Brand new colors

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Brand new colors
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Robin Bignall
Guest

Posted: Fri Nov 26, 2004 6:06 am Post subject: Re: Brand new colors

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004 22:03:47 -0000, the Omrud <usenet.omrud@gmail.com>
wrote:

Quote:

Wood Avens typed thus:

Each time I see the title of this thread I find myself wondering what
a genuinely, truly new color could possibly look like.

There is an SF story in which people are being transported to an
alternative universe, one of the characteristics of which is that
there is a new colour called (IIRC) "varm". However, I can't
remember its name or author, so that's not much help, really.

Never mind. Can you remember what colour varm was?

--

wrmst rgrds
Robin Bignall

Hertfordshire
England

R H Draney
Guest

Posted: Fri Nov 26, 2004 12:04 pm Post subject: Re: Brand new colors

Wood Avens filted:

Quote:

Each time I see the title of this thread I find myself wondering what
a genuinely, truly new color could possibly look like.

Different in some way from each of the other six, I suppose....r

the Omrud
Guest

Posted: Fri Nov 26, 2004 12:05 pm Post subject: Re: Brand new colors

Robin Bignall typed thus:

Quote:

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004 22:03:47 -0000, the Omrud <usenet.omrud@gmail.com
wrote:

Wood Avens typed thus:

Each time I see the title of this thread I find myself wondering what
a genuinely, truly new color could possibly look like.

There is an SF story in which people are being transported to an
alternative universe, one of the characteristics of which is that
there is a new colour called (IIRC) "varm". However, I can't
remember its name or author, so that's not much help, really.

Never mind. Can you remember what colour varm was?

Yes, but how do I know that the colour I see as varm is the same as
the colour you see as varm?

--
David
=====
replace the first component of address
with the definite article.

Matti Lamprhey
Guest

Posted: Fri Nov 26, 2004 12:06 pm Post subject: Re: Brand new colors

"Robin Bignall" <docrobin@ntlworld.com> wrote...

Quote:

the Omrud <usenet.omrud@gmail.com> wrote:
Wood Avens typed thus:

Each time I see the title of this thread I find myself wondering
what a genuinely, truly new color could possibly look like.

There is an SF story in which people are being transported to an
alternative universe, one of the characteristics of which is that
there is a new colour called (IIRC) "varm". However, I can't
remember its name or author, so that's not much help, really.

Never mind. Can you remember what colour varm was?

It always puts me in mind of lamprey bogies, particularly after a damp
autumn.

Matti

don groves
Guest

Posted: Fri Nov 26, 2004 12:09 pm Post subject: Re: Brand new colors

In article <i7vcq09f8q0pl98otl4icte7uos5gsibph@4ax.com>, Robin
Bignall at docrobin@ntlworld.com exposited:

Quote:

It was varm -- he just told you. That's like asking what colo(u)r
red is.
--
dg (domain=ccwebster)

John Dean
Guest

Posted: Fri Nov 26, 2004 6:05 pm Post subject: Re: Brand new colors

Wood Avens wrote:

Quote:

Each time I see the title of this thread I find myself wondering what
a genuinely, truly new color could possibly look like.

Octarine? Or is that just a pigment of PTerry's imagination?
--
John Dean
Oxford

Will
Guest

Posted: Fri Nov 26, 2004 6:06 pm Post subject: Re: Brand new colors

the Omrud <usenet.omrud@gmail.com> wrote in message news:<MPG.1c1067183b9b954998aa78@news.individual.net>...

Quote:

I remember the story very well. Actually, I just remember reading it,
but my memory of reading it is very vivid. My guess is that it was
either A E Van Vogt, or Theodore Sturgeon.

Will.

Mike Lyle
Guest

Posted: Sat Nov 27, 2004 12:05 am Post subject: Re: Brand new colors

Peter Moylan wrote:

Quote:

Dylan Nicholson infrared:

"Robin Bignall" <docrobin@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:i7vcq09f8q0pl98otl4icte7uos5gsibph@4ax.com...
On Thu, 25 Nov 2004 22:03:47 -0000, the Omrud
usenet.omrud@gmail.com> wrote:

Wood Avens typed thus:

Each time I see the title of this thread I find myself
wondering
what a genuinely, truly new color could possibly look like.

There is an SF story in which people are being transported to an
alternative universe, one of the characteristics of which is
that
there is a new colour called (IIRC) "varm". However, I can't
remember its name or author, so that's not much help, really.

Never mind. Can you remember what colour varm was?

I'm thinking a sort of smoky, iridescent but palish olive colour,
maybe.

Definitely a warm colour, almost but not quite completely unlike
octiron.

I'm seeing B flat.

Mike.

