Sorting resistors

third color band, or do you get down finer than that?

No, they were all that was available for consumer electronics in the early days. They were E3, instead of the E24 system that's currently used. 'E' is the number of values per decade. They were large, had a rough finish and the color bands were often hand painted. Some E3 resistors used the colored body & dot system for identification. A lot of people who work on antique radios refuse to believe they are 50%, because they are marked with three bands, like 20% parts.

E3 - 50% E6 - 20% E12 - 10% E24 - 5% E48 - 2% E96 - 1% E192 - .1%

You may have some undiagnosed color blindness at work, too. The most common color blindness is a complete or partial inability to distinguish green and red (the red cones are actually missing, or are sparse, or the pigment is too close to the yellow cones' pigment, I'm not sure which).

When that happens violet and blue look the same, as do green and gray, and red and orange (or orange and yellow, or red and brown). Basically the blues and yellows work just fine, but blue + (red or green), yellow + (red or green), and gray + (red or green) don't.

I have this condition in the partial form. For the E96 series I can usually get the first two digits because not all of the bands are used, but I need to use a meter for the multiplier band (and 220 looks like

I have enough bins to cover 47 to 470k in the 20% value range. Within that I just look at the bands.

Besides, these days resistors don't have color bands -- if you're lucky they have numbers, and if you're not they're just little black rectangles with silver ends.

My labs have all had daylight fluorescent tubes for years, including the circular things in the magnifiers.

Never found it to be a problem.

It is pretty amazing how some flourescent bulbs are missing colors.

GE Chroma 50 bulbs are always a safe bet. CF and LEDs can be some of the worst.

The most garish and controlled lighting I've ever seen is on some of the public transit busses in Chicago. They have 4 foot LED modules in place of flourescent bulbs. Not only did they use the cheapest, crappiest "white" LEDs that are just blue/purple only in color, the strips they're mounted on jump around and wobble like a jumprope in the fixtures causing everything to flicker. It's was definitely amatuer night over at the Chicago Transit Authority.

I'm guessing the crappy busses they're mounted in will rattle apart in the not too near future and those horrible things will be gone.

Over in the real business world, they installed LED lighting in the elevators at work as part of some those two faced "green" campaigns. They tell the tennants about how they love the earth, but the building engineer simply stated that not replacing bulbs all the time saves a ton of money in labor costs. It's a union building so there's one guy to push the lightbulb cart around, and another to carry the ladder. The ladder porter stands around when the cart pusher replaces the bulbs. There was probably a third guy at one point. I suspect this "team" is billable time to tennants once they enter an office and are not doing work in common areas.

Then a week later they actually installed hand cutout plastic filters to make the lighting more balanced, and elevator like, and less like the inside jewelry display case. It's better looking than the original incandescent bulbs they originally had. At least somebody still pays minor attention to details.

Don't blame CTA per se. Blame the bus manufacturer. One of the two biggest doing business in the U.S. right now is Gillig and Nova.

Both use the cheapo LED's.