The whole dress that melted the internet thing has brought back a curious example of semi-demi-science about a Namibian tribe that can't distinguish green and blue, but does differentiate kinds of green that look just the same to us Westerners. This story has been floating around the internets for several years, in places like the BBC and the New York Times and BoingBoing and RadioLab, and it presents an impressive-seeming demonstration of the power of language to shape our perception of the world. But on closer inspection, the evidence seems to melt away, and the impressive experience seems to be wildly over-interpreted or even completely invented.
I caught the resurrection of this idea in Kevin Loria's article "No one could see the color blue until modern times", Business Insider 2/27/2015, which references a RadioLab episode on Colors that featured those remarkable Namibians. Loria uses them to focus on that always-popular question "do you really see something if you don't have a word for it?"
Here's the relevant segment of Loria's piece:
A researcher named Jules Davidoff traveled to Namibia to investigate this, where he conducted an experiment with the Himba tribe, which speaks a language that has no word for blue or distinction between blue and green.
When shown a circle with 11 green squares and one blue, they could not pick out which one was different from the others — or those who could see a difference took much longer and made more mistakes than would make sense to us, who can clearly spot the blue square.
But the Himba have more words for types of green than we do in English. When looking at a circle of green squares with only one slightly different shade, they could immediately spot the different one.
Can you?
For most of us, that's harder.
No kidding.
Davidoff says that without a word for a color, without a way of identifying it as different, it is much harder for us to notice what is unique about it — even though our eyes are physically seeing the blocks it in the same way.
The images in Loria's article are apparently screenshots from a segment of a 2011 BBC documentary "Do you see what I see?". The relevant segment is available via Vidipedia and BoreMe, and the section about the Himba of Namibia starts about 3:00 of the BoreMe version.
The striking story about the Himba's color perception has been widely disseminated — aside from the RadioLab episode, there's Mark Frauenfelder, "How language affects color perception", BoingBoing 8/12/2011; Maud Newton, "It's not easy seeing green", NYT 9/4/2012; and Dustin Stevenson, "The last color term", 4/25/2013; and so on.
Most of the articles have the same pair of examples that Loria shows — a circle of 12 green squares, one of which is a slightly different green from the others, and similar circle with 11 green squares and one blue square. Unfortunately, like Loria, most of the others show the blue-and-green display only as a photo of a CRT display taken over the shoulder of a Himba subject doing the task.
Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing was interested enough to use an image-processing program to calculate the RGB values of the squares in the varieties-of-green display:
I get slightly different values from Loria's image: [85 168 0] for the oddball green square, and [72 166 8] for various of the other green squares. (I loaded the image into Gimp via "Copy Image" and "Create>>From Clipboard", and used the eyedropper tool to measure RGB values. In fact the values vary slightly for different parts of different squares.) For the "white" background (which is necessary for turning RGB values into CIELUV values) I get [242 242 242]. Frauenfelder doesn't specific the value of the "white" background in his image, but I get [244 244 246] from it.
From the stimulus seen over the shoulder of the Himba subject, I get [23 88 110] for the blue-looking square, and [27 74 54] (plus or minus a bit) for the green-looking ones, with "white" at [97 108 102]. This is very unsatisfactory — but it's what they give us.
So I implemented the algorithms to convert from RGB to CIEXYZ and then to CIELUV (given e.g. here), because euclidean distance in L*u*v* space is said to be roughly equal to psychophysical distance. My implementation is here.
The result for the kinds-of-green display, using my measurements:
So maybe the CIELUV space is highly ethnocentric. Or maybe the documentary's assertion about the perception of these stimuli is just wrong — the blue and the green are 4-6 times farther apart, in psychophysical terms, than the different kinds of green are.
Or maybe the over-the-shoulder shot somehow exaggerates the amount of blue-green contrast (though I would expect the opposite). So I went looking for a better version of the blue-vs.-green stimulus. One of the pages that I cited (Dustin Stevenson, "The last color term", 4/25/2013) gives a more comparable-looking blue-vs.-green display (i.e. not an over-the-shoulder photo):
The RGB values from this image, with the associated CIELUV distance, are:
But the blue value of [0 0 255] in this display is obviously either an innocent but wildly mistaken invention by Mr. Davidson, or else a complete fraud — this version is even less satisfactory than the over-the-shoulder image. It suggests that the blue-green difference is 20-30 times more salient, in purely psychophysical terms, than the green-green difference is.
So I went looking for a publication with a clear description of the stimuli, as well as a description of the experiment and the results. And I struck out, utterly and completely.
The documentary names Serge Caparos as the experimenter, and we see him and hear him running the experiment and discussing the results. But as far as I can tell, searching for Serge Caparos Himba color again leaves us without any publication that describes the experiment we're looking for.
