teslabox

Similar submission from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37180115

I bought some Zenni Optical glasses recently. Paid for the blue light filter ("Blokz"), and the yellow and amber clip-ons.

Night Driving Clip-On (Yellow Tint) - $5.95. Sunglasses Clip-On - Amber - $3.95

They also came with a "Blue Light Laser Pen".

The lenses do block the narrow wavelength of the "blue light laser".

High-energy photons - violet -> Blue - are a full 100nm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_spectrum#Spectral_colo...

It's not enough to block out a few random wavelengths of blue, you need to reduce them all.

One of you told about using amber glasses to protect themselves from LED streetlights. I found that amber glasses blocked out too much light. Some yellow glasses are pretty good, some yellow glasses are worthless. These are my new favorite blue-blockers: https://www.harborfreight.com/safety/vision-protection/safet...

They work great with contacts. I can also put my glasses over them. They're not as good as the Cocoons, that my local glasses store stopped selling because people were wearing them at night, but they can't be beat for the price.

My comment from 1.5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29962021 "Most of the glasses sold for blue-light blocking don't block nearly enough of the blue light to make a meaningful difference. I think the main thing is to reduce the amount of blue light that you're exposed to at night. [...]"

(minor edits)

There is a currently approved treatment. It’s basically an allopregnanolone supplement, given as an IV infusion over 60 hours, for $34,000.

There are much cheaper treatments for PPD, but nothing that would ever pay for the approval process.

https://twitter.com/jamesknochel/status/1688023798447316992?...

It's a good article. I have an orange LED bulb in my bedside table lamp. It's fantastic. I have 2000K ('amber') bulbs elsewhere, and 2400K COB leds. These are pretty good except for when taking pictures.

> Many people use much brighter LED lights than necessary, especially outside.

> but the street looks nicer (it's in color).

Streetlights aren't for doing your makeup, they're for seeing hazards in the roadway that are beyond the range of a vehicle's headlights. Orange is the ideal color for outdoor lighting, because of the way the light-sensitive proteins in our eyes are 'tuned' ('cones' and 'rods', 'photopic' to 'mesopic' and 'scotopic', etc). My notes from a few years ago: https://teslabox.com/2020/01/color-vision-night-vision-notes... - tl/dr: peripheral vision is tuned to blue, 2 of the 3 color-sensitive proteins are highly sensitive to orange light.

Curious: why did you link to that particular thread? 66 comments, including one by yours truly. imho, this is the best of that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19855545

My ubiquiti UAP-Lite was great, until it became flakey. I swapped it for an ancient router that supported an old build of ddwrt, and everything wireless started working again.

Retrospectively I think the ubiquiti AP’s flakiness was caused by a firmware update. This Reddit post is ~2 years old:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/n46siv/whats_the_...

I’ve been meaning to do a hard reset and/or change the firmware, and put the ubiquiti AP back into service, but the old & slow ddwrt router works fine for everything not an Ethernet cable.

Edit: (note to self) https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/204910124-UniFi-Networ...

In the beginning of the modern era, electric light was fantastically expensive. People used just enough light to get by.

LEDs put out 7x as much light as an incandescent bulb, so people can use 3x as much light as they need and still save money on their power bill. I have a neighbor that has a string of bulbs along their driveway. These are left on all night every night. City code requires "fully shielded" lighting, but the city ignores its own code.

What Is a Fully Shielded Light Fixture? http://we-watch.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/FullyShielded...

The tragedy of the increased amount of blue light in our nighttime environment is that there's a bunch of old research about the physiological mechanism behind high-energy blue photons causing inflammation in the eyes. This gradually results in people having reduced low-light visual acuity. Whoops.

I think people need to be told that artificial light is most useful to humans when it bounces off of things. This is why streetlights are mounted high on poles, and are designed so all the light is directed down.

Bulbs that can be seen are mostly emitting wasted light. A friend recently bought some light fixtures on the basis of looking nice when the lights are off. I think they're gradually realizing that staring directly into LEDs is not a pleasant experience.

In the old days, people bought light fixtures to hide the bulbs, and to direct the light where it's needed.

