Slashdot Mirror
World's Northernmost Town Gets Nightlights
Velcroman1 writes "On October 26, 2,000 Norwegians watched the sun set. The next time they'll see it rise? Sometime in February. Extended nighttime is an annual occurrence for the residents of Longyearbyen, Norway — Earth's northernmost town. Located at 78 degrees north latitude in the Arctic circle, Longyearbyen experiences a phenomenon called Polar Night, in which the town remains in perpetual darkness for four months each winter. To lighten up the seemingly endless night, Philips has started an experiment called 'Wake Up the Town.' And anyone who's complained about the brief daylight hours in winter will want to know how it works."
10 Best Wake Up Light Alarm Clocks
Some people think it's pretty. Some people realize exactly how much of that is wasted energy, or even in its way, pollution.
It's hard seeing the stars. It's brutal seeing a bunch of turtles trying to head for the sea but ending up in a parking lot.
Wouldn't wanna live there unless I had to. The darkness would mess with your eyesight, would put you in a low mood (to the point of depression) and your skin wouldn't produce enough vitamin E. I'll stick to smog-ridden, sunny, 80-degree late-fall LA.
-FB
It may be me but that linked article very much reads like one big advertisement. Having the sponsor's name all over the place isn't helping of course. Anyhow great marketing, they even managed to get it on slashdot while it has nothing to do with tech whatsoever - and light therapy isn't something new either.
I can't believe this is really on slashdot.
My girlfriend got me an alarm clock for my birthday last month, called Hello Moshi. It's a talking (and listening) alarm clock, really cool. But anyways, my girls birthday is coming up and so I thought I'd get her one of these, a sort of gift-in-kind.
I gave her a bunch of hints, but she couldnt come up with anything near this. She has a basement apartment, so I thought this would be perfect.
Unfortunately, she checks out slashdot every once in awhile. I even mentioned that "this object is being used in an experiment in the north pole". This was literally 3 or 4 hours ago.
FML.
It's a gimmick. There's no gigantic artificial whole-town sun or anything. Certainly nothing "ultimate".
Philips makes an alarm clock that includes a gradually-increasing bright light. They're couching this in the terms of an "experiment", but there's no actual science being performed. They just picked a north-of-the-arctic-circle town and gave away some of the product as a publicity stunt, and then sent out a text release, which is being published as news.
I live in Boston, which is north enough for me. I have a different Philips lightbox product, and I think it does provide a useful regulation of my mood in late winter afternoons. But I don't think the science behind it is particularly well developed, even if it seems promising. I thought for a second as I started to read the aticle (after I realized it wasn't the giant artificial sun thing) that it was a real scientific experiment with control groups and so on. Even then, it'd be hard to really control, because you can't exactly do a double-blind study. But, it's actually even lamer than that.
There are settlements in Svalbard farther north....
Pyramiden was a longtime soviet mining town in Svalbard that once was home to over a thousand people, it was abandoned in 1998 but is being redeveloped. It is 50km north of Longyearbyen. However since it currently is home to about 8 people we'll bypass that for Ny-Alesund, which is some to about 35 people year-round (over 120 in summer), and also farther north than Longyearbyen. It is listed as the "world's northernmost functional public settlement", whatever that means.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Hammerfest in Norway.
And here I thought this article would be about Barrow's plans to fend off the vampire hordes this year.
Sounds like winter here for me.. Get up at 5am, its dark. Get to work by 6:30am, its still dark. Live all day in my office with no windows (The one that let light in, unfortunately I still have the other kind). Leave work around 5:30pm to see the sun dipping behind the horizon (or if I have to work another 10-15 mins, miss it completely). Repeat for 5 days a week. On weekends I get to sleep in and when I wake up wonder where all this light is coming from and why its hurting my eyes..
It actually sounds nice there, not having to walk around half blind on weekends..
All of Svalbard (where Longyearbyen is located) is farthern north than Hammerfest.
It depends on your definition of what a "town" is. Hammerfest has about 9000 people. Honningsvåg is nearby and farthern north in Norway and has about 2500. Longyearbyen has about 2000 people, and is much farther north than any spot in Norway proper. But as I mentioned in an earlier post, there are small settlements in Svalbard farther north, including Ny-Ålesund which is about 50km north of it, and home to about 35 people year-round (over 120 in summer).
