Blinded by the headlights
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Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we are launching our much-anticipated book club, and we're doing it with Abby Wambach and Glennon Doyle, who will introduce their upcoming book, We Can Do Hard Things, Answers to Life's 20 Questions. Plus, we've got some fun and important updates from The W and the NWSL, and of course, we've got a new Are You a Megan or Are You a Sue? Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
Nobody likes LED headlights.
Their intensity, the maximum intensity that they produce actually has increased.
When they sell cars, they really want a good safety rating, which is more easy to attain with a super bright light.
Hey there, I'm John Glenn Hill, and this is Explain It To Me, where we answer the questions that matter to you most.
What the heck is going on?
I wish I understood.
Can somebody please just explain it to me? And these days... I only really get behind the wheel when I'm out of town. So when I noticed a change in cars on the road, I thought it was just me. But then we got a call from Reed and he also worried it was just him.
Am I going crazy or does every new car on the road have the world's brightest headlights? I feel like whenever I'm driving at night now, I'm constantly having to shield or avert my eyes from people with headlights. giant flashlight strapped to the front of their car. So I guess I'm wondering, why is this suddenly happening? And are there any limits? Can people just put whatever they want on the front of their car and blind everyone else?
There's literally a subreddit dedicated to this. And there are even scientists who dedicate their time to setting it. Like John Bullough, a research scientist at the Light and Health Research Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
I'm not sure anybody has a dream of becoming a lighting scientist when they're a kid. It actually started out as a summer job at the university where I went to school. And I actually thought it was the Lightning Research Center, which seemed a lot more exciting. I was a little disappointed when I learned it was lighting. But as I learned more about it, it really became something that was interesting to me about light that's all around us. And it affects not only the way we see, but the way we sleep and a lot about our health and well-being. And it hasn't gotten boring after 30 years.
I'd love to get your thoughts on the question we got from our listener. Are headlights brighter than they used to be?
Well, there's two ways to answer that question. But fortunately for your listeners' sanity, the answer is yes to both of those. The first way has to do with the color of LED headlights. You've probably noticed that a lot of them look a lot more of a bluish white compared to the yellowish white of halogen headlights.
Can we please go back to the soft white headlights that they used to put in cars? Because I feel like now all these new LED headlights are like these bright blue blaring, cold colored headlights. If you look at them too long, you're going to melt.
And the way that we define light, the definition of light, when we measure it, is actually over 100 years old. And it actually discounts a lot of the blue wavelengths, the blue part of the color spectrum. So in that sense, even though the light meter may say two headlights are equal, our eyes will see the LED bluish one as brighter. The second way to answer that question is to actually use the light meter and measure Intensity of headlights have actually increased over the last 10 or 20 years.
A halogen bulb puts out around 1,000 lumens. LEDs put out about 4,000 lumens, so four times more. But there are some aftermarket lights that advertise an extreme 12,000 lumens.
And does that include LED lights and non-LED lights that have gotten brighter, or is it just these LED lights that are brighter?
It's actually both kinds of headlights. Both the halogen headlights and the LED headlights have increased in their luminous intensity.
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