Personal Science Week - 240926 Colors
The personal science of colors
Personal scientists love simple tests that let us quantify and then study something that is otherwise left to intuition or speculation.
This week we’ll look at the world of color.
A classic topic in perception is that question of whether people experience colors the same way: How do I know that my blue is the same as yours?
Patrick Mineault, a neuroscience and AI researcher, used Claude 3.5 Sonnet to make a very simple online test to compare your color perception to other people.
At the site https://ismy.blue/, I answered a few questions about whether I thought a particular hue was green or blue. A few seconds later, it concluded:
The complete source code is on Github.
We wrote about perception and consciousness in PS Week 230309 and synesthesia in PS Week 230223 and most recently in PSWeek240321 discussion of Inner Monologue.
Speaking of Colors
Upload a picture of yourself to Colorwise.Me and get a (free) analysis of the colors that best match you. Here’s what it says for me:
More Color-Related Links
Is our culture becoming less colorful over time? Cath Sleeman examined 7000 photos from the Science Museum Collection to study changes over time in the commonly-used colors of various objects, from household products (like boxes or furniture) to many other items, including cars, which have turned overwhelmingly black and white.
The Colors of Motion is a Webby (2015) award-winning site that chopped up dozens of movies to represent each frame with a line representing its average color.
U-Penn scientists used the publicly available World Color Survey of color names from 110 languages to show how the specifics of color names are constrained in any language over time:
“The main takeaway is that, once you as a linguistic community have an efficient vocabulary, that starting point restricts the next possible efficient vocabulary that you could have when you introduce a new term,” says Twomey, the first author. “As the vocabulary grows, the number of different vocabularies that you could move to is increasingly constrained.”
So that leaves a lot of unnamed colors, so Colornames.Org lets you propose an official name for the others. So far about 4M people have complied, including my own entry which I helpfully christened “ripening rhubarb":
About Personal Science
The world doesn’t need another blog about self-optimization or personal health, and your humble author is no expert anyway. But personal scientists are serious about how we can apply rigorous, testable techniques to uncover the truth about issues that matter in everyday life. Whether it’s books, articles, on-line posts, lectures, or personal conversations, we’ve followed these ideas for decades and this is our attempt to bring some coherence to a messy process.
Paid subscribers can also read our Unpopular Science series, including our 240527 post about ideas that would get a professional scientist in trouble.
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