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Brown: color is weird [video]
- tasogare 7y agotl;dv: "Brown is just orange, but darker."
- jmiserez 7y ago"tl;dv" is so new/unused there's no results on Google (or Urban Dictionary for that matter). How is that possible? o_O
- shakna 7y agoThe more common usage would be "tl;dw"
- tasogare 7y agoYes, I tried to adapt the shortcut with "viewed" but didn’t think of "watched" (not native speaker of English).
- Normal_gaussian 7y agodw was already used for "don't worry", so its a shame shame that tldw caught on instead of tldv
- pmarin 7y agoNot really, it depends on the surrounding context like it's explained on the video.
- brianmcc 7y agoBeing colourblind I wasn't going to bother with this video but this and the other comments about his series have piqued my interest!
- cheschire 7y agoEvery “but wait!” Argument I tried to come up with, he answered seconds later. Very well paced and about as full of bad dad-scientist jokes you could make it.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoHalf a year ago he came out of nowhere for me and now I encounter his videos all the time. He deserves it. Whenever a vid pops up it's always on a topic I've been wondering about.
- scrollaway 7y agoHe's one of my favourite YouTube channels and I found out about him a mere weeks ago. Binged all his content. He has wonderful playlists on VHS and the format wars, color TV, analog everything etc. I recommend you look at his other videos and click on whatever titillates your interest.
- gibolt 7y agoI recommend you look at his Patreon page. His quality, depth of research, and overall uniqueness made supporting a no brainer for me.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- marcan_42 7y agoYeah, he catches every single one of those and does it in style. Easily my favorite educational (often retro) tech channel. He gets you hooked even on stuff you already know about. Funny thing: some people have joked that he's my alter ego (I guess we look slightly similar?), but I could never deliver stuff like he does.
- willis936 7y agoWell he did miss one tiny little thing in his toslink video. I pointed it out (and I’m sure others did) and he filled in the gap in a follow-up video. He sets a very high bar. I wish he did have a more technical discussion on CRT vs raster displays. There is a real meat there that is typically unexplored. What is the spatial frequency response of CRT vs raster? What resolution raster do you need to be “good enough” and what kind of interpolation/LPF should be used?
- pininja 7y agoBig fan of this channel. He’s got a great series on the RCA CED.
- maxnoe 7y agoAlso watch this please if you ever do plots using colormaps: https://youtu.be/xAoljeRJ3lU https://youtu.be/xAoljeRJ3lU About the perceptual uniform, colorblind friendly colormaps in matplotlib since 1.5. Now also adapted by most other plotting tools.
- quietbritishjim 7y agoIf we're on the "watch this YouTube video if you work with colours" train, here's a great explanation of why gradients usually have a dark band in the middle, on the MinutePhysics channel: https://youtu.be/LKnqECcg6Gw https://youtu.be/LKnqECcg6Gw In short: the RBG values in an image are not actually the intensity of light, but some nonlinear function of intensity. To do a weighted average of two colours you need to first undo that nonlinearity, then do the averaging, then reapply the function. Most software doesn't do that so the colours end up wrong. This also applies to resizing images.
- marcan_42 7y agoIt irks me to no end that in 2020 we are still using outright incorrect math for image processing, practically everywhere, with visible consequences (another one: this can also be blamed for a good chunk of the moiré artifacts when resizing images containing patterns, it's not just about subpar filters). Ironically, Photoshop does this wrong by default, but the open source GIMP does it correctly (in current versions).
- mantap 7y agoPretty much the first thing you learn in game development (OK not the first thing), is the difference between linear-RGB and sRGB and the need to do lighting calculations in linear space in your shaders. It's crazy that professional graphics software doesn't get this right.
- martin_a 7y ago> It's crazy that professional graphics software doesn't get this right. "Professional graphics software" does what it's supposed to be and sRGB is an inferior standard in most use-cases of that software. Its gamut is simply not large enough, but it's a nice smallest-possible commond ground.
- shultays 7y agoI honestly couldn't see the orange when the square is surrounded by black. It was still brown for me.
- ackshually 7y agoWere you in a bright room? That would have given you context, which is what he warned against.
