Talk:Color/Archive 4

message: The following struck me as odd:
:Apart from the black-grey-white continuum, English splits some hues into several distinct colors according to lightness: such as red and pink or orange and brown. To English speakers, these pairs of colors, which are objectively no more different from one another than light green and dark green, are conceived as totally different.
For orange and brown, this makes sense. But pink has always seemed to be simply a shade of red to me. Without a citation, it might be a good idea just to remove the mentions of pink/red. --Yath 07:38, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I would disagree with it for a different reason.  Red and pink differ primarily in saturation, not lightness.  Whether we conceieve of them differently, they have different category names.  So do olive and green and lots of other pairs of more subtle distinctions.  But don't just remove the red/pink thing; look for a reference for the brown/orange, and see what is actually said. Dicklyon 08:07, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: What are "category names"? --Yath 12:17, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The names we use to refer to regions in a perceptual space, such as color.  The concept of "categorical perception" means we cut up the space into categories, often in a language-dependent or culture-dependent way.  Orange and brown are different categories, as evidenced by the fact that we have different names for them. Dicklyon 17:51, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the article is overreaching here. Just because there are different names doesn't mean that they are considered "totally different" in every case. I'll tag it and see if someone comes up with a citation. --Yath 22:28, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree.  We need to summarize what a reliable source says.  The first two here look pretty good. Dicklyon 00:01, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Color naming 

message: The article currently claims "most people are not able to distinguish" indigo. Surely this is imprecise? Surely if you show most people slides of pure spectral blue and pure spectral indigo (according to some reasonable definitions thereof) they would be able to tell the difference. I mean, surely we can see plenty of minute gradiations; it's not like we can only see a few gross categories. 
So what is meant by that statement? And how can we express it more clearly? Doops |  talk 22:43, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: People just think of indigo as "deep blue-violet". Few people use the color term indigo apart from its inclusion in ROYGBIV. Georgia guy 22:45, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Such a situation would best be described by the sentence "most people do not distinguish indigo", not "most people are not able to distinguish" it. Doops |  talk 07:46, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  indigo 

message: Does anyone know what is physically changing when colors fade as a result of exposure to light?  SabrinaKalleeneye 19:59, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Dye molecules break down, usually due to absorption of high-energy (ultraviolet) photons; in their new degraded form, they no longer have the nice wavelength-dependent absorption that made them dyes. Dicklyon 20:27, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  color physics