7 ms·
Just a data point that I want to put out there. I have long heard that Japan has blue traffic lights. Earlier this year I visited Japan. Because I had heard
by 2143 3y ago
Just a data point that I want to put out there.
I have long heard that Japan has blue traffic lights.
Earlier this year I visited Japan.
Because I had heard about the blue traffic light situation, I paid special attention to the traffic lights.
They all appeared green to me. In both Tokyo and Osaka.
Okay maybe a tinge of blue if you look at it and wonder 'is this blue?', but the only reason I wondered was because I had heard the blue traffic light trivia. If I had never heard about it I wouldn't have given it a second thought.
However, the picture in the linked article seems to have an unmistakable blue color; I don't understand what's going on.
Beautiful country by the way; would love to visit again :)
- vages 3y agoI am looking out my hotel room window in Hiroshima in this very instant, and I even got my wife to confirm it: The traffic lights definitely are GREEN.
- doubled112 3y agoI'm glad you mentioned that you had your wife confirm, because I'm convinced my wife sees more colours than I do, and I can't be the only one. I've had this exact discussion. What colour is this? Blue. No, can't you see it's green? Maybe it has some green in it Okay, so is it blue or green? Yes! Why did you ask me then?
- Izkata 3y agoMaybe not more colors, but more easily distinguishes them: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/brain-babble/201504/when-it-comes-to-color-men-women-arent-seeing-eye-to-eye https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/brain-babble/20150... This is different from tetrachromacy, where some women really do see more colors: https://www.optimax.co.uk/blog/tetrachromacy-superhuman-vision/ https://www.optimax.co.uk/blog/tetrachromacy-superhuman-visi...
- galangalalgol 3y agoThe mothers of some red-green colorblind children are tetra chromatic, so they actually see more. I think hexa chromatic also exists. Edit: somehow didn't notice you'd linked this.
- Izkata 3y agoI edited it in like under a minute afterwards, you may have opened the page right in the middle. I don't usually bother with an "Edit:" note if it's that fast.
- chrisdsaldivar 3y agoYes, on average women can perceive more colors than men [1] Anecdotally, in high school we all took this test for a class [2] and the girls did a lot better than us. Although some guys were able to score pretty well on it. I don’t remember if this was the exact test but it’s very similar. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21675035/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21675035/ [2] https://www.xrite.com/hue-test https://www.xrite.com/hue-test
- wayfinder 3y agoAs a dude who scores perfect on these color tests (this is my superpower), it’s funny on male-dominated places like here and reddit when people discuss logo color changes. They’re always long threads of very confident people saying how there isn’t even a difference and I’m like lol
- Aloha 3y agoApparently my color perception is as good as I've always thought it was. I scored a 0 on that.
- irrational 3y agoOh, I’ve taken that test before. I’m a man, but I got a perfect score. I’ve always had a very easy time distinguishing shades and hues of color.
- rottencupcakes 3y agoI scored a 6, but their lack of data on the distribution of scores makes that pretty hard to interpret. Does anybody know how to read that?
- dylan604 3y ago>[2] https://www.xrite.com/hue-test https://www.xrite.com/hue-test " Best Score for your Gender -1000000 Worst Score for your Gender 1700045439 About your score: A lower score is better, with ZERO being a perfect score. The circle graph displays the regions of the color spectrum where your hue discrimination is low." I hate this kind of stuff. WTF is that Best Score?
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> because I'm convinced my wife sees more colours than I do A sizeable percentage of women have tetrachromy (5% ? I forgot the exact number but it's not nothing). AFAIR men do not have tetrachromy. So, basically, some women do actually see more colours than all the men and than most other women. Maybe your wife has tetrachromic vision? (not sure how it's called)
- arp242 3y agoPlease report the exact wavelength for verification.
- xattt 3y ago… in electron-volts to the precision of 10 decimal places.
- dylan604 3y agoThere's an app for that
- jrockway 3y agoColors are not necessarily a single wavelength, and the human visual system can't distinguish between identical "tristimulus" caused by a single wavelength or a mixture of wavelengths. This is why color monitors with red, green, and blue pixels work. The red, green, and blue are designed to stimulate your long, medium, and short wavelength receptors. Models like CIE1931 map wavelengths to tristimulus values, which your monitor then maps to the right intensity of its red, green, and blue. (Display technology is, of course, imperfect. You can see redder reds, greener greens, and bluer blues than your monitor can emit, though newer monitors with Adobe RGB or DCI-P3 have redder reds. It's also possible that the green light from your monitor is not perfectly stimulating only your medium wavelength receptors.) Some colors that look very real cannot be a single wavelength of light, like magenta. That color is a figment of our imaginations. (Rather, there is no wavelength of light that stimulates your long wave receptors and short wave receptors without stimulating the medium wave receptors. But, magenta does, because it's actually a blue wavelength and a red wavelength.)