- shultays 7y agoYea, that might be the case
- GistNoesis 7y agoColor is cool. Let's add another dimension to this video. It's one way of conveying information the brain can interpret in a flexible way. But the brain is also good at depth perception. Let's combine these : For example in the app I released yesterday StlToRelief : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22319140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22319140 I use a color gradient to increase the perception of depth. It makes a thin bas-relief standout. With color-mixing 3d-printing this is an effect we can now exploit. There is a closely related phenomena that we have when doing war paints for camouflage. Area (i.e. peaks like the nose) that would naturally catch the light appear brighter so you have to paint them dark while hollow area that naturally appear dark must be painted white. The resulting painting make a face look flat which stand out less.
- ackshually 7y agoTechnology Connections is so great. Never dissapoints.
- aasasd 7y agoObviously I now need to repeat the dark room trick but with cut-out pictures of chocolate, coffee, nuts, dirt and bears.
- mikedilger 7y agoIs our color perception influenced by our culture's language? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...
- improbable22 7y agoI don't know, but the words we use for it are certainly influenced by our culture! Here's a paper with nice graphs, drawing where different languages put the boundaries between words -- they divide up the hue-saturation space into a varying number of blobs: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/31/7937 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/31/7937 (The data isn't theirs, it was painstakingly colected by going and asking lots of people "what colour is this pantone?". The paper does some fancy stuff on top of that. But it has nice graphs.)
- cpcat 7y agoSo basically there's no such thing as orange. It's just brown
- empath75 7y agoBright brown.
- spookthesunset 7y agoOrange itself is just a name for what sits between red and yellow. We didn't always have a name for orange either.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thdrdt 7y agoI always wonder if there will be displays in the future that combine emission and absorption at the same time. Like a combination of OLED and E Ink. This will also give you the possibility to turn your TV into a painting (without using power) when you are done watching.
- Razengan 7y agoThat's an amazing idea. The E Ink layer would be great for status overlays or permanent elements that rarely change, like the date and battery charge, or a list of recent notifications while the "main/active" display sleeps when the machine is idle.
- aasasd 7y agoSome displays already have the two modes―alas don't remember what they're called, it's some variation of color eink. You get color indoors, or only black-on-white in sunlight. Some ebook devices also have ‘backlight’―usually diffused light from the sides so it doesn't shine directly in the eyes. I think this is the crux of your idea, because currently even if you use lcd/oled with backlight, no-power eink will be severely washed out in comparison. And if eink gets good color and contrast in the future, it will then fulfill the two-mode technology.
- jrockway 7y agoI think you're talking about the displays that the original OLPC used: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Display http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Display
- aasasd 7y agoYeah, apparently the Pixel Qi company is a spin-off from OLPC, and that's the name I've heard in the context of color eink tech (took me a while to remember it). Defunct since 2015, however. The page on the wiki.laptop.org isn't too clear on the technology—presumably it's more complex than just LCD and eink slapped together. The Wikipedia page on the XO laptop seems to have some detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO#Display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO#Display
- gowld 7y agoEverytime he said "context", he should have said "contrast". He also didn't mention that grey is dark white, by the same phenomenon. And of course red is dark pink, for rooster teeth fans.
- sneakernets 7y agoWell, Contrast is usually in parlance as extremes. I think he means in context of what else is in the image, not just contrast. For example, you can have a "dark green" and "dark orange" used in a graphic of a tree on a black background, and you would perceive it as brown due to the context of the "tree-ness" on your screen.
- cturner 7y agoClassical works use colour in ways that are confusing to read. You either have to accept that it is describing a fantasy, or that the author's concept of colours is different than ours. I had wondered if there was any example from own language of this, in order to get the benefit of that perspective. This seems to be it. Perhaps we had a name for brown before orange. Whereas other colours tend to be named for the saturated version. Has cultivation changed citrus colours, as with carrots?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Quai 7y agoI really enjoy this guys videos. The refreshing level of details. Great, geeky, humor. I especially enjoyed his "rants" about the design of a old toaster, and traffic lights, of all things.
- S_A_P 7y agoAgreed. This is something my 12 year old son really enjoys watching as well. I like that he usually does a pretty good job of striking a balance between deep dive and conceptual high points. On school nights, he will sing "Technology connections" to the melody of Lucky Charms "Its magically delicious". Try to not do that the next time you see that channel...
