First off I ain’t dead yet despite some of the assumptions 🙂 Life just has a way of keeping you too damn busy at times. Now back to the scheduled programming.

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have developed a computational tool that enhances, and I quote: “our understanding about the relationship between human activities and socio-economic factors at a global scale”

Interestingly it shows a direct negative correlation, where the existence of heavy night lighting influences some things we may never have thought of. Not to mention some reasons I highlighted from this post a while back :

https://evidencebasedreality.com/2016/06/11/light-pollution/

The researchers noted that locations with heavy night light activity suffered from, and again I will quote, though note my interjections in parenthesis: “Higher electricity consumption and CO2 emissions (obviously). Correlations with population, N2O (nitrous oxide), and CH4 (methane) emissions were still slightly less pronounced (compared to previous research) and, as expected, there was an inverse correlation between the brightness of lights and of poverty.” That little factoid there about increased poverty levels lining up with increased night lighting surprised me. Though I suppose it does make sense when you think about it.

I should also note that the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in these brightly lit areas is also higher which I suppose is a good thing, but the question in my mind remains, is it worth all of the negatives to achieve the positive? And is it really necessary to keep these areas brightly lit at night? There are a lot of good reasons not to do that. Just no one seems to care… As I was outside just last night observing Jupiter and a few other astronomical objects, I’m one of those who do care, and I guess this is my soapbox.

Source material here:

https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2017/03/night-lights-big-data

On a side note I may have enough pics to get another Picture Day day up, but I have to get the time and energy to do it all. I will work on it. Finally, I hope this post finds you all well and getting along just dandy 🙂