The Nine Irrefutable Laws of Colors

[digitaldog]

http://www.snopes.com/science/bumblebees.asp

I guess that equally esteemed aeronautical engineer isn't so esteemed. That much is easily understood should one try.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Oh. please! Obviously, as the science progresses, previously unexplainable things become explained. However, there WAS a reason for what is now considered debunked to exist initially, as evidenced in the links you guys provided.

I am just making a parallel to an equally absurd claims that colors are impossible to define. Ask 90-99 percent of humanity and they'll tell you sky is blue, grass is green, etc.

[digitaldog]

I am just making a parallel to an equally absurd claims that colors are impossible to define. Ask 90-99 percent of humanity and they'll tell you sky is blue, grass is green, etc.

And they would be wrong! You're using English words to define a sensation that takes place deep in our brains.
Ask a blind person to define 'Blue'.
Again, you can believe color is a wavelength of light and ignore all the processes that make us see and understand what 'blue' is but that's simply not the full reality. Any more than bumblebees can't fly. Saying all those words are just a bunch of photons hitting my retina dismisses what's really going on and if you wish to dismiss the science of the reality to make everything simplistic, then you're being a simpleton.

Good thing I couldn't understand a thing of the impossible-to-define-colors blabbering of our esteemed nerds.

If there is something I personally wrote about color you don't understand, ask. If there's something about color someone else wrote you don't understand ask. As Jim correctly pointed out, there was nothing in the 6 examples below that have anything to do with color. Light yes. Light isn't the only factor that produces the sensation we understand as color although it's vastly important. We define colors based on perceptual experiments.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... Ask a blind person to define 'Blue'....

So, 90-99% of humanity is blind? So, because a small subset of humanity can not define colors, nobody can?

... if you wish to dismiss the science of the reality to make everything simplistic...

I do not wish to dismiss science, just to place it where it belongs. I do not need science to explain to me why I am burning my hands if I put them in fire. I do not need science to explain to me that what I see as blue is not, but just a bunch of frequencies, blah, blah, blah. All I need is to share a common human consensus, reached millennia ago without science, that sky is blue. I might find it fascinating to read about a scientific explanation as to why it appears so, but that is an entirely different matter.

[digitaldog]

So, 90-99% of humanity is blind? So, because a small subset of humanity can not define colors, nobody can?

No but good job misundertanding the points about color I and WombatHorror have tried to express. Again, color is very complex. Suggesting the word "blue" can describe what we see of the sky is simply incorrect. I've stated twice that color as we understand it is based on perceptual experiments. In the context of imaging and numbers, we can define color numbers we can't see, they are not colors.

I do not need science to explain to me why I am burning my hands if I put them in fire. I do not need science to explain to me that what I see as blue is not, but just a bunch of frequencies, blah, blah, blah.

It's the blah part that indicates you have no interest in understanding what's really going on. If so, I suggest you move on. I'm no more interested in discussing time with someone who believes the Earth is 6000 years old as I'm interested in discussing color with someone who thinks calling something 'blue' means it defines the process in which we humans perceive a sensation that's complex and takes place in many areas of our eyes and brains. Ask someone who's blue-green color blind what blue looks like then tell me that just calling something blue means anything within the context of human vision. Again, if blah, blah, blah  means you don't understand what some are writing, either ask for clarification or admit you don't have the time or mental energies to understand the topic. I didn't think we were dealing with children here but blah, blah, blah sure sounds like infant speak at this point!

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... admit you don't have the time or mental energies to understand the topic...

I have both, but have no desire to spend them on your "scientific" terrorism. You are engaged in what is known from Greek times as sophism, using "logic" (in your case "science") to defy the obvious, just like they "proved" a hare can not possibly outrun a tortoise if the latter has a head start.

If I ask you for the nearest gas station, as I am running out of gas, I really, really do not want to hear from you about chemical properties of gas at the molecular level. There is a fantastic amount of science and engineering in today's cars for instance, yet I do not NEED to know any of that in order to drive it. Especially do not need to hear that the car I drive is not actually a car, but just a bunch of atoms, frequencies, blah, blah, blah...

[digitaldog]

I have both, but have no desire to spend them on your "scientific" terrorism.

