A New York City office at night in 2010. Photo: Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum Photo In the first few minutes of Joe Versus the Volcano, the 1990 surrealist rom-com, Tom Hanks clocks in for his job at an artificial testicle company, housed in a bleak, factorylike building overrun with flickering, audibly buzzing fluorescent tube lights that cast a sickly green pallor. As he makes his powdery coffee, he stares up at the lurid light, squinting, rubbing his swollen lymph nodes.
Dr. Minen told me that another way bad lighting ruins people’s lives is by depressing them and recommends that any patient who feels emotionally decimated by their office lighting get a SAD lamp and also get the hell outside in the middle of the day, for God’s sake! “Fluorescent isn’t the best; natural light is better for mood,” she said.
Arguably, things were at their worst lighting-wise in the mid-’80s, when desktop computers were proliferating and everyone was scrambling to relight their offices to avoid glare. They accomplished this via the heavily louvred Cat 2 luminaire, which made the office feel like Plato’s cave, before Plato turned around and realized he could light his cave better. “You’re too young to remember them, but they were terrible,” said Ray of the Cat 2’s. “I lived through the ’80s, and it wasn’t good.
rachel_handler 1/8 Solar & Wind are 0 emissions? Each 1 MW of solar farm power requires between 35 to 45 tons of steel, + you need to dig for cadmium, gallium, germanium, etc Make silicon Silicon metal is made from the reaction of silica (SiO2) -