I go with the distinction between factual truth and functional truth.  The former is what is true of a situation, the latter is whatever gets you through the night.  Or, seeing a tiger in the jungle it doesn’t matter whether you know it is a meat eating feline or believe it is an evil forest demon so long as you do your best to avoid it.  The feel good aspect of truthiness can be appropriated by the designers.

Functional truth is ephemeral and will become the dysfunctional truth eventually. Factual truth can be inconvient and dysfunctional right away.

Today’s installment will discuss two examples of REAL EYEBALL FUN that we are all familiar with… rainbows and color wheels.

Seeing a rainbow arc across the sky is no less awesome because you understand the science behind it. Seeing one in the spray of a garden hose or a hundred spread across the walls from the crystal in the window, it is clear that the same rainbow is being a universal signature of light. The red end is the long waves and the violet end is the short waves with all the other colors spread out in orderly fashion across the octave or so inbetween. What a neat idea. Every color is a frequency or note just like a piano keyboard. How simple. This led to many ways to attach Christmas lights to speaker terminals.

Rainbows reveal how white light is made from a combination of colors so evenly distributed that one could not find a little spot anywhere that was more red than another little spot. Step out in the sun and hold out a piece of white paper. Notice how uniformly white the paper looks. (nice paper, I trust) Use a crystal or water glass to spread a small rainbow on the paper. Notice the purity and vividness of the bands of color and imagine if any one of them were to fill the page, how awesome that would look. Now, take the rainbow away. The funny part is, even without the refraction medium, all those colors are still there on the paper in the same proportions as indicated by the rainbow. Why aren’t you seeing them all at once? Where did this white stuff come from?

White light is something that happens in your brain. There is no such thing. We’re not seeing the crystal refract white light. We are seeing an abundance of red light being collected into the red area of the rainbow and so on with the other colors. We see the colors because refraction has caused a sufficient differentiation in photon landing patterns so as to be detectable by our EYEBALLS.

We know the light spectrum is really there. Light has a frequency that has a measurable wavelength. 470 nano-meters is a nice blue. Any frequency of light will be one of those bands in the rainbow. We can know what distant things are made of by seeing which frequencies of light are absorbed or reflected. The rainbow isn’t woo even though it sure looks like it might be. Rainbows and the light spectrum it reveals are Real Science that can be understood rationally. Hold that thought.

Aside from learning about the spectrum, we also learned about The Three Primary Colors. They were often depicted as a disc divided into thirds. We would see them in school and on PBS but they weren’t always the same. The Three Primary Colors are Red, Blue and Yellow or Green (like Shemp or Curly). This was the first of many color conundrums. Why, like that one scene on the airplane, couldn’t all four be part of the same wheel? Do you remember how logical it was when you saw it laid out in front of you in vividly colored Sorry pieces and electric glowly games?

National Geo had a page with a colored wheel that could be cut out and placed on a spinning record player. It would look white until it slowed enough to become seen as separate segments of color. There were color wheels that showed how two colors could become a third color. Color wheels became a craze. Many a bedroom wall was spotted with flying marker ink.

Back before there were CD players, their discs were painted and spun on spindles for color experiments. A disc that is colored half blue and half yellow will look green if it spins fast enough. Red and blue make purple in various shades depending on how the colors were proportioned on the wheel. Red and green make yellow. Really? I could get any kid to take an invite to come home after school and see red and green make yellow. I could take bets. I had pure green and red spotlight filters that together looked black but if I held it to a bright light with white paper held close, the little passing light showed yellow on the paper. Once the EYEBALLS believed it, the logic it gave to the color wheel was quite appealling. Up to a point, then it all falls apart.

So, why doesn’t red and green make blue, and blue and green make red? Red and Blue were like Moe and Larry. They were always there and could not be broken down or remade. Red and blue made purple and that was a whole other band of the rainbow. Or was it? Yellow and green just made yellow-green. Blue and green just made blue-green. Read the crayons. There is no red-green even in the 64 box. And what about the mysterious crayons that were in the box?

We’re you ever faced with this artistic dilemma?... you want to draw a tree but your parents could only afford an eight pack of crayons. How do you make the tree trunk brown? If you think about it, there shouldn’t be any brown… or silver. Where is all the brown light then? Any brown in the rainbow? No. Yet there is brown all around. Apparently, light doesn’t start out brown, but only becomes brown after bouncing off of brown things. Have you ever seen silver light? Then how can things look silver?

