11–20 of 31 posts
It's just an arbitrary wavelength. It's not that the universe is emitting a boring color, it's the fact that we interpret this color as beige and therefore boring. The interesting thing we should be asking is why does our biology cause us to notice high wave lengths like red and find colors like beige to be really plain and boring.
http://www.thecolorofpaloalto.com/
Priceonomics: We help companies crawl data from the web. Well, the article itself is indeed interesting, but I am just curious why they post these kind of content on their blog, is it related?
http://priceonomics.com/everything-is-bullshit-a-book-by-pri...
edit: oops. My apologies, sodium is responsible for the dark band at ~5,890 I misread a graphic. Still looking into the spike... If like me you just had to know what was responsible for the huge spike in the red (@ wavelength of about 6600 angstroms).... Sodium. Tangentially related (TIL) sodium also effects a star's end-of-life cycle: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/05/130529-how-s...
It's just an arbitrary wavelength. It's not that the universe is emitting a boring color, it's the fact that we interpret this color as beige and therefore boring. The interesting thing we should be asking is why does our biology cause us to notice high wave lengths like red and find colors like beige to be really plain and boring.
Someone told me red is shorter so we see it faster -- is there any biological evidence for this?
It's pretty rare to see red in nature that isn't blood or fire, and when you do it's often on dangerous things (like those frogs in the amazon). Maybe red is so striking to us because red things in nature are things we need to pay attention to?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone told me red is shorter so we see it faster -- is there any biological evidence for this?
I don't think so, red has a smaller wavelength than the other colors we see, but I don't think that could translate into us seeing it faster (whatever that even means). It's pretty rare to see red in nature that isn't blood or fire, and when you do it's often on dangerous things (like those frogs in the amazon). Maybe red is so striking to us because red things in nature are things we need to pay attention to?
It's just an arbitrary wavelength. It's not that the universe is emitting a boring color, it's the fact that we interpret this color as beige and therefore boring. The interesting thing we should be asking is why does our biology cause us to notice high wave lengths like red and find colors like beige to be really plain and boring.
If it is statistically most common, then it is the most prevalent and thus not novel whatsoever and therefore boring.
This tells us one of two things:
1. We should be excited that we understand the universe so well that we have determined the most common thing and we represent that so often
2. More likely this is anthropomorphizing the universe around the narrow receptors of visible light