- chipperyman573 7y agoThe one on traffic lights is way more interesting than it sounds! Everybody should check it out. There's also a really interesting point he makes at the end that applies to something a lot of people on HN might relate with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8 The toaster one is alright, it kinda bothered me when he said there was "literally NO reason" to design something the way it was (I think it had to do with the position of the coils) - obviously there is, it's probably just not a reason he'd like (cost, ease of manufacturing, etc). It makes me wonder if there was other info he skipped on because it "wasn't important" or "stupid". That's a pretty minor point though, overall his videos are very good.
- jngreenlee 7y agoHe seems like a young technical Andy Rooney!
- GaryNumanVevo 7y agoTechnology Connections is criminally underrated. Their content is presented in an engaging way, always interesting, always fun.
- CWuestefeld 7y agoI loved his rant about space heaters. He showed a bunch of different products, all the same kind of heater, down to having identical 1500W output - but they were rated for small, medium, and large rooms, with proportional pricing. He went on to explain some basic thermodynamics (as opposed to marketing)...
- Priem19 7y agoThis was the last topic on which I expected to completely watch the video. Fantastic presentation.
- geomark 7y agoThis is great. I wish I had seen it before I did the unit on color with the kids in my after school club, although they did have their minds blown slightly when I made the screen on my cell phone all yellow and then put it under a microscope so they could see that there were only red and green pixels illuminated - no yellow light coming off that screen at all, it was all in their heads.
- ainar-g 7y agoIf you've liked this video, you may also enjoy Alec's series on LaserDisc[1] (no, it's not about CD) and RCA's Capacitance Electronic Disc or CED[2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFUoByWSHHoSTlUIxY7VkJLi https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFUoByWSHHoS... [2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVP0SGNlBiBtFVkV5LZ7SOU https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVP0SGNlBiB...
- ajot 7y agoThe CED saga reminds me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as in a "trilogy in five parts". Nevertheless, I love this guy and really enjoyed listening to the story of the CED.
- mbreese 7y agoCEDs were great. We had two generations of those players growing up. The best part was that you eventually got to know exactly where the cut points were in movies. Because that was when you had to go up to the TV to flip the disc. I’ll have to listen to his story on them. Probably a very different view from me as a kid just using them to watch movies pre-VCR.
- nwallin 7y agoThere are a lot of HN appropriate lessons in his CED series. Especially the one about being on time to market: if the CED hit the market before the VCR or laserdisc did, it might have survived, or even possibly kept RCA alive. Or the stuff about using tried and true methods instead of the fancy new tech of the day. My parents recently moved into a smaller home, and ... deacquired a bunch of their furniture by way of my house. In the shuffle I ended up with a bunch of my parents' old records. Being susceptible to impulse buys, I bought a record player. I actually really enjoy the experience of playing records. There's something about the physicality of it. I can't just press a button on my phone and ignore it. I have to choose what to listen to next. I have to physically flip the record twenty minutes in. It's not purely a background thing, it's a physical process and experience. Music has gone from something I ignore to something I participate in. I'm not actually sure that's in any way relevant to the conversation at hand, but when I started ranting, I felt it was.
- boffinism 7y agoAm I the only one who already thought brown just _was_ dark orange? Like, if you google 'dark orange', you get shown a bunch of brown swatches as the top results. Isn't that... just what brown has always been?
- peteretep 7y agoYes, that’s exactly his point. Brown is dark orange, and you can’t make a light that’s the dark version of any colour, you can just have less of that colour. We only think of brown as a colour because we decided to give dark orange a name.
- jessriedel 7y agoMaroon is dark red/purple. Indigo is dark blue/purple. Olive is dark green.
- yreg 7y agoYet I bet brown has dramatically more hits in the English corpus than maroon, indigo or olive (colour).
- scotty79 7y agofur-poo-bark color was probably more useful to name.
- DonHopkins 7y agoQ: What's brown and sticky? A: A stick!
- jessriedel 7y agoYes, but if you're trying to rebut me then you're mixing up the causality. "Brown" has more hits because people think about it differently (e.g., it's very frequently in their environment). The existence/prevalence of the name "brown" didn't cause people to think about it differently.
