I clicked through the vid to watch it on YT itself and the related vids have turned into a rabbit hole for me . . .
This one’s also fascinating, talking about just how rare blue is in nature, as in — only 1 butterfly has evolved an actual blue pigment. All other blue colors on land animals are due to light reflection illusions off the underlying structures, not due to actual pigments — this includes human eyes. I had no idea.
If you don’t have a word for something it becomes much harder to think about it and to communicate it to someone else.
The eye has three color receptors, red, green, and blue. This is why the color palettes for photography and computer graphics programs are called RGB.
Blue as a pigment is very difficult to make and was very expensive until recently, hence royal blue and purple.
The names for subtle color differences are definitely learned. Just stop in the cosmetics section of any drug store. The women can make the distinctions among all 739 different colors and shades, guys on the other hand just say “huh?”
The narrator is ultra irritating.
A small number of human females may be tetrachromats, meaning they have 4 types of functioning cone cells as opposed to 3.
In humans, two cone cell pigment genes are present on the X chromosome: the classical type 2 opsin genes OPN1MW and OPN1MW2. People with two X chromosomes could possess multiple cone cell pigments, perhaps born as full tetrachromats who have four simultaneously functioning kinds of cone cell, each type with a specific pattern of responsiveness to different wave-lengths of light in the range of the visible spectrum.[22] One study suggested that 15% of the world’s women might have the type of fourth cone whose sensitivity peak is between the standard red and green cones, giving, theoretically, a significant increase in color differentiation.[23] Another study suggests that as many as 50% of women and 8% of men may have four photopigments and corresponding increased chromatic discrimination compared to trichromats.[24]
The Bible contains the description of a gem stone lapis lazuli translated as sapphire. A brief look into meaning, lapis=stone and lazuli=sky or sea. I think this guys analysis is questionable.
Almost every language adopts color words in the same order.
The narrator is ultra irritating.
Nasal and sibilant as you commonly hear in the voices of homosexual men, supplemented with an actual lisp of a sort you only hear when small children speak.
IOW, it turns out rampant confirmation bias is the normal state of affairs for most humans. Which is doubtless as unsurprising a revelation as “eating too much and exercising too little can lead to obesity”.
C Fenton:
I don’t think what you wrote contradicts this guy at all. He is saying people perceived the sea’s actual color correctly, they just didn’t have a special name for it that meant blue, the color. They could certainly have a name for a blue gem, though, that meant sky or sea stone. That would be completely in line with what he’s saying.
I thought of cobalt blue, which I had thought was pure cobalt but isn’t. Here is Wikipedia on cobalt blue, which then references ultramarine that painters once used. Apparently utramarine is made from lapis lazuli. Way to go C Fenton. Never heard of that.
@C Fenton notes the biblical use of sapphire. It was not the only reference to blue. The Hebrew Bible uses different words to refer to blue fabric and green plants.
I’m not sure about the magnitude of importance for this news item, but it could be big.
France has reacted bitterly to the double blow of not only their contract with Australia for submarines having been cancelled, but Europe being “excluded” from the new defence pact between the UK, the USA, and Australia to counter communist Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific, claiming it heightened the need for “European strategic autonomy” — i.e., an EU army.
– – –
AUKUS’s first initiative will be the collaboration on the development of nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy. Canberra informed Paris earlier on Wednesday that it would be dropping its AUS$90 billion (£47.63bn/U.S.$65.89bn) contract for 12 French-designed boats in favour of eight to be constructed with the new alliance.
“We will leverage expertise from the United States and the United Kingdom, building on the two countries’ submarine programmes to bring an Australian capability into service at the earliest achievable date,” the three Anglosphere leaders said last night.
In a statement from the French government released on Thursday, French Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Yves le Drian called the decision to end the contract “contrary to the letter and spirit of the cooperation which prevailed between France and Australia”.
– – –
Le Drian also complained that U.S. President Biden’s “American behaviour” was reminiscent of former President Donald Trump, calling the decision “brutal, unilateral, [and] unpredictable”.
