Gwyneth Paltrow in each one. Hmmm. Usually it's Columbo.
I didn't see nothing. I'm not a supertaster either, but I know most of the lyrics to a They Might Be Giants song about a supertaster.
I am *too* special, and none of your fancy internet tests are going to convince me that I'm not!
Well, like Minivet and bill, I have a Y chromosome, which means we're shit out of luck, as I understand it. I think being tetrachromat would be a sad and lonely condition, because all your friends' colours would clash horribly, and you couldn't explain why.
Oops, I said the quiet part loud and the loud part quiet.
Isn't that such a cool concept? A completely, totally, absolutely useless super-power. One, in fact, that the owner doesn't even the language to describe to the rest of us. We have no idea what cDa29 (the only known tetrachromat in the world) actually sees, but her vision is as different from ours as ours is from a dog. Only we don't get the enhanced sense of smell to compensate. (Probably good, that would be worst super-power ever.)
Here's an article from Discover that gives a lot more history and details. Wade through the first couple paragraphs to get to the interesting stuff. http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-humans-with-super-human-vision/
This was the subject of one of the main stories in the recent "Color" Radiolab episode.
On a totally unrelated, but possibly interesting note, the single piece of information that I spent the longest time researching for that book was lunchboxes in the early 1950's. I spent at least five hours trying to find out whether Rose could have conceivably had a lunchbox when she was thirteen years old before finally deciding that the answer was just barely, but it would have had to be the first one in widespread circulation, therefore Hopalong Cassidy.
Probably good, that would be worst super-power ever.
True. You could end up like this.
Is this like that page of optical illusions that weren't optical illusions? Because I am not sitting staring at a computer screen for half an hour. Again.
Because I am not sitting staring at a computer screen for half an hour
God yeah, what a thought. How boring!
Are you sure that page isn't just a joke to play on gullible internet people? Oh yeah, I see an 8 and a 3 and a bird in those three circles that really are just dots of the same color!
There's also this article about the colors red-green and blue-yellow.
Apparently red-green and blue-yellow are real colors that we can't perceive because, anatomically, seeing red cancels out your ability to see green, and vice versa, and blue with yellow. But you can perceive them if you're in a fancy-pants lab with a retinal stabilization machine.
SORRY KRAABY, WE WANT SEAFOOD THAT TASTES SUPER, NOT SEAFOOD WITH SUPER TASTE!
I feel obligated to bring up the greatest superpower of them all: Superkoranic Fellatio Power.
I can see some shapes there, but it's clearly pareidolia, rather than special colour perception. Shame. It'd be nice to be tetrachromatic.
pareidolia
THANK YOU. Goddamnit I've been trying to remember that word for ages.
22: You just think you've been trying to remember that word for ages.
Everyone's a tetrachromat
Everyone's a supertaster
Everyone's a bit Asperger's
Everyone has synesthesia
Pareidolia is interestingly tricky to test empirically.
Everyone's a tetrachromat
Everyone's a supertaster
Everyone's a bit Asperger's
Everyone has synesthesia
There are other super- conditions y'all have not yet lit upon.
However everybody does not have Williams Syndrome.
Everyone just wants to be loved.
Everyone thinks they are right.
Everyone feels like U2 is singing to them personally when they lean against the rainy window pain and watch Ross walk away.
||
Well shit, here comes stormytimes again. Say goodnight, Pepco customers!
|>
Was that enough or do we all have to say it?
We'll never know (well, for a few more days) because they'll all have lost power by now.
If their phones are still charged they can let us know that way.
Yeah, it doesn't seem as intense or long lasting as Friday's storm. So they're probably fine.
I don't understand how tetrachromaticity works with the additive/subtractive color theory I was taught in school. If you have extra cones, can you see colors that can't be made with red/green/blue or cyan/magenta/yellow? Is color mixing a property of light or a property of my visual cortex?
Color mixing is a property of your visual cortex. For example, combinations of certain wavelengths will have a similar perceived color based upon what your 3 types of cones detect. If you had 4 or 2 types of cones this would be different.
It is complicated:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision#Mathematics_of_color_perception
26: Just give them random stimuli and see which one writes a thousand page book about memory and desire.
