What's Wrong With Dark?

'TimberCreek Ace'

ProfessorRoush is gravely disappointed in both mankind in general and in the thousands of electronic engineers who design our modern appliances and circuits and he has a question.   Why, oh why, does every thing that plugs into a wall need to shine at night?  I mean, quoting our aged President, "Cmon man!"  Is mankind, long established as the primary predator on the planet, still that afraid of the dark?   I know the light-emitting diode (LED) was a near-miraculous invention and it puts out a lot of light compared to its electricity use (9 times more efficient than an incandescent light source), but does everything have to have one?   Efficient or not, they still use electricity.   And they're plain irritating when they're just randomly stuck onto electronics.

'Black Stockings'

I woke up early and wandered on a still-pitch-dark night into my living room and kitchen this morning (the rooms are roughly contiguous) only to realize that I could quite clearly navigate by the indicator LED that turns on when the TV is off (of all the stupid ideas), by the two LEDs on the wifi extender, by LEDs on two kitchen safety sockets (if I wanted to know if they were powered, I COULD plug something into them), and by the clocks on the microwave, double oven, and an undercabinet radio.  Of yeah, and by the lighted panel on the refrigerator (lest I not know which button makes ice or water) and from the "Clean" notification on the dishwasher (Mrs. ProfessorRoush had run a load).  

'Night Embers'

A similar problem exists in our master bedroom, where each of three surge protectors have LEDs to assure me that everything is okay (one glows from both a switch and a blue light by the USB connections), the satellite cable system has a small red light to let me know it is OFF (it has both a white and blue one when it's ON), and a bedtable alarm clock glows orange.   This is in addition to the fact that opaque blinds are insufficient to block out the light pollution from town that floods the room and that the previously mentioned alarm clock projects on a ceiling so I can know the time without turning over.   I never use the alarm by the way, blessed with an internal clock that is always running, even away at conferences.  This year we at least eliminated one light source; a Vizio TV with an LED that turned on when the TV was off.

Unknown, but dark

It is no mystery to me that the number of sleep-deprived people is growing rapidly and why we are all ready, between our various tribes and political groups, to tear down civilization.   For goodness sake, I beg you, join me in the revolution to eliminate LED's on "off" electronics in the bedroom and to turn off street lights and other polluters outside.   Please engineers and politicians, give us back our dark nights, so we can sleep properly and deeply, albeit perhaps troubled still by dreams of saber-toothed cats and cave bears. I'm willing to chance it.

'Vatican City'

By now, Dear Reader, you've realized that I'm just on a rant and this blog entry has nothing to do with the somber dark daylilies pictured here.  In my defense, without the labels, I'm not sure anyone could tell the first four apart anyway.  I'm sorry for luring you into a rant with false pretenses of daylily pornography, but I had to get it off my chest.   Also, I need to correct a previous blog error in that this last daylily is 'Vatican City', not 'Popcorn Pete' as I said recently.   It's still pretty, even though it isn't perfectly dark, isn't it?   And now I'm really done because I just used 5 variations of "it" in the last sentence and I've obviously spent my anger and I'm fresh out of writing talent for the day.  Good Night!

Please Turn Out the Lights

Forget about drought, erosion, and Global Warming. In my opinion the real danger challenging the beauty of the Tallgrass Prairie is of Light Pollution, otherwise known as photopollution or luminous pollution.

A mere 14 years ago, when we first bought the land our current house sits on, just outside the Manhattan city limits, my son and I used to just sit and be amazed at the explosion of stars across the night sky of the prairie.  Beautiful and vibrant, it was and is the most obvious evidence of God's existence available to us. 

These days, the stars are dim in that same sky.  Despite the growth of Manhattan in directions away from us, it seems like the big city lights are growing in number at the exponential rate of a bacterial culture in unlimited fresh media.  That glow of Manhattan, a small city in reality, can now be seen more than 10 miles away on a clear night, interfering with star-gazers, lovers on country roads, and all the other higher aspirations of man. Park lights, University lights, Stadium lights, and Commercial Retail lights stay on to the wee hours of the morning, every morning. There's now a street light shining continuously on almost every corner including minor intersections in unpopulated areas, undoubtedly paid for by our increasingly-limited tax dollars and causing me to wake up in the wee hours thinking dawn has arrived. 

Even worse, I've noticed the indoor proliferation of lights all over my house from the now ubiquitous Light-Emitting Diode (LED) on every appliance large and small.  In our bedroom, a sacred, quiet dark place for this old farm boy, there are still no less than 8 LEDs shining every night in the semi-darkness from the TV, radio, mobile phone, charging cords, and other little electronic devices.  Why, I ask you, does the Visio TV in my bedroom need to have a light that comes ON when I turn the TV off?  I don't care if each LED uses a minuscule small amount of energy, billions of them still have to add up to something.  Most alarmingly, the suppression of melatonin by exposure to light at night has even been suggested as a cause for the higher rates of breast and colorectal cancers in the developed world (Pauley SM, Medical Hypotheses, 2004;63:588).  I don't want my tombstone to say "He Saw The Light And Died."   

I'm happy to debate with wild-eyed Al Gore followers whether Global Warming exists (which I question because I am old enough to remember the doomsday cries of pending Global Cooling in the 70's), but I will concede in an instant that I'd also be happy to do without all the artificial night light if the corresponding drop in energy use would help decrease the chances of Warming. For those who care, there is an International Dark Sky Association (http://www.darksky.org/), founded in 1988.

I plead with you to turn off the lights. Let the fireflies and stars take back their dominance in the night. We don't need the light to fend off the evil beasts any longer.