...and out went all the lights
Jan. 19th, 2004 09:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fleetfootmikeSo there we were in bed, talking over plans for the house, around 11pm last night, and it all goes completely dark, bar the LED on the baby monitor, which starts crackling.
Took me a second or two to realise we'd had a power cut, and the reason for the crackle was that it'd switched from mains to battery power, and the master unit in James' room had gone off ('cause it has no battery) so it wasn't getting signal.
Everything came back in about 5 minutes (barring a computer out in the office, which is a bleedin' stupid Compaq that doesn't reboot when the power is reapplied - sorry Dave!), but I got to thinking a little about light pollution.
The lights were off before the power cut: even so, it's quite amazing how much darker it got when the three nearby streetlights and the glow of a clock radio were taken away (we tend to turn the baby monitor on its front so the LED isn't as annoying). I was reminded of a night or two spent at an SF convention in Blankenheim in Germany: the venue was a youth hostel in a castle atop a hill, well above the few streetlights in the village below. And it was dark. Sufficiently dark that I suffered one of my occasional panic attacks (usually induced by not being able to see at all), and actually had to sleep with the bathroom light on.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
oreouk and demoneyes's spare room does that to me too, mostly because their blackout curtains are WAY too efficient: I tend to turn on one of the printers in the room, as the single green LED is enough light for it not to be totally dark.
So I wondered: how many kids - heck how many people - are there out there who have never experienced total darkness?
Took me a second or two to realise we'd had a power cut, and the reason for the crackle was that it'd switched from mains to battery power, and the master unit in James' room had gone off ('cause it has no battery) so it wasn't getting signal.
Everything came back in about 5 minutes (barring a computer out in the office, which is a bleedin' stupid Compaq that doesn't reboot when the power is reapplied - sorry Dave!), but I got to thinking a little about light pollution.
The lights were off before the power cut: even so, it's quite amazing how much darker it got when the three nearby streetlights and the glow of a clock radio were taken away (we tend to turn the baby monitor on its front so the LED isn't as annoying). I was reminded of a night or two spent at an SF convention in Blankenheim in Germany: the venue was a youth hostel in a castle atop a hill, well above the few streetlights in the village below. And it was dark. Sufficiently dark that I suffered one of my occasional panic attacks (usually induced by not being able to see at all), and actually had to sleep with the bathroom light on.
oreouk and demoneyes's spare room does that to me too, mostly because their blackout curtains are WAY too efficient: I tend to turn on one of the printers in the room, as the single green LED is enough light for it not to be totally dark.So I wondered: how many kids - heck how many people - are there out there who have never experienced total darkness?
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Date: 2004-01-19 04:15 pm (UTC)This is one of the reasons why our reaction times are slower in low-light conditions. We literally have to wait longer for the signals to be generated by the retina, and reach the brain. It's the basis of one system of 3D movie viewing, whereby one eye is covered with a dark filter, so that it passes its image to the brain *later* than the other eye... It's also why my sister, when she was suffering from some of the nastier side-effects of MS, could watch TV quite happily in a darkened room, with the brightness and contrast turned way down low, but would become seasick if the brightness was raised, complaining that "its all happening too fast!". The reduced light levels had the effect of smoothing out jerky movements by increasing the motion blur (pictures (or parts therof) were averaged over a longer period of time before being reported to the brain), and reducing the visual data-rate to her brain!