feeling blue?

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In the 1800s a family in eastern Kentucky started producing children who were blue. In was apparently the result of a recessive gene and in-family breeding. The family lived an isolated life and there was little opportunity to mix with others. Medically, the condition is called methaemoglobinaemia – the ability to carry oxygen in the blood is reduced resulting in it being a darker colour. As eastern Kentucky became more populated there were fewer children born with the condition though the gene still exists today. See here for more details and the original story.

This is not perhaps the only case of blue people. The picts in Scotland were known as blue people. They fought naked with their bodies painted with woad – a blue colorant. And there is also the Ainu, people indigenous to Japan whose skin was often described as blue. Some people believe there was an ancient human race – the blue moovians – who lived about 60,000 years ago. But I think this might be new-age clap-trap.

Of course, talking of blue people we should mention Avatar. This is a movie that has a lot of hype and I had no interest in seeing it. I didn’t see it for a while but then I thought I should see what it was like. Generally, I thought it was great even if the militaristic movements at the end were a bit over the top. Some people have argued that the movie is racist – that blue is the new black. Apparently, all the humans in the movie are played by white actors and all the blue Na’vi by non-whites; and the blue Na’vi have been said to represent the native Americans in their use of bows and arrows. Worth reading.

How to self publish

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I spent the last week working out how to self publish my Colour Physics FAQ. This is not a post about colour but I thought it would be useful to document my experience; in case I forget 🙂 and in case it helps anyone else. It’s not rocket science but it turned out to be a bit more complicated than I thought.

Perhaps the most important thing about publishing is to have content. You need to have something that at least one other person – though hopefully more, if it’s going to be worth the effort – will want to read. I am lucky – I have something called the Colour Physics FAQ which I have been writing since 1996 and which I know quite a lot of people like to read. Currently it is offline, looking for a new home, so I decided to look at various publishing routes to make it available again, to learn the ropes of self publishing for bigger projects in the future, and also to maybe earn a few squids in the process. Before I start, I should say that my content is in the form of a Microsoft Word document and I am working on a Mac. So that’s my starting point.

I started by looking at e-books. There are various platforms to choose from of course. I did some research and quickly realised Amazon Kindle would be a great place to start. Of course, I also considered Apple but I have read that the process with Apple is a lot more complicated and I can believe this after my experience a year or so ago of launching an app for the iPhone. So let me start by describing how I got my FAQ onto the Amazon Kindle platform.

The first thing you need to do is register on https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin. This is simple and painless. You need to create a new project and enter a name. For me, it was Frequently Asked Questions About Colour Physics. There are options to say whether the book is part of a series or has an edition number. None of this applied so I just left them blank. You need to add a description. This is what people see in the Kindle store. For my project I wrote:

What is colour? How does colour vision work? Why is the sky blue? What is the colour spectrum? The answers to these and many other related questions about colour physics are each provided in a short and easy-to-understand form. Will delight and entertain colour professionals and curious members of the public.

What is additive colour mixing?

Additive colour mixing refers to the mixing of different (coloured) lights and can be easily demonstrated by the superposition of lights (known as primaries) on a white projection screen. When this is done using red, green, and blue primaries, the colours yellow, cyan, and magenta are produced where two of the primaries overlap. Where all three primaries overlap the sensation of white is produced if the spectral distributions and intensities of the three primaries are carefully chosen.

Additivity is not a special property of any particular set of three primaries. The range of colours that can be matched with any three primaries is called the gamut of those primaries.

One often reads that the primaries are pure and cannot be matched from other colours. This is not true. If one uses three primaries such as red, green and blue it is true that none of the primaries can be matched by mixtures of the other two or by mixtures of any other colours in the gamut of the primary system. However, one could select colours outside the gamut of the system which when mixed together could match the primaries.

It turns out that no three real primaries can be chosen so that their gamut includes all possible colours. If the primaries are chosen to be red, green, and blue, however, a very large number of colours can be matched. Red, green, and blue are therefore usually the colours of the primaries in an additive colour reproduction system such as colour television.

You then have to say who the author is, what the publication date is, and, if you have one, what the ISBN number is. I didn’t bother with an ISBN number for the ebook (but more on ISBN numbers later). You also need to say who your target audience is. For this you have to choose from certain categories – I selected Textiles & Polymer and Color Theory. The book addresses colour physics mainly from a textile perspective so the first category seemed a good idea. You then have to verify that you own the publishing rights to the content and upload a cover. (There is an option not to upload a book cover if your main file already contains one.) For my cover I created a png file that I designed myself. You can see it on this page, if you are interested.

