sleep is definitely better. I attribute it not so much to the daytime light, but to the way my apartment gradually gets dimmer and redder in the evenings.
I had set out to make something like a SAD lamp for my whole apartment. But as a side effect, I also basically made f.lux for my apartment, and I really like it. When evening comes, I generally have to fight to stay awake rather than fighting to go to sleep.
Their API is also really good: clear, well-documented, REST-y. I wrote my own software to simulate a day/night cycle in my house, and I'm very happy with it. It's a much easier way to wake up, and having the gradual dimming in the evening makes it easier to go to bed on time.
This extends to home espresso makers. Some international models of home espresso makers get rave reviews in AU/NZ, but lackluster reviews in the US. Only so many watts you can get on 120V before you exceed amperage constraints.
If not, then what is your point? Are you a SAD researcher with training and experience working with SAD? Or are you a SAD sufferer or have first-hand experience with SAD?
If the answer to those questions is no, then you are starting to sound no different from the arrogant ignoramuses who think people with depression should just "get over it".
This is HN and regardless of the scientific soundness of the post, it is a nifty hack. I might even make it. And use the affiliate links to show my appreciation of the person who made and shared the project. What's wrong with that?
Perhaps you should question your assumptions before calling bullshit. What else are you missing out on in life with such an attitude?
110V * 15A = 1650W. Room for one, at least.
This provides good illimination from at least a hundred feet. You need much less, so can lamp much lower.
Dimmers should not be in quotes, they do in fact perform dimming.
If we want to get to the reality where confidence in the efficacy of things is well-founded on rigorous experimentation and analysis, then we need to get there, one step at a time. Instead of tearing people down and saying that their efforts to improve themselves is crap, you could be offering constructive criticism. Even just bring up one question that would have made it a better experiment, so that when a reader here decides to copy him, they can do it better. Maybe they'll even share their personal experience and propagate more experimentation? If enough people do that, maybe collectively we'll one day have the interest and funding to have better studies done.
Would you rather he have not done the build, not shared it with the internet? Maybe he could have been more like the status quo and consumed someone else's product, quietly?
This post and your post yesterday where you argued 2700K screen temperature late in ones day is NOT less straining than 5800K, because if that were true, movie theatres would play all their movies with screens at 2700K... makes me think you're not really interested in people improving their quality of life, you just want to argue.
[1]: http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.psych.5...
[2]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jclp.20129/full
Enthusiasm is great. Enthusiasm masquerading as medical treatment is not.
I'm all about minute optimizations, but not until you've exhausted the big, basic ones.
Your (insert issue here) is not interesting at all unless it manifests itself in the presence of regular walking, weekly resistance training and a decent cardio routine.[1]
Do all of those things and your (issue) is still extant ? Well, now we've got something interesting to talk about...
[1] Also known as, basic, functional human output.
It's also known that the body's response is based on light (known to impact melatonin production), and that light treatment in the day might ameliorate whatever effect the dim light or darkness has.
The lights we're talking about can, at best, light a small area around them to a brightness that's 10% daylight. The most extreme lamp he mentioned does 30%, again in a small area. Hardly a lighthouse.
It seems natural to me that if you hypothesize that lack of sunlight contributes to sleepiness or depression in winter months, then you'd want to treat that with something approximating sunlight as best you can, or 100,000 lux.
So we don't know for sure whether this works or how effective it is, but there are good theories behind it to test. Let me put it this way: suppose I put a lamp with 100,000 lumens in your bedroom and activated it shortly before dawn or, just for fun, at midnight. Would you wake up? It's clear that light does something to wake you up, and that it's harder to sleep in bright sunlight in darkness. Well, winter is short and dark for many people.
When I lived such a winter, the effect of standing in full sunlight when it was available was like eating sugar after heavy exercise. (And biochemically, this makes perfect sense given that we know the body uses sunlight to synthesize essential compounds.)
It makes sense to question the effect of a specific lamp, but the body's need for sunlight is obvious, even absent the scientific research.
How do you think all those legitimate scientific journals got started? It's natural to think that because science is currently done with a huge amount of rigor that it was always done with a huge amount of rigor. In truth, the author's approach is still very scientific.
He considered the research he had available to him, reviewed some of the science regarding different lighting technologies, then tried something and observed that it worked. What about that isn't scientific?
Every scientific pursuit started out as a pseudoscience. Even the most rigorous fields like Physics or Medicine were originally people intuiting about a phenomenon with each other. There's nothing unscientific about what the author did, and to me it raises far more interesting questions than a diatribe about a lack of rigor.
To me it feels like any advance in light bulbs is only on the lumen/watt scale. How long until we have a one million lumen broad spectrum LED configuration that doesn't cost a fortune?