Charles Riggs
Guest

Posted: Sat Nov 27, 2004 12:08 am Post subject: Re: Brand new colors

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004 21:24:48 +0000, Wood Avens
<woodavens@askjennison.com> wrote:

Quote:

Each time I see the title of this thread I find myself wondering what
a genuinely, truly new color could possibly look like.

From a set of paint tubes you could mix up a hundred never seen
before, probably in less than an hour. The combinations are endless.
That is, there are an infinite number of colors.
--
Charles Riggs

They are no accented letters in my email address

Bill Bonde ( ``And the La
Guest

Posted: Sat Nov 27, 2004 12:11 am Post subject: Re: Brand new colors

Charles Riggs wrote:

Quote:

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004 21:24:48 +0000, Wood Avens
woodavens@askjennison.com> wrote:

Each time I see the title of this thread I find myself wondering what
a genuinely, truly new color could possibly look like.

From a set of paint tubes you could mix up a hundred never seen
before, probably in less than an hour. The combinations are endless.
That is, there are an infinite number of colors.

It's more complex than that since colours as we see them depend on the

physical system, our eyes, which we use. Consider the search for the
human tetrachromat:

http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=3941

#begin quote
"Oh, everyone knows my color vision is different," chuckles Mrs. M, a
57-year-old English social worker. "People will think things match, but
I can see they don't." What you wouldn't give to see the world through
her deep blue-gray eyes, if only for five minutes.

Preliminary evidence gathered at Cambridge University in 1993 suggests
that this woman is a tetrachromat, perhaps the most remarkable human
mutant ever identified. Most of us have color vision based on three
channels; a tetrachromat has four.

The theoretical possibility of this secret sorority -- genetics dictates
that tetrachromats would all be female -- has intrigued scientists since
it was broached in 1948. Now two scientists, working separately, plan to
search systematically for tetrachromats to determine once and for all
whether they exist and whether they see more colors than the rest of us
do. The scientists are building on a raft of recent findings about the
biology of color vision.

The breakthroughs come just in time. "Computers, color monitors, and the
World Wide Web have made having color blindness a much bigger deal than
it ever was before," says Jay Neitz, a molecular biologist who studies
color vision at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
Color-blind individuals, he explains, often lose their way while
navigating the Web's thicket of color cues and codes. "Color-blind
people complain miserably about the Web because they can't get the color
code," Dr. Neitz says. (Just try surfing on a monochrome monitor.)

Most people are trichromats, with retinas having three kinds of color
sensors, called cone photopigments -- those for red, green, and blue.
The 8 percent of men who are color-blind typically have the cone
photopigment for blue but are either missing one of the other colors, or
the men have them, in effect, for two very slightly different reds or
greens. A tetrachromat would have a fourth cone photopigment, for a
color between red and green.

Besides the philosophical interest in learning something new about
perception, the brain, and the evolution of our species, finding a
tetrachromat would also offer a practical reward. It would prove that
the human nervous system can adapt to new capabilities. Flexibility
matters greatly in a number of scenarios envisaged for gene therapy. For
example, if someone with four kinds of color photopigments cannot see
more colors than others, it would imply that the human nervous system
cannot easily take advantage of genetic interventions.

For years now, scientists have known that some fraction of women have
four different cone photopigments in their retinas. The question still
remains, however, whether any of these females have the neural circuitry
that enables them to enjoy a different -- surely richer -- visual
experience than the common run of humanity sees. "If we could identify
these tetrachromats, it would speak directly to the ability of the brain
to organize itself to take advantage of novel stimuli," says Dr. Neitz.
"It would make us a lot more optimistic about doing a gene therapy for
color blindness."

There have been very few attempts to find Madam Tetrachromat. The one
that turned up Mrs. M in England, in 1993, was led by Gabriele Jordan,
then at Cambridge University and now at the University of Newcastle. She
tested the color perception of 14 women who each had at least one son
with a specific type of color blindness. She looked at those women
because genetics implies that the mothers of color-blind boys may have
genetic peculiarities of their own. Among that somewhat peculiar group
of women, one could expect to find the odd tetrachromat.

It's almost as if the supersense these women enjoy comes at the expense
of the men in their families. "I'm just sorry I've robbed my son of one
of his color waves," Mrs. M says.

Dr. Jordan reports that of the fourteen test subjects in her study, two
showed "exactly" the behavior that would be expected of tetrachromats.
"It was very strong evidence for tetrachromacy," she adds. The apparent
tetrachromats were Mrs. M, who was identified in the study as cDA1, and
another candidate, cDA7.

