“hey, I’m colour blind!”
they ask: “what colour’s this?”
“blue”
“what colour’s that?”
“black”
“and this?”
“yellow”
“what about and that?”
“pink”
“you’re not colour blind!”

Ha! Well, we were seven years old. What do you expect?

In any case, here’s my ‘lil invention, that I sadly haven’t implemented for myself: carry around a red and green filter. Or even a blue one as well, if you need it.

Colour Perception

Allow me to sketch an over-simplified way of how we see colour…

Our eyes are sensitive to “three colours”. But that isn’t actually true. They are sensitive to three ranges of colour. Suppose you see some yellow light, with wavelength 580 nanometer (abbreviated nm, that’s a millionth of a millimetre). This lies between the wavelength for red light and green light (620–750 nm and 495–570 nm respectively). Your eye does not get stimulated for “yellow”, it gets stimulated for red to the one side, and green to the other, which we then interpret as “yellow”. For this reason, and this reason alone, we can simulate yellow light with a computer or TV screen by combining red and green light. (Yes, red and green light together looks like yellow.)

The image above (source: Wikipedia) shows the wavelength sensitivities of our eye, notice the heavy overlap between red and green. Along the horizontal axis is the colour (according to the wavelength of the light), and the vertical is how each is perceived by the eye. It suggests that light that is right in the middle of our green-sensitivity still looks more than 80% red to our “red receptors”. Our brains or neural networks interpret something that stimulates “100% green” and “80% red” as green.

The Idea

Now to colour-blind people, it is often this distinction between red and green that they find hard to make. My idea is to externalise the filtering between red and green. A red filter (a piece of plastic that lets through red light, aka red plastic) will let through red light unhindered, while suppressing “not red” wavelengths, while a green piece of plastic lets through green light unhindered, suppressing the rest.

Again these filters will overlap, but the better you can get them to differentiate, the sharper you can make their graphs as mentioned above, the bigger their effect will be on the red and green light they let through. Under the pair of filters, red light should look dimmer on the green side, and green light should look dimmer on the red side.

Resistors, Rubik’s

Maybe something like this would help us poor colour-deficient people from telling apart different resistor values — in electronics the amount of resistance on a resistor is encoded by a couple of coloured lines. Maybe if I had these filters, I would have opted for hardware instead of software!

Naah, kidding, I got by. My deficiency isn’t too bad. It presents itself in a couple of interesting places, such as sometimes having to look twice to distinguish orange and yellow on a Rubik’s cube… while it sounds like most people find the orange to be closer to the red than to the yellow (?!) — what do you think?

Canon PowerShot woes!

The biggest evil though, the biggest handicap this is for me right now, is Canon. Yes, Canon. Canon is being evil towards us poor colour deficient people. I can not for the life of me determine whether my Canon PowerShot camera’s batteries have finished charging or not… the battery charge indicator is a mix between red/green or (or yellow/green for all I know?) representing charging/charged, and even after plugging out the battery and plugging it back in, to get the light to switch from charged back to charging, to have something to compare to, doesn’t help me! Sometimes, yes, I can determine the answer with suitable certainty, but these days I simply plug in the batteries for “long enough”. Which means it is impossible for me to charge three batteries in “as short a time as possible”.

Ugh!

I see a vague 21, or some other shapes if I search for them, but I can’t even point out where the 74 is suppose to be.

Further Reading (Wikipedia): Visible Spectrum, Colour Vision, Colour blindness

Images:

• Simplified human cone response curves, based on Dicklyon’s PNG version, itself based on data from Stockman, MacLeod & Johnson (1993) Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 10, 2491-2521d (log E human cone response, via http://www.cvrl.org/database/text/cones/smj2.htm)
• Ishihara Plate 9 – public domain – You MUST NOT use this image in diagnostics.

On 18 December a Tinus de Bruyn left a lengthy comment on my about page. (That’s the page titled You New?) It ended up in the moderation queue due to it containing more than one link. It isn’t the kind of material that seems on-topic on the about page anyway. I thought I’d respond to the first third of the comment today. The rest of the comment criticised George Claassen, I may tackle that later.

