alt Hacker NewsIs my blue your blue? (2024)
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The other week my wife and I were disagreeing over whether a house was green or blue. I was shocked when every passerby we asked agreed with her that it was green. I was absolutely 100% sure it was blue. Turns out according to this site, my boundary is greener than 95% of the population! Funny to see this proved out here!
I think the alternative should be "this is not blue". I was served what I would call a "teal" or "turquoise" but the alternative button shows "this is green", which it was not.
"for you, turquoise is blue." Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.
I think there's an anchoring effect in play here. If you select blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue -> green…, you land at the population median.
(The point being that, once you get to a somewhat ambiguous point (after two blue selections), you can say "oh, well, compared to the last one this is {opposite color}!", and it seems most people do that.)
Younger locals who have mostly or only known the LED think it's a bit odd, but just call them blue because that's the common convention and many youths may think that the former lights might have actually been blue.
IIRC from when I moved to Japan the first time (30+ y ago) when the old lights were standard, being a wildly curious Gaijin enough to ask "why" about these kinds of strange contradictions, and having lots of exposure in that time to senior citizens who had the spare time and inclination to humor my incessant questions, several of these octogenarian to centarians remembered the introduction of the first gen traffic lights, when the automobile became common enough to require them; and this seeming contradiction was new; this was the explanation I have heard common across several distinct conversations in different towns:
1. 緑 "midori" as a character and word for green was not very common usage before the end of WWII.
2. The (pre-LED) lamps for all three were yellow bulbs viewed through glass filters that were 'red', 'clear-somewhat yellow', and 'blue' - so even though it may appear green, the blue was for the color of the glass.
Also because 青い "aoi" has persisted in use for certain shades of 'green' - for example green apples and leafy fresh veggies; so this 'blue' seems to match the actual color of the light and has an implicit meaning for Japanese - in the sense of 'go while light is still fresh' - and Japanese humor is primarily Punny instead of being actually Funny, so this double meaning resonates even after switching to truly green LED light sources.
To all you nitpickers: I looked at a "white" wall and out of the window, and teal was slightly blue or green tinted afterward. Do that, too. Also, screen brightness shifted my result, as color calibration is of course an issue.
This makes no sense. It's like asking:
"Alice is in Denver. Is Alice in (a) Canada or (b) Mexico?"
- Your boundary between Canada and Mexico is at 40° latitude, more southern than 53% of the population.I never understood "forced classification" games like this (as an aside, it's also why I always hated Myers Briggs). Maybe it's because I'm somewhere on the spectrum, but it always seems like a dumb, false choice to me.
For example, when I saw the second color, "aqua" immediately popped into my mind. Aqua is literally defined as #00FFFF in RGB color space - no red, equal (max) parts blue and green. So it just felt like flipping a coin to me as it felt neither more blue nor more green.
Should this be called "Is my monitor's blue your monitor's blue?"
I'm sure this isn't an original thought, but I wonder how others see colors. Irrespective of color blindness, is what I know as red appear as blue to someone else? How would you even know or describe it? "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple." And they say, "Yes, exactly." But what they're truly seeing is what YOU know as blue. They see something different than you do, but to them that color has always been called red - even though, if you were to see it as them, it's blue.
What a fun site. Obviously results will depend on the monitor. At the last screen picture which show "where is my blue" and the gradient from green to blue I moved it from one monitor to other - what a difference! Time to dig into monitors setting to get more consistency (or for new monitors - do the color change with time? - one is more lit in the morning by sun but other do not get direct sunlight almost at all- both are the same type). What is funny it did not bother me at all - I do not work with any graphics and color. But probably now it will :).
Interestingly, there are several languages where blue and green are one color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
There's a big cultural component to it, and many languages don't even distinguish blue and green! Also many languages only distinguish them surprisingly recently --- for example, Chinese and Japanese used to use the word 青 which can refer to both blue and green, and even now, the color of the sky in the Republic of China (Taiwanese) flag is referred to by that character.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
I would love to know if "Cambridge Blue" is actually blue to the average person, because, to me, it's green...
In Polish language we commonly call turquoise "lightblue", so instinctively we'll have the boundary not at the middle of the turquoise, but between the turquiose and green, (i got hue 165, 95% of the population). We also call it "sea-color", but sea is also more culturally associated with blue than green.
Tried this on 2 monitors, made a difference of 77%-85%
I noticed that what I was actually seeing later on was 'is this more blue or green than the last colour' due to my eyes adjusting to the previous screen and just seeing the difference.
