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The UV stickers sound interesting, but is there a (human-)visual indication that they've stopped working? If not, there'll be a whole lot of useless dots on win

The UV stickers sound interesting, but is there a (human-)visual indication that they've stopped working? If not, there'll be a whole lot of useless dots on windows, making owners feel better but not actually helping anything.

theptip 3y ago
Presumably you get the auditory indication of birds resuming their collisions with your window.
xoa 3y ago
Unless you have a UV camera then no, there is no indication to humans [0]. Though as sibling said, if nothing else you'd have the obvious direct grim evidence if they had failed. But at the same time I've not found it a concern in practice, there's plenty of stuff in a household that simply needs to be replaced/renewed on an annual or semi-annual basis with no particular indicator before failure. Just part of building maintenance. I set an annual calendar notification and roll it into spring/fall cleanup lists along with things like gutter cleaning. They don't just fail at wildly varying rates, it's a straight forward curve of breakdown so when it says "replace these every 6 months" one can just do that. ---- 0: FWIW you can get basic simple monochrome UV-USB 1080p cameras (350-380nm range or so, to get down to 300nm requires much more expensive lenses) to play with for <$250 new, similar to basic low res FLIRs. They can be interesting looks at the world, you can see everything from sunscreen applications to UV patterns on some flowers.
- gus_massa 3y ago
  A few years ago, my wife was taking photos of spectral lines of a mercury lamp with our normal camera and she noticed an additional line in the photo. It was an UV line that was visible by the camera but not by the eye. [IIRC a Cannon camera, not very expensive or fancy. It was very good taking photos of dark rooms during birthdays.] Edit: Fixed typo IV -> UV
  - p1mrx 3y ago
    > It was an IV line that was visible by the camera but not by the eye. If you can't see infraviolet, consider taking a colorblind test.
    - Intralexical 3y ago
      > infraviolet …Blue?
      - callalex 3y ago
        Indigo, the made-up color that only exists to make the acronym slightly pronounceable.
    - gus_massa 3y ago
      Thanks. I fixed the typo.
    - vijayr02 3y ago
      Since we're all being pedantic: infrared is also infraviolet
      - Eduard 3y ago
        TIL I'm capable to perceive light in the ultrared infraviolet spectrum.

theptip 3y ago

Presumably you get the auditory indication of birds resuming their collisions with your window.

xoa 3y ago

Unless you have a UV camera then no, there is no indication to humans [0]. Though as sibling said, if nothing else you'd have the obvious direct grim evidence if they had failed. But at the same time I've not found it a concern in practice, there's plenty of stuff in a household that simply needs to be replaced/renewed on an annual or semi-annual basis with no particular indicator before failure. Just part of building maintenance. I set an annual calendar notification and roll it into spring/fall cleanup lists along with things like gutter cleaning. They don't just fail at wildly varying rates, it's a straight forward curve of breakdown so when it says "replace these every 6 months" one can just do that. ---- 0: FWIW you can get basic simple monochrome UV-USB 1080p cameras (350-380nm range or so, to get down to 300nm requires much more expensive lenses) to play with for <$250 new, similar to basic low res FLIRs. They can be interesting looks at the world, you can see everything from sunscreen applications to UV patterns on some flowers.

gus_massa 3y ago
A few years ago, my wife was taking photos of spectral lines of a mercury lamp with our normal camera and she noticed an additional line in the photo. It was an UV line that was visible by the camera but not by the eye. [IIRC a Cannon camera, not very expensive or fancy. It was very good taking photos of dark rooms during birthdays.] Edit: Fixed typo IV -> UV
- p1mrx 3y ago
  > It was an IV line that was visible by the camera but not by the eye. If you can't see infraviolet, consider taking a colorblind test.
  - Intralexical 3y ago
    > infraviolet …Blue?
    - callalex 3y ago
      Indigo, the made-up color that only exists to make the acronym slightly pronounceable.
  - gus_massa 3y ago
    Thanks. I fixed the typo.
  - vijayr02 3y ago
    Since we're all being pedantic: infrared is also infraviolet
    - Eduard 3y ago
      TIL I'm capable to perceive light in the ultrared infraviolet spectrum.