So, just finished reading an article on WaPo about fireflies/lightening bugs and got me thinking further… Car headlights suck. They mess up our night vision when we pass another dickhead running white/blue lights. We mess up the habit(at) of many animals/bugs. So why not red lights? My hiking/camping headlamp has a red light option, which is the only function I use, and I can see fine. Why the FUCK do we still have these ungodly bright white/blue lights?
Actually, you can’t “see fine” with the red lights. Sure, once your eyes adjust to the darker light, you can see at some level. But the red light doesn’t allow you to see anywhere near near as well as you can in a white light. also, if you have poor night vision, red light isn’t very good at all. And, the biggest reason why you can’t use red headlights is color blindness. There are people who would be completely in the dark with those headlights.
That’s… Not how color blindness works.
As a colorblind person red light still works for me
How early did you sign up to get this username. Awesome
Usernames are only unique per instance. So it’s easy to get any name you like on smaller instances.
Aha thanks, of course. Still learning over here lol
I imagine we need close to white to differentiate colours, see this video for more information on that.
However, the LED lights are way too bright, usually when I see an incandescent headlight its fine, but the LED ones are so bright and I have no idea why that is. I have a recollection of reading somewhere that headlight brightness is based on a unit based on a wavelength of light closer to orange, so the more blue a light is, the brighter it needs to be, but I can’t remember for sure.
Because red light are used for tail lights, which you also see when driving. Different light colors allow you to tell if you are looking at the rear or front of the car.
Also, we need to be able to read and recognize traffic signs, and those are often color-coded, red having a very important meaning. With red head-lamps, all traffic signs would be red-and-black at night, great !