Standing in the light bulb aisle at the “party lights” display, our current grasp of color is also on display. Party bulbs go by rainbow rules of color. Notice the orange bulb. It isn’t part red and part yellow even though the color wheel makes it that way. It’s just orange. Like the band in the rainbow. Now, grab a brown bulb and let’s go.

The horror of it was starting to become apparent. Color televisions don’t generate all the colors of the rainbow… just red, blue and green. Yet they show all the colors of the rainbow. Or, if in even amounts, the Three Primary Colors will show the Three Stooges in Black & White. If they are differentiated just right, they can create the glowing golden guy from CSI: Rock Music. The Primary Colors or, additive color, or “RGB” are all Real Science that can be understood rationally.

Have you ever tried to reconcile the three-color principle with the rainbow spectrum? It is worse than the particle-wave duality. The rainbow says that there is yellow light and it has a frequency. RGB says that yellow is what you get when mix a light red with a light green. RGB suggests that, like white, yellow is something that happens in your brain. The spectrum says that yellow is really there in the sky.

These and other dilemmas became clues to solving the mystery of silver, brown and the RGB-spectrum duality.

Other clues can be found in the popular video test signal known as “the color bars”. Three of them are an illusion.
That’s where we will pick up the trail… next time.

One more clue. Look at the color wheel below for a whole five seconds then look at a blank wall. Negative colors. Just like color film negatives. Now I’ve given away the store.

Wow! how does that work then Nhoj?
Blue-Yellow
Green-Purple
Red-? not sure.
My naming of colours isn’t good but I can see them after staring a while and looking at a white part of my screen. So it’s to do with the negative then?

Here is a brief moment of gratuitously riffing on the Boss before resuming with the forum mystery Agent RGB and the Spectrum of Death. EYEBALLS are clearly involved.

A big part of what makes our lives seem content and fulfilled is making our EYEBALLS HAPPY. The Boss’s recent post about the wood-burning fireplace is a fine example. Staring at wood fires has been keeping our EYEBALLS HAPPY for thousands of generations. Having lost its utility in most homes, it remains the space heater of choice because of the added benefit of EYEBALL FUN.

I don’t deny that it is ackward to lie flat by the furnace and look up at the burner flames. My neighbor’s wood stove sent smoke that curled under my kitchen counter puck lights before he graciously put up a new chimney. Trivia, you may say… you’ve seen those fake fireplaces and they’re not going to fool anyone.

Well… that’s a load of nonsense. Fooling your body with heat and your EYEBALLS with flaming visuals is the easy part. Living within the Chunk Limit, Hippo and Now seek only truthiness or, perception to the point of satisfaction. The troublemaker is always up on the bridge with his Great Narrative of The Way Things Ought To Be. Mr. Flashlight can’t like something unless liking it is consistent with his Great Belief in The Way Things Are. He will spoil the experience for Now and Hippo by flooding their attention with negative imagery of Queen Victoria snorting dismissively at your working class fireplace pretentions and of a future shelf who must hang its head in shame before its snooty peers.

When your great-grandkids curl up in front a nice fire, they will put on a microwave-heated fluid-lined snuggie and a 3D helmet and fool Hippo and Now into believing they are lounging on the surface of the sun with crackling digital 55.1 smoke-free surround sound. For now, we can get by with The Fireplace Channel. That’s a 24 hour all-firebox pay-channel that has special programming like Great Hearths of Bavaria, What’s That Burning?… and, of course, Shark Week.

Keeping ourselves warm and mesmerized shouldn’t be confused with convincing our illusion of self that it is obeying the laws of an imaginary reality. The Narrative is always to blame. Living below the Chunk Limit, Hippo and Now are very easy-going and adaptive and always have been.

When your great-grandkids sit in front of the airconditioner, it will show videos of ice flows and falling snow.

We use our EYEBALLS to look at all sorts of things but I think it’s time they looked at each other. For some, that may be as easy as looking cross-eyed into a closely held mirror. The rest of us can keep staring ahead. Chances are, you’re looking at a vid screen right now.

We learn all kinds of stuff from our video screens everyday. Today, we will learn about vid screens and what they can tell us about our EYEBALLS, which, for convience, you can leave right where they are.

Most of us flip right past The Color Bars when surfing the cable. That is likely because, like EWTN, we have no idea what we are looking at. The truth is, those colored bars have more to say about reality than most channels. The truth isn’t pretty but fortunately, the colors are. A simple color bar pattern is shown below.