Biden is as bad as Trump to French eyes. The honeymoon is over?
I also recall that there was an Aussie spy or diplomat who was involved in the Trump/Carter Page/Papadopoulos NSA surveillance sting.
A federal grand jury returned an indictment sought by sought by Special Counsel John Durham against Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann, accusing him of lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation.
I remember we had an African guy in one of my Anthropology classes. I’ve long since forgotten what country he was from or what his native language was, but when we discussed this topic he said that his people had no word for the color orange, that to him it was just another shade of red.
@C Fenton:
The narrator (annoying yes!) specifically says that the Egyptians did have a word for Blue and specifically because they did have the pigment readily (if expensively) available in, you guessed it Lapis Lazuli.
We moderns find it really hard to grasp just how rare and expensive certain pigments were until Aniline Dyes came along in C19.
Was nice to see a hint of Sapir-Whorf in there: once you have a name or (better yet today, a Meme) for X, you’ll start seeing more of X where X could be a thing or a pattern. Which is why you cannot allow your Enemies to control what is and is not acceptable language. And if you don’t control it, someone else will. Always. Eventually.
What interests me more is Bring Back Epithets! I like the Wine-dark Sea, Black-prowed Ships, White-armed Nausicaa, etc.
ref ROYGBIV from grade school:
I have noticed that the typical gay pride flag only has 6 colors, apparently skipping from blue to violet, and ignoring indigo. Thus perhaps gays cannot see indigo.
@ Dwaz: and if your African classmate could not designate orange, then they must not have a Western pride flag available in his country, either. So much for establishing homosexual identity politics across those international borders.
R2L —
Not having a separate word for a color doesn’t mean you can’t perceive it. As McWhorter explains in that link I posted earlier, people lacking the specific color words will comparatives or exemplars, like “the color of an avocado” (if they don’t have green) or “red like a marigold” (if they don’t have orange).
@BryanLovely:
“Not having a separate word for a color doesn’t mean you can’t perceive it. As McWhorter explains in that link I posted earlier, people lacking the specific color words will comparatives or exemplars, like “the color of an avocado” (if they don’t have green) or “red like a marigold” (if they don’t have orange).”
Agreed that ability to perceive is largely a distraction here. But not having a definite distinct lexical tag for X means you can’t abstract it and manipulate it inside your noggin. Admittedly probably not much of an issue with concepts like Colour. But subtly yuuuge in other areas.
But seems early on there was a not atypical blue-green blurring in the nomenclature. The literature and classical philology is way outside my league so really don’t have much idea how it worked in ancient times.
A bit of humor.
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/09/15/maher-liberal-media-must-take-responsibility-for-scaring-people-about-covid-people-in-blue-states-afraid-to-go-out/
Liberal talk show host Bill Maher referenced a survey on the partisan attitudes towards the virus, saying, “the question was, what do you think the chances are that you would have to go to the hospital if you got COVID? And Democrats thought that was way higher than Republicans. 41% of [Democrats] — and the answer is between 1% and 5%. 41% of Democrats thought it was over 50%. Another 28% thought it was 20% to 49%. So, 70% of Democrats thought it was way, way, way higher than it really was. Liberal media has to take a little responsibility for that, for scaring the [bleep] out of people. And the reason why I’m bringing this up is because it’s much harder for every touring act to sell tickets in blue states. They’re afraid to go out of the house. Whereas in red states, it’s all good to go.”
An exaggeration but certainly a grain of truth there too.
Restrictions on Entering the PRC. These have been in force since early last year — various bits being tweaked over time.
One of my recurring themes is Efficient Tyranny vs. Arnarcho-Tyranny. PRC being efficient, Western ones being inefficient and sloppy. End result is that your average Chinaman is safer from random crime and Covid Lockdowns, but able to get about living a pretty normal life provided that he doesn’t develop an urge to stand on a soap box on a street corner and LARP that he’s Demosthenes. Whereas your average American (or worse, Australian) has to tiptoe around Diversity and might (depending on State) be bankrupted by administrative Covid Fiat on any given day.
