Happy Holidays from Light Pollution News! Here's a special gift episode as a thank you for your continued support in 2023!
In this special mini-episode, host Bill McGeeney shares seven articles left out of the normal month to month cycle! Stay tuned to for a post-show wrap up montage!
See Full Show Notes, Lighting Tips and more at LightPollutionNews.com. Like this episode, share it with a friend!
Happy Holidays from Light Pollution News! Here's a special gift episode as a thank you for your continued support in 2023!
In this special mini-episode, host Bill McGeeney shares seven articles left out of the normal month to month cycle! Stay tuned to for a post-show wrap up montage!
See Full Show Notes, Lighting Tips and more at LightPollutionNews.com. Like this episode, share it with a friend!
Like what we're doing? For the cost of coffee, you can become a Monthly Supporter? Your assistance will help cover server and production costs.
Speaker 1:
Hey, there, it's Bill from Light Pollution News, hoping you and yours having a safe and enjoyable holiday. This is a year-end special little mini-episode that I've put together for you. Champagne is about to be poured over here actually not too long and I have a small glass of rich eggnog sitting right next to me and this guy, you know it's good when it creates that pasty, kind of pasty local in the glass and the side of the glass when you move it from one side to the other, and it slowly moves from one side of the glass to the other when you angle it. So this episode is a bit different from our standard news recap. There's no guests, no plugs, just me, and I'm going to give you some of the stories that didn't make our monthly show. They range from the absurd to inspirational and possibly everything in between. I'll let you decide on that one. So before I start this off today, I want to give a heartfelt thanks you at home for your support and your kind words, and, as with any new show, it takes some time to actually gain your footing. Your help, your word of mouth, your friends and your generous donations have really helped us chart ourselves on this road, and I'm really grateful for everything that the Light Pollution News community has done. I really hope to grow with you guys over the coming year and see what we can offer you guys. I'd be remiss not to give a shout out to our incredible guests this year, including Bonnie Payne, frank Torina, brendan Hap, dale and Bert Michael Reimer, john Barrington, scott Morgan, jared Flesher, bill Green, kim Walcheck, drew Evans, ziz Knight, ben Choppel, matias Schmidt, steven Hummel and, of course, definitely not least, travis Novitski. And I want to give a very special thank you to my wife, caitlin, who, with her tireless support and hard work behind the scenes, has helped to handle everything I don't get to, and she keeps Light Pollution News on the track, keeps us on the road and we don't fly off the rails, which I really am greatly appreciative of. Okay, how about we jump in?
Speaker 1:
Left off of the December recording, we have this piece from Ars Technica. I'm sure you guys have heard about this. Are you familiar with board Ape, the NFT? And if you're not familiar with board Ape NFTs, that's fine. And NFTs are the non-fungible collectible tokens, their crypto currency, essentially crypto token that they kind of peaked during the 2021 NFT craze. These tokens are essentially, they're like collectible assets. You can purchase one and is theoretically supposed to raise in value as demand for goes over time. Board Ape owners actually come together for an annual meetup called Ape Fest, and this year's Ape Fest taking place in Hong Kong, less than visitors with severe high pain and burning sensation in their eyes. I laugh. It's not that funny, but this is something that can snow blindness or welder's flash 20 people received what essentially amounted to sunburn from massive amount of UV exposure inside the convention. Yikes, what were they thinking over there? At the Ape Fest that's inside.
Speaker 1:
And the same month we had this inspiring piece from Africa. Lights do serve a purpose and nothing better illustrates the need for light at night than this story from Dushwell. A man by the name of Alwayne Monyanga created a solution for electricity starved rural Zimbabwe. The Chugoba lamp upcycles plastic bottles to essentially become a solar powered LED lantern. Monyanga scours trash sites to collect containers which he uses to construct the lantern. He's already made 500 such lights that he hands out to school children to help them extend their studies after hours. Monyanga is currently working to educate students on how to build their own solar lanterns. The news story spun this piece as a circular economy solution to leverage waste for good. And a very cool story In April, the Verge had a bone to pick with night sky photographers.
Speaker 1:
I'm sure there's some of you out here that will fit this bill. Have you ever done this? Have you ever faked a night sky shot? People haven't faked night sky shots longer than you think, even dating back to the ungodly age of film. Astronomer Tyler Nordren recalled postcards he saw of the American Southwest, and these postcards had the moon rising in the wrong location and even casting incorrect shadows down on the subsequent buttes.