The final step in this part is to upload your document. Actually, the Amazon Kindle site recommends that you use WORD to write the document and then convert it to Web Page, Filtered (*HTM & *HTML) format. I didn’t do this and I think it may have been a mistake. I decided to create an epub document and upload this. To create the epub document I downloaded some free somewhere called Calibre. Downloading and using calibre was quite easy. You need to save your WORD file as an rtf file, add it to Calibre, and then convert it to epub. I did this and uploaded the file. It seemed to work just fine. However, I am not entirely convinced I have everything right. In the next week I may have a go at uploading the format recommended by Amazon Kindle. I can’t be sure how my ebook looks because I don’t have a kindle. But I know I have made some mistakes here (something I am prone to because I am too impetuous). I am pretty sure my greek symbols are not displaying properly and I don’t know if I have an active table of contents. Even if I do, the page numbers I used in my automatically created TOCs in WORD are meaningless. The kindle allows the user to change font size and so the page numbers are not relevant at all. Ebooks flow much more fluidly as documents than do, say, physical books. There is a previewer that allows you to get a good idea of how your ebook will look on a Kindle; this is why I don’t think my table of contents are working well. I didn’t use any images in this ebook. There are some issues with using images because many ebook devices do not support colour images yet. I would recommend anyone else to read this help page before deciding how to format their ebook for the Amazon Kindle.

Having uploaded your book you then have to select pricing etc. The first step is to confirm you want Worldwide rights – seemed like a good idea so I selected this option. Then you need to set the price. You can choose a 70% royalty or a 30% royalty. You can only choose the 70% level if your book is less than $10. I chose this option and set the price to $5.99. Prices for UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain were set automatically based on my dollar price (you can over-ride this).

There are a couple of other options. One is to allow Kindle lending – this means that someone who has bought the book can can transfer it to a friend’s kindle for a short time (14 days, I think, during which time they cannot access it themselves). I decided to allow Kindle lending. It would be mean not to. There is also an option for KDP Select. I didn’t fully understand what this was about – I am still confused – and so I did not choose this option.

You also have to give your bank account details to allow you to be paid. You can choose the currency to be paid in. I chose UK pounds for all of the sites that allowed this – the US site did not allow it. You have to be paid in dollars by amazon usa and you need a dollar account for this. I don’t have one so opted to be paid by cheque (they will send me a cheque if my royalties trigger the $100 threshold for a cheque). There is no mention of tax so I don’t know how that is going to work.

Finally you click submit and you have the guys at amazon look over your files and come back and say everything is ok. This takes about 10 hours. The men from del monte said everything was fine and I was live! After that I made a small change to the price (having had second thoughts) and that took another 10 hours (but I think the first submission stayed live whilst the changes took time to take effect), and then I made a small change to the book file itself and that took another 10 hours. Part of the reason I had to do this was I was learning as I went along (that was my aim, of course). For my next project, now that I know all the required steps, I can work out everything that I need to before I start the upload process.

That was it. Not too painful at all and the upload webpage guides you through quite well. I am not entirely satisfied with what I have produced but it is live and you can see the final project here.

I took a day or so off, and then decided I would like to explore making the Colour Physics FAQ available as a physical book. For this I have used CreateSpace. You need to create an account. One of the nice things about this process is that CreateSpace creates an ISBN number for you. In my case it was

ISBN-13: 978-1470101534
ISBN-10: 147010153X

You can provide your own ISBN if you have one but this seemed to be the easiest option for me. Once set though, the ISBN is locked. It cannot be changed. The preferred format to upload your content (which they refer to as interior) is pdf which suits me quite fine. However, they provide WORD templates for the book size you select. I chose 6″ by 9″ (which they said was the most popular option – so why argue?) and downloaded the template. This was a little frustrating as anyone who has ever worked with a WORD template will know. But probably would not have been anywhere near as difficult had I not been simultaneously trying to look after my little boy (three years old). I created the pdf and uploaded it.

You then have to provide a cover. Again, you can do this yourself and upload a pdf file if you wish or you can use their cover design software. I decided to do the latter and within 10 minutes I had produced this:

I then had to set pricing. I chose $11.99 for my book. The royalty per book was automatically calculated as $5.04 from Amazon and $7.44 from CreateSpace eStore. I don’t know why they are different but urge you to choose to buy from CreateSpace eStore if you were thinking of buying it. Distribution to Amazon and CreateSpace eStore is free (essentially because it is print on demand there I think). However, you can pay to have the book available to bookstores, other on-line outlets, and university libraries. It seems to be a one-off cost of $25. I did not explore it. I will be interested in this for more substantial projects I plan in the future. But for now, I am happy with the standard distribution channels.