If you make some arbitrary designation on the smallest thing that can be called a town, then you could find one that makes it Hammerfest, I suppose.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Does the light produce much in the ultra violet spectrum? I had always thought that seasonal affective disorder was partly due to the reduced amount of ultra violet light being received from the sun on your skin. UV helps your body produce or use vitamin D, right? I do still think that waking with light is an important step in the day. Also, I've been using f.lux the past few months, which reduces the color temperature of my computer screen at night (makes it less blue and more red), which has had a significant effect on me getting tired earlier at night. So even what kinds of colors your eyes sense can affect your cycle and therefore your health. In general, attempting to artificially create a sun in northern's daily lives through the winter months is probably a good thing.
Can they see Russia from there?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Alert, Nunavut Canada is the worlds northernmost town. By a long way. Alert is 82 degrees North.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alert,_Nunavut
The town in the article is far South of Alert.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Wouldn't it be called Daylights?
Better known as 318230.
They could alternatively just whack a giant mirror up in space, to reflect real daylight onto the town.
Kind of like what they did in Viganella: http://fractalenlightenment.com/124/uncategorized/the-sun-is-going-to-shine-in-viganella
but on a slightly grander scale.
This is Slashdot after all...
Go to the local mass-market store like Lowes or even Target and look for a CFL bulb with the most lumens per watt. Also look for bulbs that have a curiously long life rating since these will not have any circuitry to use more power at startup to warm the bulb up. It doesn't matter if it says "instant on" or not (all slow-starting CFLs say "instant on")... in fact if the packaging is really loud about being "instant on!!!" then that's a good one to buy since it's guaranteed to take forever to get fully bright.
Now you have a bulb that will take 5+ minutes to reach full brightness even pointed upward. Then get a cheap clip-on lamp and a wall outlet timer. Set the timer to turn the light on say 15 minutes before your alarm. If the 5+ minutes it takes to get fully bright is still too fast for you, point it downward so the bulb heats up more slowly (but this will lower the life of the bulb significantly if you leave it on). You're done. Total cost ~$20.
So next time you play "CFL roulette" and get a really bad one you'll have a use for it. And since the really bad CFLs last for freaking ever (just to spite you) you'll soon have a huge stockpile of replacement bulbs for the time when all CFLs are actually instant on (yeah right...).
The vast amounts of light pollution in cities means that those of us who live in them are more susceptible to cancer and other diseases.
And to think, all those astronomers were doing more than just whining.
How we know is more important than what we know.
or some strange reason I'v been interested in this place lately. Longyearbyen is the main city there, and Svalbard is the place where the Polar Bear battles took place in the Golden Compass. They have a major world seed repository there. Their newspaper is here, but in Norwegian. Pretty interesting:
http://www.svalbardposten.no/ You can do an automatic translation of it in google.
as much as I'd like Longyearbyen to be the northernmost town in the whole place, .. well and possibly the highest polar bear v. tourist ratio.
I have it on reasonable authority that in terms of northness it can only boast the northernmost post-office.
I have a wake up light, and I have supplemented it with one of those bright anti-depression lights on a timer. So when the wake up light hits maximum brightness, the 40W fluorescent comes on -- and THAT works.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I've been there for one week in late April 2010. In such period there are 24 hours of light a day and it's really hard to get used for a person who normally lives at latitude of 45 circa.
It's really confusing coming out of a bar at midnight and wearing sun glasses. I can't imagine how hard it could be when there is no light at all.
Next Philips will start to sell sand to Bedouins. Did anyone thought that everyone living at really north are so used to darkness that they actually like it. I would not be surprised that the 'wake up' annoyance would be shot regularly back to dark by some local who really cannot stand idiot abroad who knows better how he should live.
You know that during the other 6 months of the year the permanent settlements in Antarctica are in complete darkness. Especially the one at the south pole.