Chickens are very efficient at converting bugs into human-usable protein (eggs). I think they're less vulnerable to the allergens on account of their higher body temperatures.

Lighting regulations haven't kept up with changes in the technology used to produce electric light. Most LED headlights are much bluer than the halogen bulbs the automotive companies started using in the 1960's.

I think we're all casualties of a sort of trench warfare. Luxury brands started putting High-intensity discharge (HID) lamps in their high-end cars in the 1990's. HID lights put out more blue than halogen light bulbs. This led to the association of blue-white headlights with expensive cars. I suspect the marketing departments of the automotive companies told their engineers to use blue-white LEDs when these first became available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_discharge_lamp#...

No one had the answer to my AskHN: What prevents the automotive industry from using safe LEDs? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27334405

Another problem is people retrofitting LED bulbs into housings that were designed for halogen bulbs. The fine print on these bulbs usually say "for off road use only". The LED bulbs have a totally different light output than the halogens. The housing for the halogen bulbs are designed with the assumption that there will be a filament at a precise location. LEDs retrofit into a housing designed for a filament usually just blind everyone on the road.

I've also seen people driving around with LED light bars turned on. I don't think it's legal to add supplemental light to a vehicle.

I have a few self-defense strategies to protect my eyesight. Mainly this is wearing yellow glasses whenever I'm likely to be exposed to blue-white LEDs.

(minor edits)

Polyunsaturated oils combine spontaneously with the oxygen to deteriorate into a hard film.

Vegetable oil bottles tend to get sticky on the outside. Used vegetable oil is great for wood preservation. Many stains have heavy metals in them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drying_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid_peroxidation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid_peroxidation#Hazards

Contaminated wheat gets diverted to animal feed. At a certain threshold, even chickens shouldn't be fed moldy grains.

Mycotoxins in Poultry Feed and Feed Ingredients from Sub-Saharan Africa and Their Impact on the Production of Broiler and Layer Chickens: A Review -- https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6651/13/9/633

Perhaps the next step is to feed the moldy grains to bugs (black soldier flies? mealworms?), then feed the bugs to the chickens. Animals perform an invaluable service to humanity: they upcycle inedible calories into calories humans can use.

In March 2020 I had a chronic cough - not an infection, just an itch that could only be scratched with a cough. "people are going to think I'm trying to kill them."

An old herbal treatment for the lungs is inhaling the fumes of apple brandy from a charred oak keg. Ethanol is an antiseptic, while the apple and oak flavoring compounds help stimulate the lungs to repair themselves.

Since I've started huffing on apple brandy, the itch in my lungs is much better than it used to be.

The charred oak keg is important, because it facilitates the evaporation of the brandy into fumes. Someone shared that they use oak spirals in a glass container: https://www.facebook.com/EdgarCayceOnPsychicHealth/posts/pfb...

My mom's husband tested positive for the virus recently. She developed a cough, but 'tested negative' (home tests are probably mostly worthless). After a month she was still coughing. I set her up with a barrel and sent her husband to the liquor store for apple brandy. Her cough was mostly cleared up in a week. Then she got sick again, but this cleared up quicker than her September case of "not-coronavirus".

edit: treating lungs with inhaled alcohol is science-approved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756511

The oceans are Earth’s heat buffers. Summers are when the ocean stores heat, winters are when it releases heat.

There is more land in the northern hemisphere, more ocean in the Southern Hemisphere. Summers get hotter in the north, winters get colder. This is because land does not store/release nearly as much heat as ocean.

I find most "2700K" LEDs sub-optimal. Helped someone set up their office recently. It was too dark with 1 bulb in each of the 3-bulb ceiling fixtures (48" fluorescents). We found 48" 4000K LEDs in the ceiling fixtures. She found 3000K tubes (GE? Feit? Philips) at the home store. They're quite pleasant, much better than other 3000K bulbs I've been around.

I have some Citizen "CITILED Amber Color COB" on top of my kitchen cabinets. They have a little hump in the blue portion of their spectral graph, but are fantastic. Rated at 2200K

https://ce.citizen.co.jp/cms/ce/lighting_led/dl_data/COB_Amb...

Also have some Amber Philips 2000K bulbs, which are quite nice.