It seems like the only option to be paid is by cheque (for which there is an $8 fee – of course). I don’t have a dollar account. But there is even worse news. Amazon will deduct 30% tax. I don’t know if the royalties quoted above are before this deduction or after it. Either way, it is apparent I am not going to become a millionaire from this project. I can stop the 30% tax being deducted. But I have to get something called a TIN (US Tax Identification Number) which I do by filling in IRS Form SS-4. I downloaded this form. It looks horrific and when I have completed it (if I ever do) I need to send it by snail mail to the IRS in America and then wait …. I guess this is done once though, that is, for each person rather than for each project. So it probably is worth doing in the long run if I am planning further publications, which I am.

So that’s it. My CreateSpace book is currently in review and I expect it to go live later today.

Colour Physics FAQ

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In the 1990s I used to host a colour physics FAQ on the web. The FAQ was bite-sized answers to the most common questions I used to get in those days about colour physics.

Really, this FAQ was the precursor to this blog. I much prefer the blog format because it allows a greater degree of interactivity and also fluid evolution of content. But the FAQ was quite popular. Even some university libraries used to ask me about it (I noticed a few days ago that a website in India had ‘stolen’ the content and presented it as theirs – these things happen I guess).

I had to move the location of the the Colour Physics FAQ quite a few times on the web and it became quite painful trying to maintain it. So I decided to make it available as an e-book and as a physical book via Amazon. I spent quite a few days working on the e-book format. To be honest I am not sure I got the format ready. I used the epub format and there are things I don’t like about it. Displaying greek characters is difficult and images are often converted to black and white, especially for display on the kindle or similar devices. Also, footnotes are not allowed and I am a big fan of footnotes. So I am not 100% impressed. We’ll see how it goes. But Amazon’s CreateSpace allows you to create a physical book. This seems much better. The book is printed on demand as far as I can see and I am looking forward to how it looks.

To see the e-book go to amazon. I’ll add a comment below when the physical book is available.

Roy G Biv

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We all know that Newton wrote about the colour spectrum having seven colours. As a child I wrote the mnemonic – Richard Of York Gave Battle in Vain. The sentence makes reference to Richard III, an English king who was defeated by Henry VII in 1485 at the battle of Bosworth. In order to avoid reference to this defeat, people from Yorkshire developed the alternative Rowntrees Of York Gave Best In Value, apparently. Rowntrees was a chocolate factory formed in York in 1862 (exactly one hundred years before I was born).

When I was young I naively thought that everyone would know the Richard of York line. I was surprised, later in life to learn that in the USA a different mnemonic is normally used: Roy G Biv (the name of a person). I find this American mnemonic a little bizarre to be honest; are there really people whose surname is Biv? If your surname is Biv, or you know someone called Biv, please comment below. Only recently I came across a small rhyme that goes:

Red for the rainbow, orange too.
Yellow says, ‘how do you do’.
Green is the next one, green for go.
Then comes blue and indigo.
Number seven, we must not forget, is pretty violet.

Since children learn these mnemonics from an early age most people never question whether there really are seven colours in the spectrum despite the fact that we often see the spectrum in the form of a rainbow in the sky. However, if most people look closely at the spectrum they will likely state that they can only discriminate between six bands of colour; that indigo and violet are really one colour band. So why is it that we teach children that there are seven colours in the rainbow?

The Incredible Grey Hulk

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When I was young I used to read Marvel comics. My favourites were Spiderman and The Fantastic Four but I also liked the Hulk and Thor. When I was about 10 (in about 1972) I even had this idea of designing a wrist band that could shoot out web like spiderman. What I needed was a substance that would flow (as a liquid) when it was shot out but then quickly solidified to create the web. I noticed that polystyrene turned liquid under heat and I started to build a prototype. Sadly it never worked. But I often wonder if this incident sparked my interest in chemistry, an interest that led me to study Colour Chemistry at Leeds University in 1983 and finally to my lifelong passion for colour.