I'll bet its colder there too. But don't worry, Karl Rove won't rest until the polar regions are temperate, Canada is tropical, and the rest of the world is uninhabitable desert.
how hard would it be to connect a light to a usb port, and have a driver for it that could be used to also wake you up in the morning? With the new ultramega efficient lights, low power output shouldn't be a real problem...
new sig
I live in Finland. Not as north as this town (obviously) but in a place with a few hours of light a day for a large part of the winter. And yes, it indeed causes a lot of depression. Or, I don't know whether one can say "Causes" but certainly amplifies. Let's say you're feeling down and then you won't see sunlight for a week (+don't feel like going outside because the temperature is at [-25C/-13F])... Yeah, it's a lot worse.
But different people react to it in different ways. A few days ago, some foreign exchange students asked my sister about how dark it gets in the mid-winter and how can they cope with the depression. She answered that if they aren't feeling down yet, they probably won't. I don't know if it is about genes, nutrition or what but some people just feel down because of the darkeness, others won't.
That brings me to the next subject... Actually, the mid-winter isn't the worst time. There is snow, a lot of it. It is cold and dark, sure... But the white snow is beautiful and any light that you have (stars, moon, northern lights, street lights...) is reflected from it in really nice way. The worst time for most people is actually late autumn: It is getting cold and and dark but you know that everything is only going to get colder and darker and there isn't any snow yet... When the mid-winter actually comes, people tend to be a lot happier. And they'll continue to get progressively more joyful all the way to the late summer.
Despite the downsides, I would never want to move to a country with different climate. There is something so very beautiful in this cycle of darkness and light... Captcha: Patriot
There are various types of indoor lights to mimic "normal" daylight available here in Finland. Philips is one of the more widely used/known. Personally, I do not have a huge problem with the short winter daylight hours but since I live in the south (Helsinki) we don't get it that badly, at winter solstice it's roughly about 5 hours of daylight. By the time you reach the arctic circle a few hundred miles north of here, there is little daylight left in the middle of winter though.
The benefits of these lights are fairly well known and understood in the Nordic countries, although I have never used one.
Like this light problem....
Don't send them any more light, you want to help these people, send them u-hauls, luggage, boxes. If you people would live where the LIGHT IS!
Why don't you people move to where the LIGHT IS!
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
How is this news? Devices like this have been around for years. I used one to help with my seasonal anxiety a few years ago. Awesome how the product and brand name are all over the place too. Reads just like an ad.
Worst case scenario: the sun sets on a Friday for the last time that year. Imagine trying to keep Shabbat for four months, at 78N.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
FTFS: "the town remains in perpetual darkness for four months each winter"
Four months? That's much shorter than the old definition of "perpetual"
FOX NEWS, now on CNN.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
We use alarms for deaf people with a vibrator element [...]
Best thing I ever had.
That's what she said!
Bah. Here in the states we are about to start two years of darkness.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The only thing missing from that article was more sprinkled mentioning of FoxNews.com. FoxNews.com should really start mentioning FoxNews.com more in FoxNews.com articles.
This makes no sense. Why would the Vampires go for the town that only has 30 days of night when there is this gem?
Actually, this is probably their vacation spot and the whole 'wake up light' thing is just a cover-up attempt to distract people from the fact that a Vampire clan has made this their haven.
You read it here first!
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Do they really want to see what they've been eating?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Fun fact: It's not permitted to walk around outside of the town of Longyearbyen (that is anywhere on Svalbard) unless you are carrying a high-powered rifle. Polar bears are a serious threat in those parts. Stephen Colbert be warned!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Topographic_map_of_Svalbard.svg
I spent a year at 77N - it's not perpetual darkness. The moon is up for one week 24/7 around full, the aurora is spectacular, there's a light in the southern sky at noon, and at the ends it's hours of sunrise/sunset each day, the snow multiplies the light, the whole sky glows with incoming charged particles. Only if you are addicted to artificial light is it night.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Am I the only person who read that on October 26th, 2000 - the sun went down, and hasn't come up since? Not that the population is 2000?
Depression from darkness is really rare. I've never suffered it, nor have I met anyone who has - I think it's comforting. What's the real sanity killer is the midnight sun - full sunlight all night, so you basically need to nail the windows shut if you want to sleep. As the finnish guy wrote above, people only really tend to get down at autumn, but I've met people who get very agitated/disturbed when it gets brighter in early spring for some reason.
Emotions! In your brain!
I thought they built a big dome with an artificial sun on top...