So either
The experiment was abandoned because it failed, or because serious design flaws turned up in the review process; or
The experiment was abandoned because the author(s) went on to other things, or couldn't write it up for personal reasons; or
The experiment has been published, but my search techniques were unable to find it.
Whatever the explanation, I submit that the BBC documentary (and the subsequent coverage) has given us a sensationalist interpretation of an undocumented experiment, presented as reliable science, without giving us any basis to trust that this interpretation is even close to true.
It would be funny if it weren't so sad, or maybe vice versa.
If you'd like to learn more about color vision (at least in the whole-field case), and you know a little linear algebra and/or have access to Matlab or Octave, you may be interested in some Lecture Notes on the subject of early color vision, and perhaps even in this homework assignment.
When this launched, there were dozens of confused comments from people wondering what old videogames has to do with Internet history.
In my mind, this stems from mistaken perception issues of the Internet Archive as solely an institution saving webpages.
But their mission and motto is much broader:
Universal access to all knowledge.
The Internet Archive is not Google.
The Internet Archive is a chaotic, beautiful mess. It’s not well-organized, and its tools for browsing and searching the wealth of material on there are still rudimentary, but getting better.
But this software emulation project feels, to me, like the kind of thing Google would have tried in 2003. Big, bold, technically challenging, and for the greater good.
This effort is the perfect articulation of what makes the Internet Archive great — with repercussions for the future we won’t fully appreciate for years.
But here’s a glimpse: last week, one of the JSMESS developers managed to get Netscape running on Windows 3.1 with functional networking. All of computing history is within our grasp, accessible from a single click, and this is the first step.
I played Solitaire while I waited for Trumpet Winsock to connect to the Internet. In a Chrome tab.
It’s not just about games — that’s just the hook.
It’s about preserving our digital history, which as we know now, is as easy to delete as 15 years of GeoCities.
We can’t expect for-profit corporations to care about the past, but we can support the independent, nonprofit organizations that do.
Title screen from Abandoned Places: A Time for Heroes, an RPG from 1993 I’ve never heard of, but started playing within ten seconds of seeing the title for the first time.
Community diehards must now change their rallying cry to simply “...and a movie!” as Yahoo provides concrete proof that a sixth season of the show was actually produced, and was not simply the result of one of Dan Harmon’s tequila-soaked fever dreams. The trailer takes a typically self-aware approach to Community’s many recent casting changes, introducing new study-group member Paget Brewster as “new Shirley” and allowing Keith David to grumble, “I have a brain the size of Jupiter, I’m nobody’s fourth Ghostbuster.” All this plus a thick layer of Avengers references—the whole thing is structured as a parody of that record-breakingAge Of Ultron teaser that leaked a few months back—Garrett being pelted with frisbees, and all the Chang that you can handle, and it looks like Community has not only returned, but has returned to form. Community will release new episodes every Tuesday ...
Every few years in the badlands of Utah, a rare occurrence happens, under just the right conditions, turning the landscape into a colored carpet of scorpionweed and beeplant.
Gabriel Loques é um concept artista e artista 3D residente em Londres. Suas habilidades incluem ilustrações em 2D, render, still, textura e animações tridimensionais. Conheça um pouco do seu trabalho.
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft spent billions purchasing Mojang, the studio behind the game Minecraft, and while it's unlikely to start work on a sequel anytime soon, rather than continue development of the game, it's worth considering what a Minecraft 2 will look like. After all, as a public company with revenues to justify, it doesn't seem beyond unreasonable a few years down the line, especially since a Minecraft-like game was one of the stand-out tech demos shown for the software giant's HoloLens augmented reality headset. As the author points out, Microsoft will have to tread carefully, tackling issues like whether greater graphical fidelity is actually what players will want ever — and whether to continue to support Minecraft on PlayStation."
schwit1 writes A 20-year-old U.S. military weather satellite apparently exploded for no obvious reason. The incident has put several dozen pieces of space junk into orbit. From the article: "A 20-year-old military weather satellite apparently exploded in orbit Feb. 3 following what the U.S. Air Force described as a sudden temperature spike. The “catastrophic event” produced 43 pieces of space debris, according to Air Force Space Command, which disclosed the loss of the satellite Feb. 27 in response to questions from SpaceNews. The satellite, Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Flight 13, was the oldest continuously operational satellite in the DMSP weather constellation."
StartsWithABang writes While the nerd/geek world mourns the death of Leonard Nimoy in its own way, it's important to remember the legacy that Star Trek — and that Spock and alien characters like him — left on our world. Unlike any other series, Star Trek used a futuristic, nearly utopian world to explore our own moral battles and failings, and yet somehow always managed to weave in an optimism about humanity and our future. This is something, the author argues, that is sorely missing from the new J.J. Abrams movies.
Known by many as “the river that ran away from paradise” and the most beautiful
river in the world, Colombia’s Caño Cristales or The River of Five Colors
is a veritable biological wonder.
