Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

I find our own modern ROYGBIV odd, with R=red O=orange Y=yellow G=green B=blue I=indigo V=violet

More sense would make: ROYGCBV with C=cyan (or replace the V with P from purple)

The "indigo" and "violet" are so similar to each other (and even a physically narrower band in the rainbow), while something is missing between the green and blue.

I know that it's an analog transition of colors so there are infinite shades and using 7 discrete names does not match reality, but when we do use names they should at least match popular language usage and uniform distance better imho.

Maybe it's subjective?

View on HN

It was Newton that originally named ROYGBIV. Historically the word "blue" would have referred to a cyan colour, and "indigo" to a deep blue. So in fact you and Newton agree with each other, and the apparent difference is just due to semantic drift.

There are studies that has show that people can distinguish a color faster and better if their language has a word for it. If we assume this is true, your version would work better for english in particular. I suppose that more people can make a difference between green and cyan and blue and cyan, rather than between blue and indigo and violet and indigo.

Personally, I do not actually know what indigo is supposed to look like and an image search shows everything from blue to violet.

The Gamecube is indigo.

Nintendo may have called the purple version of the Gamecube Indigo, but Indigo is a dark blue dye derived from a plant, unless you think your blue jeans match your GameCube

They're just names for arbitrary divisions of the spectrum of vibrating matter around us. The HN top bar is still orange even if it's not the same color as the fruit. My GameCube is close enough to the color of the dye that I'll allow it. It's also a long way from purple.

I'm sorry but the "Indigo" GameCube is much closer to a strict definition of purple than it is darker blue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameCube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple

I'm talking about my actual GameCube sitting in my game storage drawer, which I checked before making that comment. That image is much brighter and much more purple than the real thing I had in my hands.

Not entirely arbitrary - some of these colors(single-frequencies) match fairly well what one of our types of cone cells can easily detect, and some don't. Some frequencies are well-detected by two of the types of cones not just one, providing us with better ability to discriminate amongst those frequencies.

The blue-green distinction is interesting because it's different in East Asia:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

The color of a traffic light can be referred to as blue or green. This sometimes leads to interesting translations where the color 青 can be translated as green or blue (eg 青茶 being translated as "blue tea" in Taiwan instead of "greener oolong tea" or something).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com