[lit-ideas] Re: It's not the color it's the Humemidity
- From: Andy <mimi.erva@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2009 05:14:31 -0700 (PDT)
Turns out nature is both transcendental and practical. Colors in the natural
world are as you say, wavelengths of the sun. They're also outright pigments
that offer plants (those repositories of sunlight) protection from predators
(and help ensure reproduction by attracting mates and/or pollinators).
Humans have to artificially create unnatural pigments antithetical to life in
the form of paints and dyes that are horrifically polluting. In the little
addendums to Leonardo DiCaprio's 11th Hour the biologist talks about human
goals (some few humans' goals) to harness life's ability to clean itself
without surfactants (a dirty leaf can't do photosynthesis ), and to color our
world without artificial paints by using reflected light technology. Something
tells me it's not going to happen until pollution gets catastrophic, which it's
close to being; one out of every three American children today has either ADHD,
asthma or food allergies, the result of unnatural proteins introduced into the
food system in 1994 to aid and abet factory farming. Autism in children today
is a veritable epidemic, credited to pollution (possibly bis-phenol A plastics
among other things).
And speaking of transcendental, is it true that Thoreau caused a huge forest
fire when at Walden Pond? Anybody care to color my world with some information
on that?
Andy
--- On Fri, 7/3/09, Mike Geary <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm confused. We all know there's no such thing as color, there's just varying
wavelengths of reflected light. Names given to specific wavelengths are
totally arbitrary as is the choice of wavelength band to which that name
applies. There's no reason not to call all the visible wavelength "blue". It
you can see it, it's blue. But we have found it useful to ascribe arbitrary
names to arbitrary bands of wavelengths. And, of course, what "color" one sees
-- such as the green of grass -- is an outright lie, grass isn't green,
the wavelength corresponding to what we call green is the wavelength that grass
rejects, throws off, dispenses with -- green is grass's trash wavelengths of
electromagnetic radiation. Be glad it's not orange.
Here's my question. We live analog lives but we know that physics is
discrete. As an analog being I give wide berth to the blues. Were I a
physicist, I can imagine denying any "shades of blue" in favor of claiming each
discrete wavelength within the " blue" wavelength band a different color,
however many hundreds, thousands, millions that might be wouldn't matter,
precision matters in physics. But I'm not a physicist, thank God, and never
could be given my propensities, nor a philosopher and never could be given
my lackadasicalness. But this question seems to me to transcend physics and
philosophy. It's about interior decoration.
Mike Geary
Memphis
Other related posts:
