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Your Computer Or iPad Could Be Disrupting Sleep
Crash McBang sends in a CNN report on electronics and sleeplessness and asks, "So, what do Slashdotters do to get a good night's rest?" "More than ever, consumer electronics — particularly laptops, smartphones, and Apple's new iPad — are shining bright light into our eyes until just moments before we doze off. Now there's growing concern that these glowing gadgets may actually fool our brains into thinking it's daytime. Exposure can disturb sleep patterns and exacerbate insomnia, some sleep researchers said in interviews. ... Unlike paper books or e-book readers like the Amazon Kindle, which does not emit its own light, the iPad's screen shines light directly into the reader's eyes from a relatively close distance. That makes the iPad and laptops more likely to disrupt sleep patterns than, say, a television sitting across the bedroom or a lamp that illuminates a paper book, both of which shoot far less light straight into the eye, researchers said."
That's what f.lux is for. It changes the temperature of your screen according to the time (sunrise/sunset). It works under Mac, Linux, Windows ; a real gem.
before you go to sleep. Not only it saves your bill, but you'll get comfy environment to sleep in. No buzzing of adapters, no sound from IM, no fans, ... only silence to enjoy.
occasionally I let my computer run with shutdown -h +40 and let it play some music like vangelis or enya. computer is in the switch which controls whole multiplug -> comp goes off, everything's going off
The article claims that the light intensity is less from the other source. It is about distance and intensity. You usually don't sit 6 inches from your TV or lamp like you might with an iPad. The intensity of light (from a point source) is a function of r^2.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
But there is a difference in physical size of the light sources as well, and if you adjust the luminance (cd/m^2, probably fairly independent of the size of the screen, be it a TV or an iPod) of your TV and your laptop to be the same and if you watch both from such a distance that each of them covers the same solid angle, your eyes receive equal irradiation from both of them.
Ezekiel 23:20
Actually yes, prof. Nakamura (currently at UCSB) was responsible for the breakthrough while working at nichia corp. and creating and perfecting the process for building the InGaN quantum well used in almost all modern blue and white LEDs we see today. That was in 1993. Now I'm as shortsightedly outraged as anyone and would totally think the repercussions of ultra cheap and ultra efficient blue LEDs is just an increased amount of obnoxiously bright indicators on my computer parts for the sake of looking futuristic but pragmatically, it's also at the backbone of the most power efficient consumer light sources we have available as of today (give or take two to three times more so than metal halide arclamps and fluorescent tubes) and probably will help cut a great deal of power consumption later on.
Sure, the indicator's not the best place for these things to shine (pun, yada yada...) but what do you say to the backlight of the same laptop using LEDs and making it much brighter while extending the battery life?
Although urban lighting has always been with us, we have not (yet?) recognised it as a disruptive influence.
You city slickers can shut off your lights, but what should us country hicks do about moonlight? Only sleep one week per month?
Also you city slickers can have "silent" rooms but us country hicks whom have gone camping, hear a rock concert of bugs, birds, and nocturnal critters. Seriously loud at times!
Everything urban is not necessarily bad strictly because its urban, and "natural" is not inherently good, despite enviro-loon propaganda.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
True dat.
Before I got married I did most of my sleeping on a cot in the computer room and I can honestly say that, in regards to sleep, the hum of servers is as good as rain on a tin roof.
Also the clicking of hard drives let me know if somebody was accessing my FTP site. My ftpd didn't allow for ratios so I went through the logs by hand to make sure people uploaded first.
RelicNet FTW!
I can't jerk off to internet porn in the living room! People are out there!
ctrl+alt+command+8 negates the screen on a mac. I, too, have used that feature during night a couple of times and it does help.
I started using it a week or so ago, and have noticed a striking difference. I'd all but forgotten what it felt like to actually want to go to sleep because I spent so much time at night in front of a big LCD monitor. When I started using f.lux, I started actually feeling tired at night, and found myself going to bed earlier and earlier. It would usually take me a week or more to adjust to sleeping 3 hours earlier than I'm used to, and it would never stick. When I started using f.lux, I was going to bed hours earlier after a few days. Now it takes getting extremely absorbed in a conversation or work to keep me up late, and it's nice being able to wake up before the crack of noon without feeling like a bomb went off in my head. Even if it's the placebo effect, though, it's worth it to be able to turn on my monitor in the middle of the night without being blinded by it.
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Actually, studies (which i can't be bothered tracking down right now) have shown white text on black on a screen isn't terribly easy on the eyes either. If I recall, the best was black text and less contrast, like 10-20% gray.
As far as I can tell (and I've been trying to follow this topic for about 15 years, though perhaps not very successfully) it's not always all that different.
The intensity might be different, looking at a monitor instead of a book lit by a lamp on a bedside stand. The color temperature might be different. It's polarized, while the light from a lamp isn't, but then sunlight is polarized under many conditions as well. And the lamp will tend to light up a whole area as well as a book, whereas a monitor mostly just lights itself up, so there's can be more of a difference in contrast of the object vs. ambient, depending on how the room is lit.
So, that's a whole lot of maybes. The specifics depend on how your particular gear is arranged, along with the rest of the room. It's completely possible to eliminate or drastically reduce all of the potential differences I listed (or, at least it is on a real computer -- not an iPad).
Very simply: If you set up a display to look like a book under whatever lighting you like, then (gasp!) it looks like a book.
However, most folks haven't done so. The color temperature is typically whatever it was set to out of the box, the brightness is somewhere between "ouch" and "surface of the sun," and so on. And, I think, most folks think they're happy with things that way.
Ignorance is bliss, as they say.
Kid-proof tablet..