The Sense of Joy

Beachcombing with my big sister and everything green

Your eyeballs, that’s the sense I’m talking about.

The world through Green colored glasses

We see millions of colors and yeah taste is pretty great and smell too and I know there are five senses but lets stick with those three for now because I can’t remember the other two. Touch? Is touch a sense? Ok I hear you screaming so yes hearing and - just looked it up - touch indeed is #5.

But vision is hands down, sense numero uno. Our eyeballs provide the primary source of info to our brains, painting our world around us and bringing us joy.

Babies start off only seeing black and white. Like Racoons used to the night life baby, they can’t see colors … yet. Can you remember when you started seeing colors? Of course you can’t, because you were 3 months old. By the time you’re one year old you get all the colors. You can’t beat baby life for new and amazing stuff coming your way every single day.

I know you remember your favorite color and I wonder if it’s still your favorite color? Mines green. I bet you picked yours out when you were a kid. These are major life decisions when you’re a kid and they become a core part of your identity along with how old you are and your favorite food and your best friend. These are the cornerstones of playdate dialog.

Last week I was up in Oregon with my big sister and she showed me a bottle of sea stones we collected out of tide pools when we were kids. I insisted they all be green and even though Peggy’s favorite color was/is purple, she obliged 💚

Other animals favor other senses. Like smell. If you’ve ever walked a dog you know what I’m talking about. A dog’s sense of joy is their snozzle which can smell 1000X better than ours. Dog vision - not so good. They see 2/3 of the colors we do. We have vision receptors or cones that pickup Blue, Green and Red. Dogs just Blue and Yellow. No Green, SAD.

We don’t even have the best vision around. Shrimp do. Yep shrimp. Shrimp have twelve types of vision receptors versus our three and they can see light outside the visible spectrum like Ultraviolet. Not the first time Tech Tales has talked up UV - the light waves that come after the shortest light waves at end of our visible spectrum. Remember the EXTREME UV machines at the heart of making ever smaller computer chips in Chip Wars?

I will always love green - remember my green Mac in A Bicycle for the Mind?

One day, I must’ve been around 10, my choice of green was called into question. Peggy and I were lying on the floor of my dad’s office at the foot of a tall bookshelf, paging through a LIFE Sciences encyclopedia book on the body. That whole bookshelf was full of reference books our parents had assembled to feed our growing minds, but the LIFE series had as many pictures as words and so those were always the first ones we pulled out.

We happened on the Ishihara Color Tests, a page of images like this:

You should see a 74; I barely see a 21

Honestly I can barely make out the 21 and 74 - well I can’t see anything resembling the number 74 in this picture. My mom and dad were consulted, the family assembled and we all had fun guessing the numbers and not believing I couldn’t see the ones they saw. Turns out I’m red-green colorblind.

At first I was worried because ‘blind’ sounds bad when we’re talking about the best sense. But colorblind really means the red and green cones in your eyes are just a little off kilter from the norm. So, it’s not like I don’t see Green, I just see it differently than most people. It’s impossible to explain because it’s still just Green to me. People always ask me to describe it, but it’s like explaining how a banana tastes … err like a banana?

Just don’t try hiding in the forest from me in your thrifted Carhartt camo outfit - I WILL find you.

Your camo does not fool me

We can create all the colors digitally now. Using the same Red/Green/Blue model as our eyes, every pixel on a screen can do 256 variations of each primary color for over 16 million colors¹.

Digital color hasn’t been this good for long and it wasn’t so long ago that everything was Black & White.

Remember my old green Mac? It has the cutest little black and white CRT screen that can show you all the shades of grey. The screen is 9” diagonally and that’s 512 pixels wide by 342 pixels high so it can show pictures with over 175 thousand points.

Apple shipped their first color monitor a few years after my Mac. Go to the store today and get yourself a new 32” UHD screen - that’ll get you over 8 million pixels, each one capable of showing you millions of amazing colors.

Before my Mac I was an avid amateur B&W photographer in High School complete with a mad scientist darkroom beneath a big trap door down in the basement. Trays of chemicals, eerie red lights, monster B&W enlarger machine - the works. Digital color photography swept away the B&W photo industry with amazing ways to take/edit/print images in color.

Before my darkroom, my mom was a Dodgers fan. Before my mom was a Dodgers fan we had a B&W TV. When the Dodgers made the playoffs in 1974 we got a color TV. There’s no Dodger Blue in B&W!

Wirepine Digital is all about the greens. Revel in the resplendent official Wirepine Green button AKA #2D5B65

Stay with me for a minute - the story behind that number is interesting.

The shortest way to represent colors digitally is with a 6 digit Hexadecimal number like #2D 5B 65 and it all goes back to our eyeballs full of Red, Green and Blue cones or photoreceptors. Hex is a base-16 numbering system that uses 0-9 and A-F to represent 16 values. Correspondingly, the number is composed of three pairs representing Red, Green and Blue. Each pair represents one primary color with 256² possible variations like so: RR, GG, BB. For example #00FF00 is no red, no blue and end of the green slider resulting in Lime green, kissing cousin to Nike’s favorite green Volt which has the teeniest bit of red in it #CEFF00.

The secret to better tech is getting closer to the Human Experience. Rich digital color is amazing. In a different way, AI is amazing because all of a sudden you’re having a freewheeling conversation with a computer.

Whatever will we think of next? While you wait, go outside - or sit in front of your new UHD monitor - and get your joy on 🌿

best, Andrew

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Postscript

I was reminded by somebody I promised a shirt too, on behalf of all the other people I promised shirts too, that I am lagging.

Motivate me! What color do you fancy?

If you want something else comment below or send me a snarky email andrew@wirepine.com.

1. 256³

2. 16²