OT Stop signs

[micky]

OT

**How many of you remember when stop signs were yellow, because red faded a lot.

[philoÂÂ]

They were changed to red because red was more visible.

I do remember the yellow ones though....and on a private road near my house there was still a yellow stop sign as recently as about 20 years ago.

BTW: "Stop" was the very first word I ever learned how to read.

I came home one day and asked my parents what P O T S spells.

After they asked me a few questions they realized I was reading a stop sign backwards. I knew the letters but did not know which direction they were supposed to go.

[ItsJoanNotJoann]

They've always been red here and I ain't no kid, either.

[micky]

That's pretty funny. And an insight into how people, at least you, think.

Mine was probably boy, or whatever is first in the first grade reader. I didn't learn much on my own.

[micky]

I don't think so.

How old are you? And where are you?

I think the big cities got red signs earlier than small towns, but since they made yellow until 1954 and I'm sure they used them for years after that (depending on how much money the govt. had to spend on replacement signs) I'll bet even in big cities there were some yellow ones up to

1960.

Here's a picture of a yellow stop sign, obviously taken after the invention of photography:

He doesn't mention red fading, but he does say that yellow and black were quite visible, while red wasn't . He goes on to say that improvements in reflectivity made red more visible than it had been, and that red meant danger and stop, and was the color of stop lights. So I think red fading** was just the best guess of my mother and me why the signs had been yellow. **For example if you leave a street map on your dashboard for 3 to 8 years and you park outside, the red streets will disappear completely, leaving no evidence visible to the eye that they were ever there.

[RobertMacy]

Red is more visible? At night they look black. that's why firetrucks were changed from red TO yellow!

[philoÂÂ]

I was pretty smart when I was a kid, but it did not take me too long to get dumb.

[philoÂÂ]

The secret to having red /not/ look black at night is to drive with your lights on.

I've never seen a yellow fire truck.

Of course I live in Milwaukee and it takes things a bit longer to get here.

[Kurt Ullman]

That is why they have a distinctive shape. Also, FWIW, even color blind people can still see changes in brightness and can (usually) obey stop lights. It would be interesting to see if the change over to LED impacts that at all.

[Ed Pawlowski]

And why they are changing back to red again.

[hah]

[snip]

Plain Old Telephone Service

[Mark Lloyd]

I haven't seen any yellow fire trucks yet. Even the new one the city got last year was red.

Red is a dark color.

I once heard that green was the most visible color at night.

[Stormin Mormon]

The guy on the right, with the black hair:

[Harry K]

When I was a young boy (don't ask, but Jesus was a few grades ahead of me), there was a Donald Duck comic strip that had that and some other words tha t he was reading backwards. I can't recall any of the others though.

Harry

[Harry K]

Happens to all of us, I got dumb when my son was 7 and stayed dumb until he moved out :)

Harry K

[IGot2P]

"Don't" and "Stop" are the two words that I hate the most....unless they are used together. :-)

[Robert Green]

If people can't see a fire truck lit up like a Christmas tree at night - and they all are around here, not sure about elsewhere - they should turn in their license. At night it doesn't matter much what color the truck is. Even in the day, the lights and sirens make the colors sort of irrelevant. I have seen lime green firetrucks in the past, but I suppose they realized that red has been the color of firetrucks since there have been firetrucks and when it was time to buy new ones, they went with "Firetruck Classic." (-: I don't recall seeing any yellow firetrucks lately.

[Doug Miller]

micky wrote in news:dqgfh9dkik6bkq4o75s2758infs0fap266 @4ax.com:

Dunno if I should admit to being this old.... but yes, I remember yellow stop signs, back when I was a kid.

[micky]

What I think is funny is that they're changing the SATs again and ABC evening news, in its infinite wisdom, interviewed some high school kids and they all thought it was good that it would be easier. They grade the SATs on a curve, so they'll probaly still get the same score for the first and now only 800 points.

And today, ABC, which tries to get 2, 3, even 5 days of stories out of every story and even evert piece of videotape they shoot.

ABC touted that the words in the English part will now not include little used words like panegyric, only commonly used words. So how will they tell who is better read than other kids? Probably they'll punish their scores more for making errors on common words, so they'll be testing reliability under pressure instead of knowledge.

I had a big advantage when I took the SATs. I'd been offered algebra in the 8th grade, so I'd had all the math classes by the end of my junior year for any problem on the test. In fact I'd had every problem on the test, just with different numbers. And my mother had a large vocabulary, so even though I didnt' read much, I knew a lot of words. Oh they also had a word list in the 7th, 8th, and 9th grade, and I did my job and learned them all. My mother certainly didn't grow up with money, and neither did I after my father died when I was 8. (He had insurance. We weren't poor either. )

By the time I was first or second year in college I had realized that the Scholastic Aptitude Test did not test aptitude but learning. It's very hard to test aptitude. I wouldn't know how to do it. And about 20 or 30 years, they changed the name to the Scholastic Assessment Test, as it should have been in the first place.

/rant off

[micky]

Those two webpages about red and yellow said that they had increased reflectivity by the time they went to red. Not so much the red but the white letters STOP had reflective stuff.