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Jul. 11th, 2017 10:42 am
door_of_time: (Default)
"I used to liked yellow but I got fed up with it."

What flower colours do birds and bees prefer? (ABC, 16 November 2016) Bees see blue, green, and ultraviolet; some birds are "violet-sensitive", seeing red, blue, green, and violet, and some are "ultraviolet-sensitive" and see that part of the spectrum as well. Most Australian pollinating birds are violet-sensitive; plants may have red hues which attract birds, their preferred pollinators, but not bees. The flies that do the pollinating on Macquarie Island prefer a "yellow-green-cream colour".

A Lost Purple Pigment, Where Quantum Physics and the Terracotta Warriors Collide (Hyperallergic, 17 December 2014)

How Glistening Egyptian Blue Pigment Was Forgotten then Lost (Smithsonian magazine, 31 August 2015)

Female lemurs with color vision provide advantages for their group (phys.org, 5 December 2016) About a quarter of the female Verreaux's sifakas were trichromats, able to distinguish green and red; females tend to lead groups in foraging.

Disordered nanonetwork produces robust and vibrant colors for vehicles, biomimetic tissues and camouflage (phys.org, 28 November 2016). Borrowing the structure of the cotinga's brilliant feathers to create "metamaterials".

these are colorblind glasses.

This Artist Is the Only Person Banned From Using the World’s Pinkest Pink (Smithsonian magazine, 16 December 2016) The feud behind this is a riot.

"'I’m color-blind, but I can pick out that blue anywhere,' [Eddie] Redmayne said and walked toward the painting in a sort of trance. 'I wrote 30,000 words on this color, and I never grew tired of it. The pigment is staggering. It’s amazing that a color can be so emotional. One can only hope to achieve that intensity in acting.'" (W, 1 April 2013). Presumably Redmayne is red-green colourblind. It'd be interesting to know if and how this affects his experience of International Klein Blue. But my understanding of the science of colour vision is still crap. See also: Double filters allow for tetrachromatic vision in humans (TechXplore, 23 March 2017))

Listen with your eyes: one in five of us may 'hear' flashes of light (Guardian Australia, 17 January 2017). "One in five people is affected by a synaesthesia-like phenomenon in which visual movements or flashes of light are 'heard' as faint sounds, according to scientists."

The Colorful Stories of 5 Obsolete Art Pigments (Hyperallergic, 2 July 2013) | More Vibrant Tales of Obsolete Pigments (Hyperallergic, 8 July 2013). Maya blue, Tyrian purple, white lead, lapis lazuli, dragon's blood, mummy brown, Indian yellow, Scheele's green, orpiment, hartshorn, ivory black, Paris green, iris green, sepia ink, smalt, uranium yellow, gamboge, and verdigris. Whew!


As I was making this posting, I realised I was remembering the dates of the articles partly by the colour of the years - that is, I have Grapheme-colour synaesthesia, and associate a colour with the last digit of the year; deep brown for "6", for example. I often find it difficult to keep the date in mind as I move between the original article and my posting - I wonder if this is a way my brain can divide up the work a bit.

ETA:

Colour and Culture Among the Aztecs (1) (Mexicolore, 11 October 2015) | Colour and Culture Among the Aztecs (2) (Mexicolore, 12 October 2015)

The vision thing: how babies colour in the world (The Guardian, 11 April 2017)
 
Spectral discrimination in color blind animals via chromatic aberration and pupil shape (PNAS 113(29) 23 May 2016). A different way to see colour.

New paint colors invented by neural network (lewisandquark.tumblr.com, June 2017). Everything from "Light of Blast" to "Turdly".

Notes on synaesthesia: How seeing music changes everything (SMH, 7 July 2017)

Synaesthesia could help us understand how the brain processes language (The Guardian, 26 February 2016)

How we all could benefit from synaesthesia (The Guardian, 27 April 2014)

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Nov. 14th, 2015 10:06 pm
door_of_time: (pearlescent sky blue to international kl)
The spider known as Adanson's house jumper has excellent colour vision, with three opsins (visual pigments), which makes them trichromatic, like us - but unlike us, the spiders have two opsins for visible light and one for UV. Dragonflies have as many as 30 opsins. But as the mantis shrimp demonstrates, more visual pigments doesn't necessarily mean seeing more colours.

Human eye proteins detect red beyond red (New Scientist, 6 December 2012)

Colour: The Spectrum of Science (site for the BBC Four show)

Magnet triggers colours in 'blind' man's brain (New Scientist, 28 October 2008)

Paletton Color Scheme Designer

Coloradd, "a sign code for aiding color blind people to recognise colors"

Optical illusions show how colour can trick the eye (The Age, 1 March 2015)



door_of_time: (piece of the sky)
We saw this exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney:

Take your time: Olafur Eliasson

It explores colour in numerous ways, including painting, sculpture, and installations, including whole rooms taken up by deceptively simple displays of light, which encourage you to interact and experiment. Plus a room full of white Lego to muck about with! I ended up with a childlike, gleeful grin. I do recommend it. :D

From the brochure: "Individual works find inspiration in the distinctive landscape of [Iceland]; theories of colour and perception; and the recent history of art and its shift from physical object to idea or sensation. Drawing careful attention to the ways in which we perceive the world about us, they invite us to become active agents in the creation of meaning, rather than passive observers."

Science

Sep. 3rd, 2009 03:17 pm
door_of_time: (spectrum)
door_of_time: (paints)
I read this book last year and posted a bunch of stuff from it over in my main lj. I've been meaning to get back to some of the things it says about colour vision and synaesthesia.

Primates have "thirty areas in the back of our brains" involved in vision. The area called V4 is the one involved in colour vision. Ramachandran describes the effect of damage to V4: if it happens on both sides of the brain, the patient suffers from cortical achromatopsia, or cortical colour blindness; their eyes work fine, but their brains can't see colour.

In his chapter on art, Ramachandran talks about exaggerated figures in art, such as ultra-feminine Hindu statues, or Western political caricatures, in terms of "peak shift": the brain picks out the details that make a woman's body different from a man's, or Richard Nixon's face different from other men's; the more the artist exaggerates those details - big bust, big hips, or big nose - the more the brain notices them. "It looks comical, but it still looks even more like Nixon than the original Nixon." He goes on to apply this "peak shift" idea to colour in modern art by Van Gogh and Monet: "Hence the effectiveness of artificially heightened 'non-realistic' colors of their sunflowers or water lilies." So, because of the way the brain recognises things it sees, those flowers look more like flowers than actual flowers do. Blimey. I can't help being reminded of the Aztec idea that this world is just a "painted book", a poor imitation of the much more intense, but hidden, world of the spirit, in which flowers really would look more like flowers than actual flowers do.

More in a bit.
door_of_time: (Default)
Colours for sale

More colours for sale

Fictional colours

The first vertebrates were tetrachromats and could see ultraviolet; many still can. Mammals, active at night, lost two of the four receptors - but later, primates evolved a new red receptor, giving us our three-colour vision.

The lens of the human eye blocks UV, but cataract patients who have had their lenses removed can see ultraviolet. Unlike animals which actively use UV (to identify mates, etc), humans don't have a dedicated UV receptor; but our blue receptors are also sensitive to violet and ultraviolet light.

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door_of_time: (Default)
Sad preacher nailed upon the coloured door of time

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