Superkoranic Fellatio Power
Expialadocious?
(In which I am pwned seven years ago.)
Basically, the existence of the colour "green" is a physical fact - monochromatic light of a certain wavelength looks green - but the fact that you can make something by mixing blue and yellow that _also_ looks like green to you is a phenomenon of your visual cortex.
There are military applications: green leaves and green-dyed uniforms both look green to us, but to sensors with different sensitivities - or tetrachromats - they might look very different.
ajay: Thanks, that makes a lot of sense! I vaguely remember being taught color mixing as a physical fact (i.e., in Physics class), though I don't remember what the actual physical explanation was supposed to be.
If this guys experiment works (which it might not, there's an improbably large number of people in his comments who think they see something), it implies there's a high degree of redundancy for non-tetrachromats in the (32 bit?) RGB/CMY colorspace used by modern displays. Which are the parts of the colorspace that are useless to us?
OT, relevant to the Barclays story: I can't help thinking that Lady Vadera must actually be the wife of Lord Vader.
In answer to 43, no idea, sorry, because I am not quite sure what a colourspace is.
Different colour spaces have different gamuts. In fact, lots of display gamuts are narrower, rather than wider, than we can see.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut
for an overview. If you look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Colorspace.png
You'll see that the various colour spaces used in software and hardware implementations overlap imperfectly with each other, and with the visible colour space.
I'd like to see a representation of the tetrachromatic chromaticity diagram, the trichromatic (CIE 1931), and RGB color spaces. I'm somewhat sceptical, as for the monitor experiment to work, there have to be colours within the gamut of RGB and not within CIE1931, which are also simultaneously within the tetrachromatic space.
However, sRGB is located entirely within the CIE 1931 space. So, erm, hmmm. Also, as a pragmatic fact, most people have their monitors with the color temperature jacked into the blue range and the brightness way too high, so they probably aren't even displaying the full range of sRGB colours accurately.
Should have mentioned this in 21.*
* I do a bit of consultancy at work on colour accuracy in photography. Hardly and experiment, but I've read a lot of the non-specialist lay-person [i.e. aimed at people working with colour, not people researching colour] literature on gamuts and colour-spaces.
That should have read 'hardly an expert, but ...'.
most people have their monitors with the color temperature jacked into the blue range and the brightness way too high
That's interesting. My monitor is on factory settings, with the colours equalised and the brightness smack in the middle. I imagine most people's are - why would you fuck around with it unless you have special requirements?
Does this mean that i. what is presented as equalised colours are in fact jacked into the blue range? and ii. default brightness is too high (by what criteria)?
I painted every wall in my house off-white to avoid having to deal with color space (and to avoid some masking).
OT, relevant to the Barclays story: I can't help thinking that Lady Vadera must actually be the wife of Lord Vader.
The Vaders would naturally want to help out people like Bob Diamond, Rich Ricci, Rollo Rolex, Sir Fred Von Snob, Pluto Crat, and whoever else is in charge of the big banks these days.
Lady Vadera must actually be the wife of Lord Vader
This hypothesis is supported by her reputation among people who worked for her when she was a minister as being an egregiously unreasonable, evil tempered bitch, even in that company. Nobody will be inclined to jump in and save her if they've thrown her to the sharks.
51 et al.: I heard a comedian the other day talking about the Barclays business who said that it had blown up his irony meter. He then said that he had only just replaced his irony meter which had broken when he heard Rebekah Brooks complaining about the unfairness of the coverage she was receiving in the British press.
30: I just got (the other half of)* my electricity back last night. Now I can see what I'm doing when I use the bathroom! Life is grand.
*Apparently my apartment is connected to two different circuits.
Life is grand.
Visual confrimation is gratifying, isn't it?
Eh, conniption, Schenectady, fussbudget, pluperfect, coriolis, Terpsichore and lackadaisical are all much better words.
re: 49.last
A lot default to being too blue, yeah. PC monitors used to always default to 9300K which is a lot higher than daylight, so has a strong blue cast. It looks nice and bright though, editing documents. People working with colour typically have it set to 6500K, although some may use 5000K even (which will look quite red to some people). Also, many people crank the brightness to 100%. Again, because they like a really bright 'clear' screen. LCD monitors tend, I think, to more often be set to 6500K so are less blue, although not always.
