![]() ![]() “He understands people aren’t necessarily going to agree with him, but when (Pearl) explains his logic, it all just seems so obvious,” said Kaoru Mulvihill, Pearl’s office assistant. When computer scientists said machines should be answering the question, “What?” Pearl said they should be answering the question, “Why?” When computer scientists said computers could only understand true or false, Pearl found a way to make them understand uncertainty. ![]() “I always have my internet when everyone else is complaining about it,” he said while typing code onto the green and black screen to load his email. When people upgraded to newer computers, Pearl continued to use his 20-year-old Wyse terminal. Pearl, an emeritus professor of computer science at UCLA, built his career by challenging generally accepted conventions in the field of artificial intelligence. “That was when I first started questioning authority,” he said, chuckling. Pearl was unphased: He thought his teacher had made a mistake. They were convinced the area of a kilometer-length square was a thousand square meters, not a million like Pearl said. It’s time for a more thoughtful, considered use of lighting technologies, treating artificial light as the precious resource it is.Judea Pearl’s fourth-grade teacher and classmates insisted he was wrong. Of course, too much lighting is a luxury that much of the global population doesn’t have. For example, while the move from traditional sodium vapour streetlights with their yellow glow to more energy efficient white LEDs sounds like a good thing, evidence shows that the extra UV light many of these give out disturbs wildlife. The impact of light and light pollution on nature-humans included-needs more research. Its extent can be seen from space, with satellite images showing a brightly lit Earth. ![]() An estimated 80% of the global population live with this sky glow. In his 2009 book 43 Principles of Home, designer Kevin McCloud describes the use of multiple types of lighting-task, ambient, directional and decorative-in the design of a 'good lighting scheme'. The lure to add ever-more light to our homes is hard to resist.īut what have we lost in our illuminated world? Walk around the edges of the suburbs at night and you'll never be plunged into complete darkness-the city glow or 'sky glow' is a constant presence on the horizon. In the home, lighting schemes have become ever more sophisticated. ‘Little Sun’ solar lamp by Olafur Eliasson and Frederik Ottensen Light was produced by an electric current which arced between two carbon rods-hence the name. The development of electric generators made them a practicable solution for lighting public spaces. While gas provided relatively gentle illumination, the huge electric arc streetlamps which began appearing in the 1870s gave out an intense light. ![]() Gas lighting at home was increasingly popular among the middle classes in the 19th century, although it was usually frowned upon in bedrooms due to the unfortunate downsides of choking fumes, smoke, blackened walls and the risk of the odd explosion. Most people first encountered these technologies not at home but in the street, or at work in the growing number of factories lit by night. The Costume of Great Britain: Lamplighter by WH Pyne, 1808ĭespite significant advances benefitting the rich (such as a much brighter oil lamp with a circular wick developed by Ami Argand in 1780), real change in lighting our streets and homes only came when lighting technology began to develop on an industrial scale: first as gas lighting at the end of the 18th century and then as electric lighting from the mid-19th century onwards. ![]()
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