decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains | 483 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, December 23 2012 @ 02:22 AM EST
Interesting - BTW the green traffic light colour was chosen to be different from
red for those suffering from red/green colour blindness. It is shifted towards
the blue.

You can have endless arguments about what colour things are.

Chris B

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, December 23 2012 @ 03:21 AM EST
Interesting that in the comments several pointed out that Chinese
words for color may depend on the object as much as the color.
And for traffic lights chinese use the green-green word 绿
rather than the blue-green word 青.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains
Authored by: JimDiGriz on Sunday, December 23 2012 @ 06:23 AM EST
"In Japan, people often refer to traffic lights as being blue in color. And
this is a bit odd, because the traffic signal indicating ‘go’ in Japan is just
as green as it is anywhere else in the world. So why is the color getting lost
in translation?"

That's because there are a lot of words in Japanese that don't have an exact
equivalent in English, and vice-versa.

AFAIK The Japanese word "aoi" is a colour that covers the range from
bluish-green to greenish-blue. "Midori" is more towards the emerald
green part of the spectrum.

JdG

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Interesting article, but could have used more biological foundation
Authored by: Gringo_ on Sunday, December 23 2012 @ 06:41 PM EST

Specifically, I would like to have seen more of a biological foundation about how the brain responds to the stimuli that are produced when incoming light reacts with the several types of cone photoreceptors in the eye. There are three types of cones sensitive to three different spectra, resulting in trichromatic color vision.

According to Wikipedia, these three types do not correspond well to particular colors as we know them. Rather, the perception of color is achieved by a complex process that starts with the differential output of these cells in the retina and it will be finalized in the visual cortex and associative areas of the brain.

I think when they were doing those experiments on how people group colours, they should refer back to the principal theories on how we perceive colours to see if the outcome could have been predicted from hypotheses based on these theories. Without that, the investigation into how languages or people tend to group colours appears arbitrary and lacking in a biological foundation.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, December 23 2012 @ 11:56 PM EST
Somewhere in the darkest recesses of my mind, I remember [hearing] something
about women perceiving colour differently to men.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Context
Authored by: globularity on Monday, December 24 2012 @ 04:12 AM EST
Japanese is very context dependent, aoi can mean either blue or green depending
on context.

---
Windows vista, a marriage between operating system and trojan horse.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • Context - Authored by: myNym on Monday, December 24 2012 @ 04:27 AM EST
  • Context - Authored by: Wol on Monday, December 24 2012 @ 06:56 AM EST
Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )