Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

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Blood isn't actually blue. It can appear blue under the skin, but that's only because of refraction[0]. I'm pretty pale[1] and I can tell you that the blue looks NOTHING like that blue. It's much darker and much fainter. Not close to neon at all. Which, btw, as soon as it touches the air it's not going to look blue anymore.

While I don't think the average person is going to notice or care about these "nuances" I would be pretty surprised if anyone that huts would not immediately notice. The "well I look at my veins and they are blue" argument only holds up if you don't look at the pictures in the link. Like they just look very different. Easy to sound right while being very wrong (and often hard to explain why it is wrong without sounding like nitpicking). It's not like they're hunting horseshoe crabs...

[0] https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/is-blood-blue

[1] Pale enough that a phlebotomist once told me I was the easiest person to draw blood from because it is so easy to see my veins.

If something “appears” as a color then that’s the color it IS.

The reason anything is the color it is is because that’s how it appears.

Am I missing something?

It’s like saying, “oh the sky is only blue because it scatters blue light”. Well then the sky is blue. Full stop.

“Red paint is only red because it happens to absorb certain other color spectrums leaving mostly red light”. Ok then it’s red.

Look at that blue sky through sun glasses. It may longer be blue to you but I assure you the sky is still blue to everyone else.

  > Am I missing something?

Go grab a thin colored sheet of plastic (or anything transparent will do). Hold it up to the sky and look through it. What color is the sky?

Now yes, the sky will be yellow or whatever color the plastic is but if you go around and start telling everyone that they'll call you crazy.

If you really want to get into it, colors are also determined by what everyone else sees. You could be colorblind and what color something is to you is not what color that thing is to everybody else. Or you could take the sun itself, which everyone agrees is yellow except some armchair expert redditor who once heard in science class that "the sun is green" and is willing to discount his eyes rather than hear the rest of the discussion where it is white because it emits in a broad spectrum and appears yellow on Earth because the blue sky removes some colors before we can see it. So you can imagine a future civilization where most people don't live on Earth might call the sun "white" but for now everyone will call it that because it is yellow. This is a bit in your favor but you might notice the main point of my previous comment isn't about blood looking blue so much as the pigs being fucking neon blue and that blue looks nothing like blood and could not be mistaken for the same thing. Look at the pictures.

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