Dr. Jordan set up an experiment in which subjects tried to determine
whether a pair of colored lights matched. They used joysticks to blend
two different wavelengths as they pleased. The resulting hues lay
outside the spectrum of the blue photoreceptor, rendering it nearly
useless, so that normal trichromats would have the use of only their red
and green photoreceptors. Having hit upon a color, the subjects would
then try to reproduce it by mixing two other wavelengths. Because the
trichromats had the use of only two receptors, they found a whole slew
of mixes that produced a matching color.

However, any tetrachromat should have been able to use three receptors
in this color space, and therefore make a single, precise match. In the
experiment, cDA1 and cDA7 performed pretty much as a tetrachromat would
be expected to.

Nevertheless, Dr. Jordan declines to say that she has finally found a
tetrachromat, partly because her testing is still a work in progress.
The vast majority of us have no idea what tetrachromacy would be like.
Anyone who had the supersense wouldn't know she did, let alone be able
to describe it. After all, it is an exercise in futility for trichromats
to try to explain their visual experience to color-blind people.

Dr. Neitz and Dr. Jordan each plan a more definitive search for
tetrachromats. Dr. Neitz plans to take advantage of the fuller
understanding of the underlying genetics of color vision. His will be
the first experiment that will use genetic techniques to identify women
with four different color photopigments.

What will he be looking for? Let's start with the basics. The genes for
the red and green photopigments are adjacent to each other on the X
chromosome; strangely, blue is way off by itself on another chromosome.
Women, of course, have two X chromosomes and therefore two sets of red
and green photopigment genes. Men have only one X, so they have just one
shot at getting the red and green photopigment genes right.

Unfortunately for men, it turns out that those genes are prone to a kind
of mutation that occurs when eggs are formed in a female embryo. When
the eggs are created, the X chromosomes from the maternal grandmother
and grandfather mix with each other in random places to make the egg's
brand-new X chromosome. Because the genes for the red and green
photopigments are right next to each other, those genes sometimes mix.
That's perfectly normal. But every once in a while, the mixing occurs in
a lopsided way, and the result, 30 years later, could very well be a man
who has to check with his wife every time he dresses.

A lopsided mix can have three outcomes: (1) the egg in the embryo has an
X chromosome that's missing either a red or a green photopigment gene,
(2) the X chromosome has two slightly different red photopigment genes,
or (3) the X chromosome has two slightly different green photopigment
genes. In any of these cases, if that egg gets fertilized and becomes a
male, the man will get that X chromosome and be color-blind.

Here it gets interesting. Suppose a woman inherits one X chromosome with
two slightly different green photopigment genes. And let's say her other
X chromosome has the normal complement of red and green photopigment
genes. Because of a well-known biological phenomenon called X
inactivation -- which causes some cells to rely on one X chromosome and
others to rely on the other -- that woman's retinas would have four
different types of photopigments: blue, red, green, and the slightly
shifted green. (It would also be possible, through a different genetic
sequence, to produce blue, green, red, and a shifted red.) X
inactivation is only possible in women, so there has never been, and
probably never will be, a male tetrachromat.

True tetrachromacy would require a few other characteristics in addition
to retinas with four different photopigment receptors. For instance,
there would have to be four neural channels to convey to the brain the
sensory inputs from the four receptors, and the brain's visual cortex
would have to be able to handle this four-channel system. If a woman
were born with four types of photopigments, would her brain wire itself
to take advantage of them? No one knows for sure, but some experts
strongly suspect it would. "Yes, definitely," says Jeremy Nathans, a
pioneer in color-vision research at Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine. One reason to think so is the brain's great plasticity in
other respects. People with special skills -- musicians, bilinguals,
deaf people who learn sign language -- often show characteristic brain
patterns.

Dr. Nathans also believes, however, that for full-blown tetrachromacy,
the fourth photopigment must not have a peak in sensitivity that is too
close to the peaks of either the red or the green photopigments. That's
the rub, as far as he's concerned -- he suspects that most female
tetrachromats would have only mildly superior color vision, because the
genetics indicates that the fourth photopigment would almost always be
very close to either the red or the green. Every now and then, however,
an oddball photopigment might appear, well separated from both red and
green. "The genetics do not rule it out," Dr. Nathans explains. "It
would be a rare event. But who's to say it hasn't happened? There are a
lot of people out there."

That idea finds support in the recent discoveries about the genetics of
color vision, many made by Dr. Neitz's group. Those findings have shown
that the genetics underlying color vision are surprisingly variable,
even within the narrow range regarded as normal. "The variety in
photopigment genes in people with normal color vision is enormous," Dr.
Neitz reports. "It's enormous."

