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The species Metasepia Pfefferi is commonly called the flamboyant cuttlefish. Not only is it colorful, it “walks” along the bottom of the sea between Malaysia and Australia. According to a rather dry scientific description at Wikipedia, the color changes are a complex form of camouflage, used either to blend in with the cuttlefish’s background or to warn away predators. The cuttlefish’s flesh is poisonous, making it only one of three known toxic cephalopods. -via the Presurfer
Juan-Diego was inspired by colors to write a song. The result is both cute and funny. Who knew a guy getting hit with a pie had so many colors? -Thanks, Juan!
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After considering the new Smurfs movie, the folks at Slate compiled an interactive color wheel to show the spectrum of colors by which we know our favorite cartoon characters. At the site, you can mouseover to enlarge and identify each character. Link -via Buzzfeed
One disturbing shade at a time.
SEEING RED
When the Spanish arrived in Mexico in the early 1500s, they weren’t just shocked by the impressive Aztec temples, they were also stunned by Mexico’s bright red clothing. Europeans hadn’t yet discovered how to make a color that vibrant, and the conquistadors were mesmerized.
The Aztecs didn’t guard their secret particularly well, though. They showed the Spanish how to make the red dye by crushing the carcasses of cochineals, female beetles that live on cacti. When the conquistadors left to return to their homeland, they made off with the Aztec’s gold -and their fashion secret. For the next few hundred years, the Spanish made a fortune producing the crimson dye, keeping the source of the color closely guarded.
Red dye from cochineals is still used today in lipstick and food. After all, it’s organic! You can find it in juices, jams, and maraschino cherries. But if you’re squeamish about ingesting beetle juice, it’s easy to avoid. In 2009, the FDA required it to be declared on product labels.
PRETTY IN PINK
Pink, now the province of Paris Hilton and Barbie, was once considered the most appropriate color for clothing boys. In 1918, the hospital trade journal Infants’ Department explained the rationale behind the fashion trend: “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy; while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”
How did boys and girls swap colors? According to one theory, Hitler made homosexuals wear pink triangles on their uniforms in his work camps, and men have been wary of the color ever since. (Image credit: Flickr member *pinkpooch*)
PURPLE MAJESTY
Once upon a time, a dog belonging to Hercules went for a walk along the beach. When he returned to his master, the pup’s mouth was bright purple. Hercules’ girlfriend at the time, a nymph named Tyra, fell in love with the color, and she told Hercules that she wouldn’t see him again until he gave her a robe of the same shade. So Hercules, who had a weakness for nymphs, tracked the dog back to the beach and found the source: His dog had been eating sea snails.
The story of Tyra’s robe is a myth, but Tyrian purple -the color worn exclusively by imperial officers and clergy in ancient Rome- really does come from sea snails, specifically Bolinus brandaris. To get the regal color, Roman dye makers would pulverize the snails, boil them in salt, then leave them in the sun until the secretions from their glands turned purple. Eight thousand of the hapless snails were needed for one gram of the very expensive dye. (Image credit: Wikimedia user M.Violante)
BLUE BLOODED
Prussian blue -the pigment favored by Picasso during his Blue Period- was discovered completely by accident. Back in 1704, a Berlin dye maker known as Diesbach was trying to create a rich, red pigment from the cochineal beetle [see "seeing red" above]. In the process, he used a potassium-rich substance called potash and “animal oil,” a mixture of bones and blood. But when the potash and the blood combined with iron sulphate from the cochineal, it produced the world’s first synthetic blue pigment. As PBS painter Bob Ross would have said, it was a happy little accident.
SICKLY GREEN
When Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele was investigating the chemical properties of arsenic in the 1770s, he used the toxic substance to make a verdant pigment known as Scheele’s green. In the process, he ingested way too much arsenic, essentially poisoning himself to death by the age of 43.
Sadly, that wasn’t the only life Scheele’s green would claim. In Europe, the color was used extensively in decorating. In fact, a study done in England at the end of the 19th century indicated that four out of every five wallpapers contained arsenic from Scheele’s green. Researchers of the time noted that when the wallpaper became damp, it gave off a “mouse-like” odor that caused illness and even death. In the 1930s, scientists confirmed that the smell was a lethal gas produced by a fungus feeding off arsenic in the wallpaper.
Interestingly, Scheele’s green may have even contributed to the death of Napoleon. During the last years of his life, Napoleon lived in exile in St. Helena, a humid island off the west coast of Africa. His bedroom was wallpapered bright green, and the air in St. Helena was definitely moist enough to grow fungus. In 2001, scientists analyzed samples of Napoleon’s hair and discovered arsenic levels as much as 38 times higher than normal.
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The article above, written by Michael Franco, is reprinted with permission from the May-June 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!
One more degree of difficulty, and this picture might have been a candidate for the What Is It? game. It’s a graduating class that really called for an overhead shot.
They are the Graphic Design Majors of the CalPoly Pomona graduating class of 2011, who received their diplomas last night. Each decorated their mortarboards with an oversized Pantone chip! Congratulations to all. -Thanks, Professor Ray Kampf!