- longtom 7y agoGrey is also weird for the same reason. The moon appears white at night, but its albedo (% reflected light) is actually 0.12 which is comparable to that of asphalt.
- OrgNet 7y agoBlack or white-ish asphalt?
- longtom 7y agoNot black asphalt. Well, depending on the context it will appear black. :^) https://i.imgur.com/dGDaVLz.jpg https://i.imgur.com/dGDaVLz.jpg https://nasaviz.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011900/a011924/c-1280.jpg https://nasaviz.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011900/a011924/c-...
- fyp 7y agoI can kind of make sense of why humans(animals?) evolved to see brightness in relative terms. The same object will have different amount of light reflecting off it based on the time of day so you don't want your brain to register those as different scenes. Hue also makes sense. It's the distribution of wavelengths being reflected. But what does saturation correspond to? When do things become saturated/desaturated in the natural world?
- joshspankit 7y agoRipeness?
- scotty79 7y agoSunbleached? Roughened surface?
- loa_in_ 7y agoThe (high) opposite of saturation, the "grayness" is a characteristic of glare, specular reflections, metallic materials (and salts).
- jerf 7y agoTake an image and force all colors to the same saturation, and you may get an idea. If nothing else, there is advantage to extracting as much detail from the signal as rapidly as possible. Not everything has to have a direct, straight line relationship; second-order and third-order effects are perfectly selectable too. In fact straight-line relationships are the exception; even the ones we think we see are the confluence of a lot of individual second- and nth-order outcomes.
- pjc50 7y agoIf you take the absolute value of differences between each pair of the three "color" signals, and find how varied they are, that is saturation. https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/color/rgb-to-hsv.html https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/color/rgb-to-hsv.html I suspect a lot of natural stripe patterns require saturation to distinguish them.
- 7y ago
- ken 7y agoMaybe weird but not unique: every non-saturated color is like this. Try to set your RGB lighting strip to gray. Or watch the veins pop out of your LD's forehead when someone asks for gray lighting on stage.
- whatshisface 7y agoPass out grey translucent glasses with a little bit of diffusion to everybody in the audience.
- MarioMan 7y agoNow I'm wondering if there are programmable lenses to provide basic, real-life filters at concerts and other events.
- derefr 7y ago> Or watch the veins pop out of your LD's forehead when someone asks for gray lighting on stage. White light + black fog from a fog machine? Can you "pigment" air like that?
- willis936 7y agoI watched this with my SO last night. We have a very small cross section of shared media interests (notable ones being star trek and grand designs). One of the few youtube videos I’ve put on that she got excited about was Tech Connections video on rice cookers. I mean, I know I really like his stuff. Even though I’m deep in the weeds with most of his topics and already know it, I still find pleasure in hearing advanced topics explained from base concepts with such clarity. He knows his business and it shows.
- Waterluvian 7y agoSo after all that (it was fantastic) I just want to confirm my understanding: "brown" is literally just "dark orange", correct?
- seanalltogether 7y agoOne thing he missed in the video is the fact that red and green cone cells make up 95% of the cones in human eyes, hence our extreme sensitivity to colors that fall between the two. Dark orange looks brown because we have so much resolution in that space to work with, whereas dark green is just dark green, or dark blue is just dark blue.
- martin-adams 7y agoIn the video he said that we recognise it as brown because we learned the name for it and thus recognise it independently. Is that idea compatible with us having more red and green cone cells than blue - i.e. having more resolution to recognise brown?
- haydenchambers 7y agoThere was a study done on groups of people from landlocked tribes that had more language for ‘earth tones’ vs those that lived near sea with more language for blues and their ability to actually notice different hues. Chicken and egg?
- marci 7y agoAlso a matter of context. Brown is orange and grey can be red. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJBfn07gZ30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJBfn07gZ30 Here's a part of a documentary talking about the cultural aspect of how we perceive colours and the power of naming a color (with the Himba people) https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl7eh1 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl7eh1
- MarioMan 7y agoThere is certainly a cultural aspect to it. Tom Scott's video on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TtnD4jmCDQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TtnD4jmCDQ
- andrewxdiamond 7y agoHe actually covers that in a previous video, the one he linked below. https://youtu.be/uYbdx4I7STg https://youtu.be/uYbdx4I7STg
- VBprogrammer 7y agoAs someone who suffers form a colour vision abnormality these things make me happy; if the world is so messed up for normal people then who cares that it's slightly more queer for me.
