Comment by egypturnash
2 years ago
I got hue 174 as my threshold and really I just wanted to say "neither, this is turquoise/teal" for most of the questions. But blue/green was the only option.
2 years ago
I got hue 174 as my threshold and really I just wanted to say "neither, this is turquoise/teal" for most of the questions. But blue/green was the only option.
I got hue 175. It's interesting to note that some older cultures, Japan for example, didn't always have separate words for blue and green, both were the same color ("ao" in Japanese). You can see the effects of this even today with things like traffic lights in Japan, which are considered "green" by their standards but blue by many others' standards.
There are also other cultures, such as Russia, where light blue / dark blue (simplification) are effectively considered separate colors.
All this to say, personally, I think we will continue to evolve to recognize more distinct "colors" such as teal, which is neither blue nor green but somewhere between. A lot of this recognition power is rooted in linguistics and culture, it's not as strictly biological as one might think.
Thanks for this comment! I dabble in fountain pens a bit, and one of my favorite inks is "ao" by Taccia.
Now it all makes sense (tho, to my eye it's kind of a blurple–royal blue; I get no green or teal from it. But, now I'm tempted to go do a blotter of it and look at it extra carefully in natural light.)
In Russian light blue is “blue” and dark blue is “indigo” essentially. It still has seven colors in the rainbow. It’s just that in English colloquially nobody uses indigo.
Yes, well that's what I mean. Culturally, Russians think and speak about colors differently, dividing them up differently than the West.
> Russian does not have a single word referring to the whole range of colors denoted by the English term "blue". Instead, it traditionally treats light blue (голубой, goluboy) as a separate color independent from plain or dark blue (синий, siniy), with all seven "basic" colors of the spectrum (red–orange–yellow–green–голубой/goluboy (sky blue, light azure, but does not equal cyan)–синий/siniy ("true" deep blue, like synthetic ultramarine)–violet) while in English the light blues like azure and cyan are considered mere shades of "blue" and not different colors.
> Blue: plava (indicates any blue) and modra; in the eastern speaking areas modra indicates dark blue, in some of the western areas it may indicate any blue
etc. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
I am not deeply knowledgeable on Russian, I failed Russian in high school, just going off of my surface-level knowledge of linguistic relativity regarding color, and discussions with a friend from that part of the world, so I might not know what I'm talking about here.
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The point is to determine whether turquoise to you is more green, or more blue.
The color name question here doesn't have a clear answer because most of the respondents would call this "teal", "blue–green", "turqoise", "cyan", "aqua", or some similar name. You'd get somewhat similar results asking whether an orange (the fruit) is really "red" or "yellow", or whether an eggplant is really "blue" or "red".
An individual person's answers on this kind of question are likely to vary from day to day, are context dependent (i.e. whether one object or another appears more "green" or "blue" depends on what kind of object it is), and colors this intense are very sensitive to changes in eye adaptation and technical details of the display and software, as well as inter-observer metamerism.
So in addition to the color naming difficulties, it's not even a very good test of color naming, if you want to get reliable psychometric/linguistic data.
For a single individual, all of the above is true, but for a large enough sample size, the answers may be more generally useful because you account for all of those rounding errors.
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That’s like asking which way a Necker cube is oriented. It’s both and neither. For blue and green, there’s a range of shades for which that ambiguity is true and you can “flip” it in your mind.
I would actually find it more practical to determine the thresholds on both sides where I find it to become ambiguous.
> I would actually find it more practical to determine the thresholds on both sides where I find it to become ambiguous.
Isn't that the point of this exercise?
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Fun, I got 174 and when I saw the results my reaction was "but that is not turquoise!" which I suppose means I either don't know what turquoise is, or my screen has bad calibration/gamut.
Nobody knows what turquoise is
I got 174 as well.
Me too... Apple Silicon era MBA, with Samsung 4K display with corresponding U28D590 driver...
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Funny, 174 by me too.
Here is a chart of HN reader results, based on two pages of comments: https://i.imgur.com/tIQfTjN.png
Mean is 176 Median is 175 Mode is 174
Me too, but I liked the conclusion ("to you, turquoise is blue/green")
To be honest, when I got turquoise and had to choose blue or green, I just thought "oh whatever" and picked one randomly.
Same here... Then again, natural turquoise can appear more blue or green in nature too.
I actually disliked the conclusion, because it forced me to classify turquoise as either blue or green. When it's a mix more than anything.
It lacks the "can't classify" to make it a better tool.
You could look at it as “How much yellow do I have to add to my blue until I no longer consider it blue and instead consider it turquoise”
yeah kind of a waste of time, what is this 50% mixture of green and blue? pick one - Blue or Green
answer it should have: Its both
That must be the perfect result. I also got 174 but it said "For you, turquoise is green."
But it isn't. Turquoise is turquoise, and since that wasn't an option, I picked one at random.
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176 for me its blue
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it looks like my default is if there is 40% green in that it is green. Thus it told me that turquoise for me is green. Which if I look at Turquoise the RGB color, that is green. If I look at Turquoise the mineral about half the time it is green and half the time blue.
Same thinking here, though I got 184
Same, my answer was “neither” after the third color so I just alternated between blue and green until it stopped.
"Neither" is the coward's choice.
Logically, a color, green etc., is a 'simple' notion and cannot be explained terms of anything simpler. With color we have to revert to a different description, here wavelength. But wavelength is not human perception (and we can't explain such perception in simpler terms).
Is a crab a mammal or a reptile?
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Try looking away between tests.
I tried twice and got 182, then 184. Which I suppose it more or less consistent.
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