Speaker 1:
The spring, samsung came out with a new enhanced feature, essentially a blur corrector, which can add detail to things that weren't apparent the first time around, as was the case when a Reddit user showed a cleaned up version of a previously completely blurred moon photo, which then Samsung's enhanced feature turned into a very sharp, perfect moon photo. But beyond Samsung, adobe users have found a way to create a further disingenuous touch up, and one such came from a National Geographic photo that was published in 2019. Photographer Beth Moon shot a picture of old trees a really, really pretty picture of old trees arching under a Milky Way. However, a keen eye will definitely pick out something, and actually you don't even need to have such a keen eye for this. You will note the cloned Milky Way that stretches almost copy and paste repetition across the entire night sky. That's block, block, block, block, block, block. That's some shoddy fakery right there. With the introduction of AI photo editing software, I can only imagine such fakes have become commonplace or are much less identifiable. I'm going to take a sip of eggnog here and just salute those individuals who still are able to take classic photos without any of the fakery. God bless you all.
Speaker 1:
Well, in September, I saw this press release investing firm Lombard Odeir, when all in, on restorative investments, which I presume are targeting responsible practitioners of environmental activities, including everything from pest management to heavy industry. What is Baste, specified was securing the future of our skies, which took aim directly at promoting smarter cities to reduce environmental impacts and protect night skies. The press release specifically cited the example of Barcelona and the City of London, two communities that we actually spoke about earlier this year. You'll recall the City of London, a sub-site community in a greater London area, requires builders to submit plans on light pollution mitigation In 2021. Barcelona used motion detecting lamp posts that auto dim when no one was present. It's a chalk one up for capitalism.
Speaker 1:
As you're aware, we have a lot of streetlight stories that end up on the show. If there's one thing that I can tell you in 2023, we had a share of strange ones. We had lights crashing on people multiple times, multiple times. I didn't include one of those in the monthly shows, and that was in Boston Disney. You had lights attacking people. You had a couple other articles where lights were attacking people, so watch it. When you're walking under a streetlight, they might get you.
Speaker 1:
However, this one I'm going to share is probably the saddest one of the whole year. This comes to us from March, where a streetlight pole electrocuted a dog when it's leash, which had some metal in it, conducted a charge from the pole to the dog. The city of Milwaukee claims that the short was caused simply by aged infrastructure. That's not going to bring back. Ted Eric Gross is poodle mutts rescue. Now Gross is on a one man mission to ensure this problem doesn't occur again, and Gross goes literally pole to pole testing voltage levels. What is sad story? What is sad story? And I think Milwaukee is trying to use some of the federal funds that they received from the Inflation Reduction Act to fully overhaul some of their streetlight problems. This one came in late to my feed, but it was a good one. I ended up not including it in I believe it was the October show or maybe it was the September show mainly because it was a little bit redundant with some of the themes you already had going on. So I want to bring it here because it really is a good good op-ed.
Speaker 1:
Back in July, the Biden administration gave the energy department the green light to flick the switch on incandescent and everything converted over to LEDs. This was largely done due to the vast energy efficiencies realized from LEDs, though the move did have its detractors. Some of those include a University of South Florida public health professor, catherine Dreybjack. Following the rule change, dreybjack wrote a detailed piece in the Hill disputing the Biden administration's claim that there is no evidence that using LEDs in daily life results in averse health effects or negatively effects animals. Dreybjack's intention cited numerous sources, including a report from 2019, for which the French Agency of Food, environmental and Occupational Health and Safety identified dangers including LED flicker, food and toxicity, glare and circadian rhythm impacts. If you recall, the December episodes are guest Stephen Hummel's girlfriend experienced headaches and eye strain due to the flicker of the LEDs. Some people are simply more susceptible than others.
Speaker 1:
Dreybjack also cites a 2014 study that found that blue light in LEDs induced damage in retinal cells, which can lead to vision problems, speed up aging of our eyes and lead to macular degeneration. You know, I've always wondered about this specific piece here, because I see these parking lots, these apartment buildings, these gas station owners, and they will pick up the brightest possible LED panel that I've ever seen in my life to light up their parking area and I mean these things are extraordinarily bright. You could light up sports fields with these panels. So I wonder I've always wondered, I'm curious, as we go further down the age of LEDs, if we'll see studies kind of reassessing the damage from these super, super, even just as bright or brighter than the sun. It's so bright when you look up you get blinded instantly. So lastly and I didn't mean to take us too far off course there, so I apologize Lastly, dreybjack cites several other proofs to further her case, and I found this one also to be very interesting, perhaps because it's the most overlooked.