I don't like this because many of these transition colors I don't really consider blue or green but some sort of blue-green or green-blue.
I would also trust the results more if it bounced you around a bit randomly rather than tried to center you in. It gets to a point where I don't really have confidence and I suspect the environment around me contributed a fair amount at that point.
Seem to get ~172.
This "test" makes no sense. Cyan, and especially turquoise are neither blue nor green, they are a mix (similar to orange between red / yellow).
I had actually a very hard time to answer the questions, needed to overlay most of the color with some mostly white / light gray window and only squint at the color around it to decide. In the end my result was 176, which is almost the exact turning point for most people (and that even while my monitor is set to be more cold than default; but like said I had whatever my monitor shows as "white" to compare; even that "white" is likely technically slightly blue-ish).
Color perception is anyway much more influenced by contrasts then anything else. (Likely similar to acoustic tones, which are very hard to name / locate absolutely than when comparing to some reference tone.)
Besides the things mentioned in the about popup, blue is AFAIK the color we have the most receptors for. So it's imho quite "natural" that most people perceive cyan—which is technically the exact middle—as blue-ish, and of course the color left to it, turquoise, is green-ish (and as it seems, for most people, the mentioned turning point).
72 green though where it drew me on the gradient at the end I definitely would say the line is on green. and the swatch that is says I think would be blue was, well turquoise and not "blue".
my path was basically: ok def blue, ok cyan which would be "blue", greenish sea-foam? teal? ok now I wouldn't call these green Or blue . Then kinda bobbled the guess
crappy monitor aside, Feels like there's a combination of factors, some color fatigue from looking at a full screen saturated color and I think some "over thinking" the colors.
I had a colour-blindness test when I worked at an abattoir.
My job was to find odd things on a one third section of a side of beef as it went past and cut it off. 1500 or so per day.
The test showed numbers created with blobs of close colours.
The last test didn't have a number in it.
Cheeky buggers.
Cool to see this experiment crowdsourced.
Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” is a very readable history of linguistic relativism, including the long history of this experiment. It even has some colour plates to illustrate. Recommended.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/412264/through-the-language-...
There are colors in between blue and green that are neither blue nor green!
This is great!
Somewhat similar to a site I made a while ago, but for more "perception boundary" colors: https://theleo.zone/colorcontroversy/
How much does display calibration factor into this? I'm fairly confident it must impact the results, but unsure how much error it would introduce.
> Your boundary is at hue 164, greener than 94% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.
No, turquoise is turquoise!!1
I think this site is doing a binary search, so that you narrow down on a boundary.
It would be much funnier, and also more insightful, if it didn't do this and let you contradict yourself.
It's crazy to me that most people don't get it. This is not a "who knows the exact name of this hex color" game, it's "more blue or more green?"
Orange is its own color, but is this hue it 51% red or 51% yellow?
Interesting. Looking at each in isolation, my boundary is pretty far into Green territory. But when I look at the gradient, I would place it far closer to the center.
Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?
My numbers kept varying wildly from 174 to 189, in the same patterns across multiple devices (initial number different from stable next-five results), so I tried a few things.
First I shifted the app to use P3 `oklch(.7066 .1611 $hue)` with range (150..210) centered on cyan at 180°, same as sRGB. No change, so it's not some sort of artifact of colorspaces. Then I upped it to 16 steps instead of 8. The window narrowed slightly, but the same first-then-the-rest shift kept happening. Finally I raised the random color static mask duration from 200ms to 5000ms. Scored 180 +/- 1. Huh. Makes sense, given the image persistence stuff I deal with.
So, for those seeing that same variability I'd recommend editing that first (local response override index-blah.js, search `, 200` replace `, 5000` by hand, reload page) to get a more stable result.
Though everyone calls a solid blue color as blue, the actual visual perception or experience of that color could be entirely different. They just grew up calling that experience of their own, as blue color.
As others have pointed out, the 2nd color is not something I would call either blue or green. Except for the first, it never showed anything I would call blue. So really I have told it the border where I still call something green. So is my green your green?
This is flawed. Turquoise is not blue or green. Also different displays will show different colors. And a lot of displays aren’t great at producing the hues in the green color space. Idk the test seems arbitrary, but I’m not color expert
One thing that I find interesting when thinking about colour perception, is that even if two people agree that a given colour is red, there is no way to know (as far as I am aware) that they actually perceive it in the same way. Maybe the brain of one person paints it red, and another paints it differently, and there is no way to know as we can't get into other people's heads.
