As you may recall, almost three months ago, I got myself a pair of glasses with red-tinted lenses. My purpose, other than being able to make jokes about literally looking at things through rose-coloured glasses, was to try to improve my sleep by applying the theory that limiting exposure to blue light shortly before bedtime improves one's ability to fall asleep. A couple of other tools I have to apply this theory are the "Redshift" program, which changes my monitor's colour balance; and a remote-controlled RGB light-bulb.

Unfortunately, my attempts at gathering useful quantitative data have been foiled by a confounding factor: my "non-24-hour sleep/wake phase disorder". (On the plus side, I've started collecting some decent data on said disorder, such as that I average out at a 25.5 hour circadian cycle, though with high variance.)

Today, however, I finally got in the mail a tool that lets me collect quantitative data of a different kind: a spectroscope. It's a passive optical tool, which cleverly applies refraction to let you see exactly what frequencies of light are being shone (plus or minus 5 nm). For example, in a dark room, I pointed my green laser pointer at a wall, and looking into the spectroscope, I saw a line right at the 535 nm mark, pretty darned close to the pointer's actual frequency of 532 nm. When I pointed it at my RGB bulb, then as I set the bulb to different colours, I saw up to three lines, one red, one green, and one blue; and when there wasn't any blue, there was /no/ blue. So setting that bulb to red, green, or anywhere between them (such as to 'yellow'), I can happily avoid blue light.

Pointing the spectroscope at my laptop screen, I got more RGB bands. However, even when setting the screen to a solid red, that blue band didn't disappear; and whether the Redshift program was running or not, I was still getting blue. And when I put my red-tinted lenses in front of the spectroscope - still blue.

So, now I know that even if the avoid-blue theory is true, neither the program nor the lenses will help. So I get to keep using my RGB bulb... and I get to consider whether to try buying more heavily-tinted lenses. The ones I got were "10% tint"; also on offer are "50%" and "80%". At something like USD $15 apiece, plus $10 shipping, they're just expensive enough that I don't want to waste the money if they don't work. And with my coming move, I need to save my pennies. ... But at least now I'm saving my pennies by using Data! :)

(PS: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FGARIAO/ . USD $8 plus shipping. Some instructions and examples are at http://www.chemistryland.com/CHM107Lab/Exp7/Spectroscope/Spectroscope.html .)