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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Less Wrong Product & Service Recommendations - Less Wrong
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Aluminum foil. Use a gluestick to put it over your bedroom windows. Now there is darkness, and you can sleep. This made a huge quality-of-life difference to me, and I felt very silly for not doing it 10 years earlier. (A sleep mask, which I previously used, was not nearly as good a solution.)
This probably occurs to most people, but to be explicit about the downsides:
Isn't this what curtains and shutters are for?
Yes, it's what they are for - but they are typically inferior alternatives for the specific goal of preventing light entry.
My parents visited Israel when I was a kid. My grandparents' apartment had Israeli air-raid-quality shutters which ACTUALLY blocked out all the light; they were wooden slats that rolled down and stacked themselves solidly over the outside of the window. You pulled on the cord and the light went out completely - that simple. I expect it helped on noise reduction too, though I wasn't checking then. Ever since, I've taken the lack of this simple, extremely useful feature on any other windows I've ever seen, as proof that the housing industry is dysfunctional.
In Italy, roller shutters that block all of the light (like this) are pretty much ubiquitous. (This is one of the few things where I think Italy is less retarded than the rest of the developed world. Now I've bought a sleeping mask and I'm going to use it the next time I go abroad.)
If you can choose, French shutters work miles better than roller shutters at blocking light.
I've seen steel shutters like that in Pisa. Some of them still had bullet marks.
But not all of us need pitch darkness to sleep. My eyelids are the only shutters I need.
Some shade too I assume? I find I at least need to ensure that my eyelids aren't subject to direct sunlight for sleep to be realistic. This occurs sometimes in my room when the sun is at exactly the right point and the curtains aren't carefully aligned. If I am trying to go to sleep at that time I need to either lie on my side such that my head is facing away or cover my eyes with a pillow (or be very tired, or it could be overcast).
Listening to heavy metal in a brightly lit room will almost inevitably put me to sleep within 30 minutes. One of my friends only produces melatonin when exposed to sunlight or full-spectrum bulbs. Not everyone's body responds to "night = sleep, light = awake".
Wow. Really? Those are.... exceptional observations. Should I take them at face value or be confused?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder
I can't say for sure whether things like full spectrum bulbs actually help us sleep, or if that's just psychosomatic, but there definitely exist people who naturally sleep during the day and wake up at night. Left to my own devices, I go to bed at dawn rather reliably, sleep ~8 hours, and wake up feeling incredibly rested. Any other sleep cycle tends to leave me feeling restless and tired, but I've learned to force myself to conform to "normal" society.
I hate windows facing south in bedrooms.
As a morning person, I prefer to rise with the sun in summer, and well before it in winter.
If the foil is visible from outside it signals behaviors that are widely disapproved of. To that end, it would be wise to put something between the foil and the glass, perhaps colored paper or arbitrary fragments of unwanted posters.
Light may also come in around doors. In this case, a folded flap of duct tape with foil inside may be attached to the edge of the door on the swingward side and on the frame on the contra-swingward side. That may eliminate all light.
Particularly thin (cheap) foil may get have small tears that let through points of light. A piece of duct tape will patch those.
Blacking out windows is less beneficial than adapting to a conventional day/night cycle when possible. Natural light improves quality of life.
“A conventional day/night cycle” (for certain values of “conventional” at least) during the summer involves waking up several hours after sunrise.
I second this recommendation.
For the last 9 years, the room I sleep in gets pitch dark even in the middle of the day when I close the door and jam a towel or such under the door. (Makes naps much more restful.)
Wow! that is a great idea. Here I was using blackout cloth and nails... Edit: A friend of mine informs me that this is commonly used by meth labs...and may attract unwanted attention from authority figures?
That doesn't seem optimized for removal, but I also haven't used glue sticks for over a decade. I'd go with duct tape (or masking tape) instead.
Duct tape is a bad choice if one of the goals or requirements is not to leave adhesive residue. I know this from personal experience.
A very thin layer of the stuff from glue sticks is probably what I would use because if some of it remains on the windows after foil removal, it seems the easiest to scrape off the glass with a one-sided razor blade. I have never actually used glue sticks for this purpose, though.
Scotch Blue tape is usually the best choice if you want to make sure you can remove the tape and any adhesive residue even after the tape has been in use for years, but in this particular application there are two problems with Blue tape: (1) light will shine through the Blue tape and (2) direct sunlight is the one thing I have found that will over time render the blue tape hard to remove.
I have used aluminum-foil tape for this purpose and can verify that it and its residue can be easily removed from glass (but not from the metal part of the window near glass) after years of service -- although you will need a razor blade. This tape usually comes in 2-inches-wide rolls for some reason and comes attached to wax paper that it has to be (carefully) separated from before you can use it.
I've found tinfoil often lets through entirely too much sunlight (the thin cheap stuff, evidently). But I did do something similar with black card in one house. Now we use blackout curtains, so we can get light through the windows when we actually want it.