On Fri, 29 Apr 2011 05:20:35 -0700, "William Sommerwerck"
wrote:

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.


I don't think so. Expanding beyond just fluorescent versus incandescent
we can observe more of what is being discussed. For most people, mercury
vapor (MV) lighting is easier to read by but tends to make people look
ghastly, especially in photographs. On the other hand people look better
and photographs look better with high pressure sodium (HPS) lighting, and
many find it easier to see large objects especially at very low light
levels, but reading is more difficult. It is primarily a matter of
spectral intensities and the placement of the various strong lines. Many
comparisons of MV vs HPS lighting are available but most rarely touch on
these issues, especially the reading and fine resolution issue. Now that
white (fluorescent) LED lighting is becoming more available with yet
different color balances, the whole subject becomes even more complicated.