The Universe of Disco

Mysteries of color perception
Color perception is incredibly complicated, and almost the only generalization of it that can be made is "everything you think you know is probably wrong." The color wheel, for example, is totally going to flummox the aliens, when they arrive. "What the heck do you mean, 'violet is a mixture of red and blue'? Violet is nothing like red. Violet is less like red than any other color except ultraviolet! Red is even less like violet than it is like blue, for heaven's sake. What is wrong with you people?"

Well, what is wrong with us is that, because of an engineering oddity in our color sensation system, we think red and violet look somewhat similar, and more alike than red and green.

But anyway, my real point was to note that the colors in look a lot different against a gray background than they do against the blue background in the bar on the left. People who read this blog through an aggregator are just going to have to click through the link for once.

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