In the beginning of Electric Light, all bulbs were 2500K (incandescent). Mercury Vapor lights started getting used outdoors, but eventually the lighting industry figured out High Pressure Sodium (blue-free), and Low Pressure Sodium (pure orange) for outdoor lighting. Halogens can be tuned, I think... Some Halogens are 3000K. Automotive halogens are much more orange/yellow than the halogens I have in my ceiling fan.

The two essential tools for creating a tolerable light in our modern world are dimmer switches and the using safe color temperatures for LED light sources.

> The most significant benefit I’ve noticed is that I can get back to sleep after getting up in the middle of the night—now that I’m no longer blinded by harsh overhead light in the bathroom.

My bathroom has too much light most of the time. If I was "working on my makeup" the amount of light would be just right, but that's not me. I bought my first dimmer switch at Habitat for Humanity. It was the kind that has a little lever next to the on/off switch - basically you decide on the amount of light, then it's pre-set to that amount.

The Habitat dimmer switch was okay, but I'd still walk into the bathroom from a black hallway and blind myself, as I never checked the light level before hitting the switch. On surveying the dimmers at Home Depot, I settled on the kind that starts "off", and gradually increases the light level.

My other dimmer switches are the classic round-dimmer option, and one that has a button and a big 'how much light do you want' .... "slide":

https://www.homedepot.com/b/Electrical-Wiring-Devices-Light-...

I have three bedroom light switches. Ceiling fan light has halogen bulbs with a slide dimmer. Outlet switch has a deep red LED bulb in a table lamp. There was a 5000K fluorescent above the closet that I replaced with a fixture from the thrift store, that has a mix of orange and red bulbs.

The kitchen has horrible hanging lights over the stove. Someone installed 3000K LED bulbs. I replaced these with incandescents and halogens, and installed a dimmer, but they were all terrible. Eventually I found some 2000K "Amber" Philips LED bulbs. These work with my LED dimmer, and are tolerable. With the Amber bulbs at least you're not staring into an artificial sun. If it was up to me, I'd get rid of the hanging lights and go back to the 90's light canisters in the ceiling.

tl/dr: Good lighting is invisible. Bad lighting forces people to stare into artificial suns. "5000K" light sources are for plants, NOT people. To protect eyes, slide dimmers that always start with the minimum amount of light are the greatest.

> Water consumption with respect to the animals themselves is high but once you factor in all of the water used in the production of the feed itself it's crazy especially when considering the subsidies in play.

Animals are properly used to upcycle calories which humans can’t consume. Ideally the heavy lifting would be done by bugs, egg chickens and dairy cows.

Subsidies were initiated by politicians who didn’t understand the problem they were trying to solve.

Lots of discussion online about the investigation. Search for “Toyota ECU spaghetti code”

One result: https://www.safetyresearch.net/toyota-unintended-acceleratio...

The investigation found the code was a mess:

“Michael Barr, a well-respected embedded software specialist, spent more than 20 months reviewing Toyota’s source code at one of five cubicles in a hotel-sized room, supervised by security guards, who ensured that entrants brought no paper in or out, and wore no belts or watches. Barr testified about the specifics of Toyota’s source code, based on his 800-page report. Phillip Koopman, a Carnegie Mellon University professor in computer engineering, a safety critical embedded systems specialist, authored a textbook, Better Embedded System Software, and performs private industry embedded software design reviews – including in the automotive industry – testified about Toyota’s engineering safety process. Both used a programmer’s derisive term for what they saw: spaghetti code – badly written and badly structured source code.

“Barr testified:

“There are a large number of functions that are overly complex. By the standard industry metrics some of them are untestable, meaning that it is so complicated a recipe that there is no way to develop a reliable test suite or test methodology to test all the possible things that can happen in it. Some of them are even so complex that they are what is called unmaintainable, which means that if you go in to fix a bug or to make a change, you’re likely to create a new bug in the process. Just because your car has the latest version of the firmware — that is what we call embedded software — doesn’t mean it is safer necessarily than the older one….And that conclusion is that the failsafes are inadequate. […]”

- https://www.safetyresearch.net/toyota-unintended-acceleratio...

