this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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I appreciate the skittles reference
Is it a skittles reference or is it a reference to purple not being an actual color and thus not a part of the rainbow?
the heck do you mean purple is not an actual colour??
Don't let them pee on your Cheerios. Purple is a color, just like magenta, pink, cyan, brown, and all the other "not in the rainbow/ROYGBIV" colors.
Gatekeeping colors, I tell ya. Don't let 'em get you burnt sienna with rage.
Purple, the color directly between red and blue, is a creation of your mind interpreting a band of light that triggers your red and blue sensing nerves, but no green is sensed. The actual band of light we can see goes from red to green to blue. Purple doesn't fall between those colors, meaning it wouldn't be included in a rainbow, and isn't any "pure" light you could see, since it doesn't fall on the spectrum.
Essentially, any time you see purple, you're seeing two different frequencies of light that your mind interprets as a single frequency.
Like binaural beats for the eyes?
What is violet at the end of the visible spectrum, then? We call the higher wavelength stuff ultraviolet, and violet looks purple to me, so I'm having trouble reconciling this stuff with what you're saying.
We call it that but our eyes see the far end frequency as a colour that only very slightly activates blue sensitive cone receptors and no others. For red sensitive cones there is a slight bump in the high end frequencies also that makes it possible for them to look violet as it activates the blue sensitive and a bit of red sensitive receptors but a much purpler purple is made by combining high and low frequencies.
There is evidence to show that violet does actually weakly activates red cones too. This is because the violet light starts creeping up to double the frequency of the lower end of the red sensitivity, and so it can actually successfully activate it very weakly. There are other factors that can lessen or even fully negate that effect though, it's all kind of fuzzy.
Would this not disqualify any mixed color? We only have receptors for three colors, and if we're arguing that purple isn't a color because it's actually two mixed together, that should also mean colors like orange, yellow, cyan, magenta, atc are also not colors by that definition right?
This is 100% incorrect. Not in terms of science, but in terms of a qualifier of what a colour is. Just because a colour doesn't exist on the rainbow spectrum, doesn't mean it's not an "actual colour".
What you're referring to is the definition of colour specifically by physics. There are other professional fields and areas of science that use different qualifiers for colour. I work with color everyday and I can with certainty say that purple, pink, rust, teal, and sky blue are all colours.
Kind of like how different fields have different definitions of entropy or different cultures have different names for snow. It's all dependent on the framework you use and ignoring every other framework is wrong.
ah a similar explanation to why yellow is not an actual colour either
the silly explanation that has no effect on how we perceive, use, or think about colour. sigh why are the people responsible for those studies calling those colours not real? Why not just colours resulting from mixing other colours like the artists have done since the invention of paint?
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I believe it’s indigo not purple there.
Correct. Initially, Newton didn't have indigo in his list for the visible spectrum, but he wanted seven colors instead of six because it matched up with the number of notes in music (and because he liked the number). So at some point there was discussion of removing indigo entirely because it's kinda just a shade between blue and violet that the human eye just isn't as good at distinguishing compared to the other colors. But the neat thing is that what people back in Newton's time called blue and indigo is more akin to what we today call cyan and blue (they know this by looking at his labeled drawings of the light scattered by prisims). Now the spectral colors are: red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and violet.
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This feels like a case where botanical science should just have picked a different name. If you invalidate everything people think of as a berry and then tell them a dozen things that are clearly not berries are, in fact, berries, you're just making the word berry meaningless.
Berry means a tiny, usually sweet, fruit-like growth from a plant. The kind that is usually picked in bunches. The kind that you use to make smoothies. That's a berry.
Botany did us all a disservice by choosing the word "berry" to mean "a specific thing which invalidates everything you think is a berry." Just call that plant structure something in Latin, ffs.
Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
Knowledge is knowing the common definition of fruit doesn't include tomato.
Well, cooking terms and botany terms are not the same. Any non reproductive part of a plant is vegetable. But in cooking we have a completely different idea of what vegetables are.
This really doesn't matter because most people are not botanists and those who are probably know the terms. The only people that care are quirky internet people with debates about weather or not potato salad should be considered a cake or something.
"Weather" is a nice ultimate touch
They did. It's Baca. Which means berry. Or maybe cow. Naming stuff is hard
Naming would be easier if we collectively review the names every few years and retire the BS.
That's because the scientific definition of berries has little in common with the colloquial one. That doesn't make either wrong, they are just used in different contexts
Botanical vs culinary.
wait until you hear about vegetables
Just happened last week.
Me: "I don't even want to get started about vegetables. We'll go into it for hours."
Them: "Wait what?"
(Proceeds to go into a long conversation for hours)
Sometimes you feel like a peanut is not a nut!
Sometimes you don't!
I've willfully disregarded botanical terminology every since I learned it.
Bad practice, picking generic terms to define differently.
A berry is a watery, often sweet fruit under 4cm
That is the colloquial definition. The scientific definition of a berry differs a bit.
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Behold - a berty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_tomato
They said often sweet, not...
I can't think of something disgusting to properly describe how much I hate cherry tomatoes.
but what about boo-berry?
Ah! A person of rare and refined taste!
TIL, wow. I mean, to be fair, "berry" is in the damn name, so I never questioned it.
These are lies! This is pumpkin propaganda, spread by the spirit of Halloween.
Pumpkin pie also rarely is made with pumpkin, it's usually squash
Pumpkin pie is always made with squash. Occasionally, those squash are pumpkins
Pumpkin is a squash
Having made pumpkin pies for decades, this is true. Pumpkin is a squash.
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