Then move on. Considering your first post here was:Good thing I couldn't understand a thing of the impossible-to-define-colors blabbering of our esteemed nerds... that seems to admit you're lost and has no positive bering on the topic, why are you here?

Look, if you have something valuable to share, do so. Otherwise, what are we supposed to make of your first post here and what appears to be an admission of being lost and adding blah to a large part of your text?

[WombatHorror]

Light travels in straight lines.

except when it doesn't 

[fdisilvestro]

Light follows the geodesics of spacetime, which might not always be straight lines in the classical sense

[digitaldog]

Light follows the geodesics of spacetime, which might not always be straight lines in the classical sense

Careful there, you're getting into blah blah territory 

[MarkM]

Ask 90-99 percent of humanity and they'll tell you sky is blue, grass is green, etc
…
All I need is to share a common human consensus, reached millennia ago without science, that sky is blue.

It's actually not true. The way the spectrum is divided lexically, i.e. the word categories that are used for sections of the spectrum are different across cultures. Famously (in some circles) the New Guinea speakers of the Dani language only have two color terms: mili (black, blues, and greens) and mola (white, reds and yellows.) Other cultures have different numbers of terms. Paul Kay and Bret Berlin wrote extensively about the way cultures carve up the color wheel in their 1969 book Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Many more have followed — it's a well-discussed topic.

Since you specifically cited the color of the sky and the color of grass, I should mention that the distinction between blue and green is especially interesting. Vietnamese, for example has one word, xanh, that encompasses both green and blue. They will tell you that the sky is xanh and that the grass is xanh. Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive discussion about the lexical categories surrounding blue and green here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language

[digitaldog]

I am just making a parallel to an equally absurd claims that colors are impossible to define.

No such parallel or claims I can find anywhere on this thread.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Mark, both you and I know that EVERY generalization is wrong to some extent. Yet they serve the purpose. We both also know that exceptions prove the rule. That is why I did not say 100% of humanity, but gave a guesstimate 90-99%. Some people seem hellbent to use exceptions do disprove the rule. We can argue if 90% is the right bracket, but even if it is 51%, it still means majority. Shall we, for instance, gauge human understanding of the world by some Amazon tribes who have never seen outside world?

[digitaldog]

Mark, both you and I know that EVERY generalization is wrong to some extent. Yet they serve the purpose. We both also know that exceptions prove the rule. That is why I did not say 100% of humanity, but gave a guesstimate 90-99%. Some people seem hellbent to use exceptions do disprove the rule. We can argue if 90% is the right bracket, but even if it is 51%, it still means majority. Shall we, for instance, gauge human understanding of the world by some Amazon tribes who have never seen outside world?

Just a big pile of "Generalization" terrorism.

[MarkM]

This isn't a case of finding some fringe exception to a generalization. It's evidence (and there's lots of it) that the generalization is dead wrong. We don't all agree what color the sky is and what color the grass — color is an artifact that doesn't have a reality outside our own heads. Because of this it is susceptible to many cultural biases that we mistake for universal facts leading us to think that 99% of the word agrees with us. In the context of this thread it is a further example of how misguided it is to talk about irrefutable laws and color in the same sentence.

[digitaldog]

Slobodan, I’m generally very open to reading your posts but whatever you’ve smoked or eaten recently is affecting you and in not a good way.

You came late into the thread with an admission of not understanding some posts about color. The admission of this in your writing is as clear as the nose on your face. Then you say you do understand it and come up with some term about terrorism in a snooty way and attribute multiple “blah's” to other’s writings. You write about absurd claims concerning impossible to define colors that do not exist anywhere in the post. You make extravagant claims about a huge number of people and how they communicate and perceive color using English words. You having a bad week?

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

This isn't a case of finding some fringe exception to a generalization...

If tribes in Papua New Guinea are not "some fringe exception" than I do not know what is. If you show me that at least 51% of the Earth population can not actually define sky as blue, I would stand corrected and the generalization would be "dead wrong."

When we say "we", we also tend to rely on conventions, and use the word "we" to mean "people similar to us," and, in our case, it means the Western world, or Western civilization. Bringing tribes lost in history into a debate on a photographic forum in the Western world does not make much sense.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can be said on the Internet (or else) that someone, somewhere won't disagree with or find an exception to.