Speaker 1:
In 2013, an article identified the impact of resource extraction and depletion for LEDs, citing it to have negative environmental impacts upwards to the tune of three times that of the incandescent bulb. There's a piece of research that rarely gets bannered around and it will be interesting to see if LED production is reined in during the coming year. So let me take a quick sip here again. I gotta gotta throw this guy back. Before I finish up this show, we got one more article. Hmm. All right, I hope you guys are having a good holiday. I hope you guys are enjoying it.
Speaker 1:
This last one here is from the daily yonder and it was from October six. Title why do humans need dark skies? Per the New Mexico based park ranger, peter Lipscomb, daily yonder, ask the question the night sky is very important to you personally. When did you first feel the connection? And here's Lipscomb's response.
Speaker 1:
So my personal relationship with the night sky began as a young one, as a child growing up in Virginia and being in part and being in parts of Virginia that were rural places that had enough dark sky. I was just enthralled by what I could see after the sun went down the twinkling stars, the moon, things that are available to everybody If they got out to places naturally dark. So that became a source of fascination to me. But it all shifted in a really big way. When I experienced a total eclipse of the sun on March 7th 1970, when I was eight years old, and that experience was profound at every sensory level, I was at the beach, so I felt the breeze freshening, I smelled the ocean, I felt the cooling of the air against my skin and, as the breeze started blowing and I heard the birds quieting as if it was twilight and they were going to roost. And seeing that there were big things happening out there the moon moving in front of the sun I wanted to know more about those big things. I want to know what they were. So at that moment, I began a deeper journey in astronomy in terms of wanting to learn more about the different phenomenon out there and getting a sense of how we fit into the cosmos.
Speaker 1:
Well, thank you for listening and thank you for listening to all of the episodes this year, really really appreciate it and I look forward to seeing what light pollution news can do for you, our community, and how we can grow together in 2024. As always, you can find this show and the links over at light pollution newscom, and always feel free to reach out to me, bill, at light pollution newscom For one last time in 2023,. I'm your host, bill McGeaney, asking you to shine the light only where it's needed. Hope you and yours have a great holiday. If you'd like to be part of LPN, simply reach out to me, bill, at light pollution newscom. We can always use volunteer hand editing and hosting the show. Feel free to leave your questions down below and check out the other section of the way. But enough with me, let's jump right over. I'll be that this is episode one and I'm having a hard time trying to find co-hosts.
Speaker 1:
Joining me today is my ever-beautiful wife, Caitlyn Evans. I'll tell you why I think it matters. People see the stars. Human creativity is only as good as the environment it's in and be able to see stars and have curiosity constantly churning, and as a kid if you're a kid out there, you see all these different stars and planets. The creativity to crave juices that come out as a kid are there. And if you take away the natural environment, which is another effect that white pollution is having, and you're replacing it only with man-made environmental items, items that have limiting curiosity impact, at least in my mind, that have a limiting ability for someone to get curious about, you can build all the buildings and everything, but a lot of the problems is that people become subjects of their environment and they can't see outside of that environment.
Speaker 1:
Vanneker is the son of a former slave and his son of a former indentured servant. However, he left his mark on history as the first African-American astronomer of notoriety. So he's born in 1730s and this is during the colonial time. He attended a Quaker school, had a pro-election for engineering, he built irrigation solutions for his family farm, built a wooden clock that would keep time accurately. Until his death, vanneker spent three months even helping survey the newly planned Washington DC. By using these very using proof through his almanacs of the dignity that African-Americans needed to have, he sent one of them to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who actually floated out to his friends over in France because he was so impressed. The numbers of no light drivers over the last couple of years has noticeably increased. There aren't many drivers out there. This hasn't happened to him.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, it's just happened to me the other day, hey so a little request for the listeners out there If you happen to have a dash cam and you see somebody driving without your headlights, take a clip and then I'm trying to put together a video of just the dash cam or drivers without headlights, just to show that, hey, this area might be a little bit too great, and you can send that to dashcammitideapghcom or like to be able to go see a dark sky.
Speaker 4:
You got to have the time and the means to afford doing it here come the lumens.
Speaker 1:
This is a blog article written by the Haas School of Business Professor, lucas Davis. To start, I believe Davis sums up the current LED movement at Onefell Swoop. The LEDs are great, even if they won't necessarily result in large net energy savings.