Furthermore, you don't need this light all day. Just in the morning and evening.
You can get 460 nanometer LED lights from grow shops online for around $50, and put it close to your face for 15 minutes in the morning and evening. It'll reset your rhythm, cure your sad, and that's all you need.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Yescom-98-Watt-Wired-Street-Garden/dp/...
Consider that you could have said the same thing about the anti-vax movement. Sharing autism anecdotes for other people to build upon is not getting you closer to proper assessment of the vaccine safety.
That's why we dislike this stuff so much - it's bad science, and you can't build good science from bad science.
It's a cool engineering project though, nothing wrong with discussing it as such.
What about these: http://www.ebay.com/bhp/460nm-led ?
These are easy to implement, they are proven medically, and they have tons of other benefits for heart health etc.
1. How hard is it to do work on your computer with that much light shining directly behind your monitor?
2. From the amazon bulb description:
"Remove The Electronic Ballast, Capacitor,Ignitor In The Fixture"
What does that mean? Is it a poorly written instruction to do some obvious? Or is it a strange after market modification?
In informal English there is no accepted equivalent to the third-person pronoun "one", so people reuse the second-person pronoun "you".
person 1: Aliens have visited our city.
person 2: Is there proof of that?
Probably just an optical illusion or something.
person 1: Can you prove aliens didn't visit?
What is your math for optical illusion?
I used three (1 warm, 2 cold) relatively inexpensive 36W LED bulbs from ebay locally - http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/121704759594
(Note they are LARGE and require a free-standing light fixture without any type of lampshade)
How are you supposed to exercise if you're already suffering from SAD? How much of the perceived benefit from walking comes from sunlight exposure? What about climes where there are extended overcast periods with no direct sunlight for weeks at a time?
Any claim of "you can't do X until you did Y first" is of little value to people who have adequate motivation or resources to do X but not to do Y. Maybe doing X will make it easier to do Y later.
In fact, this is the exact approach I took; one of my motivations for starting an automation startup years ago was better lighting for myself, and that better lighting later made it easier to exercise more, start swimming regularly, etc.
The founding history of scientific journals is often amazing, involving legends in the respective fields. Then over decades those journals became "legitimate" by not publishing crap.
> Every scientific pursuit started out as a pseudoscience
I don't think that word means what you think it does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience
The LED lamp has just as much (or more!) support circuitry, but it's built-in; note the comment in one of the reviews that it takes about four seconds to light up once power is applied.
But isn't that produced through exposure to UV, which LEDs don't emit?
edit: colour for most seem to be 6500k too
http://www.ebay.com/itm/52INCH-300W-LED-LIGHT-BAR-Mounting-B...
My mum's house is from 1905, but had to be required when she bought it in 1980, and there's no problem running everything in the kitchen at once, plus many portable heaters. We did this at Christmas a couple of years ago when the gas heating broke. I can't remember ever tripping a breaker.
My apartment's main breaker is rated to 50kW, with the oven and hob and laundry machines on 3-phase power, and several 230V 16A circuits for lights and sockets.
It's because we have special photosensitive cells in the sides of our eyes that only see blue light. They're not part of the vision, they only regulate the circadian rhythm. So all this talk of white light is uninformed. You only need blue light.
In case you're not familiar with them, we're discussing something like [1], or, to show these are very widespread commodity appliances, [2], which costs $7 including tax.
[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Andrew-James-Cordless-Indicator-Warr...
[2] http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/9016710.htm
Creating a startup to treat a mood disorder is a very roundabout way of doing things.
My main objection to rsync's comment was the flippant dismissal of people with actually diagnosed depression ("not interesting" were the exact words).
In response to your present comment, I would say that people who find themselves trying to invent solutions to their problems have likely already found the medical establisment to be less than helpful.
Also, when people assert that UFOs are probably just an optical illusion, they are (or at least should be) doing that based on the long observational baseline of many investigated incidents which indeed turn out to be optical illusions. That is to say, it's legitimate to say that perceived UFOs are probably optical illusions it's because there's real data demonstrating that perceived UFOs really are optical illusions.
The illegitimate version of that would be saying it based on general arrogance, which is frequently a barrier to scientific progress. See, e.g., the story of Nobel Prize winner Barry Marshall.
Further, your request is nearly tautological. The way that one gets to a big, statistically robust test of a hypothesis is via small stepping stones. E.g., this sort of self-experimentation. If you scoff at everybody doing something small and say, "you're probably wrong because there's no big evidence", you decrease the chances of getting the sort of proof that you claim to want.
I don't think there's anything wrong with saying, "personally, I'd like to see convincing measures of the effect of bright light therapy on mood and intelligence before I adopt this." But that's frustratingly different than your apparent attitude that in 2 minutes of thought you know more about this guy's experience than he does.