After all these decades, I was surprised to learn a couple of years ago in an eye exam that I’m somewhat color blind. It’s never affected my life, as far as I know — I see red lights on a green Christmas tree, and I’ve never had trouble distinguishing between red and green traffic signals. But apparently others must see the colors more vividly than I do. Or perhaps it was a late onset kind of thing. Anyway, though I can see many red spots, I can’t quite make out the message on this shirt. Which is probably a good thing.
7 thoughts on “An Amusing Teeshirt”
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I believe everybody is in a sense, colorblind. Probably best defined as the inability to distinguish between two colors. Well that definition would include everybody. Color is made up of two parts, sensors in the eye and interpretation in the brain. Each has a unique combination of sensors. That data then goes to the brain, even more unique among individuals.
Most human eyes can see about 24 to 26 bits of color I’ve heard, more in the green and less in the red. But is my blue the same as your blue? Not likely.
It’s not probably important enough for a decent study, but I think it would be interesting to learn from a large population if the colors we can distinguish are the same ones for each person or unique for each.
I ought to be ashamed of myself for laughing at some of the offerings on T-Shirt Hell.
What’s it say?
There is apparently a native american/native mexican tribe that is incapable of distinguishing orange as a color distinct from red.
Rand, your color blindness seems to be weak on the red cones, which is pretty common with age. Red cones are a late evolutionary adaption. If you saw things as a deer or other ruminant does, you’d see yellow, blue, and various shades of the two trending toward grey. Old people with weak red cones who like red have a tendency to overdo bright red things in their lives.
“What’s it say?”
Really? it says “fuck the color blind” in all caps. Which even the color blind could probably figure out from the URL. Missing a [sarc] tag?
“It’s not probably important enough for a decent study, but I think it would be interesting to learn from a large population if the colors we can distinguish are the same ones for each person or unique for each.”
XKCD did something similar to that study idea, and surveyed 140 thousand people to name colors. Although the sample is self-selected, it is probably sufficiently large to draw some general conclusions – among them, that colors are pretty much the same for everyone, though women have a few more modifiers for color names than men do.
I am “color differently abled”. No joke. A study was done by some guys who stopped to consider the problem with partially color blind guys like me. They figured that since one of the three cones in the eye is defective and picks up light at a wavelength close to one of the others then we visual gimps might be extra sensitive to fine destinctions at the “dual-cone” wavelength. They ended up creating a dot/circle test that we did wonderfully at and all of you bland normal people failed. Now I just need the city to install “brown yellow brown” stop lights. Bwa ha ha ha.
I wrote a computer program for a Fourier spectrum display showing two traces — kind of like a dual-trace scope. One trace was green, another trace was cyan (a kind of blue-green). This was done on the VGA where the color selections were rather limited, and I think you know where this is headed.
So a colleague in the lab where we used this thing comes up to me, “That spectrum display program is pretty good, but I am wondering if you could make some changes. The two traces can be distinguished by being different shades, but would it be too much of a change to make them different colors?”
So I got this big “stuff-eating grin” on my face and the colleague asks, “OK Paul, let me in on the joke.” “Well no offense, but I had no idea that I had put one of those color-blindness tests into the software.” I think my friend and colleague didn’t know that he had one form of “color blindness” as he probably passed his Driver’s Test OK.