Average color of the NYC sky every 5 minutes
nskyc.com
nskyc.com
https://storage.googleapis.com/nskyc-3727d.appspot.com/nyc/1...
Makes me miss NYC.
Add sodium lamps for lighting and you get a rich, orange hue.
I have this idea to implement in my house: a sensor that would measure temperature of the light outside and set the lights inside to the same temperature. Getting this measurement right seems to be non-trivial. Though maybe it wouldn't have to be exact in terms of physical units, a pair of sensors calibrated together (one for outside, one for inside) might achieve the desired result too.
I wonder if there's a way to scrape that data and then send it to Home Assistant for light control.
People should really get comfortable with the idea that color is relative, so choose whatever looks nice to you and stick with it. True Tone certainly isn’t scientific.
In this scenario, all that matters is that the instrument doesn’t try to change its white balance. You can actually calculate the spectral energy of the sky based on these color changes alone, and it doesn’t matter if you start at a white balance of fluorescent or incandescent.
Adjusting the inside lights until the inside sensor is satisfied, rather than based on specifying in absolute units, would also have the benefit of taking into account any influence on indoor overall color contributed by your walls, window coverings, and anything else. Might need to average multiple sensors for best results, unless a single sensor does that through a wide angle diffuser.
This is a bit like how automatic audio equalizers (I think Sonos offers this, for example) don't work just by ensuring that the speaker delivers the desired frequency response curve (or lack thereof), but by actually using a measurement mic, since your experience will be influenced by the combination of speaker+room. The difference is that you only need to have the mic around when making changes to the room/furniture (which is rare) whereas you'd be making changes to the indoor light bulbs continuously (based on outdoor light), so you need your indoor sensor running continuously.
Presto, yellow sky makes yellow light.
You’ll quickly grow tired of how it looks. And not because it isn’t calibrated correctly.
I've never seen it in action, I only have boring old single-color lights. I am not really annoyed by 2700K lamps during the day, and mixing daylight and 2700K doesn't really look as awful as you'd think during zoom calls.
[0] https://twitter.com/mikebodge/status/1666541169273372672
> I wrote this program that hooks up to a webcam. It takes a photo out the window every five minutes, and it will upload that to a server. The server then reads the sky portion of the photo, and it goes pixel by pixel. What it does is it takes all those values, the RGB values, and it averages them. So what you are seeing is not the dominant color in the sky it’s actually just the average color.
Mike Bodge's personal website:https://bod.ge/
Recent tweet by author: https://twitter.com/mikebodge/status/1666507978663690240
Here's also a submission from a decade ago (2011): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2685621
Shameless plug: Assisted by my HNRelevant browser extension
[1] https://www.villagevoice.com/2011/06/23/mike-bodge-nskyc-cre...
Average raw RGB gives you bad results.
If you're enthusiastic about the project, maybe consider DMing the author on Twitter to discuss it with him
But I would like to be able to see the background image for some of the shots bythemselves - as there are some cool pics of that view.
But indeed, it is very non-obvious what you'd select for the constant exposure and white point (or combined as a gray point). You might also want to apply a strong curve to the brightness so nighttime skies are quite visible.
EarthCam view:
https://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/worldtradecenter/?cam=s...
No idea if this link remains permanent:
https://static.earthcam.com//hof/newyork/skyline/16862004424...
The CIELAB coordinate space represents the entire gamut of human photopic (daylight) vision and far exceeds the gamut for sRGB or CMYK.
You might initially think that the three axes of what is "RGB" defines a perfect color cube which accurately describes all perceptible colors but this is not true. The typical RGB we encounter when encoded with an sRGB gamut (almost always on smartphones, TVs, and PCs as of 2023) forms a bizzare polyhedron in the objective L*a*b* color space instead of filling the whole thing with itself because it is just a small subset of what we can actually see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SRGB_gamut_within_CIELAB_...
Of course, we may re"match" by lighting California on fire again when the prevailing winds are from the Southwest.
I realize your post was mostly silly, but it made me curious so I ran the numbers.
We generate plenty of wildfire smoke internally anyway.
Smoke happens, it is bad, but I’m sure everybody in the country gets it a couple times in their life (unless you live on Martha’s Vineyard or something).
It's definitely not something to take lightly, even if you wear a mask.
And what recourse? Who?
That's simply not true. People can, and do, develop long-term issues from acute exposure to bad air (that's literally why the range is called "Hazardous" on the AQI).
Not to mention that one in ten New Yorkers has asthma, which means that yes, people can literally die from acute exposure to air pollution.
Not for a day, no. At least not for what was going happening in the East Coast. It wasn't like ash and debris was flying through the air. It was like sitting around a campfire. People aren't that fragile. Now, hypochondriacs might think they are (and we have a growing population of those), but they simply aren't. Is it bad for someone with COPD? Yes, but the damage had already been done for years.
Isn’t that exactly what smoke is? It’s worse than visibly large particles, the small particles are more likely to get inside your lungs and do damage.
> Not for a day, no.
You might want to familiarize yourself with the evidence-based WHO air quality guidelines which sets standards based on short-term 8 & 24 hour exposure periods, and separate long-term recommendations for annual exposure. https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/what-ar...
The recommended short-term 24 hour exposure levels are far below what NYC saw (as well as what many cities in the west have had for months at a time over the last ten years. These numbers are published based on the WHO’s ability to demonstrate that adverse health effects appear in the population when exposure exceeds these levels. The recommendations were lowered recently compared to their 2005 numbers because the studies and data and evidence have grown in the last 20 years and it shows that even mild levels of exposure result in more doctor’s visits, more lung conditions, more athsma, more damage and more risk.