Of the six colored bands, three of them are the same as the color wheel above- red, blue and Shemp…  I mean, green. The so-called primary colors. If you did the staring trick (count to five while staring at the wheel, count to five while staring at blank space, then the negative image appears) then you have already seen the other color bands- magenta, cyan and Curly… I mean yellow. Since a TV makes white from a red, a blue and a green screen all at full tilt, those three other “secondary” colors can be made by subtracting one of the primary colors from this so-called “white”. Take the red away and the screen is cyan. Take the blue away and screen is yellow. Take the green away and the screen is magenta. Any modern LCD TV or monitor has a menu with RGB levels and you can try this yourself. Just remember where they were set.

So now, if you were really determined to have a sensible conceptual color wheel in your head, you would think you had it made. Now the wheel has six sensible segments- three real colors and three phantoms or negatives or anti-colors. They have a nice logical reversable symetry. Once you get the idea, you can perceive it within the Chunk Limit. That means it’s a comfortable, un-narrated thought. It’s even vaguely rainbow like. Imagine a tubular rainbow. Our brains can do that, so maybe we’re on to something.

The next time you print out an article on deforestation, notice how printing supports the color wheel scheme. There’s no rainbow in the ink cartridge. The computer’s printer makes color via subtraction from the white of the paper or, “CMYK” (K for black). Notice that the color ink cartridge contains cyan, magenta and yellow. Equal amounts of magenta and yellow with no cyan make red. Equal amounts cyan and yellow with no magenta makes green. Leave out the yellow and you get blue. Black is added to darken the colors.

Back to the bars… notice that the left side has lighter colors and the right side has darker colors. Each band has a slightly darker “grey level” than the band to its left. The truth is, that’s where the real truth is as far as our EYEBALLS are concerned. Our EYEBALLS started out as simple bean-counters that tracked the bulk weight of photons that passed through its dual optical sphincters. We call it “brightness”. Our brains have used the bean-counts to re-map the world in front of us as a mental sensation. Prof. Darwin (used here as a figurehead for a body of opinion) would remind us that our ancestors did this to be successful and not clever. Once success was achieved and evolutionary pressure was relieved, further cleverness was not pursued. Our EYEBALLS used brightness to make us happy, which is just what your vid screen is doing.

If you turn the color level all the way down, the pattern becomes seven bands of grey that scale light to dark. They should appear to be even increments of darkening from left to right. Your TV’s Gamma control will adjust how light or dark the middle bars are by stretching the grey-scale toward light or dark. Contrast will control the range or distance between the darkest and lightest the picture can get. Brightness just collectively changes the whole light level up or down. These are all things our EYEBALLS can do. It’s all about mapping light intensity. In tech-talk, it is called the TV Luminence Signal. If you’re watching a black & white movie, it is all you need.

If you sat too close to the TV screen, you likely noticed how the picture is lots of rows of dots of light. Each dot has one light level. Together, if you move back enough, they form a picture to your EYEBALLS. But really it’s a big map of light levels. The reason it works is that inside your EYEBALLS are lots of rows of little light receptors making a big map of light levels. All the picture adjustments listed above are done right there in the EYEBALL. By the time the “picture” is sent down the chute, it is already much happier than the raw photon stew it was drawn from.

This should explain our tendency to see “optical illusions”. Those are brightness maps that, while making us happy, do not stand up to a narrated, post-cinema examination and must re-explained in order to make us intellectually happy. It may be truthier to think of optical illusions as “sight” and that these illusions come in two forms- successful and unsuccessful. There is no reason to see “color” any differently.

The truth is that the color wheel is our EYEBALLS’ way of making us happy by making up colors that they can’t possibly know are there. Not for sure. The Three Primary Colors are three narrow bands of the rainbow that our EYEBALLS have selected as the most useful in bringing us optical happiness. Why three? Why not five? There is no way to fit five fields of color-tuned light-mapping sensors into our EYEBALLS without limiting their ability to see luminence detail (which was still vital to happiness) or by slowing the rate at which maps could be created.

So, while the rest of the rainbow of colors are really there, our EYEBALLS are only pretending to see them. Based on a large body of evidence connecting rainbows to happiness, it is natural that our EYEBALLS should consider the job done.

Vid screens and color bars are made to create the Color Wheel o’ FUN specifically for primates with EYEBALLS like our own. Other species developed different color wheels based on two or even four bands of “real” color. Our vid screens may look very different to them. They may see better, happier rainbows or none at all. That’s a sad thought to a primate.

Next time: Weird Crayons Explained.

Interesting information.  Don’t know about my eyeballs but some of my brain cells are pleased.

