:)

If you wake up to go to the bathroom, sleep disturbed. Gotta turn off and black out those blue lights. Sleep masks are nice, but only helps while you have it on.

Just get a nice pillowy sleep mask. Absolute pitch black heaven.

I hate blue LED's. My eyes can't focus on them properly. If you show me a red LED ticker alongside a blue one, the red letters are pin sharp to me and the blue letters are blurred as if I'm not wearing glasses.

Blue LEDs have replaced amber tone activity lights in most electronics, and the disturbance to sleep patterns is evident in everyone’s behaviors globally. I have to tape over nearly every LED on every piece of electronics to tone it down enough. Otherwise it illuminates an entire area if the lights are turned off.

Blue LEDs are the scourge to sleep.

The inventors won the Nobel Prize.

If I remember, he wrote the song "Jean" which was very popular and there are a lot of women around named for that song.

The creators of the bright blue led won the Nobel prize in physics for it as it allowed us to create white light LEDs that are now the most energy efficient form of illumination for homes and saves countless billions of dollars in energy costs.

This is really specifically wild for me to stumble onto here. Let me explain. In the early 90s, a few of us in the clubs were into the whole "cyberpunk" movement that was pretty new back then.

Some club denizens went as far as to create electronic apparel, with an LED or two, and one guy even made a skin temp sensor and connected it to an LED bar graph, so the more he exerted himself the higher his temp would show on his arm.

Anyway.... everyone has either red or green or yellow. I wanted a blue. Couldn't find one.

Internet was pretty limited back then, so a lot of shopping in parts stores, catalogs. Etc....

We finally found a supplier in China that manufactured blue LEDs, but we'd have to buy like 250,000. Somehow this dude gets a hold of exactly 5 of them. He worked a deal with a store who ordered the he quantity and let him buy 5.

Craziest thing, the turn on voltage for the ones We used was 6V. So, strapping 4 AAA batteries somewhere on you would give you 6V.

These blue LEDs from China needed 5V.

Took a while, but we figured out that rechargeable batteries output 1.25V, so we used 4 of those to achieve the 5V turn on voltage. The whole thing took about a year while we figured it out.

Haven't thought about it in 30 years. Then I run across this random article telling me exactly why what I tried to do 30 years ago was so difficult.

/endstorybro

Blue light was so rare, we didn't have glasses

A 2-for-1 TIL. Thanks!

Y’all forgot his name. It’s Rod.

Bukowski might have been close, but he's not terribly female-friendly lol

"Live Love Laugh" could have been his.

Who was forgotten?

Probably the last poet to become a celebrity and household name.

There's another Too Much Joy song that started as a Rod McKuen poem - "Seasons in the Sun" - it was a cover of a song by Terry Jacks

Terry Jacks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tPcc1ftj8E

Too much Joy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVwU83bsMAM

What a fascinating character. I know I'd heard the name but reading up now, I didn't really know Jack about Rod.

Did you go out with her?

Lol nice catch

I'm so fucked.

Wow that was interesting.

And today perhaps you also learned that his name is actually Rod.

Knew a woman in college who gave me a Rod McKuen poem as a sort of courtship gesture. This was late 90's in a college full of mostly English majors. I knew who he was, but barely, and associated him with (figurative) cheese. Think only time he came up after that was when Gene Ween did a whole album of McKuen poems as songs [someone else mentioned].

Ber, we nigma now.