Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Tonight was our biweekly meeting of the Bainbridge Island Geeks, a local gathering of software types on the island. We've been working our way through Josh Kerievsky's "Refactoring to Patterns", but we didn't quite get to it tonight, in part because turnout was a little bit light, and in part because we got sidetracked onto other things.
One of the other things that I got sidetracked into was a long discussion and exploration of color settings on the Mac. Sarah was complaining about the differences between colors on Macs versus Windows and Linux, so Rick sat down to give her (and me, inadvertently) a lesson on computers and colors. During the course of the lesson, we ended up creating several color profiles for Sarah's Powerbook. Sarah was switching back and forth between profiles, and she and Rick were commenting on the differences that they saw under the various profiles. I was watching along, but at a certain point, I just could not see a difference between the two profiles under consideration. I moved so that I was looking at the LCD straight on, and then I stuck my face quite close to the screen while Sarah toggled back and forth between the profiles. I just could not see any difference whatsoever.
Early on when we got married, Julie used to tease me about being color-blind. While I'm not color-blind (I can see colors), the whole experience has left me feeling "color-impaired". My eyes seem to be lacking a certain amount of color resolution, because I just could not see what Sarah (and Rick) were talking about.
Posted by David Dorward at Fri Mar 11 01:45:20 2005
It's interesting that you're discovering this so late in life. As a kid my Kindergarten teacher discovered me coloring in black when I was supposed to be coloring in red. (I couldn't understand why all the fuss). Your experience confirms my belief that this is a continuum. Have you tried the tests? (numbers in circles)
The funny thing is, I've traced this back in my family a few generations and found no one else who is color blind. It's a sex linked gene - the rules for inheritance are awfully specific. My two brothers have a 50% chance of being color blind, and one is. Same probility for my 4 maternal uncles. But here the trail fades - none are color blind. (or at least no one admits it). And no one remembers the previous generation being color blind either.
In general, it's not a big deal. Outside of the occasional embarassing comment the most serious consequence is that in bright light a red stoplight looks black. But then, you shouldn't be driving straight through a dead stoplight anyway.
Posted by Will at Fri Mar 11 10:04:29 2005
http://www.toledo-bend.com/colorblind/Ishihara.html
There wikipedia link above has another set.
Posted by Andrew at Sat Mar 12 13:40:04 2005
Red was the obvious choice for the points highest in altitude. I used green way down near the bottom of the legend, not because I was trying to create a "green grass in the ocean valley" image, but because the standard green color on the display was one of the dimmest colors to me. I put blue next after red, since it was the next brightest color to me.
As soon as one of my colleagues saw me demo the system and explain the color scale that I had chosen, he had me take the Ishihara test. I was 25 years old then, and this was the first time I was aware that I had any degree of color vision deficiency whatsoever.
After discovering that I had deuteranopia, I took a look in my closet. I had a very large number of blue shirts, and only one green shirt. I still have disagreements with my wife over whether something is green or brown, though I know I'm always wrong. Before I buy any clothes that I think are brown, though, I always check with her. No point in looking like I'm trying to dress up for St. Patrick's Day all the time.
The test for deuteranopia on the Wikipedia color_blindness page is pretty good. While I can barely make out what appears to be some faint wisps of green in that image, I don't see anything in it that looks even remotely like a number. I can quite easily see the digits in all the other images.
Posted by Robert Stewart at Sun Mar 13 00:40:17 2005
Posted by Ted Leung at Tue Mar 15 01:02:46 2005
Posted by Jonathan at Tue Mar 15 10:50:08 2005
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