Who else tried with both eyes? A few years ago I had an implant to treat cataracts. It was notable at the time that the "new" eye was less yellow-tinted than the aged-in-place eye. I was told that the lens does yellow with age. Over time, my brain mostly adjusted, but on this test I did notice a subtle hue difference between eyes. Did anyone else try that experiment?
It is mentioned on the about page but I still feel like pointing out that your response to this test has as much to do with your perception of colors as how green or blue your screen is and what kind of ambient lighting there is. Especially considering how subtle the differences are in the final rounds of the test.
Still an interesting experiment, but I would be cautious about drawing conclusions about anything from it.
"Your boundary is at hue 181, bluer than 87% of the population.
For you, turquoise is green."
Took it 3 times (90%, 85%, 87%). At least, I now know why sometimes I'm surprised that people call green things blue :)
To be honest, there should have been a "neither" category, because that was frustrating to classify a color that is clearly neither. But I understand the need for a binary choice for this experiment.
Turquoise `#40E0D0 ` feels green to me, while Dark Turquoise `#00CED1` , I can agree to consider as blue.
This is like one of those eye tests where they switch between lenses narrowing in on the prescription. The question is really what shades of turquoise is more blue than green.
I got 80 which is close enough, I think it’s really only the extremes that are meaningful. I tried simply alternating green-blue etc and got 60. I think adding some randomness and taking more samples (more questions) would help - I was worried that the prior color left a residual effect as a relative comparison was easier than absolute comparison. The extra random samples could help give an idea of confidence in that middle zone.
I've got a color question that I need some opinions on:
When I look at the green/blue boundary region on an HSV color wheel like the ones in this S/O thread [0], it appears as a white un-saturated region.
If I look at similar layouts in other colorspaces (e.g., something perceptually uniform like Lab) I don't generally see this white patch.
My question is: - I'm colorblind. Do other people also see a white patch there? - If this is a genuine problem with HSV, is there an explanation for why there's a hue angle that is unsaruated regardless of S value?
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62531754/how-to-draw-a-h...
We never get to find out what the author's blue is
Reminds me of the discussions with my wife. She is from Japan and, over there, you cross a traffic light when it's "blue". IIRC, the word was chosen before international agreements, and the colour has shifted towards green since, but it's still more blueish than in other countries. And they still call it "blue".
I came back as with a measure of 174 and a label of "true neutral".
However, I know enough about perception to know that this called for some hacking.
So as soon as I saw the second color I realized I needed to look at something else. So each time after choosing and seeing the next color I looked around quite a bit, inside and through the windows at the outside (I happen to be in a Hawaii, so blues and greens are abundant) before choosing and I noticed significantly different color perception after looking around, specifically, I had more confidence in whether it was blue or green.
I can imagine if you just stare at the colors and try to power through, you might get kinda irritated.
Just last week I called something blue and my daughter objected; she said it was green. After discussion we both agreed it was was teal and she said roughly "but teal is a shade of green." To me Teal is a (admittedly greenish) shade of blue.
Curious how this looks for red/green colorblind folks?
Do they see everything beyond the initial green as a shade of blue?
--Edit--
My red/green colorblind father just got back me with this result:
> Your boundary is at hue 175, bluer than 68% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.
If you have a spare moment today, look up "wine-dark sea". As far as we can tell, there was no such thing as a _concept_ of blue in Ancient Greece.
> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
apart from not giving the "neither" option of turquoise, you cannot just line up asking without neutralising perception in between eg. with a non blue/green and then white before the next test. Color perception is >relative< not just across individuals, not sure how someone interested enough in blue perception does not understand this.
> For you, the turquoise is green!
No, turquoise is turquoise. You gave me two options, and you act like I didn't know that word exists
As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow.
I understand that across cultures "orange" does not exist as a distinctly named color (it only got its name in most European languages around the 1500s), but as someone who was trained since preschool that orange is a distinct color, it would feel wrong to "round" it to red or yellow.
I haven't had green-cyan-blue drilled into me the same way as red-orange-yellow. So sometimes I do "round" it. I might note how "green" some cyan river water is, or call something cyan "blue" when it is next to something kelly green. But when I just have a screenfull of pure cyan light, I don't know what else to call it.
As a side note, I do wonder how differently a child would perceive color if they were taught more than 7 colors in preschool.