Category Archives: opinions/rants

Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours

knowledge, opinions/rants, , , ,

In 1794 John Dalton presented a lecture to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society about colour vision. The first two sentences are shown below:

It has been observed, that our ideas of colours, sounds, tastes, etc. excited by the same object may be very different in themselves, without our being aware of it; and that we may nevertheless converse intelligibly concerning such objects, as if we were certain the impressions made by them on our minds were exactly similar. All, indeed, that is required for this purpose, is, that the same object should uniformly make the same impression on each mind; and that objects that appear different to one should be equally so to others.

It is interesting to reread this sentence again in the light of the recent controversy about the blue and black dress.

Dalton

colour and language

culture, opinions/rants, , , , ,

One of the things that #TheDress controversy has highlighted is that colour is not as fixed as the majority of people believe. We tend to think that objects have a single colour and that we all see that colour the same way. However, in the image below you can see two central grey patches that are physically identical but probably look different in colour to you. My experience is that the majority of people would explain this as the two grey patches being the same colour but looking different in colour because of the background. An illusion.

90

I don’t agree with this way of thinking however. The colours we see when we look at something do depend upon the other colours around it but this is not a a special case. It’s not unusual, as Tom Jones would say. It’s how colour works. If it is an illusion then it’s happening all of the time, almost whenever you are looking at colour. So what is the real colour of something? Is it even sensible talk about an object having a single fixed real colour?

There is a body of research emerging that suggests that the language that we use influences how we see things. Jules Davidoff, a Professor at Goldsmiths University, went to Namibia where he conducted an experiment with the Himba tribe, who speak a language that has no word for blue or distinction between blue and green. When shown a circle with 11 green squares and one blue, they couldn’t pick out which one was different from the others. But the Himba have more words for types of green than we do in English. When looking at a circle of green squares with only one slightly different shade, they could immediately spot the different one, even when the difference was so small that we would find it very difficult to see the odd one out. See below for an example.

davidoff

In the image above – a screenshot from one of Davidoff’s experiments – the Himba tribe can easily see that the green patch at about 1 o’clock is different from the others.

In fact, some people even think that in ancient times we could not see blue at all because we had no word for it. In the Odyssey, Homer famously describes the “wine-dark sea.” But why “wine-dark” and not deep blue or green? It turns out that most ancient languages (including Greek, Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew) did not have a word for blue. Does this mean that they didn’t see blue? Is blue a relatively modern phenomenon? There is a thought-provoking article about this by Kevin Loria at Business Insider. Read more here.

It couldn’t get much blacker

opinions/rants, technology, , ,

black
A few weeks ago I was taking my son to a birthday party and a journalist from The Independent phoned me to ask my opinion on Vantablack. This is the blackest material ever made. Whereas most black materials reflect about 4% of the light (or more) at all wavelengths, this new nano-material has really really low reflectance. It only reflects about 0.035% of the light. I gave a few comments and an article appeared in The Independent which was nice. I used to really like The Independent, back in the days when I read newspapers. The original article by Ian Johnston was very good imho.

However, a few days later the story was all around the world and I was often cited, all based on that one phone interview with Ian. The thing was that it was not even that big news. That is, yes, it is the blackest material ever made, but the truth is it is an incremental improvement in blackness beating the previous blackest material from a few years ago. My name even appeared in the Daily Mail. Most embarrassingly, I was interviewed on an American radio show. The reason I say it was embarrassing was that this new development actually had nothing to do with me and I didn’t want people thinking I was trying to claim credit. So when I agreed to do the radio show I told the researcher that they needed to be clear that this was nothing to do with me. I didn’t invent it. Imagine my surprise when John Hockenberry (that was his name, I believe) asked me, “So Dr Westland, what have you stumbled upon?”. Arghhhhh!!! Luckily, it was not a live interview because it actually got worse. A lot worse. So bad, that I could barely summon up strength to listen to it when it went out the next day. But actually, the editors did a good job and the final cut is not too bad. You can hear it here.

It would be nice to talk about my own work. I work in the area of blackness. One of the things I do is to ask people to rank different black samples in order of least black to most black. This allows me to discover, for example, that women prefer reddish blacks and men prefer bluish blacks. Also, asians prefer reddish blacks and caucasians prefer bluish blacks. I am developing a blackness index; a way to measure a sample and say how black it is or whether one sample is blacker than another. Why? Well, one application is for manufacturers of black ink for printers (which may be made from coloured inks). Different recipes produce different blacks. What if one recipe is chromatically neutral but another recipe is less neural (it has a slight hue) but is darker – which one is blacker?