Properly calibrated monitors will usually have the brightness lower than would be common (although yours set at half-ish is probably not as bright as a lot of people set it). The brightness is too high if you start getting the white end of the brightness range [e.g. in a step-chart] all blending together, and too low if the same happens at the bottom end.
People can obviously set it any way they like, per preference, but if they do the photographs or images they are looking at may not look at all like they looked to the photographer or designer who put them together. Take a look, for example [this is purely for brightness and contrast, not colour]:
http://www.photofriday.com/calibrate.php
[We use hardware calibration at work with devices, which is different]
I loved the "Sign on you crazy Diamond" headline.
Tories also have a longstanding grudge against Vadera for renationalising the railways.
Also, many people crank the brightness to 100%. Again, because they like a really bright 'clear' screen
The automatic brightness on my mac almost aways makes my eyes strain because it's too dim, especially if the room is dim. And if I'm on the computer, the room is usually dim because I don't feel like I need to bother turning on the overhead light. So I'm always jacking up the brightness.
I'm still not clear on what "too bright" means - it distorts the colors?
The idea on the page ttaM linked is that if your monitor is set too bright, you lose differentiation at the bright end of the scale -- white is indistinguishable from very light grey. On the other hand, I tried adjusting my screen on that basis, and even with the brightness cranked all the way down in a dim room, I still couldn't distinguish their white from their lightest grey.
What LB said. You lose the ability to make fine differentiations of shade at either end of the scale, if the monitor is set either to light or to dark, or if the contrast is set incorrectly. Some people have them set so high that the everything that ranges from middling-light-grey through to light-grey all collapses into white.* On the opposite end, I know people who suffer from eye strain typing who drop the brightness and contrast down [as a conscious choice].
LB: might be the contrast, the two interact. It's worth playing around with both. There are other variables, too. Sometimes viewing angle is all it is. With an LCD monitor if you aren't perpendicular to it, you can lost quite a bit of the dynamic range at either end.
* exactly like overly loud audio going into clipping.
On my home PC monitor I can't differentiate the bottom two shades, i.e. black and next-to-black, from the seat position I have. Whereas if I raise the seat slightly I can just see it. I suspect I could probably raise the brightness by a tiny percentage and get slightly better results.
Plus, some monitors are just shitty monitors.
I can only distinguish both ends if I crank up both the contrast and the brightness to full strength. Diagnosis: shitty monitor.
Could just be the lighting. Or yeah, shitty monitor.
Maybe that validates how I'm always cranking up the brightness - maybe the entire range is on the low side.
Another installment into fascinating details about my computer monitor, stay tuned.
Another installment into fascinating details about my computer monitor, stay tuned.
This episode really lacked dramatic resolution. In my opinion, geebie's earlier work exhibited much tighter narrative and more satisfying characterizations.
Hopefully in future she'll be able to call back to this stuff and we can just chalk it up to 'world building.'
Bottom line: not a great effort. Hopefully the network can keep the advertisers from bolting before sweeps, when I know geebie has a fascinating story arc planned regarding her other peripheral devices.
Good grief, it was several years ago that I adjusted my monitor to its current settings, and now I stupidly can't figure out how to do it. Uh, the buttons at the bottom of the monitor bring up various menus, which do not operate via mouse. Right, I have to use up and down (or left and right, whichever) arrow keys. And yet they do nothing either.
Nor does it appear that + and - keys do anything to increase or decrease the settings. My brightness level is set to 23, though (whatever that means, since it's not obvious what the scale is, though it appears that 50 would be in the middle).
It would seem that my monitor's button's were/are overridden by some software that came with the monitor called MagicTune(tm). Via the software, I tried their auto settings. Good god! Stop! Far too bright and weirdly fuzzy.
Switching back to my previous settings, I apparently like a darker/more saturated screen. Brightness 23, contrast 75. I can't tell if that makes sense.
To continue with serial commenting:
54: Yeah, power outages continue to cast a pall in the mid-Atlantic and elsewhere. A handful of my household's friends and acquaintances are still without power, and there's a lot of making-do going on. We got lucky here. Our freezer, though, is stuffed with a friend's freezer goods; said friend lives only 6 miles away, but no power there.