The psychologist Roger Shepard wrote several papers back in the 80s developing the question of “why only 3 dimensional color space (pigeons and some other birds have 4 dimensions)?”  The point was, to accurately represent surface reflectancy you’d need a very large number of dimensions.  What Shepard showed is that a three dimensional color space is the minimum necessary to preserve color constancy under the sort of varying illumination conditions you get in a normal terrestrial environment.  (In abnormal environments you get weird effects, as in the way things look under sodium lights.)

The point was, to accurately represent surface reflectancy you’d need a very large number of dimensions.

Fortunately, accuracy was never the point.

…Shepard showed … that a three dimensional color space is the minimum necessary to preserve color constancy under the sort of varying illumination conditions you get in a normal terrestrial environment.

It was truthy enough to do the job. What would be served by more complexity?

Speaking of complexity, I was avoiding terms like color space, reflectancy or constancy or on the whole talking like you. I wanted to present this optical tale of lies and deception as the boyish, after-school journey of discovery that is was for me back in the Dark Ages before cable.

(In abnormal environments you get weird effects, as in the way things look under sodium lights.)

Weird and weirder. Welcome to my world. LED fixture color “temperature” is a customer relations nightmare. Lighting backrooms, giant coolers and warehouses was easy in the old days. The only choice was cost and the color was the color. Now that customers can choose their color temp, everyone has an opinion. It is a miasma of subjectivity.

So it’s to do with the negative then?

It’s worse than negative. It’s a cheat.

This truly is “Eyeball Fun”, more please.

Nhoj Morley - 12 February 2012 03:59 AM

It’s worse than negative. It’s a cheat.

Well, I don’t want to think of my eyes cheating on me, but being slightly colourblind I have long ago lost my “belief” in what my eye balls are telling me.  My big visual problem really has to do more with ‘greyness’ (and even ‘brownness’) than it has to do with a red/green confusion or a blue/yellow confusion.  I can never tell if some colour is really grey or perhaps actually a slate-green or a slate-pink . . . and the brown/grey confusion is also in play which wreeks havoc with all the other colors.  Take for instance that tv colour pattern, I tend to see cyan and that other greyish bar as two different shades of grey. I see the magenta very nicely and I have always loved the different shades of purple (magenta, fucsia, violet, burgundy, etc.), but naturally my most favourite colour is yellow!

Anybody here familiar with Goethe’s theory of color?  I don’t recall any detail at all, except that while physicists rejected it, it made major contributions to psychophysics.

My family had a very slow-starting black and white TV that needed to be turned on well before the show began. I saw the first run of Star Trek in B & W. I was keen to know what color all the things were… like those shirts they didn’t have to tuck in. After seeing pictures in the TV Guide and remembering who was red or blue or gold, I could recognize the grey scale and always know which one anyone was wearing on the show. My brain would sort of put them there afterward and I could remember the show in color.

It was surprising to learn that Star Trek was shot with black and white film. Hordes of diehard Trekkies painstakingly hand-painted each frame before it was aired. Actually, like most color TV shows of that era, it was shot with black and white film. Color film was incredibly expensive and could not be wasted on bad takes. So they made these crazy cameras that split the light from the lens to three film gates and shot three reels of cheap B & W film simultaneously. The gates had color filters so each film saw only red, blue or green. That makes each film slightly different in just how grey things are compared to the other two.

After the show is cut and timed, and all three “RGB” films are edited exactly the same way, a big crazy machine plays all three simultaneously through red, blue and green filters and combines them into a single image that is transferred to the hi-priced color film stock. It makes sense since the TV only shows red, blue and green anyway. Or, like mine, it shows no color at all and presents the average of the three grey scales put together. The recent re-issue of the old series was rebuilt from its three RGB films with all the FX updated with CGI by aging hordes of diehard Trekkies. “Doomsday Machine” and “Gallileo 7” (!) will blow your occipital lobe.

Any lingering sense that color is like something that can come out of a faucet should be gone. Any so-called color we perceive other than red, blue or green is made up in our brains. So why do the colors in our brain match the colors of the rainbow? Because we see an RGB rainbow in our brains and not in the sky. All that is actually out there are lots of wiggly photons hurling at you that have been segregated into little neighborhoods on your retina by their particular kind of wiggly-ness. In real estate, this is called “red-lining”.

