Me (& Walmart) vs The World

36 thoughts on “Me (& Walmart) vs The World”

1. What’s interesting is the context cues you talk about. Before I scrolled down far enough to see the shoes, I might have said gray.

   But since the shoes are clearly brown, the pants are clearly green, because who wears brown shoes with gray pants?Report

   1. Color is almost entirely dependent on context. A whole host of visual illusions are built around this. Since it’s a “link to my old blog” week:

      http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2006/07/08/cool-visual-illusions-craikobr/

      http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2006/06/24/cool-visual-illusions-the-wate-1/

      Or one of last year’s winners:

      http://illusionoftheyear.com/2014/flexible-colors/Report

   2. By the way, I zoomed the page and put the shoes below the page, so that I could only see the pants, and then scrolled up. The effect is pretty dramatic: there’s a visible and discrete change from gray to green, or at least from a lighter to a darker green.Report

      1. scrolled down, obviously.Report

   3. I doubt all of our monitors are displaying those pants in the same color anyway.Report

      1. As I’m sure you know, it’s impossible to accurately show a pigment colour using RGB LED colours.

         My wife is a theatrical lighting designer, and is often teased by theatre techs when she goes through a theatre’s inventory of fancy new LED instruments, and asks if they have any old incandescent instruments.

         Then they light a scene with just the fancy LEDs, and the fades are all jumpy, and one of the actors looks like they’re in a public lavatory, until they get some tungsten filaments glowing at them.Report

2. I would call those pants a kind of green-gray but closer to the green family. They are a very dark Army green.Report

3. I would call those pants Feld-Grau.Report

4. The world is already difficult enough to navigate thanks to those who falsely insist that there are more colors than exist in MS Paint’s sixteen-block preset palette. Now they’re going to start using the wrong words to describe those colors?

   It’s nothing new — there are many profound differences of opinion on the point when “blue” becomes “green” or vice versa. What color is the sea?Report

   1. @burt-likko

      You mean you don’t differentiate between Lincoln Green and British Racing Green?Report

      1. Grrrrr.Report

      2. Are you saying “grrrrrrr”, or “grrrrrrrr-eeeeeen”?Report

      3. I was saying “Boooo-urns”.Report

   2. Wine-dark, if you ask Homer.Report

      1. Mmmmmmmmm….wiiinnne.Report

   3. The sea’s color always will be… “aoi”.Report

5. Green
   Grey?

   I thought everyone used color names like “stone” and “moss” now a days 🙂Report

   1. And those are totally moss.Report

      1. I would have said “streets ahead”, but I don’t know what the current lingo is.Report

      2. I was thinking they’re closer to Night at the Opera.Report

      3. I think they are more slate.Report

      4. I would have said Salon.Report

   2. Are these colors, or bastard names from Game of Thrones?Report

      1. They are the names of the Palins to come.Report

      2. @tod-kelly FTW.Report

6. greys can have a green undertone to them, or brown, or blue. so you’re not entirely wrong.Report

7. Is it possible that the pants in the same picture are not the same color as yours?

   Both of my kids have slight/partial color blindness, and this happens a lot. We’ll be out, and someone will talk about their shirt being purple and one of the kids will say, “See? Whenever I call my color shirt purple you always say it’s red!”

   And I’ll have to point out that their shirt at home *is* red, and that the shirt that they are looking at now *is* purple.Report

8. “Those color-blindness tests. You know, the number in one color surrounded by another color. They make it so that it’s hard to see with those weird effects.”

   I almost fell out of my chair laughing. That’s the funniest thing I’ve read in a long time, Will.Report

9. Traffic lights signalling go in Japan are “blue”.Report

   1. I’m quite sure trafic lights in Japan are “brue”Report

      1. On the other side, I’ve been several times to China. Traffic lights there are “gleen”Report

      2. This Japan Times piece uses “grue” for the Japanese word that used to cover both green and blue.Report

      3. No, grues live where it is pitch-black.Report

10. At the risk of incurring Burt’s wrath, might I suggest the pants could be described as olive?Report

11. Hues that have a lot of black in them are tricky. There’s a house in my neighborhood a friend kept talking about, “the blue house,” only it’s charcoal gray; she sees the blue in that gray, more then most of us.

    There’s an online test to order hues that might give you some more knowledge of what hues (shades) you see well, and where you have ‘holes’ in your vision.

    http://www.color-blindness.com/farnsworth-munsell-100-hue-color-vision-test/Report

12. For years my wife suggested I wear one of the Navy blue sports jackets in my wardrobe. I insisted I had only black jackets. Last year I had a cataract removed from one eye and discovered I had two ‘new’ Navy blue jackets to wear.Report

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