Of course the American can comfort himself with the thought that Tomorrow (it’s usually Tomorrow) he can rise up and take a stand and some pot-shots and that this knowledge of this future potentiality (Tomorrow Belongs to Him! :P) makes him a better human being than that Oppressed hive-minded Chinese Hive-creature with his bug-nest-hatched Rockets and Mars Probes and High Speed Trains. Quick… We need to find Our Ender! 😛
Well… It’s Complicated. I for one favour manning up and letting a virus like Covid-Delta have its way and getting it over and done with. Or in the Theoretical Platonic Ideal USA letting different states and localities experiment with differing approaches. But that USA does not really exist. FedGov Exists. I’m not quite an Anarchist, but I’m starting to see their point. If you can’t do it well, don’t do it at all. Texan Old Style Anarchy with a few Rangers. Not the Kropotkin Variety.
I’m not quite an Anarchist, … Texan Old Style Anarchy with a few Rangers. Not the Kropotkin Variety.
Anarchy + Rangers. Now that’s funny. Not a big fan of the Somalia Mogadishu variety, eh? There’s a new fantasy born every minute.
Color’s not in the world, it’s in your brain. Sort of how like optically your eyes show everything upside down, but your brain turns it right-side-up.
I’ve always been fascinated by yellow. To me violets always look intermediate between red and blue, but yellow looks nothing like red or green (at least to me). Humans do not perceive a bluish-yellow or a reddish-green because of the way eyes are built. There’s two ways something can be perceived as colored yellow:
Light of a specific wavelength range
The combination of two kinds of light of two different wavelength ranges: green light and red light
The reason is that the the three color receptors in the eye (there is not one for each primary color) interact in a very complicated way. Two sets of cones are triggered by mostly the same wavelengths with a small difference in where the peak sensitivity is (one peaks in yellow and the other in green but they both span the same colors except one doesn’t go as far into red).
In a similar vein, this guy goes into how different languages have different names for colors, and how blue and green often get the same word…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TtnD4jmCDQ
I clicked through the vid to watch it on YT itself and the related vids have turned into a rabbit hole for me . . .
This one’s also fascinating, talking about just how rare blue is in nature, as in — only 1 butterfly has evolved an actual blue pigment. All other blue colors on land animals are due to light reflection illusions off the underlying structures, not due to actual pigments — this includes human eyes. I had no idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g246c6Bv58
Why “newspeak” or “wokespeak” works.
If you don’t have a word for something it becomes much harder to think about it and to communicate it to someone else.
The eye has three color receptors, red, green, and blue. This is why the color palettes for photography and computer graphics programs are called RGB.
Blue as a pigment is very difficult to make and was very expensive until recently, hence royal blue and purple.
The names for subtle color differences are definitely learned. Just stop in the cosmetics section of any drug store. The women can make the distinctions among all 739 different colors and shades, guys on the other hand just say “huh?”
The narrator is ultra irritating.
A small number of human females may be tetrachromats, meaning they have 4 types of functioning cone cells as opposed to 3.
In humans, two cone cell pigment genes are present on the X chromosome: the classical type 2 opsin genes OPN1MW and OPN1MW2. People with two X chromosomes could possess multiple cone cell pigments, perhaps born as full tetrachromats who have four simultaneously functioning kinds of cone cell, each type with a specific pattern of responsiveness to different wave-lengths of light in the range of the visible spectrum.[22] One study suggested that 15% of the world’s women might have the type of fourth cone whose sensitivity peak is between the standard red and green cones, giving, theoretically, a significant increase in color differentiation.[23] Another study suggests that as many as 50% of women and 8% of men may have four photopigments and corresponding increased chromatic discrimination compared to trichromats.[24]
The Bible contains the description of a gem stone lapis lazuli translated as sapphire. A brief look into meaning, lapis=stone and lazuli=sky or sea. I think this guys analysis is questionable.