Thought this was interesting:

> A co-generation plant uses just one fuel source and produces both electricity and steam, making it a very efficient mode of energy production. “ConEd steam service has the lowest carbon emissions intensity per unit of energy delivered compared to all other options available to the buildings of Manhattan,”

Cogen is also known as "combined heat and power": https://www.energy.gov/eere/amo/combined-heat-and-power-basi...

A lot of our modern use of energy is inefficient-by-design: the system is designed to 'use as much energy as possible'. Why don't we have more cogeneration systems, where the waste heat is used instead of released?

Earlier today I looked for information about boilers that can run on anything: wood, coal, oil, etc. I guess this was inspired by talking to my neighbor, who was waiting for his wood delivery yesterday. I don't know if he's hooked up to natural gas, but his fireplace gives him the option to not be dependent on the gas system for keeping warm. I was also looking at a hybrid boiler/heat pump systems, where the heat pump can be supplemented. The same neighbor told me his former employer's ground-source heat pump system did not work very well at all, on account of the ground loop making ice cubes out of the groundwater (or something like that).

The oils of safflower, rapeseed ("Canola"), safflower, corn, cottonseed, etc go rancid during the production process. They are usually 'refined' with steam to remove the distinct odor of rancid oil. All the 'vegetable' oils at a modern grocery store are refined.

After pressing, the remaining oil is removed from the little seeds with the petroleum distillate hexane. The hexane is mostly boiled off and captured for reuse.

Olive oil can be produced without much in the way of modern technology. It's got a little more Omega-6 than ideal. Sometimes I pick up a bottle of unfiltered olive oil at Trader Joe's.

Coconut oil is stable at tropical temperatures, but doesn't have any vitamin A.

I think it's important to avoiding Omega-6 oils. Pig/chicken fat mostly reflects what the pig/chicken was fed. Ruminants can bio-hydrogenate PUFA's, but this system gets overwhelemed when they're finished on grain...

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable_oil#Production

Natural fire is incompatible with houses built with sticks. Either you figure out how to build fireproof houses, or you manage the forests in the Wildland-urban interface [0].

[0] https://www.usfa.fema.gov/wui/

> Actively managed forests sound good, but be rational.

It can work. The U.S. Forest Service does a pretty good job of managing the forests around my part of Northern Arizona. 20 years ago a fire got out of control and we lost a few homes, but they've been diligently mowing the underbrush ever since.

~5 years ago a fire started. I went to their briefing. They were honest: "this is a worst-case-scenario location for a fire", because it was burning in an area that hadn't been burned or treated in 40+ years.

They contract for companies with brush mowers to shred the underbrush, and keep track of when each section of the forest gets mowed.

No fires this summer, on account of a crazy amount of rain. It'll be 10 years before this summer's growth dies out and becomes a fire hazard.

> “It’s well known that when you put a ton of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it doesn’t stay up there forever. A massive amount of it falls into the oceans, while the rest of it is taken up by trees and wetlands and those kinds of areas,” Dr Sohngen explained.

In the pre-modern era the oceans emitted enough CO2 to keep land plants alive. Now the flow has reversed. I don’t think climate activists are taking this into account.

We’re in the third year of La Niña: cool ocean temperatures in the pacific: https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/e...

The oceans are heated by underwater volcanoes and the sun. The sun has been slightly less active than usual this Solar cycle. We don’t measure most of the underwater volcanos’ output.

Probably going to be a cold winter in the northern hemisphere.

Ibuprofen is not terrible, and there's a children's version. I think it's usually better to let children have mild fevers, and do something else when the fever is more serious.

Tylenol does NOT have anti-inflammatory properties. Ibuprofen is a better in many different ways.

I noticed paracetamol was given at the very beginning of the girl’s ordeal. Acetaminophen (paractemol / Tylenol) is the standard of care for fevers and pain, but it is a terrible drug. A comment here said it’d never be approved in the modern world because the mechanism of action is unknown.

But the mechanism of harm is known: disruption of the “electron transport chain” in the mitochondria.

Prenatal Tylenol is now well-associated with autism. I have a friend who I talked out of using Tylenol daily - she’s doing much better.