I just came across a story that the Hulk was not green in the original comic strip versions. He was grey!! Apparently, in The Hulk’s debut (May 1962, a few days after I was born) Lee chose grey for the Hulk because he wanted a colour that did not suggest any particular ethnic group. The chap in charge of the colour, Stan Goldberg, however, had problems with the grey; colour management was not what it is now and this resulted in several different shades of grey, and even green, in the first issue! Given the colour problems, Lee chose to change the skin colour to green. What a shocker! Next, I’ll probably find out that Spiderman was not real!!

taxi colours

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In 2009 I blogged about a big row in Derby (UK) about yellow taxis. Most taxis in UK cities are black (in most other cities they are yellow). In 2009 Derby decided that their official taxis should be yellow.However, they didn’t specify exactly which yellow and they ended up in a bit of a mess with a taxi driver that they said had used the wrong shade of yellow. Good business for lawyers!

Then in 2011 I blogged about a major row in Durham (UK) where, again, there was a similarly heated row about the local council wanting to adopt white taxis in the city. It seems to be a topic that people get quite emotive about. So I wonder if there will be similar argument in Kolkata (West Bengal) where the government wants to change the taxi colours from yellow to blue and white. See here for the story.

I guess I sound like a bit of a sad geek, writing about taxi colours. Have I nothing better to do on a Sunday morning? The answer is obvious no. 🙂

But if you have read this far you might be interested in Beijing (China). Beijing is not known for its good taxis. But about 6 years ago the authority of Beijing city unified the colours to make them easier to recognise. The body of taxi is fixed to be 3-stripes-2-colors. The middle stripe is a golden yellow color while the rest of the body in another color which are commonly blue, green or red. When I was last in Beijing someone told me that the colours had special meanings but I am not sure it is true. I am going to consult my colour guru who works at Tsinghua University in Beijing and will add a comment later.

The date for abstract submissions to AIC2012 (the International Colour Association’s conference in 2012) has been extended to 14th February 2012. There is still time to apply to present at this very exciting event in Taiwan. For further information see http://www.aic2012.org/. Taiwan is going to be a great venue and late September will be a fantastic time of year to see Taipei.

You may also be interested in the AIC’s new colour journal. It’s online and free to publish in and read. For further information see http://aic-colour-journal.org/.

And whilst we are add it – please make a note in your diaries for the AIC 12th International Congress which will be held in Gateshead (UK) in 2013 (8-12th July.

traffic lights for everyone

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About 8% of men are colour blind. In the past I have written about how designers may not adequately take this into account effectively ignoring 4% of the population. I also wrote about how in Korea the problem of traffic lights for colour blind people was being addressed by using different shapes for the different colours.

Now I am interested to hear about a development from Japan – Professor Ochiai at Kyushu Sangyo University has developed a clever modification that is not noticed by people with normal colour vision but helps those who are colour blind. Before the introduction of LED lights people often could tell red from green by the difference in brightness. But LED lights are so bright that they look rather similar in brightness, and for someone with red-green colour blindness they may look identical. Professor Ochiai has added a blue cross to the red light which is very visible to colour-blind observers but can hardly be noticed by the rest of us. Very clever!!

The new lights are being tested in Fukuoka and are due to go on test in Tokyo soon.

don’t go down dark alleys

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A report in the Scunthorpe Telegraph describes a project where alleyways – traditionally dark, lined with brick walls or fences, with no colour and plenty of possibilities for crime – are being filled with plants to create a colourful and welcoming environment. A recent report by the Royal Horticultural Society shows that this sort of activity has a significant positive effect on communities.

For further information visit www.rhs.org.uk/communities.

I am not a gardener. I don’t particularly like gardens. But this does seem like a great scheme. And I do think that colour can have an effect on our well-being. Perhaps we should use it more carefully – whether it is to correct situations where we are bombarded with a myriad clashing colours that can be disorienting (for example, in a shopping mall or airport terminal) or where there is a lack of colour (for example, dark alleys or many hospital environments).

oldest work of art ever

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I previously wrote about the finding of the oldest cave painting in the UK which was a 14,000-year old painting found in a cave in South Wales. You can read about that post here. Of course, the oldest cave paintings in the world are perhaps 30,000 years old; probably the Chauvet caves in France. Today, however, I read of a new finding: these are six paintings of seals that have been found in caves on the coast of Spain, about 35 miles east of Malaga, and thought to be about 42,000 years old.

The article claims that these paintings of seals are the oldest known works of art in the world. But are they? In 2000 the BBC reported that archaeologists in Zambia uncovered evidence that early humans used paint for aesthetic purposes far earlier than previously thought. The team found pigments and paint grinding equipment believed to be between 350,000 and 400,000 years old. The oldest pigments previously found were 120,000 years old.