John McWhorter on color words: https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/09/john-mcwhorter-on-the-english-color-words.html
Almost every language adopts color words in the same order.
The narrator is ultra irritating.
Nasal and sibilant as you commonly hear in the voices of homosexual men, supplemented with an actual lisp of a sort you only hear when small children speak.
“New research confirms that people lend greater credence to sources of information confirming what they already believe to be true — or at least what they hope to be true.”
IOW, it turns out rampant confirmation bias is the normal state of affairs for most humans. Which is doubtless as unsurprising a revelation as “eating too much and exercising too little can lead to obesity”.
C Fenton:
I don’t think what you wrote contradicts this guy at all. He is saying people perceived the sea’s actual color correctly, they just didn’t have a special name for it that meant blue, the color. They could certainly have a name for a blue gem, though, that meant sky or sea stone. That would be completely in line with what he’s saying.
I thought of cobalt blue, which I had thought was pure cobalt but isn’t. Here is Wikipedia on cobalt blue, which then references ultramarine that painters once used. Apparently utramarine is made from lapis lazuli. Way to go C Fenton. Never heard of that.
@C Fenton notes the biblical use of sapphire. It was not the only reference to blue. The Hebrew Bible uses different words to refer to blue fabric and green plants.
I’m not sure about the magnitude of importance for this news item, but it could be big.
Biden is as bad as Trump to French eyes. The honeymoon is over?
I also recall that there was an Aussie spy or diplomat who was involved in the Trump/Carter Page/Papadopoulos NSA surveillance sting.
Silent John Durham speaks, the day before the statute of limitations applies.
A federal grand jury returned an indictment sought by sought by Special Counsel John Durham against Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann, accusing him of lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation.
I remember we had an African guy in one of my Anthropology classes. I’ve long since forgotten what country he was from or what his native language was, but when we discussed this topic he said that his people had no word for the color orange, that to him it was just another shade of red.
@C Fenton:
The narrator (annoying yes!) specifically says that the Egyptians did have a word for Blue and specifically because they did have the pigment readily (if expensively) available in, you guessed it Lapis Lazuli.
We moderns find it really hard to grasp just how rare and expensive certain pigments were until Aniline Dyes came along in C19.
Was nice to see a hint of Sapir-Whorf in there: once you have a name or (better yet today, a Meme) for X, you’ll start seeing more of X where X could be a thing or a pattern. Which is why you cannot allow your Enemies to control what is and is not acceptable language. And if you don’t control it, someone else will. Always. Eventually.
What interests me more is Bring Back Epithets! I like the Wine-dark Sea, Black-prowed Ships, White-armed Nausicaa, etc.
Covid Delta Outbreak in Fujian Province, China:
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3148633/china-city-lockdown-cases-rise-135-fujian-covid-19-outbreak
ref ROYGBIV from grade school:
I have noticed that the typical gay pride flag only has 6 colors, apparently skipping from blue to violet, and ignoring indigo. Thus perhaps gays cannot see indigo.
@ Dwaz: and if your African classmate could not designate orange, then they must not have a Western pride flag available in his country, either. So much for establishing homosexual identity politics across those international borders.
R2L —
Not having a separate word for a color doesn’t mean you can’t perceive it. As McWhorter explains in that link I posted earlier, people lacking the specific color words will comparatives or exemplars, like “the color of an avocado” (if they don’t have green) or “red like a marigold” (if they don’t have orange).
@BryanLovely:
“Not having a separate word for a color doesn’t mean you can’t perceive it. As McWhorter explains in that link I posted earlier, people lacking the specific color words will comparatives or exemplars, like “the color of an avocado” (if they don’t have green) or “red like a marigold” (if they don’t have orange).”
Agreed that ability to perceive is largely a distraction here. But not having a definite distinct lexical tag for X means you can’t abstract it and manipulate it inside your noggin. Admittedly probably not much of an issue with concepts like Colour. But subtly yuuuge in other areas.
Request for Scholarly Commentary:
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/530127/jewish/Tekhelet-The-Mystery-of-the-Long-Lost-Biblical-Blue-Thread.htm
So what did the Jews call Blue then? Way Back When.
