What a stupid statement: "blue is so rare in nature (if you discount the sky and the ocean ..."
Of course the Blue Planet isn't blue if you remove all that makes it blue...
Of course the Blue Planet isn't blue if you remove all that makes it blue...
For most cultures on Earth, the last color they named was blue --- this is thought to be due to its rarity in nature.
Up through the Renaissance, the pigment for blue paint was made from Lapis Lazuli which made blue a very expensive paint and rare in most art. This is another sign of the rarity of blue in nature as pigments for other colors were much easier to come by.
I haven't listened to this episode of Radiolab in a while, but I think it provides more info/source on both of these points: http://www.radiolab.org/story/211119-colors/
There is also an interesting anecdote where one of the interviewees tells the story about teaching his daughter colors. He and his wife made the decision not to tell her what color the sky was; he would go on walks with his daughter and ask her to identify the colors of various plants and objects, when asked about the sky for a while she didn't have an answer and when she finally did she said its as "white" not "blue" --- which does seem like a better way to describe the sky since even on a clear day the brightest parts can look almost white; but someone told me once it was blue.
(Source of the famous 'wine-dark sea')
And for the sky and water that we'd now call blue, there was no need to differentiate between blue and green. You might want to tell someone "Don't pick the green fruit, only the ones that have turned red," so having a single word for green and red would be a problem. But the sky is always going to be either blue, gray, or red, so a single greenblue word doesn't constrain your communication about it.
I can think of a couple exceptions, like blueberries (where you can refer to their darkness instead of hue for ripeness) and green tinted skies in severe storms, but it definitely makes sense that the word for blue would be invented last.
That said, it's still one of the three basic colors humans can see. There was clearly an evolutionary advantage to seeing it. And I find it hard to believe that radiolab episode that said people literally didn't see blue, not just use a different word.
The hosts did keep talking about "not being able to see blue", but I believe what the guest was getting at is that without the word for blue you see it but do not perceive it (or at least as strongly as the perception of other colors).
I wonder if this is related to the color/language study talked about in this episode: http://www.radiolab.org/story/211119-colors/ (the part discussing a rat study with Charles Fernyhough).
[1] http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2014/why-the-blue-led-shou...
The sea is a notoriously hostile environment for great apes such as us.
The sky is notoriously unattainable (we fly since, what, 2 centuries?)
Everywhere else, Blue is pretty uncommon On average, the wilderness is mostly shades of brown and green. And what is blue tend to be pretty intense: flowers and venomous animals, mostly.
That said, I've read around here that colours are mostly a cultural thing (except maybe red). So I'd wouldn't put too much into it. The interesting parts come later in the article anyway: how UI design could take inspiration from sci-fi, including its mistakes.
For the scenario of a neon sign at night, you're probably in the mesopic vision [3] range, which is a somewhat fuzzy mix of the two. If they're all putting out an even number of photons, the blue sign would still not be as visible.
An interesting real-world experience I had with this: I was driving at night and saw the indicator LED on my phone flashing blue out of the corner of my eye. When I stopped and checked it, it turned out that it was actually yellow. Even when something's bright enough to trigger a color response in the center of your vision, it may be a primarily cone response toward the outside of your vision, which is strongly dominated by rod cells [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photopic_vision
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotopic_vision
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopic_vision
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell#/media/File...
I quite often have a similar experience...
I always put my phone on my desk just below my monitor - just at the edge of my field-of-view. My phone has an LED that flashes green when I have an SMS and red when I have a missed call or low battery (both with the same cadence). If I'm focussed on the monitor, I can see the light flashing but until I look at it, it appears to be flashing white (presumably because I have very few cones at the edge of my field-of-view).
Even more interestingly, once I have looked at it, determined whether it's red or green, and then return my eyes to looking at the monitor, I can still see it flashing at the edge of my field-of-view, but now my brain fills in which color it is - I now see it flashing red or green (despite there still being no cones to detect this).
I think it's amazing how of my perception of the world is actually filled in by my brain rather than "raw data".
As a side effect of a meditation technique I use, I several times daily look for one each of objects in my environment that are red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. Blue takes a long time to find and purple takes longer. If sci-fi screens are blue bc of rarity, wouldn't purple be a choice, too?
I think blue and purple are strange and rare. But purple probably has too many connotations with little kids' arts and crafts or quirky old people.
And we don't have to limit ourselves to what is natural, we can consider things in the man-made environment. We tend to make many more things blue than we do purple.
Looking around my desk:
Blue things: static mat, phone LED, supply label, USB cable, sticky notes, Outlook, mouse pad, pen, bananajack, map, medicine bottle cap.
Purple things: coffee mill box, cover of notebook.
Are the authors assuming that people never looked up?
I think the reason blue looks so fascinating to us is precisely because the sky is blue. What is that blue thing over our heads, I wonder (says ancient man), it's a very interesting thing, whatever it is.
If it's green, you have a reason to say it's green. If it's black, you have a reason to say it's black. If it's blue... who cares? It's almost always blue, and it never indicates anything that you need to be concerned about. Kind of like an ancient, completely homogeneous society doesn't need a word to indicate the color of their skin. It's just skin colored. Until they meet another tribe with a different color of skin.
There are plenty of things we still don't have words for the color of. Steel comes to mind. We literally just call the color "steel" because steel is always the color of steel. It's not quite grey, it's not quite silver. And silver is colored silver without a distinct word for it. Because the only way we need to talk about the color of steel or silver or gold is when they're not colored like steel or silver or gold. Blued steel, rose gold, white gold, etc. But if it's colored gold, it's just gold. And if they sky is blue, it's just the sky.
Ancient man spent a lot of time outdoors. I'd like to think that they were intensely interested in the color and appearance of the sky.
There's also this rhyme[1]:
Red sky at night, sailors' delight.
Red sky at morning, sailors take warning;
It's almost always blue
Unfortunately not true in the Portland Oregon metro area.
The only reason you need to mention the color of the sky is when it's not sky-colored. Unless the sky is red or grey or black or green, you could just call it "sky".
Yes, that's probably the simplest and best explanation.
In the human retina, the responses from the 3 types of cone cells (daylight light detectors) are immediately combined into a lightness signal (M + L), and two color signals, “red–green” (L – M) and “yellow–blue” (L + M – S), where {L, M, S} are the long-wavelength-, medium-wavelength-, and short-wavelength-sensitive cone cells, respectively. The basic L/M/S signals never make it past this first level of processing in the eye; all the brain sees are the combined signals.
The perceptual geometry of human color vision therefore has a built-in notion of red, yellow, green, and blue as “unique hues”. There’s a fair amount of variance from person to person, but anyone with trichromatic vision will be able to pick out some particular hue of “blue with no green or red in it”, “green with no blue or yellow in it”, etc.
You’re right that some languages apparently didn’t have any particular need to distinguish blue from green. I could believe that the introduction of blue dyes made this distinction useful. There’s been a lot of study of the topic of color naming, but I’m not sure there’s a definitive answer on that point.