"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message
...
Yes, indeed -- I am colour blind, and if that is what makes the
difference between someone who does have an issue with
CFLs, and someone who doesn't, then 12% -- one eighth --
of the population being forced to suffer because of this legislation,
seems a pretty poor show of arrogance by the powers that be, in
insisting that we suffer in the way that we are being made to.

I assume you suffer from protanopia or deuteranopia. My father did. (I
don't.)

I worked with a guy with that problem. One day he asked me to help him
pick
colors for a Web site. It was causing him all kinds of confusion. I showed
him a fluorescent-green pen, and asked him what color it looked to him --
"Orange". (That doesn't mean he saw it in the way a person with normal
color
vision would see orange. Rather, he could not distinguish it from what we
would call orange.)

Peter Wensberg, the author of "Land's Polaroid" (a beautifully written and
wonderfully entertaining book) told how, during a lunch of Chinese
takeout,
Dr Land administered one of the standard color perception tests (the kind
with colored circles, where you indicate which letter or number you see).
Wensberg utterly flunked it, getting every one wrong.

I've lived with fluorescent light for more than 60 years, and have never
suffered (except in my early days at Microsoft, when the office lights
gave
me (and some others) headaches). It appears to me that your suffering is
primarily aesthetic.



As I've said on a number of occasions, linear flourescent light doesn't
affect me in anything like the same way as CFL. I can read perfectly well
under it. I work perfectly well under it. I don't find the light displeasing
in either colour or quality. I don't know how to reconcile this apparent
disparity, as I too have lived under flourescent light for over fifty years.
I don't know what my type of colour blindness is called, nor whether it is
common in type, or rare. I am apparently red blind and green insensitive, as
far as I recall. It is many years since I took the test. I think it meant
that I couldn't see some shades of red at all, when they were mixed in with
other colours, and that I couldn't distinguish some shades of green amongst
other shades of green. Oddly enough though, the light from CFLs always
appears to have a slightly 'sick' green caste to me, irrespective of the
quoted colour temperature.

Arfa