Car Headlights - Why not red?
Car Headlights - Why not red?
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?
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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
Yeah. I was so stoked when I got this name before I learned how it all worked
Hmmm for some reason it says my username is Lemmy on some instances I'll have to fix that
Isn't there some specific color blindness that would make people unable to see reasonably under red light because they lack red cones and the other cones aren't sensitive enough at that wavelength, so they'd effectively be seeing like a normal sighted person would see with only 10-20% of the light that's present?
Shouldn't affect the area outside the fovea since there are also rods but that's not too helpful.
I'm not personally colorblind, but lots of men on my wife's side are, including my son. My understanding is that it doesn't affect brightness, it affects being able to differentiate colors.
It's important to note at this point that we're talking about mixing dye or paint colors, which behaves differently than mixing colors of light. When you mix red and green light, you get yellow. When you mix red and green paint, you get brown.
So to my son, for example, when you have an object with a mixture of mostly red and a little green - I would see that as "mostly red with a little green," while he would see it more like "brown." My expectation would be that if he was in an otherwise dark room illuminated with only red light, that he would see objects with a similar clarity as I would, but that his experience of the color would be different from mine in a way that I could never really understand (and vice versa).
Since I have access to a relatively large number of colorblind people, this makes me want to do an experiment.
Looked it up - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Based_on_affected_cone
Protan (2% of males): Lacking, or possessing anomalous L-opsins for long-wavelength sensitive cone cells. Protans have a neutral point at a cyan-like wavelength around 492 nm (see spectral color for comparison)—that is, they cannot discriminate light of this wavelength from white. For a protanope, the brightness of red, is much reduced compared to normal.[38] This dimming can be so pronounced that reds may be confused with black or dark gray, and red traffic lights may appear to be extinguished.
This is much less common than Deutan color blindness. ("same hue discrimination problems as protans, but without the dimming of long wavelengths")