Category Archives: news

pink stinks?

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PinkStinks (http://www.pinkstinks.co.uk/) is a campaign and social enterprise that challenges the culture of pink which invades every aspect of girls’ lives. The campaign has been running for 18 months and activists argue that while a wide variety of boys’ toys are available, those for girls are often predominantly pink. They argue that body image obsession is starting younger and younger, and that the seeds are sown during the pink stage, as young girls are taught the boundaries within which they will grow up, as well as narrow and damaging messages about what it is to be a girl.

It’s interesting that the notion of pink for girls and blue for boys has not always been so. A recent article on the BBC web site claims that in 1918 the Ladies’ Home Journal included the statement: “There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger colour is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” For more see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8401742.stm.

a new colour?

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Even those not particularly interested in colour are likely to have heard or read news stories recently about the remarkable colour vision of shrimps; the mantis shrimp has been discovered to effectively have 12 different classes of wavelength-sensitive detectors (whereas most of us have only three!). I have already posted about this story before – see http://colourware.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/how-many-colours-are-there/ – and moaned about how many of the reports say that human can only see three colours (which is not the same thing as having three classes of cone – as our light receptors are known – of course).

However, today I was listening to BBC Radio 5 and I heard the latest development of this story which is that the mantis shrimp has now been shown to be able to differentially detect light according to how it is polarised. For a nice descriptiopn of what this means in simle English I recommend the article on the National Georgraphic website – http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/05/080519-shrimp-colors.html. However, the ‘popular interest’ angle of the story that was reported on the radio today was that shrimps can see colours that we cannot see. This notion that there are colours out there that have never been seen by humans, and that shrimps can see them, is interestig. Radio 5 ran a poll inviting listeners to phone in with their least favourite colour – if we could choose to see this new colour that shrimps can see but had to throw one existing colour out to make room for it, which one would it be? I didn’t hear the end of this but the first candidate for colorimetric execution was mustard colour!

Of course, that shrimps can detect wavelengths that we cannot see and can detect different types of polarization is one thing; claiming they can then see colours that we cannot, is quite another thing. I won’t ram this point home here but would simply quote Issac Newton who famously said that, to speak properly, the rays are not coloured. However, the notion of a new colour reminded me of a novel that was written in 1939 by Brian O’Nolan called The Third Policeman.  This is a strange book but the plot incorporates a man who paints his bicycle a colour that nobody has even seen before and that, if seen, would cause the observer to go insane. Sadly, the book failed to find a publisher whilst the author was alive. It was finally published in 1967, one year after the author’s death.

colorization

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One of my favourite movies – especially at Christmas – is It’s a Wonderful Life; a 1946 American movie directed by Frank Capra and starring James Stewart, a man who is financially ruined and is about to commit siucide on Christmas Eve until he is visited by a guardian angel.

Today I saw a new colorized version of the movie being advertised on DVD (or maybe Blu-Ray, whatever that is). It turns out that it is not the first colorized version of this movie. The first was introduced in 1986 and improved upon in 1989. The process of colorization is a difficult and time-consuming process; essentially an artist adds colour to each frame of the movie (obviously this is usually done digitally on a computer). There are two interesting properties of the world and of colour vision that makes the process a little easier than it might otherwise be.

Firstly, colour varies slowly over the scene so that it is not necessary to individually colour each pixel; the artist can define an area an add a single colour to that area with a single mouse click. The importance of luminance for detecting edges and defining form allows some error in this process with the knowledge that it probably wouldn’t be noticeable to most observers. However, in addition to spatial smoothness, there is also temporal smoothness. So, most adjacent frames are very similar. This allows the artist to colorize every, say, 10th frame, and use interpolation to do the rest.

The results of colorization are sometimes disappointing, especially for flesh tones. However, the process is improving all the time and I look forward to seeing the latest results.

blue santa

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In an attempt to influence the way in which the public perceive police offers, a program in Logan County (Ohia, USA) will have officers knocking on the doors of the needy bearing gifts, accompanied (where possible) by an officer dressed in a blue santa suit. 

 The program is designed for families with at least one child at home and is focused mostly on food, toys and clothing for young children. For more information about the Blue Santa program, contact Joe McBride at the Logan County Sheriff’s Office at (970) 522-2578, Ext. 3507.

The Blue Santa Program has its origins in San Antonio (Texas, USA) and goes back to 1976. It became an official programme of SAPD in 1986 – http://www.sanantonio.gov/saPD/bluesanta.asp?res=1280&ver=true

By coincidence next year’s IS&T Color Imaging Conference will be held in San Antonio. For further information see http://www.imaging.org/ist/conferences/cic/index.cfm

where do the stars go in the daytime?

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Galloway Forest Park in Scotland has picked up an international award as one of the best places for stargazing in the world. The 300sq mile Forestry Commission site has been commended for its dark skies and named one of the best places in the world for stargazing.

stars

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8362265.stm

So where do the stars go in the daytime? The answer is that they are still there of course. It is a nice reminder that our colour vision is more about contrast than about absolute intensities. With old TV sets when they were switched off the screens were grey; but when they were turned on it would be possible to see some really dark blacks. But the screen cannot emit less light than when it is turned off! So the black looks black because of contrast, not simply because of the amount of light emitted or not emitted.

Against the dark skies of night the stars contrast and appear bright – during the day, the skies are much brighter because of the sun and though the light from the stars is just as intense as it is at night the contrast conditions are very different.