Plus, it's really hot. People are subdued, for this fourth of July.
Last night here it must have rained for an hour or more. We really need it.
We do need it. Last summer's heat wave killed off a lot of our garden's peppers and tomatoes -- the explanation is that early heat makes the flowers drop off the plant, and of course without flowers, there is no fruit. For tomatoes, burgeoning fruits can be baked in the sun, on the vine. We therefore have a couple of large umbrellas over the tomato plants, which might seem silly.
We had no more than 15 minutes of pathetic spitting rain here last night, unfortunately.
God is punishing Baltimore for inflicting that song on his chosen people, and DC for going along with it. The rest of you folks are just collateral damage.
I was quite surprised when I moved to DC in the 80s by how often summer storms caused power outages, how big they were, and how long they lasted. Still surprised, I guess: you'd think someone would be thinking about how to make this not happen nearly so often. I'm curious about other eastern regions: short of a hurricane, can one expect in New England or NC to be without power for a week as a result of a summer storm?
Which song?
The word is that this particular storm was distinctive. As for thinking about how to make this not happen as often: there's been some discussion about underground power lines (as opposed to overhead ones), and there are pros and cons, financially, either way. Apparently it costs roughly 10x more to dig for underground power lines; on the other hand, how much does this cost every time the power goes out significantly like this? Millions, apparently. I don't know enough to make a judgment.
80: Oh! I was going for the Randy Newman Baltimore song, and wondering if it was really that bad.
Happy Independence Day, everyone! (yes, you non-Americans too)
Having cooked, fed, eaten, watched a parade, cooked, fed, eaten, and cleaned up, I am now flopped on the couch with the ceiling fan on.
In case you haven't seen this yet:
These men and their children had good cause to be bitter, and perhaps on other days they indulged in it. On this day they were proud to be Americans at last. Without forgetting the wrongs that had been done to them, they believed in an America that was more than the sum of its wrongs. Without forgetting 54 years of injustice, they believed in an America that had the potential to transcend its injustices.
82.last: I haven't looked at that link yet, but I saw one Khalil Ghibran Mohammed (a historian) on Bill Moyers recently talking about the form this country's independence statements took, and he kept pointing out the oddity of so many Americans celebrating this day when they were clearly left out of it at the time. It was interesting; he equivocated between feeling that this now-enfranchisement and participation was right and good, and feeling that it was an exercise in collective amnesia.
he kept pointing out the oddity of so many Americans celebrating this day when they were clearly left out of it at the time
Yes -- I can't find the essay I just read about Juneteenth, talking about how many years it took for black Americans to fully adopt July 4 as their holiday too.
I've been looking for a link to the Bill Moyers show. I've horribly misspelled the interviewee's name: it's Khalil Gibran Muhammad. Link to a brief write-up here.
Full show here, I think. I became increasingly fascinated with the man's historical perspective.
billmoyers.com, just the front page, has a great deal of excellent content, by the way.
Some famous fellow -- MLK probably -- talked about the declaration/founding as a check written without sufficient funds, but which will/must be covered in the fullness of time. It's a fact that no one now alive was left out of anything 230 years ago, and is a fact that the check isn't fully covered even still. It takes a particularly foolish binary sort of thinking to dismiss the last centuries of progress because (i) they were necessary or (ii) are not complete.
My flags are still packed: I usually fly a Bennington flag, but have been thinking of getting a Taunton. To annoy passing tea drinkers.
86 directed at straw people, not the fellow on Moyers.
It's a fact that no one now alive was left out of anything 230 years ago
86.2: It will also come in handy to preserve your body heat if you get caught out in a storm and can't get back to Echo Base.
75: People are subdued, for this fourth of July.
It's really hot here too, and I witnessed an argument very nearly come to blows on the bus this evening. Some old white guy was talking all this racist shit, and the black guy sitting in front of him wasn't having any of it. He was on the cusp of slapping the shit out of the racist (or so he averred), an action that everyone on the bus -- even the driver -- conceded would only serve the racist guy right, but thankfully discretion was found to be the better part of valor, and no shit-out-of-slapping occurred. Fucking racist asshole guy got off the bus, but was then on the later bus that I also was on, and apparently has a girlfriend who lives in or around my general neighborhood. I'm not saying that I would ever kick the shit out of him if I happened upon him on a dark night outside of the view of CCTV cameras, but I would be sorely tempted.
