XKCD Color Name Survey | Hacker News Reader

XKCD Color Name Survey

aram.xkcd.com

27 pointsNathanKP19 comments

Pretty much a must-have for this if you don't want to type purple, red, blue, pink, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colors

Although, after doing this for a little while, I'm getting the feeling it's to measure people's endurance when filling out online surveys.

Interesting -- I'm getting different color names in the sentence, "'<color1>' and '<color2>' are both good answers", every time I refresh the page. I wonder if he's seeing what answers people will give when they're primed with different color names.

Many of my color names were based on Crayola crayons and answers from Celebrity Jeopardy.

Some how doesn't work for me. I get:

"There was a strange value in some of your form responses. Please select from the available choices and try again."

I'm answering LCD, Don't Know, Blank, Yes, Yes, Spanish

I got that too, but tried again and it was fine.

I gave up after like 30. Is there a point at the end? Did I miss out?

From the page: "The survey doesn't have an explicit end. You can continue for as long as you'd like or come back later to do more." So, no, it doesn't have a point at the end.

There is a point, but it won't be revealed until it's over. http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/03/01/color-name-survey/

i'm guessing they want to address the notion that women perceive colours more accurately than men (as opposed to just giving them fancy names they learnt from style magazines). i think maybe it checks that you were consistent in the naming of the same colour, or what colours there was most uncertainty about

Ambiguous question - There is a a point to the survey, but no endpoint to the questions.

I could only stomach 30 or so... once I exhausted all of the prismacolor marker colors I could remember, it became oddly exhausting.

I'm guessing it's serving up mostly the colours with ambigious names (based on what others have entered), I'm not sure why but I'm sure we'll end up with some sort of graph on XKCD

Good Lord. I thought I'd go represent the color-weak population. Those were very hard colors to name.

I know what you mean... I realized about 20 colors in that I seemed to have a different name for each incarnation of blue, but all shades of green were just "green" to me.

It did require some imagination. I ended up putting in "vomit green" for one, and "mango" for another.

Right, I think that is part of the survey, to come up with interesting names. Some of the saturated ones are extremely hard to name.

I stopped after I realized I could just as well have answered "I don't know" for 70% of them.

I realized after about 20 of these that I would use the hex code when talking about these colors. While using firebug to check out the source, I noticed this field in the form:

input type="hidden" value="#2309a7" name="color"

It looks like anyone could just change the value of that hidden input and screw up the results.

Even just to be a dick, that'd be an oddly pointless and easy-to-clean-up sort of dickishness.

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