black plants can save the world

design, nature, opinions/rants, , , , , ,

leaves
About three years ago I posted about the question of why leaves are green. In this I postulated as to why chlorophyll (the green stuff in leaves) should be green; after all, this means that it only absorbing some of the wavelengths in the visible spectrum. In fact, I argued that it would be better if plants were black, absorbing all of the wavelengths in the visible spectrum. Now, someone on co.design is suggesting just that – that green plants absorb only about 2% of the possible energy and that scientists are thinking of turning them black. Presumably this would save the world because plants would be more efficient at converting harmful greenhouse gasses into oxygen. There’s catch though, apparently. If you make the plants black they get too hot and overheat resulting in cell damage. Actually, I also suggested this might be the case in my original article in 2011. Looks like black plants won’t save the world. They won’t even save themselves.

There’s nothing wrong with black carrots though – see here.

colour and branding

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mcdonalds

According to Jon Feagain colour affects brand development in five ways:

    It helps boost perception

    It attracts attention

    It can help to emphasise or conceal information

    It can help you appeal to the right audience

    It can can help the audience digest information better

I think all of these things are true. However, to make the right decisions a good understanding of colour semiotics is critical in my opinion. Achieving that is easier said than done.

grab colour – use it

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colour pen

Many of you will have seen the Scribble Pen which uses a colour sensor to detect colours. The sensor is embedded at the end of the pen opposite the nib. The pen then mixes the required coloured ink (cyan, magenta, yellow, white and black) for drawing, using small refillable ink cartridges that fit inside its body. The device can hold 100,000 unique colours in its internal memory and can reproduce over 16 million unique colours.

But wait. Don’t think that means you will be able to use the pen to write in 16 million different colours. You won’t. A typical phone screen can display about 16 million unique combinations of RGB (red, green and blue). But many of the RGB combinations are indistinguishable. Open up powerpoint and make two squares. Set the RGB values of one to [10 220 10] and of the other to [10 220 11]. I would be amazed if you could really tell the difference between them. And anyone who has read much of my blog will know that I believe that if two colours look the same then they are the same. So the pen might be able to create 16 million combinations of cyan, magenta, yellow, white, and black – but that doesn’t mean 16 million different colours.

The second problem is that just because your pen can grab a colour (using its sensor) doesn’t mean it can create it. There are lots of colours out there in the world that are outside the colour gamut of an ink-based system (even one using five primaries – cyan, magenta, yellow, white and black).

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2647129/Forget-crayons-Multicolour-pen-lets-pick-colour-draw-16-million-shades.html#ixzz35gJ0racJ
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new designs for UK flag colour

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I blog about anything related to colour and I am interested in all sorts of aspects of colour whether they be based in arts and design, cultural studies, evolution, chemistry, physics, biology or technology. But a couple of themes keep cropping up and I end up posting about them at regular intervals. So, in 2012 I posted about the historical development of the UK flag – the union jack. And then earlier this year I posted about an article on the BBC about the possible redesign on the union jack is Scotland votes to leave the United Kingdom in the forthcoming referendum there. Some of the designs that were being put forward were really horrible. Perhaps I am too attached to the union jack. A few days ago I came across another BBC story which included 25 readers’ designs for the union jack should Scotland leave. . I must say I much prefer the readers’ designs rather than those previously proposed by experts – the BBC reliably informs me that such experts are known as vexillologists. I like this flag (by David and Gwyneth Parker) – where the blue of Scotland has simply been swapped for the green of Wales, thus preserving the traditional look. (If you wonder why the green of Wales is not in the current flag see my earlier post.)

flag1

And I also like the following design (by Matthew Welch), where England and Wales are represented in the top left and bottom right corners respectively and the diagonal stripe represents Northern Ireland of course.

flag2

You probably have to be from the UK to understand this humorous design (by Al Main).

flag3

You can see all 25 readers’ designs at the BBC here.

If you are interested in vexillology (is that a word?) you may like to read another BBC story about a potential new flag for Norther Ireland. And finally, I was interested that the CIA apparently has a flag database that it makes available to the public.

new British flag

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Some of you may recall that last year – a big year for the UK with the Olympics in London and Queen’s jubilee – there was a lot of waving of British flags. I posted about how the flag was derived historically and noted the absence of any representation by Wales. For those who are less familiar, the United Kingdom is a union of four countries (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). By contrast Great Britain is just England, Scotland and Wales (not including Northern Ireland) and the British Isles is a geographical feature that includes the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Simple?

Next year the Scottish people be asked if they want to be independent. If they vote yes (in my opinion this is not very likely, but possible) it will signal the end of the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Today the BBC ran a feature about possible new designs of the new flag. I wasn’t very impressed by any of them, including the horrible one below. Try reading my post first and then the new BBC article.

flag