I just went through an odd web surfing journey:

I was reading one of Cracked.com’s funny lists and I ended up with copies of published papers on work I did as a staff scientist 15 years ago. Cracked -> linked article->book article uses as reference->my old workplace->my old boss->published papers. What an odd journey from silly to serious.

The Cracked.com funny list is 6 ways your office is literally killing you

http://www.cracked.com/article_18654_6-ways-your-office-literally-killing-you_p2.html

Because my old profession was lighting, the bit about how fluorescents and over-lighting causing problems peaked my interest and hit my research button. Almost everywhere I have worked, I end up reducing the overall lighting. No one had done it before and generally people found they really liked it to the point it would end up too dark and lighting would need to be added back in.

(Lighting story and geekiness)
At one job where I worked for five years, I would unscrew the lights above me. I would be moved to a different desk since corporate reshuffling happens a lot and the person getting my old desk would find they like the light level as is and wouldn’t want the lights screwed back in again. I would unscrew the ones above my then current desk and things repeated each shuffle. Eventually the entire floor became too dark because no one wants theirs to be the lights turned back on to provide lights for everyone. A lot of people coming to see us would remark on how dark our space was. We started calling ourselves Mushrooms. The dark was our choice, the BS was typical corporate type BS.

The Cracked.com thing was posted today (July 26, 2010) and the article they use as reference was written in 2008. The book the article uses as reference has a 2nd edition available via Amazon.com published in the 80′s. All of them claim how bad fluorescent lighting is for you. Which is our of date. It is interesting to see how something continues on and is completely supported by references and is still wrong. Their claim may or may not be valid but because of some major changes that are not taken into consideration, the claim doesn’t have a base.

In the 90′s legislation went through outlawing the types of fluorescent light bulbs that the 80′s book talks about. This happened for energy efficiency reasons but has the benefit of higher quality lights. Fluorescent flickering went from 60 cycles a second to 3,600 cycles a second. The compound in the tubes that give off the light was changed from one spectrum of light to a more complex mix of minerals which gives lighting better suited for our eyes than before. The ones that are comparable to full daylighting are more expensive but the regular ones are so much better than when many assumptions about fluorescent lighting were carved into stone.

I have a lot to say about overlighting but am not going to go into it now. A lot of it boils down to the idea that more is better than not enough. From some of the other stuff the article said, it may have been found that the opposite is true, more is much worse than not enough.

(End Lighting geekiness)

From the book referenced the Lighting Group at LBNL which is where I worked in 1996. I found links to published papers of projects I worked on. Since I was there for 7 months and worked on the end of one project, the experimental phase of another project, the beginning of another project, and was not part of any project from beginning to end, my name is not included on any of the papers. The project where I was the one that collected the bulk of the data wasn’t a government project and there was no government paper released on it.

From there I looked up my old boss and found he stopped publishing in 2000 and left in 2004 to go to UC Davis and form a Lighting Group up there. It was odd finding him on Linkedin. I can find no record of my co-worker after our boss left. I can’t find him out working on his own. I admired my boss and liked him. Towards the end of my time there (funding for my position was cut) he did something that really stepped on my toes. I find now that I think I still admire him and have fun stories to tell about him to others but with the possibility of reaching out and reconnecting with him I find that I really don’t like him and view him as a snake in the grass that will strike with a poison bite without thinking and maybe even without noticing he has done so. He is using the same pictures that I saw of him 15 years ago. I can remember seeing those pictures and smiling and thinking how cool, unique, and quirky he is. Now I see the exact same picture and he looks sinister and not trustworthy. He isn’t a bad person, I just feel he is harmful for me to deal with.

This started as a light hearted post and got a lot deeper. Not getting a chance to talk to people for days means it gets stored up, I guess.