'Global epidemic of blindness' on the horizon (Warning about bright screen use) | Hacker News Reader

'Global epidemic of blindness' on the horizon (Warning about bright screen use)

dailymail.co.uk

7 pointscoreyp_111 comments

I don't get this article. The laptop I'm reading this on has a maximum brightness of ~300 lux. Its emission spectra looks something like this [1].

In comparison, indirect sunlight from a clear sunny day is around 10,000-20,000 lux. Its emission spectra looks something like this [2], with significant amounts of "harmful" blue light.

So, I don't get this article. Why does the blue light from my laptop cause blindness, while the 30-50x brighter indirect sunlight seemingly doesn't?

[1] http://scienceblogs.com/principles/files/2014/02/display_com...

[2] https://cdn.comsol.com/wordpress/2016/01/Emission-spectrum-o...

Note that the peak region on the clear sunny day spectra is around 475 nm. That's near a deep local minima on the laptop spectrum.

I wonder if that could lead to errors in dilation adjustments in response to brightness changes? It would make sense for that mechanism to give greater weight to those wavelengths where the eye is most sensitive. If it does that, it could judge the laptop as less bright than it really is, and so open the eye too far.

This article is basically bullshit. There is no coherent, reliable body of knowledge saying there is any global epidemic of blindness, or that use of LEDs leads to retinal degradation in all but the most extreme circumstances.

Note the sidebar where the researcher making the claim has invented a solution (a filter) for the problem. It even lists a price. So this article is literally bad science wrapped around an ad.

As a rule, I take anything in the Daily Fail with a ton of salt.

That's what I gathered. But seeing on HN I wasn't sure I wasn't missing something.

Is there info about how bright the light setup was? The last such "study" that came through here had the mice drugged up with their pupil wide open in absolutely ludicrous amounts of light.

I found another study with much more sane levels of light and resulting eye damage: https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/1307294/

Studies like this make me cry inside. Everyone tells me that I shouldn't let my kids use phones/iPads/TVs/Nintendo for too long, but I just don't know what else they would do all day. I can't send the kids outside to play out of fear they'll wander off and get hit by a car, I don't have the money for day care, and I can't guide them through structured play activities all the time because I'd end up exhausted, irritable, and I would never get anything done.

I don't want my kids to go blind, but... what am I supposed to do? Being a parent is hard. I wish that instead of doing all these studies to prove that how we raise our children is dangerous and bad for them, scientists would focus on coming up with practical ways to make modern society more kid-friendly.

Our kids broke "their" tablet, and we just never replaced it. After about three weeks they figured out imaginative play again. It's amazing the games they invent.

Everyone tells me that I shouldn't let my kids use phones/iPads/TVs/Nintendo for too long, but I just don't know what else they would do all day

There are thousands of activities kids can do, depending on their age and interests. Books, crafts, games ...

I was the only child of a single mother, and I didn't like going outside. I liked playing with my LEGO, reading books, writing, drawing, coloring, daydreaming, doing puzzles, playing with toys, doing science experiments, etc.

There are endless resources out there, both on the internet and in book form that you can use for ideas.

They might hate it at first (junkies hate it when you take their smack), but they'll get over it and be better off in the end.

An iPad does not a computer engineer make.

Sounds like the article is an ad for a product:

"The rats that were exposed to tablets filtered with Reticare, the only eye protector based on scientific data, experienced no retina cell death."

I've been looking at 'bright screens', for varying values of 'bright', for 40 years - and I'm not blind, yet.

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