Needless to say, a few years ago, a teacher 'got into trouble' over the mnemonic.
Yes, I realised the spectrum connection, and have never needed a mnemonic for that - orange looks like it is between red and yellow (as well as possessing 'oranginess'), &c.
I wonder whether people who work with colour a lot, like artists and designers 'see' more distinct colours than the six that most (non colour-blind) 'see', or only if they have extra words for the colours (like teal and indigo).
At school, when we were doing the spectrum, a colour-blind boy said he could only see three colours. I think the teacher told him to shut up.
Components are so tiny these days that I often have difficulty telling orange from red from brown in the tiny bands. And then you have 1% and
2% tolerance resistors so you have to work out which end to start. I often end up using a multimeter. Life was a lot easier when resistors were big chunky things with clearly visible bands, or the old "body tip and dot" ones.
It is alleged that women, on average, can determine finer differences between near-identical colours than men. I've seen tests on web sites where you are presented with several patches of colour, all of them identical apart from one which is very slightly different.
I'm not sure whether the ability to see "that dress on the internet"
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as blue or gold is generally polarised men versus women. For the record, I see it as gold and bluey-white: probably taken in the shade (which tends to be blueish) on a camera that is set for sunlight. Given that the dress is supposed to look like this
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the photo that divided everyone is a spectacularly bad rendition of it and I'm not surprised that so many people saw something different!
When I worked in a chemistry lab as a research assistant in my year off between A levels and university, we were doing a lot of work with adding tracers to proteins - either radioactive or colour-change. My supervisor asked me "are you colour blind?", and when I said I wasn't, he told me about my predecessor who kept getting different colour changes to those reported in scientific papers. Eventually my supervisor looked over this guy's shoulder and found that the colour changes were exactly as expected... but the assistant was reporting them wrongly. "Oh, I'm colour blind - does it matter?" he asked, innocently. Does it matter - just a little ;-)
Apparently the change in UK wiring colours from Red, Black, Green to Brown, Blue, Green-and-Yellow (L, N, E) was partly for the benefit of colour blind electricians: with most forms of colour blindness, the new colours appear differently to each other, whereas the old colours made live and earth appear very similar.
I remember hearing a colour blind person saying that he could not distinguish between red and green traffic lights and had to rely entirely by position, so he had to be extra careful at night when he couldn't see *at a distance* whether there were two unlit lights above the one that he could see was lit, to give context. That's partly why many (all?) traffic lights now have a white rectangular border around the three-light head so you can infer the position of the light that you can see.
those dipped polyxx capacitors that had IIRC red for 250V and yellow for 400V working.
Life was so colourful, now I need a magnifier just to see the surface mount componets.
We get asked to make circuit boards such as.
--------- Please find the attached files for an antenna we would like to fabricate. The design is simple and the holes do not need to be plated. The board thickness is 0.787mm and I will give it to you by today.
Shortly before colour TV started we had a very interesting conversation with our RS rep who revealed that he was colour blind. However, although he couldn't see colour, he could see minor variations that normally sight folk can't.
He said that when he visited Ford's factory at Dagenham he walked past the production line and would often spot a car and think "I don't know what colour it is but some poor beggar is going to by a car with different colour doors to the body!"
This was very useful during the war. He was part of an experiment involving a group of colour blind men and an equal number with normal sight. The RAF took them on a circular flight of Britain that took in several camoflaged sites.
He and his group spotted all of them whereas the other group spotted none!
I had heard something similar; where colour blind cards are setup to catch various groups with certain forms of colour blindness, where a normally sighted person will not see a number of pattern, but one with certain kinds of colour blindness will.
I do find it horrifying that there are people out there driving who can't tell the difference between a green or red light.
Which is why traffic light heads now have a white rectangle around them so the *position* of any of the three lights can be inferred in relation to the rectangle, even if the colour itself is unknown.
Some countries use different shaped lights: eg square for red, diamond for amber, circular for green in Quebec and Nova Scotia provinces, Canada.
Mine are marked like that too but those markings are very difficult to see when selecting a bit from a box or trying to spot what bit there is in a holder.
Yes, I have some stored that way but an aid to quickly selecting the right one would save time.
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