Speaker 6:
But it's not just the satellites in the night sky that are having an effect on the world. They have to get space somehow, and that means there are a lot more launches taking place, and launches involve exhaust from rockets that is contributing some things like black carbon to the atmosphere. That has a climate warming effect. Those satellites have to come down when they're done, and there's a prospect now that we're looking at a future in which there are dozens of satellites coming back down to Earth every day to just replace the ones that are being launched, so that you have a more of a kind of steady state on the one hand.
Speaker 1:
Olivier Bozzetto devised a compromise allowing individual users to activate street lights for 15 minutes at a time, based on a GPS location. All the user needs to do is go to a website, switched on several lights at a time. Is this a path that should be emulated to either of you guys for seeing any problems with this? Is this a good thing? I'm curious. I'm curious to have any feedback. What about this?
Speaker 3:
I can definitely see cases where it could be abused.
Speaker 1:
Well, it's for 15 minutes, right? You'd have to sit there either create a bot that can do it for you.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, that's what I was thinking you know somebody.
Speaker 3:
you know somebody is going to create that app that you know automatically does it. Hopefully, you know, this isn't like Windows based, you know, because I mean we're going to have all kinds of hackers trying to hack this. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
So yeah, I can see. I can also see someone sitting in their room, like somewhere in like San Francisco or something Just in the bottom.
Speaker 3:
Somebody doing more code for the International?
Speaker 6:
Space Station.
Speaker 1:
Jared, I am in awe of you guys found a chalkboard.
Speaker 4:
You know that was in Gaspar's dining room, his house, where he's got three boys who are, I think are in high school and middle school. And it's the kind of household where there are math equations written on the dining room chalkboard that I can't make any sense of, but you know, that's kind of that's what they do.
Speaker 5:
Now I just want to pull out a few things that were said by Philadelphia. One of them on their website said I'm going to quote it here said Philadelphia we're replaced all the cities 130,000, 130,000, three lights with energy efficient bulbs over the next two years, with the dual purpose of showering high crime neighborhoods in brighter light and cutting electricity used citywide.
Speaker 1:
This is interesting. Should Greenwich, connecticut, ban exterior landscape lighting? Under the guise of protecting birds, the proposed code aims to reduce total business looming output by 30% or have them turned off completely an hour past closing time or after Tempea. An extension of the code will prohibit landscape lighting. Drawing from the unified eye of business owners and ostentatious residents alike, is this overreach? Isn't it one thing to say like you have a common sense framework for eliminating upward lighting, but is it OK to curtail purposeless vanity light which people seem to love, such as lights pointlessly focused on trees? Flower beds side of you're not nearly as attractive as you think. It is white stucco house. How do you guys feel about that?
Speaker 5:
I know they're facing down. You know they don't have to be facing into trees, into the sky. Certainly you're not illuminating anything more than you know. You're building so and my wife, Honda, has one switch in the top room to turn every light off in the car. Wow, it was like somebody. Why, Honda? Wow, I've heard of design for after photographers. I know, I know.
Speaker 4:
When we went to Cherry Springs I had no worries because I was like just switch that, switch and we're good.
Speaker 1:
It's offering prominent programmable outdoor lighting that you can paint your house trees and the sides of your neighbor's house in colors all seasons, for all holidays. Essentially, it's programmable lights that the advertises being the, you make your house look like a nonstop Disneyland year round and you know it's all on an app on your phone and you can decide where you want every different sector to look like. And this holiday season coming soon and maybe not leaving ever is a full color homes. I don't know if any of you guys live in areas where you have a lot of people.
Speaker 7:
Is this like National Influence, christmas vacation, where the Griswold turned on the five hundred thousand light bulbs. It's yep, you got it, but, yes, dead off. And there's nothing like pop culture that Germans love watching American movies. I grew up with it and it's. It's like a competition, right, who has the best lighting in between things and people who make like skipping anymore put up their Christmas lighting. It's what? Why are we competing with each other, right, to have the better outdoor lighting? You know, I have Santa Claus with a full lit up sled and the seven reindeer with a blinking red nose. I mean one night a year, right? Just like we have an international dark sky day or dark sky week where we turn off lights. You have, like you go all out one night a year, the day before Christmas, light up the whole town for one idea and then stop. It's ridiculous.
Speaker 1:
Well, the good news is, this technology just these programed by LEDs will be year round, so once you set it up, you can just keep reducing.
Speaker 7:
Awesome, perfect.
Speaker 2:
But these studies really show like the consequences of our bright city lights extend far beyond our surroundings and like maybe it's time we dim those lights and let our fellow earthlings have their own party in the dark.