- arp242 3y agoStop ruining my jokes with facts!
- kouru225 3y agoMy memory form my time living in Japan is that they do not have a consistent shade of blue/green that their traffic lights conform to. You will see completely different colors depending on the location, and even see different colors within the same location. Some areas are more blue and some areas are more green.
- schattschneider 3y agoI have never seen the big main lights using blue instead of green anywhere in Japan; the traffic lights for pedestrians however were blue in some places.
- kryptozinc 3y agoyou would know if you read the article :)
- account42 3y agoAre you sure? This seems to be the full article: > www.rd.com > Checking if the site connection is secure > www.rd.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.
- lionkor 3y agoweird, maybe you have to send them your blood, fingerprints, and a list of your favorite laundry detergents in order to get through?
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoFrom the Guidelines: >Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. Which you'd know if you read the guidelines (: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ensignavenger 3y agoI have been to Japan a couple of times. The first time I was there in 2016 many of the lights were very blue with hint of green. I noticed when I was there over the summer that the lights were getting greener, many of them pretty much just green. I think they have been transitioning, perhaps as they have updated to LED lights or something they have been making them more green?
- nagisa 3y agoI wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with the Tokyo olympics. Are other cities also green now?
- ensignavenger 3y agoYes, I was in several other cities and noticed it throughout. Spent half of the summer in Sapporo (my favorite Japanese city so far!) and it was definitely noticeable there.
- yamazakiwi 3y agoIt depends on where you are in Japan, it's mostly Green but there are some Blue ones occasionally.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- netfortius 3y agoAnd yet another data point: there are places in France with blue lights, instead of green.
- groos 3y agoHow old are you roughly? The reason I ask is that the eye lens yellows with age and transmits less blue and violet through. So colors that would look blue-green to a younger eye would look more green to an older one.
- NovemberWhiskey 3y agoThe "go" signal in traffic lights in Japan is 青い (あおい) "aoi". That adjective in Japanese means both blue and green. The Japanese language didn't have a widely-adopted word for just "green" - 緑 (みどり) "midori" - until after WWII. Green apples or vegetables are still "aoi", for example. I lived in Japan for four years and never saw a blue traffic light.
- eric-hu 3y agoDo you know more about the history of this color use? It’s surprising to me that midori uses the kanji for green in Chinese if it’s such a recent idea in Japan.
- NovemberWhiskey 3y agoWhat I was told, when I asked about this, was that "midori" existed as a Japanese word but was not in common usage. That is what Mizutani-san from JAL Academy told me back in 2009 anyway. EDIT: I apologize for the vague sourcing!
- Umofomia 3y agoGreen (綠) in Chinese also came later. In Old Chinese, 青 was generally used to represent both blue and green colors. While the word 綠 to mean green has been attested as far back as 1000 BC, the idea that it was a separate color rather than describing a shade of 青 is relatively more recent. Wikipedia[0] indicates that it was adopted in the early 20th century in Chinese (as part of vernacular language reforms) and after WWII in Japanese, though these claims are currently marked with [citation needed]. While both are relatively recent, the usage in Chinese did have a longer period of time to take hold. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language#East_Asian_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
- my12parsecs 3y agoI don’t know about the green kanji, but the traditional “Jueju” Poem by Chinese poet Du Fu has the line “山青花欲然”, and “青” the Kanji for Blue in Japan means green in this context, as it describes “山” which means mountain. By the way there’s a variety of kanji that reads “aoi” in modern Japanese. 青い, 蒼い, 碧い are all “aoi”, but we use 青い mainly as blue today.
- hatsunearu 3y agoA lot of traffic lights in the US are actually "not just green". The traffic lights have an abnormally high amount of blue light for being an overall green light, to help people with red-green colorblindness to tell the difference between the red and "green" light. If you take a look at the green light on a dash cam, you might see that the color is abnormally bluer than what you might see in real life.
- wodenokoto 3y agoJapan has green traffic lights, there are no two ways around it. I’ve lived in Japan for 3 years in all the major cities. They are green, just like everywhere else. They just call them blue. Why they do that is something you can argue about and I’ve heard Japanese try and come up with all sorts of explanations: “The character for blue is easier to learn than the one for green, so it’s better to say blue with children.” “They used to be blue, so we still just call it that” “Green isn’t an original Japanese color. Before foreigners arrived we didn’t call anything green” “They are blue!” - usually these are people who will call traffic lights in Europe and smarties blue even when speaking English. It’s just a quirk. I think Japan places the border between blue and green different from most western cultures and that gives.