Edit: spelling (comment below)

Estrogen is a 'stress hormone' that needs to be balanced with anti-stress hormones for optimal health.

All the steroids in the body are made from cholesterol. The term is steroidogenesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steroid#Steroidogenesis

Estrogen is at the end of the steroidogenesis pathway. It's a stress hormone. In the menstrual cycle, estrogen tells the uterine lining to 'swell and divide'. Fertile women are protected from their higher estrogen levels by their high levels of Progesterone USP during the luteal phase of their menstrual cycle. When women reach menopause, their heart attack numbers rapidly reach men's heart attack numbers.

Adipose tissue has a lot of the aromatase enzyme [0], which converts testosterone to estrogen. People with more adipose tissue lose their testosterone by converting it to estrogen. The heart of both genders concentrates testosterone.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aromatase

[1] Obesity, estrogens and adipose tissue dysfunction – implications for pulmonary arterial hypertension - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20458940209520...

I sold a progesterone supplement on Amazon years ago... My best customer was "Billie", who I suspect was MTF and was using progesterone USP to balance his estrogen treatments. I referred him to other manufacturers when he noticed my supplement was no longer available.

Pregnenolone is a useful supplement for balancing the steroid system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steroid#/media/File:Steroidoge...

(edit: added [1])

A sentence or two summarizing the link would be helpful: “This is the slatestarcodex psychiatrist’s 2015 take on ‘chemical imbalances’”

> We could do that if we'd only replace cow's milk with nut milk

Agree that meat is very inefficient. But…

Dairy animals concentrate the calories on land that can’t be mechanically farmed, converting them into human-usable nutrition.

Even dairy animals on a conventional dairy farm upcycle calories - just searched and learned dairy farmers can boost a cow’s low-quality straw diet with cottonseed meal (high protein). Humans don’t eat cottonseed meal.

I’ve known people with a single dairy cow, or a few dairy goats. I don’t think “nut milk” works without a nut milk factory.

The fine article mentions Michael Pollan, whose book Cooked [0] was recently given to me. The chapter on the history of wheat is great.

Pollan says that humans have been trying to make their bread whiter as long as we've been making bread. But we didn't get really good at it until the roller mill was invented in the mid-1800's. In the olden days every community had a flour mill, because milled flour only lasted 2 weeks before it became stale. At first the white flour was a modern miracle: perfectly airy/fluffy bread, flour able to be stored, transported and shipped long distances, etc. Then degenerative diseases started appearing.

Fortification started around 1940's / 1950's, after the Army noticed the recruits for WWII weren't nearly as healthy as in decades past. The joke of fortification is that they only replace some of what was removed by turning wheat into white flour.

Haven't finished the article yet, but it's great.

Besides the widespread fortification and consumption of white flour, what other science-mistakes have become endemic?

edit: [0] https://michaelpollan.com/books/cooked/

> my doc was able to diagnose me with narcolepsy. That diagnosis allowed me to have Xyrem covered by my insurance.

That’s a very effective but highly controlled substance.

My introduction to Xyrem was via a simple statement: “Sometimes people sleep but don’t get rested. Those people can take gamma hydroxybutyrate, which is found in passionfruit.” I haven’t found any confirmation of passionfruit having this substance. I got a friend some passionflower tea, and she found it remarkably effective for helping her drift off to sleep.

It’s a safe simple compound, easy to synthesize with lab chemicals. But it also has nefarious uses, so it got scheduled.

“Sodium oxybate is the sodium salt of γ-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB).”

I didn't take up coffee drinking until my late-20's. At first I took my coffee black, then I read how caffeine boosts the metabolism. This draws down sugar from the blood. To avoid a cortisol response, it's best to complement the caffeine in coffee with sugar.

This study seems to confirm that fake sugar is harmful. I have family who drink fake-sugar cola products - these don't help their weight. I've seen one person fall apart 'mentally' within 1/2 hour of drinking an electrolyte beverage made with sucralose and other fake sugar.

Ideally glucose is consumed with potassium, to avoid insulin release: milk, orange juice, potatoes, etc... Fructose does not stimulate the release of insulin.