I was playing with the sun, today. It seems to travel along my wall at an inch a minute, so I can sit there and watch it go. At about 12:30, it enters through the bedroom door enough that there’s a 7″x10″ square on the wall, and that seems enough to light the room like a 60-watt bulb.
I’ve decided that sunlight is a pale (near-white) yellow colour, which is completely different from either cool-white or daylight bulbs, which are red-white or blue-white, respectively. It’s also far away from those horrid orange bulbs, which people seem to believe mimics natural sunlight. I’d say those reddish Cool White bulbs come closest, so far.
The problem with lightbulbs is that they’re so dark. When a patch of reflected sunlight a square foot in area is brighter than a 60-watt bulb, what’s a full-on beam from a window? You’d need to fire a pale yellow light onto a wall or the ceiling at about 20000 lumens to get a full daylight effect. That’s like having at least ten lightbulbs on.
I repositioned my big-ass mirror so that the afternoon sun is directed onto the ceiling directly above me, which casts an amazing light around my desk.
In short: We should stop kidding ourselves. Normal lightbulbs are like fire; dark, hot, and orange; and the more we try to convince ourselves that they’re fine, the more we’re just living in modern caves. It’s the future, and we should really be finding that real daylight lighting solution.
I’m imagining fake ‘windows’ made with a huge sheet of OLED material. With luck, we’re only a year or two away from good, real consumer applications. Those would create a fairly-diffuse light of any colour the manufacturer chooses. Hopefully, they don’t go with dark orange.
Tags: lightbulbs, OLED, sunlight
wow… Big ass mirror… This is mostly nonsense… btw when is that naked web developer day where all the sites show only the coding in the website for that day? Also which sites? for school.
CSS Naked Day is April 9th. Google’s cache seems to have the wrong date.
For more, you can check out Dustin Diaz’s site, at http://naked.dustindiaz.com/
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Wow, these comments are unbearable. I feel like I have to apologize, on behalf of all the thinking citizens of the net.
I’m happy to see you driving IE’s standards up so far in the past few years. I can see, from the above comments, how the mistakes of the IE6 team has damaged your reputation so horribly.
I’d like to believe all of Microsoft is coming around. Office 2007 is beautiful, Windows 7 sounds like it runs amazingly, and IE is quickly swooping back to a semblance of standards.
Just make sure it’s easy for developers to test in IE6/7/8.
Keep at it!
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You my friend are a douche.
Say what you will about IE6, because it’s horrendous. But the current IE team is working as hard as they can to improve standards. We’re hearing about rounded corners in IE9. And don’t say “oh, but everyone’s had that forever,” because Opera is only just releasing rounded corners in the next little while.
The thing you need to remember about big corporations is that each department can have a completely different mentality, and that often-times the managers will dictate what happens with the products. The individual developers blogging on the IE blog are hard-working people who feel deeply for standards and hurt when they see what IE6 has done. Blast Microsoft however much you want, but have some respect for the people. If they truly didn’t care, we wouldn’t have gotten a W3C-compliant box model in IE8.
Even then, I’d rather you blame the Fortune 500 companies who’re too cheap to upgrade past their ten-year-old computers, and who stick their employees on IE6. When it comes to the net, those companies will fail, because the entire strength of the net is the rate of change that’s possible in such a short amount of time.
If it wasn’t for those companies, IE6 wouldn’t exist today.