I got hue 174 as my threshold and really I just wanted to say "neither, this is turquoise/teal" for most of the questions. But blue/green was the only option.
I got hue 175. It's interesting to note that some older cultures, Japan for example, didn't always have separate words for blue and green, both were the same color ("ao" in Japanese). You can see the effects of this even today with things like traffic lights in Japan, which are considered "green" by their standards but blue by many others' standards.
There are also other cultures, such as Russia, where light blue / dark blue (simplification) are effectively considered separate colors.
All this to say, personally, I think we will continue to evolve to recognize more distinct "colors" such as teal, which is neither blue nor green but somewhere between. A lot of this recognition power is rooted in linguistics and culture, it's not as strictly biological as one might think.
Thanks for this comment! I dabble in fountain pens a bit, and one of my favorite inks is "ao" by Taccia.
Now it all makes sense (tho, to my eye it's kind of a blurple–royal blue; I get no green or teal from it. But, now I'm tempted to go do a blotter of it and look at it extra carefully in natural light.)
In Russian light blue is “blue” and dark blue is “indigo” essentially. It still has seven colors in the rainbow. It’s just that in English colloquially nobody uses indigo.
Yes, well that's what I mean. Culturally, Russians think and speak about colors differently, dividing them up differently than the West.
> Russian does not have a single word referring to the whole range of colors denoted by the English term "blue". Instead, it traditionally treats light blue (голубой, goluboy) as a separate color independent from plain or dark blue (синий, siniy), with all seven "basic" colors of the spectrum (red–orange–yellow–green–голубой/goluboy (sky blue, light azure, but does not equal cyan)–синий/siniy ("true" deep blue, like synthetic ultramarine)–violet) while in English the light blues like azure and cyan are considered mere shades of "blue" and not different colors.
> Blue: plava (indicates any blue) and modra; in the eastern speaking areas modra indicates dark blue, in some of the western areas it may indicate any blue
I am not deeply knowledgeable on Russian, I failed Russian in high school, just going off of my surface-level knowledge of linguistic relativity regarding color, and discussions with a friend from that part of the world, so I might not know what I'm talking about here.
That’s a bit complicated. The difference between синий and голубой is not really a difference in hue, it’s a difference in brightness.
It tends to be true that hues tending towards green are perceived more brightly than hues tending towards red, which means that blues with more green in them are more likely to be голубой, but by virtue of the fact they are perceived to be brighter.
But in principle, the line is drawn horizontally on the colour chart (or at least diagonally), not vertically.
The color name question here doesn't have a clear answer because most of the respondents would call this "teal", "blue–green", "turqoise", "cyan", "aqua", or some similar name. You'd get somewhat similar results asking whether an orange (the fruit) is really "red" or "yellow", or whether an eggplant is really "blue" or "red".
An individual person's answers on this kind of question are likely to vary from day to day, are context dependent (i.e. whether one object or another appears more "green" or "blue" depends on what kind of object it is), and colors this intense are very sensitive to changes in eye adaptation and technical details of the display and software, as well as inter-observer metamerism.
So in addition to the color naming difficulties, it's not even a very good test of color naming, if you want to get reliable psychometric/linguistic data.
For a single individual, all of the above is true, but for a large enough sample size, the answers may be more generally useful because you account for all of those rounding errors.
No, because if my case holds more genera (and I suspect it does), the answers are in part out of sheer frustration, and therefore prone to being similar to the last one given.
I didn't exactly rage quit but did think it was silly.
I wouldn't describe teal as blue or green any more than I'd describe purple as red or blue, so being forced to pick felt silly. Like being forced to choose my seventh favorite Norwegian glacier - technically its a valid question but my answer is necessarily going to be arbitrary.
That’s like asking which way a Necker cube is oriented. It’s both and neither. For blue and green, there’s a range of shades for which that ambiguity is true and you can “flip” it in your mind.
I would actually find it more practical to determine the thresholds on both sides where I find it to become ambiguous.
Not as far as I can tell. The phrasing of the question test does not acknowledge such ambiguity to start with, and by forcing them to answer one way or the other the test does not allow the users to signal perceived ambiguity even if they wanted to.
So how could the point of this exercise possibly be to find the range of ambiguity?
Fun, I got 174 and when I saw the results my reaction was "but that is not turquoise!" which I suppose means I either don't know what turquoise is, or my screen has bad calibration/gamut.
I don't think those specs make a difference. You would need a wide gamut display and a hardware calibrator to be sure you were looking at the colour as it should be
That wasn't clearly part of the test. To be ultra-pedantic (this is HN after all), the user's choices don't say "This is more-blue-than-green" and "This is more-green-than-blue". The choices are only "This is green" and "This is blue" forcing you to just pick one, where there is no clearly correct choice. When the color on the screen is neither green nor blue, many people will just pick a random answer.
I bet if the choices actually said "This is more green than blue" the results would be different.
Turqoise doesn't feel either more-green-than-blue or more-blue-than-green. It feels neither blue nor green, and I don't see any way to compare it to either.
It's clearly more turqoise than blue. Or green.
Turqoise on a computer monitor is always missing part of itself, so maybe I should've answered based on that, but I don't think the computer monitor was the point.
180 and blue and I suspect that language also plays a part (I was brought up in an environment where the word turquoise starts with green, but now live in a turquoise-producing state where the finished product look far blue-r.)
it looks like my default is if there is 40% green in that it is green. Thus it told me that turquoise for me is green. Which if I look at Turquoise the RGB color, that is green. If I look at Turquoise the mineral about half the time it is green and half the time blue.
Logically, a color, green etc., is a 'simple' notion and cannot be explained terms of anything simpler. With color we have to revert to a different description, here wavelength. But wavelength is not human perception (and we can't explain such perception in simpler terms).
(Yes in New York and Indiana, no in Massachusetts, and the law is silent elsewhere. Personally I believe that because the torta exists, the burrito may have some characteristics of a sandwich but should be considered a wrap)
There are also other cultures, such as Russia, where light blue / dark blue (simplification) are effectively considered separate colors.
All this to say, personally, I think we will continue to evolve to recognize more distinct "colors" such as teal, which is neither blue nor green but somewhere between. A lot of this recognition power is rooted in linguistics and culture, it's not as strictly biological as one might think.