(Image credit: Robby Cavanaugh)
These ants ate so much that their transparent abdomens swelled up to display their meal color! You can easily tell which ants moved from one blob to another. The photographer is unknown, and there is speculation that the ants are eating drops of Terro ant killer with food coloring added. Link -via The Daily What
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It doesn’t look like it, but the girl in the illustration above has two gray eyes. (And some vicious-looking fingernails.) This is due to the “opponent process” our brain uses to interpret signals from photoreceptors in our eyes–a process that sometimes produces weird and counterintuitive visual results. There are more illusions with full explanations in Scientific American‘s “Colors Out of Space” slideshow. Link
Image: Akiyoshi Kitaoka
Bran Thompson made this video from footage taken at the annual Holi Festival (previously at Neatorama) at the Sri Sri Radha Krishna Temple in Spanish Fork, Utah. The song is “Optimist” is by Zoe Keating. -Thanks, Brian!
Stanford University has an ongoing study of how children learn language. Part of that study is how they learn color names. They found it to be difficult for a lot of children -in fact, their parents worried that they might be colorblind!
As it happens, English color words may be especially difficult to learn, because in English we throw in a curve ball: we like to use color words “prenominally,” meaning before nouns. So, we’ll often say things like “the red balloon,” instead of using the postnominal construction, “the balloon is red.”
Why does this matter? It has to do with how attention works. In conversation, people have to track what’s being talked about, and they often do this visually. This is particularly so if they’re trying to make sense of whatever it is someone is going on about. Indeed, should I start blathering about “the old mumpsimus in the corner” you’re apt to begin discretely looking around for the mystery person or object.
Kids do the exact same thing, only more avidly, because they have much, much more to learn about. That means that when you stick the noun before the color word, you can successfully narrow their focus to whatever it is you’re talking about before you hit them with the color. Say “the balloon is red,” for example, and you will have helped to narrow “red-ness” to being an attribute of the balloon, and not some general property of the world at large. This helps kids discern what about the balloon makes it red.
When the researchers switched the color and noun, they found a significant improvement in performance over the children’s baseline performances, compared to the children who received prenominal training. Link -via TYWKIWBI
(Image credit: Flickr user wine me up)
Austin Seraphin got an iPhone. Since he is blind, the first thing he did was activate VoiceOver, which reads text out loud. Then later, he tried the Color ID app, which identifies colors picked up by the camera.
I have never experienced this before in my life. I can see some light and color, but just in blurs, and objects don’t really have a color, just light sources. When I first tried it at three o’clock in the morning, I couldn’t figure out why it just reported black. After realizing that the screen curtain also disables the camera, I turned it off, but it still have very dark colors. Then I remembered that you actually need light to see, and it probably couldn’t see much at night. I thought about light sources, and my interview I did for Get Lamp. First, I saw one of my beautiful salt lamps in its various shades of orange, another with its pink and rose colors, and the third kind in glowing pink and red.. I felt stunned.
The next day, I went outside. I looked at the sky. I heard colors such as “Horizon,” “Outer Space,” and many shades of blue and gray. I used color queues to find my pumpkin plants, by looking for the green among the brown and stone. I spent ten minutes looking at my pumpkin plants, with their leaves of green and lemon-ginger. I then roamed my yard, and saw a blue flower. I then found the brown shed, and returned to the gray house. My mind felt blown. I watched the sun set, listening to the colors change as the sky darkened. The next night, I had a conversation with Mom about how the sky looked bluer tonight. Since I can see some light and color, I think hearing the color names can help nudge my perception, and enhance my visual experience. Amazing!
Technology is a wonderful thing. Link -via Metafilter
What could be better than little yellow chicks being born from multi-colored Easter eggs? Why multi-colored Easter chicks being born from regular eggs, of course.
The picture on the left is not photoshopped. That’s really what the chicks look like. Their eggs were injected with dye, leaving the little ones colored upon hatching. Once their new feathers grow out, they’ll be normal-colored again, but for now, they’re mighty festive.
How can you possibly have a bad day when you start it with rainbow pancakes? Link -via Buzzfeed
In this infographic, Stephen Von Worley observes that the number of discrete colors in a box of Caryola Crayons doubles about every 28 years. That’s an annual growth rate of 2.56%. Von Worley writes:
If the Law holds true, Crayola’s gonna need a bigger box, because by the year 2050, there’ll be 330 different crayons! Shortly thereafter, frazzled packaging designers rejoice, for to the rescue comes a revolution in household appliances: the new-fangled Replicator-Dissociator! Load it with the Crayola plugin, and you’re seconds away from every shade in the rainbow – no boxes required!
I wasn’t all that impressed with these swirling colors until I started playing with the sliding controls. You can change the size of the colored splotches, the amount of blur, the color change rate, and other dimensions until you find a very pleasing sequence of eye candy. Link -via Gorilla Mask
Expo TV has a video interview with Lee Eisman, the Director of the
Pantone Color Institute. In the video, Eisman discusses how Pantone
chooses its colors and predicts color trends.
You may or may
not be surprised by the amount of research that goes into selecting new
colors and keeping existing colors fresh – factors ranging from
economic conditions, world affairs, clothing featured in the
entertainment industry, home décor trends and art trends play into the
decision making process.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