You can’t generalize from a 1-off event like we saw (where most nobody was being exposed for much of it) and then average across the population and say it causes things.
Repeated exposure, yes. But not this. Is it good for you? No. But it’s not like it’s really hurting anyone. Walking past a person smoking a cigarette isnt going to give you cancer no matter how hysterical sone people get about it. It’s ridiculous to even entertain it.
Nobody said anything about walking past a single smoker, that’s pure straw man in this context. The stats also aren’t generalized from a single event. You’re arguing armchair FUD logic without any facts, against real-world evidence from a global organization with a many decades history of monitoring all available science on this topic.
The full methodology and 24 pages of scientific references are available online: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240034228
Because no one is dying from some smoke blowing across the region for a day, lol.
Chronic pollution is a problem. Breathing bad air daily is a problem. working around smoky environments day in and day out is a problem Having some smoke in the area for a day is not.
I'm tired of the neurotics and hypochondriacs making big deals out of things that aren't. Like, don't get fat and don't smoke, and use bad things in moderation and get regular checkups and don't stress about everything and you'll live to 80 in most cases. Some people get unlucky.
People dramatizing this recent event like it was HARMFUL to them and "scary" or some type of public health crisis are insane. Posts like yours that for whatever reason want to reference something that isn't really science but is used like it's irrefutable truth to say that the smoke event was somehow dangerous - I mean, just c'mon. It's fine.
Why do you think that? How do you know, exactly?
I would totally recommend reading the WHO report! The guidelines are based on mortality statistics. They have in fact studied how often people are dying from a 24 hour exposure to bad air. Statistically, a few people are actually dying from one “bad day” exposure. It’s not many people, but it’s still a measurable number greater than zero, and they are demonstrating the number is greater than if they didn’t have the one bad day of smoke. Yes, for a single event it affects the most prone population. What we are talking about is risk factors. Most people will not die from one day of smoke, but that doesn’t mean no one will.
I could see this topic being irritating to hear about if you don’t believe in science and don’t trust the WHO, and we certainly have a political climate with people intentionally trying to reduce public trust in science and organizations like the WHO. But it’s worth keeping an open mind and studying a little bit about what they’re actually saying, what they’re not saying, and how they arrived at their conclusions.
Yeah it wasn’t the million other things they did in the last 80 years of their lives. Perfectly healthy people keeling over because of a bad air quality day lol. Please take a moment to use a small bit of logic here. This is a make believe idea like people who died in car accidents but had Covid were victims of Covid. This is aggregate nonsense and to suggest a single, mild event (hundreds of miles from danger) was the bullet to the head is so far fetched as to be hilarious to me.
I’m not a science renter but as a person highly educated in that field I can spit bullshit quickly. I know what the report is saying because stats and math are fun to tell a story. But just because you’re using the tools of science doesn’t mean you’re doing meaningful science.
Your report is a political statement to justify power/action when it isn’t warranted. Much like people used to reference the word of god as authorities truth.
Maybe all the alarmists and doom sayers caused unhealthy rubes undue stress that that’s what did it. They never even breathed a breath.
Your science is laughable at best in the context of this weeks event.
Do you live in NY? I dont know anyone that lives here that feels the way you do. I can only reason that someone who is so far removed from the situation can say something so callous.
My dad who has 65 years in NYC has never seen it this bad, and that was with pollution before EPA was created.
And I kept my windows closed and we did not go to the playground. But the dog was still walked and I went about my business walking around or driving when needed. It was an exceptional scenario but it wasn’t dangerous.
People need to get over themselves I think. It was fine for the short duration it was.
One in 10 people do NOT have asthma.
You are incorrect. Current prevalence state-wide is 8%[0] and lifetime prevalence is 14%, indicating that many people are expected to develop asthma but have not yet been diagnosed.
Incidence is more concentrated in the city due to a strong causative relationship between asthma and certain measurable factors: poverty, childhood exposure to vehicular-generated air pollution, and the tendency to have highways located near poorer neighborhoods.
If you look at a map of asthma incidence in the city by neighborhood, this heterogeneous distribution is even clearer.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/asthma/stateprofiles/asthma_in_nys.pdf
Perhaps a bathtub curve? Many people have childhood asthma which resolves in adolescence. So they'd count for lifetime but not current.
I think there should be more nuance here, but concede you are correct as the subject is discussed.
It's not good, but it's far from the worst around. The peak AQI here in NYC was about 350, which is actually much lower than the average AQI in Delhi between November and January, for example. (Air pollution is highly seasonal).
Effects of air pollution are cumulative, so the people who really suffer the most from it are the ones who experience this regularly, as opposed to historical anomalies like this.
It's been a little comical having this NYC air quality situation keep finding it's way into my news sources -- it's been a part of my life as long as I've been alive. I check the FireNow site as much as I check the weather during the warm month.
https://denvergazette.com/outtherecolorado/news/the-brown-cl...
The 'urban legend' remains because it is constantly mentioned on right-wing 'news' sites as proof that DEI programs are dangerous to society.
https://files.littlebird.com.au/Shared-Image-2023-06-10-08-5...
The only single sensor near my city is 50 miles away, it says air quality is fine, yet the smoke tracker map has several wildfires nearby
We need a huge, reliable pm2.5 etc network, start with every single public school
https://www.purpleair.com sells those sensors (you can see their coverage on their map).
It would be something to assist/help fund and public schools would be an excellent place to have them be situated.
Sorry. I know that's horrid. But it's also true.
Yes - the capital markets are also huge enablers.
Boys and girls - you did this. The sky is orange because of things you did. Face it, front up and deal with it.