Color

Cool things about color I learned today:

  1. When Newton said “blue” he may have meant what we mean by “cyan”. Ish. https://thinkzone.wlonk.com/Color/NewtonColors.html Newton seems to have seen indigo as a shade of blue. Neil Gaiman, on the other hand, sees indigo as a shade of purple. http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/09/spectrum-of-stuff.html
  2. There’s a CSS color (#663399) named Rebecca Purple (warning – this one is terribly sad) https://medium.com/@valgaze/the-hidden-purple-memorial-in-your-web-browser-7d84813bb416
  3. Hanuno’o language, from Philippines, has four color categories that are distinguished by light/dark and red/green and at the same time indicate wetness/dryness and strength/weakness http://unurthed.com/2008/11/29/hanunoo-color-categories/

This is a good place to put my favorite links about color:

  1. Visualization of color in cultures https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in-cultures/
  2. Himba colors https://glimpsejournal.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/from-the-glimpse-archives-naming-color/
  3. Changing how you talk about color (“this is a purple pencil” vs “this is a pencil that’s purple”) affects how well a toddler will identify colors. Also, toddlers seem to identify colors by the same mechanism horses use to do arithmetic, i. e. by responding to the non-verbal signals of their handler. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-johnny-name-colors/
  4. Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/ https://xkcd.com/1882/