- analog31 7y agoWhile I was in school, a professor was grilling me on color, and said, okay smarty pants, if you think you know what brown is, show me a brown laser. We happened to be in the lab, so I pointed to a brown spot on the wall, made by a very powerful laser. After that, we referred to it as the brown laser.
- robbrown451 7y agoYou can't have a magenta laser either (since magenta can't be represented by a single wavelength). Or a black laser. Or for that matter, a C sharp laser. That doesn't mean those concept are particularly hard to wrap one's head around.
- JdeBP 7y agoNowhere in that anecdote does anyone assert that brown does not exist. "If you think that you know what brown is" is not talking about existence.
- robbrown451 7y agoIt seems a bit of a pedantic distinction, but ok. I edited the comment. I don't think it changes the spirit of the comment, though. I've seen many people try to argue that magenta doesn't exist, or isn't a color, etc., simply because it doesn't correlate to a single wavelength. Regardless, what is he trying to say, then? That brown can't be understood because there is no such thing as a brown laser? My point remains.
- analog31 7y agoI was just recalling an amusing anecdote. The brown color produced by the laser was because it burned the wall. It's too late for me to edit the post for clarity.
- robbrown451 7y agoYes and it is an amusing anecdote. I commented because I've seen so many people who think that "color" must have a one-to-one relationship with wavelength of light, and it seemed your professor was doing that as well.
- mygo 7y agoColor is hard to talk about correctly. If you’re reading this, video creator, since you asked at the end, this was very well done. Really, really good. Thanks for distinguishing magenta. Thanks for discussing both the additive and subtractive color models. Thanks for going over a few mathematical ways to describe color (RGB, HSB, etc). Thanks for mentioning photoreceptors and the visual cortex, how colors appear differently in different environments, and how color is an event. Thanks for mixing paints! I would include this as part of an introduction to color theory. If you were to make a V2, I’d suggest discussing gray, since I’m sure you’d find a way to make gray interesting (I mean it is though) :)
- Noxmiles 7y agoSo, brown is only a cultural construct - actually it's just a dark orange. The Video is amazing. I wish to read more scientific research on this subject.
- t_treesap 7y agoI used to like this guy, and his factual information is usually interesting, but he sometimes expresses opinions that downright infuriate me, to the point I had to stop listening.
- tessellated 7y agoCare to give examples?
- sixothree 7y agoTo be fair, the title is "Brown; color is weird"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rabuse 7y agoWe do have other labels for colors nowadays though (ex. Olive, Khaki, Navy)
- kwelstr 7y agoWhy is yellow ignored as a primary color green pushed as a primary color?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bityard 7y agoBecause that's not how light works.
- cwingrav 7y agoAdditive vs Subtractive colors: https://stackoverflow.com/a/6531772/2664702 https://stackoverflow.com/a/6531772/2664702
- a-nikolaev 7y agoRed, blue, and yellow are subtractive primary colors. E.g. if an object absorbs(subtracts) red light, then under white light it looks green (blue+yellow remained). This is how colors work in painting. On the other hand, your monitor does not absorb colors, but emits it. If you shine red and green light on a white surface (or on your eye directly), you will see green. This is called additive color. RGB (red, green, blue) are primary additive colors. https://drawpaintacademy.com/subtractive-additive-color/ https://drawpaintacademy.com/subtractive-additive-color/
- robbrown451 7y agoMagenta yellow and cyan are subtractive primaries. Cyan might pass for blue, but magenta really isn't red. And really you could say red green and blue are subtractive primaries (as well as additive), but we use cyan ink because it subtracts red light. (etc)
- a-nikolaev 7y agoYeah, technically yes, but the poster above refers to the primary colors used in arts, which are red, blue, and yellow. They do represent subtractive colors magenta, cyan, yellow.
- garfieldnate 7y agoTechnology Connections is one of my favorite channels! It's one of the few whose videos I consistently watch immediately after release.