I sense impending old-fartdom, not least because some of the signs are becoming manifest:

you don’t get Christmas lights like you used to.

Now I don’t exactly dislike the houses – over here in Britain has seen fungal growth in people setting-out vast quantities of exterior Christmas lighting, so much so that some entire farmsteads drip with luminous pixellated icicles.

In suburban housing estates they tend to be done tastelessly and glaringly, but then that’s the intention of the house owner, and if they lack taste and want to show it off, so long as it doesn’t persist very long, then I consider it to be their problem.

To what I have grown to object are the decorations in a town like nearby Hook, where white LED lights are drangled over conifers in the High Street. The LEDs are set to flicker and strobe in the very binary way that LEDs do, without any of the visual warmth of an incandescent bulb, nor indeed the analogue rise-time associated with a real bulb. I found this distracting, and rather ugly.

My local village’s tree is also bedecked with white LEDs, but for some reason I found that OK; I later determined that the LEDs are on permanently, and any twinkling effect is due to the bulbs moving gradually in/out of eclipse amongst the conifer leaves. Which is therefore prettymuch analogue.

It’s odd that the binary flashing annoys me so – perhaps this is a human perception thing, or perhaps this is due to being an astronomer and finding this to be alien behavior[1] to what small white twinkling lights are meant to be doing.

Either way, there’s probably an undergraduate Psych paper in it.

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[1] Apologies for the pun.