Would there be any practical advantages to tetrachromacy? Dr. Jordan
notes that a mother could more easily spot when her children were pale
or flushed, and therefore ill. Mrs. M reports that she has always been
able to match even subtle colors from memory -- buying a bag, for
example, to match shoes she hasn't laid eyes on for months. And
computers, color monitors, and the Internet raise a whole raft of
possibilities. Just as someone with normal three-color vision surfs
rings around a dichromat on the Internet, a tetrachromat, looking at a
special computer screen based on four primary colors rather than the
standard three, could theoretically dump data into her head faster than
the rest of us.

If Dr. Neitz or Dr. Jordan finally finds Madam Tetrachromat, the
discovery will confirm that the human nervous system can handle
four-channel color vision. And that confirmation would raise the
possibility that, within a couple of decades, gene therapy will make
tetrachromacy just another option that wealthy parents could check off
on the list when they are designing their daughters.

It won't be possible with male children -- not for quite some time,
anyway. So as long as we're on this flight of fancy, let's take one more
short hop: a few decades from now, men and women will still be seeing
the world differently. But the expression might not be merely figurative
any more.
#end quote

Wood Avens
Guest

Posted: Sat Nov 27, 2004 12:12 am Post subject: Re: Brand new colors

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 13:51:58 -0800, "Bill Bonde ( ``And the Lamb lies
down on Broadway'' )" <stderr2@backpacker.com> wrote:

Quote:

It's more complex than that since colours as we see them depend on the
physical system, our eyes, which we use. Consider the search for the
human tetrachromat:

http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=3941

[snip]

What an absolutely fascinating article.

I don't think the ability to match even subtle colours from memory can
be exclusive to tetrachromats. This caught my eye because I can do
that, but I don't think I'm one (though would I know?). I attribute
my colour-matching capacity to having been exposed to paint boxes and
pigments from a very early age, via two grandmothers who were
painters, and learning specific names for far more separate colours
than most children are taught to identify. That is, I think it's
nurture rather than nature.

--

Katy Jennison

spamtrap: remove the first two letters after the @

R H Draney
Guest

Posted: Sat Nov 27, 2004 6:09 am Post subject: Re: Brand new colors

Wood Avens filted:

Quote:

I don't think the ability to match even subtle colours from memory can
be exclusive to tetrachromats. This caught my eye because I can do
that, but I don't think I'm one (though would I know?). I attribute
my colour-matching capacity to having been exposed to paint boxes and
pigments from a very early age, via two grandmothers who were
painters, and learning specific names for far more separate colours
than most children are taught to identify. That is, I think it's
nurture rather than nature.

Yeah, but extra retinal pigments?...I can't shake the feeling that the world
these people see looks like a Peter Max poster....r

Charles Riggs
Guest

Posted: Sat Nov 27, 2004 6:04 pm Post subject: Re: Brand new colors

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 13:51:58 -0800, "Bill Bonde ( ``And the Lamb lies
down on Broadway'' )" <stderr2@backpacker.com> wrote:

Quote:

Charles Riggs wrote:

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004 21:24:48 +0000, Wood Avens
woodavens@askjennison.com> wrote:

Each time I see the title of this thread I find myself wondering what
a genuinely, truly new color could possibly look like.

From a set of paint tubes you could mix up a hundred never seen
before, probably in less than an hour. The combinations are endless.
That is, there are an infinite number of colors.

It's more complex than that since colours as we see them depend on the
physical system, our eyes, which we use.

<interesting article, snipped>

All fine and well, but a subset of infinity is still an infinite
number. There is no end to the number of colors we can see, I
maintain.
--
Charles Riggs

They are no accented letters in my email address

Stan Brown
Guest

Posted: Sat Nov 27, 2004 6:05 pm Post subject: Re: Brand new colors

"Charles Riggs" wrote in alt.usage.english:

Quote:

All fine and well, but a subset of infinity is still an infinite
number.

Nonsense. { 1 } is a subset of the infinite set of integers, yet it
is a finite set.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com
A: Maybe because some people are too annoyed by top-posting.
Q: Why do I not get an answer to my question(s)?
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

Charles Riggs
Guest

Posted: Sat Nov 27, 2004 6:05 pm Post subject: Re: Brand new colors

On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 10:28:15 -0500, Stan Brown
<the_stan_brown@fastmail.fm> wrote:

Quote:

"Charles Riggs" wrote in alt.usage.english:
All fine and well, but a subset of infinity is still an infinite
number.

Nonsense. { 1 } is a subset of the infinite set of integers, yet it
is a finite set.

Poor wording on my part, and somewhat obnoxious on yours. How should I
have worded it, since I think you know what I intended but wanted to
show off your knowledge? How about, take any fraction of an infinite
set of integers and you still have an infinite set? Will that do? If
not, have at it. Unlike our man in Orlando, I have no problem
admitting my mistakes.
--
Charles Riggs

They are no accented letters in my email address

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