Lest you think I am being too hotheaded, I would point out that when the black guy left the bus, the racist guy shouted several versions of "see you later, boy at him. I was really fuming, but it would not have done anyone any good for any of us to spend the night in jail. Grrrrrrr.
It might have helped me.
can one expect in New England or NC to be without power for a week as a result of a summer storm?
I have one co-worker in a expensive Boston suburb, verging on rural with their lot sizes, who lost power for a week twice in a year. Once as a result of a snowstorm, the second time as a result of the summer-storm remains of Hurricane Irene.
My parents seem to be pretty much immune from the kind of power outages seen so frequently in New England, but then they do live less than 1,000 feet from a hydroelectric generating station. I assume our relations of a more Arcadian bent do not always fare so well.
I have never lost power for more than a day in Camberville, I don't think. But yeah, the MA suburbs and exurbs have gotten it bad in the last couple years.
Lost power today when a transformer blew on my block. It was out for a couple hours while the neighbors stood around and made cynical comments about who is collecting triple time. A couple with a toddler got locked out of their house because they'd taken a stroll with only the garage door remote as a key. I was on the verge of getting a ladder for them to try to break in when with a ping and rush of window fans we heard the block turn back on.
We don't usually lose power during storms in my neighborhood, and if we do it's only for a few hours. I've been assuming it's that we're in the city vs. the outlying rural areas, where numerous cow-orkers still report being without power after this most recent derecho storm. But TJ's comment #30 makes me wonder if points north just got hit harder.
Did people in DC proper, Arlington, and the other close-in suburbs lose power?
To be honest worrying about monitor colour for most people (i.e. everyone not working on digital image editing) is quite pointless.
And even if you do heaps of stuff with colour, the easiest thing is to always check the colours as they appear in the end product, especially printed matter.
(And where possible check in the light they will be seen in! Check things that will be seen outdoors in daylight, things that will be under fluoros under fluoros etc.)
People are subdued
I had a very subdued Fourth of July, because I'm a doormat I volunteered to work since I'm leaving soon and wanted another cow-orker to be able to have the day off.
I can't really complain. In addition to being paid for the day, I earned a floating holiday, which I plan to deploy later in the month when my band opens for a rather large national act coming through town.
Yeah. Things are pretty great at the moment. I suppose that's worth beaming about a bit, at the risk of sounding like a jerk.
Beam away. It's nice to hear about friends doing well. I think so, anyway.
Happy Independence Day, everyone!
Treason doth never prosper; what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
I looked up Wiki to find out who actually was born on the Fourth of July.
U.S. Grant, Meyer Lansky, Rube Goldberg, Leona Helmsley, Michael Milken and Koko the Sign-Language Gorilla.
re: 99
I'm not sure I quite agree. For the bulk of digital imaging produced these days, the screen image _is_ the final output. Also, the number of people working in 'digital imaging' [interpreted very loosely] is large, given that most people have digital cameras these days, and even if they are just producing snaps for family and friends, there's no harm in making editing and display easier.
If you are producing printed output, you still need [and I can't emphasise this enough having seen expensive hard-back print runs pulped because of it] colour accurate monitors.
I don't know about all of the capital region, but as of yesterday evening one person I know in Silver Spring *just* got power back.
108: if you're going to print, you would almost always proof, and that's what the reference point should be, not the computer image. (Old fashioned and idealistic, I know, but.)
Of course there's no harm in making sure that monitors are accurate, and if you are ever getting paid to do this you're a mug if you don't.
But given the infidelity of most printing processes --- especially cheap printing ---, and the fact that different processes introduce different flaws, a habit of proofing work extensively and making sure that the print process puts out the right thing is better than relying on the monitor.
But yeah, I'm being too dogmatic when as sweeping 99.
110: would should be should in that first para. I am quite doctrinaire on this one, sadly.
110: and of course the last line ought be `But yeah, I'm being too dogmatic when being as sweeping as in 99.'