Like the TV cameras, we have three “fields” of light-level mapping receptors in our EYEBALLS each tuned to a particular range of photon wiggliness or wavelength. All that refers to is how much closer to your EYEBALL the photon gets with each complete wiggle. Photons that wiggle fast and hence cover less ground per wiggle have a shorter wavelength. One of our EYEBALL receptor fields sees our favorite short wavelength photons- the ones that travel 450 nano-meters per wiggle- and makes a light level map of those with a gradual blindness to wiggles much faster of slower. It’s a grey scale that favors high-frequency light. Another mapping field favors low frequency or long wavelength light that borders on the sort of energy wavelengths that other parts of our body are sensitive to as heat. Like the “R” film of Star Trek, it is just a grey-scale or brightness map that doesn’t really have any “R” in it.

The third field in our EYEBALLS isn’t as simple to explain. It sees a narrow mid-band of wavelengths and is the most sensitive to light intensity (photon bulk) of the three. In dimly lit spaces, it is still making useful grey-scales while the other two have bottomed out and gone dark.

Warning: The rest of this post cannot be fact-checked with wikipedia.

There is a controversial new theory that has been ignored by everyone until right now. It’s called the Third Stooge Theory and it tries to explain why our color perception is variable and subject to so many visual influences. It is possible that the middle range “green field” of our EYEBALLS actually offers a selection of wavelengths to tune to depending on the sort of light they are experiencing. So this third color of the Three Primaries is a floater that can see slightly different grey scales depending on how it is tuned. At any moment of sight the third band must be fully Shemp or Curly and can never be both. That doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be other mid-band tunings as well that could give us Red and Blue plus Shemp or Curly or Joe or even Curly Joe Derita. These would all be particular bands of green and yellow-green but another possibility is that our green band is continuously varible over some modest range. As if the third stooge could be any one of an almost infinite number of intermidiate states between being fully Shemp or fully Curly.

So, is there color in our EYEBALLS? No. Three color-biased grey scales are produced and their levels are adjusted. Distribution is complicated and handled in the optical stem. Simple functions like detecting movement or spotting a certain color (seeing an area that differentiates the three grey scales just so) make instant alert signals to our sub-cinema perception. Like the instant impulse to quickly move our EYEBALL SOCKET MUSCLES and aim our EYEBALLS in the direction of a sudden movement. Sub-cinema signals keep our EYEBALLS aligned and stereoscopic depth info is sent straight to muscle control for good eye-hand coordination. At the same time, whole visual fields are being organized for the cinema view at a slower rate. That’s when color arrives. Grey scale differentiation becomes a sensation of color and is incorporated into each EYEBALL’S visual field that then combine to make the cinema view. …in our brain, and not in our EYEBALLS. By the time the cinema view sensation arises, our EYEBALLS are already gathering the next frame.

When viewing one of the earth’s many awesome scenic landscapes, it is hard not to wonder how Nature could not know that it looks like that. No, it is only the colors that Nature determined were the minimum necessary to make primates happy. Why happy? For the same reason that sex makes us happy… so we will make more EYEBALLS.

On the subject of color film—any of you ever checked out the Library of Congress digitized selection of the Prokudin-Gorskii Collection; a collection of photographs of the late Russian Empire using an innovative (if cumbersom) technique developed by Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii early in the 20th century.

It’s pretty striking to see actual color photographs of Tsarist Russia in its final decade.

burt - 12 February 2012 08:33 PM

Anybody here familiar with Goethe’s theory of color? I don’t recall any detail at all, except that while physicists rejected it, it made major contributions to psychophysics.

I looked up Goethe’s color wheel. Even when laced with naivety and mysticism, it is FUN to watch the process of discovery and all the people that pulled something new out of their brains.

I was particularly impressed with the idea that both Shemp and Curly are illusions created by the convergence of Moe and Larry.

Here is another example of MAKING FUN of YOUR EYEBALLS.

Read this short quotation closely. It will be followed by a question…

“It seems that we can’t give up one fight without pondering another. The more we learn about the countries of Middle East, the more we want to attack them. General Ordiano says the Republic of Iran can put up a fight. Little is known about its elite Lashzara Army. The US should think twice about starting another war. Not as long as we have to drive to work. Unless of course, we could win a clear, quick and decisive victory and take their oil for free. Then, the taxpayers would finally benefit from one of these of wars. I wonder what happened to tribute for the victorious.”

Now, look at the paragraph without reading any of the words. If your text size lines up with mine, it should appear in the middle. For those who missed it, here it is again…

“George Orwell never wrote the script for Razors In Love starring Loni Anderson.”

C’mon, you had to have seen it this time…