#cic17

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This week I attended IS&T’s 17th Color Imaging Conference in Albuquerque – http://www.imaging.org/IST/conferences/cic/

Attendance was a little lower than normal (because of the recession) but the quality of the conference was certainly not down on previous years. In fact, it was one of the best CICs for a while. I would recommend the conference to anyone with an interest in digital colour or colour imaging – the next conference will be November 2010 in San Antonio, Texas. The two things I like best about the conference are the content (as usual I came away with several new ideas that I can’t wait to get back and try) and the people. It’s a really friendly bunch of people and a great place to meet all those great colour scientists whose papers and books you’ve read.

Next year I may offer a short course in MATLAB. The short courses are held on the day or two before the conference starts proper.

As for the location – Albuqueque. Well, a little disappointing, to be honest. It’s a place I always wanted to visit. It sounds so exotic but in the end it is about as exotic as Huddersfield. It’s true that Old Town Albuquerque (where the conference was held) is interesting and quite qaint. However, I just walked down Route 66 into the downtown area today and it was disappointing to say the least. I think I saw the future of UK cities today – with the downtown area boarded up and empty and everyone in shopping malls that are 8 miles out of town and only accessible by car.

To read more views about the conference go to twitter and look for #cic17.

See you there next year?

Tokyo blues

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East Japan Railway Co. has spent £100,000 fitting out all 29 stations on Tokyo’s central train loop, the Yamanote Line, with the strong bulbs.

The operators believe they will emit a soothing glow, despite the absence of any scientific proof that the method reduces suicides.

Mizuki Takahashi, a therapist involved with the project, said: “We associate the colour with the sky and the sea.

“It has a calming effect on agitated people, or people obsessed with one particular thing, which in this case is committing suicide.”

A total of 68 people threw themselves in front of trains in the 12 months until March, up from 42 in the same period the year before. The lights will be hung at the end of each platform, a spot where people are most likely to jump to their deaths.

blue tokyo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See http://tinyurl.com/ydocbh6

 

Cryptic coloration

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Cryptic coloration is the most common form of camouflage, found to some extent in the majority of species. The simplest way is for an animal to be of a colour similar to its surroundings.

crabspider2

The female Misumena vatiaspider switches her body colour over the course of days depending on the flower where she lurks. This is often cited as an example of cryptic coloration. However, according to a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a white spider on a white flower doesn’t catch more prey than a white spider moved to a yellow flower. Nor does a yellow spider on a yellow flower get a colour-coordination bonus. The study may shatter the myth of crypsis by colour matching in crab spiders. For further details see http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49079/title/Textbook_case_of_color-changing_spider_reopened

The colour of the universe

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The colour of the universe is …..

beige!!

the-universe-001

 

 

 

Astrophysicists Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry took light measurements from more than 200,000 galaxies, broke them down into their constituent colours and then averaged the colours out to produce a single shade visible to the human eye. The result was beige. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/nov/04/pass-notes-the-universe

Staying on the space theme, One week ago, the MESSENGER spacecraft transmitted to Earth the first high-resolution image of Mercury by a spacecraft in over 30 years. MESSENGER’s Wide Angle Camera is equipped with 11 narrow-band color filters, in contrast to the two visible-light filters and one ultraviolet filter that were on Mariner 10’s vidicon camera. By combining images taken through different filters in the visible and infrared, the MESSENGER data allow Mercury to be seen in a variety of high-resolution color views not previously possible. MESSENGER’s eyes can see far beyond the color range of the human eye, and the colors seen in the accompanying image are somewhat different from what a human would see.

The color image was generated by combining three separate images taken through WAC filters sensitive to light in different wavelengths; filters that transmit light with wavelengths of 1000, 700, and 430 nanometers (infrared, far red, and violet, respectively) were placed in the red, green, and blue channels, respectively, to create this image.

mercury

How many colours are there?

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I sometimes begin a series of student lectures on colour with the question – how many colours are there? At least one student always answers: three! In fact, this week in my lecture when I asked this question the first three or four answers were all three.

I can see where the idea of three comes from since the number three is ubiquitous in colour. We have three different classes of cones in the retina of our eyeballs – each with maximum sensitivity at a different wavelength. As a direct consequence of this trichromacy we use colour monitors with three primaries (RGB), colour printers with three primaries (CMY – ok, sometimes black as well but there’s a good reason for that), and there is a misconception that there are three primary colours from whose mixtures it is possible to make every other colour – see http://colourware.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/what-is-a-colour-primary/

I think that the number of colours that we can see is about 10 million; maybe less, but certainly millions. However, there are arguments that the true number may be much greater than this. See, for example, Mark Fairchild’s article – http://www.cis.rit.edu/fairchild/WhyIsColor/files/ExamplePage.pdf.

However, even the people thinking about colour mixing and three primaries must surely be aware that they have seen more than three colours. Indeed, were probably wearing more than three colours! So why do they respond with three? Well, it could be that they misunderstand the question and think I am asking about primaries (perhaps because they think the real question I am asking is too hard and nobody in their right mind would ask it). Or it could be that they equate the word colour with physical colorants. One of the most interesting – but also frustrating – things in field is that even the name of the field – colour – means different things to different people. Is colour something physical? Is it something you experience? Or is it simply whether something is red, yellow or blue etc; in other words, another term for what I would call hue?

This probably explains why we find the following text on this webpage – http://english.kompas.com/read/xml/2009/10/29/06125368/The.Shrimps.That.Can.See.in.Twelve.Colors:

A juvenile Mantis shrimp. These shrimps have the most complex vision systems known to science. Special light-sensitive cells allow them to distinguish between different types of polarized light, and they can see 12 colors (compared to three for humans) ranging into the near-ultra violet to infra-red parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

It literally says that shrimps see 12 colours whereas, elsewhere on the page, it says that humans see 3 colours.  Despite this irritating lack of precision in the writing the article is quite interesting and describes the surprisingly complex nature of shrimp colour vision.