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Has the world become less colourful?

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Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#31
post #8

Car colours is something that sometimes worries me, brighter colours are sold as 'extra', while greys are default/cheaper. This leads to some cars basically camouflaging with the road, especially at times like dawn or dusk. There are other colours that make it harder to spot a car depending on location/time-of-day, but from my experience greys and grey-navy-ish are the worst.

It might be a self-perpetuating problem. Maybe people prefer (red, green, bright blue), but they fear that they won't be able to sell their car because of its color. So they buy white. (I read somewhere [so take this with a grain of salt] that this effect happens with marble kitchen countertops: not that many homeowners actually like them, but they believe that potential buyers might, so an overproportional amount of…

> Maybe people prefer (red, green, bright blue), but they fear that they won't be able to sell their car because of its color. So they buy white.

There's definitely location/cultural variety here, people would worry a white car wouldn't sell, due to the increased visibility of dirt and scratches, so only gets 5% of sales here. The top colours here are silver (24%), black (22%) and blue (17%, mostly darker shades).

I'm not sure why silver cars escape the stigma of white cars here since they have the same issues, but they do.

After the size of vehicles and number of pickups, the amount of white cars was the next thing that stood out to me about the cars when I first went to california

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#32

An explanation might be LED lighting. Sunlight, candle-light and resistive filament lights (incandescent) have a broadband spectrum. Through most of history we've viewed the world lit by these sources. Moving to fluorescent lights causes spectral quantisation as the frequencies are due to electronic band transitions in the gas. The phosphor absorbs and re-emits energy in different bands that fills out the spectrum bu…

I have real problem with colour-perception in LED lighting - board game evenings are tricky when I can't tell the piece colours apart so well. Feels like it's just me though...

Maybe the problem is cheap LED lamps. Check for a high color rendering index [1] (CRI >>90)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#33

It's not just colours. The world rapidly turning into a real-life "borg-world": same kinds of buildings; same kinds of dresses; same kinds of "world models; same philosophies; and now the same language too. The world is for all real purposes has been gobbled up by the Anglosphere. It's all but dead; I'm sure many people realize how drab and low-entropy our world is today.

When I first moved to Thailand, it seemed to me the colors were much more vibrant here than in Northern Europe. And even after living here for 5 years now, I still appreciate this often. Greens are more green, blues are more blue, etc...

I'm guessing it has to do with the position of the sun relative to the earth / how sunlight enters the earths atmosphere.

Just seeing these more vibrant colors have the effect of lifting my mood a bit.

Just last week I heard somewhere that colors in New Zealand are very vibrant as well. I've never been there, so not sure how it compares to Thailand, but perhaps it's true.

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#34
There is a famous if possibly apocryphal study where random people were asked to rate various toaster colors, and everybody swooned over lime green and hot pink and whatnot.

After they finished, they were told that as their prize they could take one of the toasters home -- and everybody chose white, stainless steel or black.

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#36

Maybe? The headline graphic is from https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer... which really tells us about the colour of a subset of objects in the Science Museum's collection – so a bit of a biased sample, and I'd wager primarily due to changes in materials. There does seem to be maybe 20% more neutral-coloured cars since 1990, though. Interior design is probably the thing I'd most readily say h…

> so a bit of a biased sample, and I'd wager primarily due to changes in materials

Yes, the wood telegraph in the article is a good example of this. Because of wood’s texture, it contains a bunch of colors from red to yellow when you look at it at the pixel level. It’s more colorful than an iPhone, but the variety of pixels alone gives the impression that it’s more colorful than it is.

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#37

An explanation might be LED lighting. Sunlight, candle-light and resistive filament lights (incandescent) have a broadband spectrum. Through most of history we've viewed the world lit by these sources. Moving to fluorescent lights causes spectral quantisation as the frequencies are due to electronic band transitions in the gas. The phosphor absorbs and re-emits energy in different bands that fills out the spectrum bu…

> Only by combining these do we trick the eye into seeing "white light"

Vast majority of white LEDs are phosphor based and not color-mixing

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#38

There is a famous if possibly apocryphal study where random people were asked to rate various toaster colors, and everybody swooned over lime green and hot pink and whatnot. After they finished, they were told that as their prize they could take one of the toasters home -- and everybody chose white, stainless steel or black.

The reason for that seems obvious to me. Grey, steel, white and black will work in basically every kitchen. If you want a more colorful pallet in any room in your house, then you need to put a lot more thought into planning it. I think most people aren’t highly motivated to do that.

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#39

An explanation might be LED lighting. Sunlight, candle-light and resistive filament lights (incandescent) have a broadband spectrum. Through most of history we've viewed the world lit by these sources. Moving to fluorescent lights causes spectral quantisation as the frequencies are due to electronic band transitions in the gas. The phosphor absorbs and re-emits energy in different bands that fills out the spectrum bu…

> re-emission in valance holes

Are you talking about single-colour LEDs? Since white LEDs use a "phosphor", just like fluorescent lights, that convert blue or UV light. In fact I thought that the phosphors used by LEDs today are much better than those used by fluorescent lights.

Maybe you're talking about RGB lights, which combine separate reg, green and blue LEDs so that the colour mix can be changed. But even then I thought, unlike lasers, LEDs are not using single frequencies but relatively wide bands (but will still leave gaps between the red, green and blue colours).

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#40

Maybe this is why the Instagram article was a bit weird yesterday? " On Tuesday morning, Instagram head Adam Mosseri appeared in full damage control mode. Facing the camera and wearing a bright yellow sweater, he attempted to quash a growing revolt from some of Instagram’s most prominent users. " https://archive.ph/FF2d1 Why even mention the color of the sweater? I can see that clearly on the video.

not everyone who can use a screen reader can see

And most of us who can see, simply don't care. We don't need that kind of detail.
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