The Chinese certainly had some blue pigments way back:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_purple_and_Han_blue
But seems early on there was a not atypical blue-green blurring in the nomenclature. The literature and classical philology is way outside my league so really don’t have much idea how it worked in ancient times.
A bit of humor.
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/09/15/maher-liberal-media-must-take-responsibility-for-scaring-people-about-covid-people-in-blue-states-afraid-to-go-out/
Liberal talk show host Bill Maher referenced a survey on the partisan attitudes towards the virus, saying, “the question was, what do you think the chances are that you would have to go to the hospital if you got COVID? And Democrats thought that was way higher than Republicans. 41% of [Democrats] — and the answer is between 1% and 5%. 41% of Democrats thought it was over 50%. Another 28% thought it was 20% to 49%. So, 70% of Democrats thought it was way, way, way higher than it really was. Liberal media has to take a little responsibility for that, for scaring the [bleep] out of people. And the reason why I’m bringing this up is because it’s much harder for every touring act to sell tickets in blue states. They’re afraid to go out of the house. Whereas in red states, it’s all good to go.”
An exaggeration but certainly a grain of truth there too.
Restrictions on Entering the PRC. These have been in force since early last year — various bits being tweaked over time.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3148925/can-i-travel-mainland-china-guide-entry-restrictions-documents
TL;DR: Not easy.
One of my recurring themes is Efficient Tyranny vs. Arnarcho-Tyranny. PRC being efficient, Western ones being inefficient and sloppy. End result is that your average Chinaman is safer from random crime and Covid Lockdowns, but able to get about living a pretty normal life provided that he doesn’t develop an urge to stand on a soap box on a street corner and LARP that he’s Demosthenes. Whereas your average American (or worse, Australian) has to tiptoe around Diversity and might (depending on State) be bankrupted by administrative Covid Fiat on any given day.
Of course the American can comfort himself with the thought that Tomorrow (it’s usually Tomorrow) he can rise up and take a stand and some pot-shots and that this knowledge of this future potentiality (Tomorrow Belongs to Him! :P) makes him a better human being than that Oppressed hive-minded Chinese Hive-creature with his bug-nest-hatched Rockets and Mars Probes and High Speed Trains. Quick… We need to find Our Ender! 😛
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender's_Game
Well… It’s Complicated. I for one favour manning up and letting a virus like Covid-Delta have its way and getting it over and done with. Or in the Theoretical Platonic Ideal USA letting different states and localities experiment with differing approaches. But that USA does not really exist. FedGov Exists. I’m not quite an Anarchist, but I’m starting to see their point. If you can’t do it well, don’t do it at all. Texan Old Style Anarchy with a few Rangers. Not the Kropotkin Variety.
I’m not quite an Anarchist, … Texan Old Style Anarchy with a few Rangers. Not the Kropotkin Variety.
Anarchy + Rangers. Now that’s funny. Not a big fan of the Somalia Mogadishu variety, eh? There’s a new fantasy born every minute.
Color’s not in the world, it’s in your brain. Sort of how like optically your eyes show everything upside down, but your brain turns it right-side-up.
I’ve always been fascinated by yellow. To me violets always look intermediate between red and blue, but yellow looks nothing like red or green (at least to me). Humans do not perceive a bluish-yellow or a reddish-green because of the way eyes are built. There’s two ways something can be perceived as colored yellow:
Light of a specific wavelength range
The combination of two kinds of light of two different wavelength ranges: green light and red light
The reason is that the the three color receptors in the eye (there is not one for each primary color) interact in a very complicated way. Two sets of cones are triggered by mostly the same wavelengths with a small difference in where the peak sensitivity is (one peaks in yellow and the other in green but they both span the same colors except one doesn’t go as far into red).
Your eyes are not built to process these combinations differently from the single “yellow” wavelength. There are yellow colors that cannot be accurately represented by any combination of red, green and blue and so cannot be reproduced accurately in images.