More Blues

I'm really into butterflies right now, especially little tiny blue ones. Saturday I went to the PVIC (Point Vicente Interpretive Center) again to see if I could find the Acmon Blue butterfly to compare it with the El Segundo Blue. It was another beautiful day. Not too hot. Not too windy. But by late morning, I hadn't seen a single small butterfly. Then one pair obliged me by flitting around the Coast Buckwheat I was observing. These guys are really tiny! No bigger than 1/2 an inch across. It's good exercise for your eyes to try to follow them around.

OK, so now comes the hard part, trying to identify them. As with most of these butterflies, the blue part is on the top and the males usually have more of it than the females. But interestingly, it is the underside that tells the story. I think this pair was the Acmon Blue and here is why. In looking at many websites and photos, and reading many descriptions, I noticed that the Acmon tends to be cleaner and neater especially on the underside. The El Segundo Blue (ESB) has a smudgy gray appearance especially towards the body. The orange on the underwing of the Acmon is in a nice neat pattern (usually) or there is less of it, and on the ESB it is smeared. The black dots or squares are bigger on the ESB, especially on the forewing. One web page that compares the Acmon to the Smith's Blue Butterfly, mentions that the Smith's has a black-and-white checkerboard pattern along the edge of the upper wing. I noticed that the ESB has this, too, to some extent. The Acmon again is cleaner and the edge, when you can see it, is all white. It seems the ESB is closer to the Smith's than it is to the Acmon!

Walking around the garden, another pair of blue butterflies attracted my attention. While they also flitted around the buckwheat, they never landed on it. When they finally did settle down, it was on plants with red flowers like the Baja Fairy Duster (Calliandra californica). The blue of these butterflies was very deep at the body and sort of iridescent. The underside was completely different with a brown zebra pattern and two or three large eye spots at the end.

My friend Yvetta has come up with two possibilities for this pair. (Why are there always two?) One is the Marine Blue (Leptotes marina) and the other is the Ceraunus Blue (Hemiargus ceraunus gyas). (Don't click on the link if seeing a beautiful butterfly stuck on a pin bothers you!) I am tending towards the Marine Blue because the striping continues all the way to the body. But what do I know?

Let There Be Light

Until man duplicates a blade of grass, Nature can laugh at his so-called scientific achievements.

—Thomas A. Edison

The L.A. Times had a front page article last Saturday about a proposed California law that would make it mandatory to buy compact fluorescent light bulbs to replace old incandescent bulbs beginning in 2012. The purpose of the new legislation, authored by Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, is to save energy. They compute that the difference in energy costs per year between the incandescent bulb ($9.20) and the CF bulb ($2.50) justifies the switch. If everyone used these new low-energy, long-lasting bulbs, electricity consumption would be slashed by 75% according to the article.

All of this sounds very good but nowhere in the article did it mention the one aspect of artificial lighting that matters most to me, i.e., whether or not the bulbs provide full-spectrum lighting. Until now, I had thought that fluorescent lighting was very bad for your eyes and that you could not get full-spectrum light or "natural light" from a fluorescent tube. I was wrong.

Let me explain what full-spectrum lighting is. The sun provides light in a fairly even distribution over the visible spectrum of electromagnetic waves. This is the light that our eyes evolved to see. We were not meant to spend our lives inside a dark cave (modern office building) coming out only for small periods of sun, or staying awake for very long past sunset. Of course, the sun's spectrum changes with location, the seasons, and time of day, and our eyes were also meant to soak up the sun's rays at various times throughout the day. Sunlight also provides a small amount of mid- and near-UV light.

The best artificial lighting would try to imitate what the sun can do for us. Full spectrum lighting is better not only for our eyes but for our general health as well. How can you tell if you are getting full-spectrum lighting? There are two numbers that will indicate the color temperature and the color rendering of any light source. The Correlated Color Temperature (CCT) is a measure of a light source's apparent "whiteness," yellowness (warmth), or blueness (coolness). This number is given in degrees Kelvin (K). If you use a good camera, you have probably encountered this number already. A flash will give you a cooler, daylight exposure than without flash in low light. Indoor photos taken under incandescent light will be very yellow. In the old days, there were different kinds of film you could use to counteract this. The sun's CCT can vary from 3600K (warm/yellow), to 4870K at noon, to 7100K on an overcast day, or to 25,000K (very cool/blue) in the Northwest sky. 5500K is considered "white" light from the sun.

The Color Rendering Index (CRI) indicates how well the colors of objects are rendered (reflected), using a light source at a specific CCT. Sunlight has a perfect CRI rating of 100. Note that this number cannot be compared with different sources that have different CCT ratings. An incandescent bulb may have a high CRI rating of 95 but still appear yellow because it's CCT is only 2700K. But generally, a light with a CCT of 5000K and a CRI of 80-89 will give excellent color rendering. To qualify as a "full-Spectrum" light, a bulb or fluorescent tube must have a CCT of 5000 to 7500K and a CRI of 90 to 100. Whether or not the artificial light also includes the proper ratio of mid- and near-UV light is another issue and a very thorny one.

