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Comment by 51Cards | Hacker News Reader

Wadda ya mean thousands of years ago? I thought as recently as the 1930's everything was black and white and colour was discovered sometime during WWII.

Interesting article, I had never thought about early societies having limited colour descriptors. I found the last part to be intriguing as the colour progression somewhat follows the importance of environmental elements. White/Black... day/night. Red: sun/fire. Green/Yellow: foliage/plants/food Blue: sky Brown: earth. As stated in the article the definitions increase with the ability to describe their environment and those items would be top of the list.

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You surely mean this ?

  Calvin:  Dad, how come old photographs are always black
           and white? Didn't they have color film back then?
  Dad:     Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs
           are in color. It's just the world was black and white then.
  Calvin:  Really?
  Dad:     Yep. The world didn't turn color until sometime
           in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
  Calvin:  That's really weird.
  Dad:     Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
  Calvin:  But then why are old paintings in color?! If
           their world was black and white, wouldn't artists have painted it that way?
  Dad:     Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were
           insane.
  Calvin:  But... but how could they have painted in color
           anyway? Wouldn't their paints have been shades of gray back then?
  Dad:     Of course, but they turned colors like
           everything else did in the '30s.
  Calvin:  So why didn't old black and white photos turn
           color too?
  Dad:     Because they were color pictures of black and
           white, remember?
  Calvin:  The world is a complicated place, Hobbes.

But that aside, don't we still only see 3 colors. We have only three types of color receptors and any color gets resolved, if at all, into varying responses from three of them. To our color interpreter in the brain there are only those 3 axes. To us and other trichromats any color is a mixture of those three.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichromat#Humans_and_other_ani...

Maybe the interesting question is when did we start naming the different mixtures. There's another hypothetical question that has fascinated me: say I perceive the color red as yellow, and it is some one to one map. But since I learn the names of colors from people, I or anybody else will not realize that I perceive them differently, I just happen to label them alike.

Your latter question has always fascinated me as well. How do I know my 'red' is your 'red'. My father was colour blind and I used to enjoy trying to explain the missing colours to him and for him to explain what things looked like. I quickly learned it's hard to describe colours someone else can't see.

I read an interesting article on colour perception once and about how the physiology makes it pretty likely we all perceive 'red' to be 'red'. I will have to try to find it.

What I find quite ironic is that traffic lights happen to lie right in the centre of the most common form of color blindness: red-green color blindness.

What I find quite ironic is that the UK's effort to combat this problem, by adding a blue tint to their green lights, actually makes it more dangerous for people with my form of colour blindness (protan, which is not the commonest form of red-green blindness but is still significantly represented (2% of males according to Wikipedia)).

That's because having little red vision, at night I mistake cyan ("green") go lights for white street lights. Having street lights suddenly turn to yellow stop lights is unnerving, to say the least.

When I was a kid, in Quebec, traffic lights were color-blind friendly; they used shapes and color and orientation. They arranged the lights horizontally, like this:

   [R] <Y> (G) [R]

For stop, you'd get two red squares. Wait was a yellow diamond usually on the left side, and go was a simple green circle on the right side. If you could only go in a few directions, they'd list them out with green arrows.

Seemed like a great system to me but I don't see it in use as much any more. Perhaps it was too expensive to manufacture custom lights for just one province.

you're talking about qualia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia#The_inverted_spectrum_ar...

That's my favorite Calvin and Hobbes

http://brake-down.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/I...

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