Cynics, skeptics and meme-tics

Why is it that cynics always think themselves to be more enlightened? In reality, it is quite the opposite: Cynicism is nothing but a cover-up for naivety. Cynics live by the dictum that “I don’t believe it so I don’t have to know it.” What is so informed about that?

Skepticism is in itself a good thing, but when invaded by cynicism, it becomes warped and discriminative, losing its scientific value. Without the capacity to question, the sciences would not be possible, but mingled with cynicism it is reduced to mud-slinging. Cynicism is all too often confused with skepticism, robbing the “skeptic” of the chance to learn.

In this context, cynic: “A person whose outlook is scornfully and often habitually negative.” It appears Tinus considers me a cynic.

For instance, take a look at the website thinktoomuch.net, which opens with the slogan: “An emerging memetic engineer…” The web host wants us to respect his intellect, but right upfront, he associates himself with Blackwell and Dawkins’ fantastical meme theory. It does not seem to bother him that meme theory exists only on paper; as a crack-filler for the already-precarious house of evolution. Theory built on theory is hardly the basis for establishing truth, but this website host goes one step further – he claims to be a meme engineer; engineering that which probably doesn’t even exist. That’s pushing it a bit, don’t you think?

Huh? OK, Tinus, please suggest to me another word instead of “meme”. I’m looking for a word to refer to the aspects of culture that evolve. Consider for example the evolution of music, or art, or cooking methods, or language… or the evolution of bird songs for example. The usefulness of the word is completely unrelated to who came up with it. (It was Richard Dawkins, in “The Selfish Gene”.) I’m associating my blog with the idea of memes, not with specific people. If you, in your mind, want to associate the idea of memes with a particular pair of people, that’s your prerogative. I still suggest you re-evaluate your approach though.

Yes, taglines generally suck, being an attempt to communicate as much information about a blog’s stance in just a couple of words. If you have any better suggestions than “An Emerging Memetic Engineer”, I’d love to hear it. However, those words were chosen with a particular audience and effect in mind. (It used to be “An Apprentice”, but “An Emerging” communicates another aspect of my identity quite well, to those that I’m trying to communicate it to.)

With respect to intellect, I’d like you to respect my potential intellect just as much as I respect your potential intellect. If you see a flaw in some of my statements, let’s discuss it. Please refrain from hit-and-run mud-slinging.

At best, meme theory is a clever “scientific fairy tale.” Read Blackwell and see for yourself what a crafty author she proves to be, ascribing intelligent characteristics to her memes (after she told us not to see them as such). “Memes” (the name designed to rhyme with genes – so that it would sound more scientific) become the “fairies (of evolution) that fixes the “shoes” (theoretical shortcomings) in the “night” (netherworld between the mind and the DNA).

Tinus, please tell me you understand figurative language? It is very sad that so many people in the world seem unable to recognise hyperbole, metaphor, personification and other figures of speech. (What is more lacking, our science education, or our language education?) The tradition of personifying things seems rather ingrained in the human psyche, and is a useful way of relating to otherwise abstract ideas. I’m sure Susan Blackmore also took some inspiration from Dawkins’ personification of genes.

Perhaps thinktoomuch should spend less time thinking (as he suggests himself) and more reading, verifying and learning. A teachable spirit opens the doors to learning.

On what do you base your suggestion that I read too little? On what front do you reckon my knowledge/education is particularly lacking? What books do you recommend I read? Possibly some Dawkins and Blackmore? Blackmore’s book is actually waiting on my shelf… I have indeed done less reading than I would have liked to do. Until recently, my reason was the need to get my thesis finished. Hopefully I will be doing significantly more reading from now on. I will also make some posts about the books on my bookshelf, in case anyone is looking for some book recommendations.

And then you seem to imply I’m not teachable. I resent that. Based on what do you make that claim?

So, dear readers, does anyone agree with Tinus that I’m relatively cynical, or do you think Tinus is misguided in his appraisal of my blog and merely busy with some mud-slinging himself? (Oh, and please do let me know when I come across as cynical. I consider myself to be quite teachable.)

This is from The Bad Astronomer’s Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2007.