OK, now try and find these numbers on the box of bulbs you are considering buying. It's not easy. Phillips assumes you are not interested in these technical details or couldn't understand what they mean if they gave them to you. GE offers a glossary of terms that does explain all this very nicely, but when you go to buy a particular bulb, you can't get the specifics. After much searching on the web, I found a few companies that will give you the full details and this is when I found that you can indeed purchase compact fluorescent bulbs that fit the definition of full-spectrum lighting. These bulbs are very costly, ranging from $10 to $50 for a simple 75W equivalent bulb. They are not available at your local Home Depot, at least not at mine, you must buy them over the Internet adding shipping costs to the total. If you are interested, you can get lots of info and the names of brands to consider from the Bates Method website store.

One major drawback to these fluorescent bulbs is that they contain mercury, although not very much. To dispose of them properly, they should be taken to a hazardous waste site (which I am not sure really solves the problem. It only pushes it on to someone else). And these bulbs don't fit some sockets and cannot be used with a dimmer switch. Currently, I have several lights with full-spectrum bulbs made with neodymium oxide, a rare earth element. These bulbs contain krypton gas and a chrome plated brass base that give them an earth-friendly life of over 3,500 hours. I am very satisfied with the results but may consider the CFLs when they need to be replaced.

But I still wonder if it is good to have the equivalent of noonday sunlight at 10:00 p.m. And what about UV light which is also important for our health? Most fluorescent bulbs have coatings to absorb the UV rays and many health experts think that this is good. But again, we were meant to soak up the UV rays all day long, too. And nature has ways of making sure we do not get too much of a good thing. (See Dr. Michael Eades's blog for Feb. 16, 2007 on the subject of Folate and Fun in the Sun.)

All in all, I think the best solution may be to insist on buildings with windows or skylights and at night to turn off the lights and go to bed early.

Wanderings

I had a "eureka" moment this week. Eureka moments are also sometimes called "aha" moments. That's when things suddenly click for you in your mind, something that you were trying to understand but couldn't quite grasp suddenly becomes clear. These moments come unannounced and seemingly without any preparation. And when they come, you ask yourself, Why didn't I see that before?

There was a research report in last week's Science magazine about where the mind goes when it wanders. The scientists were trying to determine if the "default network" of our brains is activated when we daydream. The default network is that region of the brain that remains active when we are at rest, at least in functional imaging experiments. They concluded that "mind-wandering constitutes a psychological baseline that emerges when the brain is otherwise unoccupied, supported by activity in the default network of cortical regions. Results demonstrated that reductions in processing demands, that is performing practiced versus novel sequences of otherwise identical tasks, were accompanied by increases in both the generation of SIT (stimulus-independent thought) and activity in the default network." (You gotta love these scientists and their acronyms.)

My mind seems to wander a lot these days, especially when I am thinking about what to write about for this blog. This morning I wondered if eureka moments come when our mind is at rest and allowed to wander and that's why they seem to come from nowhere. I wandered as I wondered to my recent attempts to renew my efforts to "cure" my myopia. My "aha" this week was when I finally discovered what Thomas Quackenbush meant in his book, Relearning to See, by "centralization."

Centralization is the opposite of diffusion. It is the knowledge that the human eye can only see one point clearly at any moment. That fact is inherent in its structure. But centralization is not concentration. Centralization happens naturally, for people with normal eyesight, when the eyes and the mind are at rest and it happens with movement. We see best what is in the center of our vision, but we cannot hold onto it. We constantly shift our focus from one point to another. Fixation, concentration, creates blur. People with good vision are constantly moving their eyes from one point to another of the thing they are looking at, staying at one spot for no longer than a few seconds.

Quackenbush goes on to say, "Actually it is the person's interest that shifts from one point to another, the eyes and head simply follow the 'mental movement.'" p. 151

Hmm... sounds a bit like mind wandering to me. We see best when we are relaxed. We think and learn best when we are relaxed. We are at our most creative when we are relaxed.

I have learned to turn on my clearsight, i.e., perfectly clear vision without my glasses, by relaxing my eyes. One method is to simply close them and then very gently open them again allowing them to "see" whatever is there. Usually, I do this outside while looking into the distance. Another method of getting the eye muscles to relax is by "palming." You cup your palms over your eyes, gently, and rest them in the darkness and warmth of your hands. Then you release your hands and open your eyes to see the world in front of you.

Until now, I have not been able to get my clearsight to last more than a few minutes. What I learned this week was that I could turn on this clearsight state by really looking at a small point and telling myself that this is what I could see best. Suddenly it cleared and I could move to the next point and the next and they were all perfectly clear. One point at a time, each the best I could see.

Now I want to apply this principle to my knitting. What do I look at when I am knitting? The needles and my hands are in constant motion. I sometimes diffuse as I knit to try to see everything at once, the yarn, the loops, the needles, my hands. Not good. But what do I centralize on? Do I let my mind wander, or do I count stitches? Do I SIT to knit? I have already learned that I cannot do lace with distractions and that knitting is like meditation. I cannot knit lace on auto-pilot. But do you force yourself to empty your mind of thought when meditating? Obviously, no. What do I centralize on? The mantra yfwd, K2tog, K-one, yfwd, K2tog K-two, etc.? But what do I look at?

Another wandering thought: maybe it's all these people who have been diagnosed with ADHD that are normal, and it is the state of forced concentration that is abnormal.