This is why I am such a believer in proofs --- I never see my own mistakes until they are in print.
re: 110
Sure, print proofing is important. But in the pulping case I have in mind, I'm talking of a lengthy book, with hundreds of full-colour images gathered together from multiple sources, being printed in another country. Which would be fairly common with out-sourcing, and external print bureaus. You can proof, but you can't do multiple iterations of every image and go back and forth to your printers. Without a colour accurate monitor as a starting point, you are really handicapped.
[I don't think we really disagree here]
And, as I said, for lots of images, the screen is the output. Again, from personal experience, I get passed complaints from scholars and the public, complaining that 'manuscript X' looks wrong, or they can't read this bit of text, or the illuminations are too blue, or whatever. Ninety times out of a hundred, it's because their monitor is set incorrectly. Another nine or so out of ten it's because they expect it to look either like their imaginary version, or the version they've seen in a book (where some designer has massively bumped up the colour saturation and contrast to make it look teh shiny).
For most people, hardware calibration is overkill, but taking five minutes to make sure the brightness and or contrast aren't wacky, and the colour temperature is OK is, I think, a good recommendation. Recognizing of course, that a lot of people don't care, or have good subjective reasons -- they like a dim monitor because they get eye strain, or they work in a very brightly lit environment, or whatever -- to set it differently.
113 -- yeah, I agree, and if there's money on the line, any unforced errors like that are pretty stupid.
I just think that for a lot of print applications around the home/office it is more important to think about the print process, because that is way more likely to be dodgy.
I am also enough of a snob I don't think most people should try edit their own photos, even to the extent of trying to adjust colour balances etc. Just let it be! The camera is probably as good at this as you are! I am aware this makes me a pretty horrible person.
re: 114.last
I sort of agree. Although a lot of cameras actually still produce pretty horrible output, especially if the person doesn't know how to 'drive' it. So there is a bit of scope for after-the-fact fixing. However, I'd guess (backing you up) most people who don't know how to work their camera, also don't know how to use software to fix it later.
I rarely make any changes to colour balance myself [for personal stuff], for that matter, although I will quite often tweak contrast or exposure slightly.
I suspect partly I am used to cameras that have decent colour balance, and that I know how to work, so I tend to assume that the best thing to do is to get this stuff right first time, and do as little post-processing as possible.
Also I tend to be photographing still objects in good, controlled, known lighting with very little time pressure, so it is possible to get it right first time!
And then I transfer prejudices picked up there to people trying to fix the one good shot they got of their family at the Colosseum that was ruined by the fact the camera thought it was still (naughtily) photographing the Sistine Chapel ceiling and so got the colours all wonky.
100: Great news. If you get to meet the band, be sure to tell us what Justin is really like.
116.last: That's why I take pictures with my phone. It has GPS.
White balance is one of those things, funnily enough, where my digital compact (about 18 months old) is much more accurate than my dSLR (about 4 years old). I haven't owned a very recent digital SLR [I shoot film most of the time] but I wonder if that's an across the board improvement or just a model-by-model thing.
OT: Guy on bus reading a script of Hamlet with Claudius's lines highlighted. He's wearing toe shoes, a cowboy-style belt, and a Crocodile Dundee hat.
"That's not a dagger you see before you. This is a dagger you see before you."
(Yes, I know, wrong play.)
"I smell a 'roo behind the hangins"
Jumping waaaay back to 46/47: I think talking about gamuts is off on the wrong track. IIUC they define the boundaries of color spaces and perception, whereas what the image is testing is distinctions within the color space.
I zoomed in on the test image in GIMP and used the color picker tool to try to figure out exactly what's being tested. The red blobs seem to vary in the ranges (each color has a possible range from 0-255):
Red: 240-255
Green: 0-15
Blue: 0-20
So presumably what's being tested is if you can make fine distinctions in the proportions of green and blue in a color even when red is near saturation. I think this particular uncontrolled test will be very influenced by the brightness/contrast of your monitor.
I see fourier transforms, so I totally saw all those patterns.
Scientists cure color-blindness in monkeys
and successful gene therapy in adult humans!
I wonder if I want mantis shrimp vision. Probably everyone would look distressingly blotchy.
