pickI enjoyed this; although it did feel a bit disjointed at times, eventually I got into it and it get easier to keep reading. Some fascinating history of pigments and ways of thinking about color.
My #bookspin for February - or actually I think it was my #doublespin ?
pickA fascinating book of popular science that begins 400 million years ago with the geological forces that made titanium and ends with futuristic colours that exist only in our heads. (Pixar mind manipulation! 🤯) Across the centuries, people have worked hard to widen our art palette & solve the puzzle of colour vision—Newton even stuck a giant needle in his eye for the sake of knowledge—and Adam Rogers has an engaging way of writing about it.
Nobody makes colours alone. Nobody sees them without a context, without a contrast or a constant, without geology and biology and history and chemistry and physics. We all make colours together.
[…] we just have to tacitly agree that when I say “blue” you know what I mean […]. Colours may be less about cognition and more about communication.
The single most important thing that determined how you saw The Dress was how your brain identified, unconsciously, the colour of the light illuminating the image—maybe even what time of day you thought the picture was taken. The Dress undermined or outright broke almost every assumption scientists had about colour constancy and the daylight bias of human vision.
I remember the buzz about the dress when it was posted on Buzzfeed in 2015. Just like the author, I initially couldn‘t understand why the fuss… the dress was so obviously blue & black. And then my sweetie looked at me strangely (like, was I blind?) and pronounced with certainty that the dress was white and gold. Adam Rogers wrote about the dress in Wired; he says over 38 million people read it. Me included.
Palmer basically made an informed guess and nailed the mechanism of colour vision: trichromacy, a retina with three photoreceptors sensitive to three different kinds of light. It was the first time anyone had connected the physical world of light, the chemical world of colour, and the biological world of the eye and brain.
The cargo of the Belitung wreck redefined the history of colours as commodities, their materiality & technology as valuable as gold, silk, or spices. The way people made & used those colours was the era‘s highest of high tech. And the delivery mechanism was literally hardware, the killer app of the day: porcelain.
(Photo of some pieces retrieved from the Belitung wreck, c 826 CE)
Carbon‘s ability to stick to all kinds of other atoms in all kinds of ways is what makes “organic chemistry” organic. Be grateful for carbon‘s profligacy; that‘s life, as the saying goes.
The first half of the 18th century saw the publication of […] Denis Diderot‘s 39-volume Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers. The whole point was to get knowledge about practical colour and colour science to a wider audience.
[39 VOLUMES ABOUT COLOUR!]
We learn to see, and then we learn to create, and then we learn more about how we see from what we‘ve created. It‘s a grand oscillation between seeing and understanding.
In 1859, the novelist Charles Dickens decided to use his fortune to make explicit the radical political and economic subtext of his stories. He started a magazine, All the Year Round, and made himself a columnist. As a journalist myself, let me say that this is a good scam.
You‘ve probably heard of other Chinese inventions—gunpowder, movable type, the needle compass, paper money. Porcelain predated all of that, and was every bit as important, technologically and culturally as significant, as silk and ink. Northern white and southern celadon were two of China‘s greatest exports, the products of an almost magical technology.
(Internet photo)
Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern | 