[MarkM]

It's not just the Dani speakers — it's the Japanese, many Turkik languages, Vietnamese, Korean, and others. I don't know the percentage, but that's not the point. My point is that the idea behind the generalization is wrong. Your argument seems to be that because you know what color the sky is and many people agree with you, you have therefore created a definition of color. But, whatever percentage of the population agrees with your color categories will be a result of demographics, not some truth about color. You have said it's absurd to claim that colors are impossible to define and I am saying that whatever definition you assert regarding color is a statement about your language and culture more than statement about color. 

And it's not just cultural relativism. Color is also highly dependable on context. So you can point to the sky and proudly call it blue, but I can show you that exact same color (as defined by it's spectrum) in a different context and you will tell me it's gray. Which leaves an additional problem when defining color: do you define color with spectral measurements or perception? A lot of problems go away if you just define color by its spectral characteristics — it's easy to measure, easy to define — but it has a fatal flaw in that the same 'color' will be a different color in different contexts. You can call all this blah blah mumbo jumbo if you want, but that's just avoiding a real problem with real practical consequences for no apparent reason other than it's a little difficult.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Slobodan, I’m generally very open to reading your posts but whatever you’ve smoked or eaten recently is affecting you and in not a good way.

You came late into the thread with an admission of not understanding some posts about color...

My "admission" was sarcasm, Andrew, and you should know it by now if you read my posts regularly. I have enormous respect for science in general, and YOUR personal contribution to color science. I wasn't mocking either. What I was trying to point out, in a humorous (sarcastic) way, is that there is a time and place for complex scientific debates, and this forum and this particular thread, isn't.

This thread started by someone asking about The Nine Irrefutable Laws of Colors, and then the OP explained that it was a humorous take on the world of color "before the ICC was formed and before the WWW (internet)." But humor and geeks do not mix well, apparently (other than geeks becoming a target for humor).

About my "absurd claim" (concerning "colors impossible to define") that "does not exist anywhere in the post":

... The weird thing about colors is that you can't really describe them in the end...

Then someone pointed out what painters [at least those "before the ICC was formed and before the WWW (internet)"] have known for millennia, i.e., about three primary colors (red, blue, yellow), and all those color wheels display as such to this day, and you guys shot him down with "there are no primary colors."

This is why I argue with you at al... you use scientific complexity to muddy the waters for what is obvious to common people in everyday use. You are trying to shatter commonly accepted conventions, which, however imprecise, have served its purpose for the vast majority of us quite well so far.

Yes, words and how we use them are often language and culture specific. We, common people, say "love" and geeks say "it is just neurons firing in the brain" (I am improvising here), thus impossible to define. And yet love exists, however difficult to define it is. The same goes for beauty. Or pornography. Or color for that matter. Yes, it is cultural, yes, it is subjective, yes, it is context-specific, yes, it is hard to define. Yet you know it when you see it (literally and figuratively).

[digitaldog]

My "admission" was sarcasm, Andrew, and you should know it by now if you read my posts regularly.

So what you're writing is also sarcasm?

I wasn't mocking either.

Well you fooled me with all the blah's! At the very least, ad a  

What I was trying to point out, in a humorous (sarcastic) way, is that there is a time and place for complex scientific debates, and this forum and this particular thread, isn't.

Why not?

About my "absurd claim" (concerning "colors impossible to define") that "does not exist anywhere in the post":
Then someone pointed out what painters [at least those "before the ICC was formed and before the WWW (internet)"] have known for millennia, i.e., about three primary colors (red, blue, yellow), and all those color wheels display as such to this day, and you guys shot him down with "there are no primary colors."

You guys? Seems to have come way out of left field but whatever....

This is why I argue with you at al... you use scientific complexity to muddy the waters for what is obvious to common people in everyday use.

Muddy? Sorry, I was trying to be accurate in terms of the use of color. Again, if something I or someone else is unclear (muddy), ask for clarification. The Blah's and comments about scientific terrorism just come across as rather nasty. Hence my question about you having a bad week. Because as far as I can tell, everything was going rather smoothly until you posted.