Octarine

[bloodyrosemccoy]

You know you’re a serious science fiction writer when you find yourself wondering how to look up just what trace impurities in a gemstone would give it an ultraviolet color—so it’d appear colorless to us but be brilliantly shaded to some other species with a different visible spectrum.

Yes, dudes, I take this stuff seriously.

Granted, this may stem from when I was a kid and I would try my damndest to imagine completely new colors. I don’t think it ever quite worked, but I sure did work at it. But it turns out it’s not for lack of wiring, so there’s still hope!

Comments

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Wait, the what now?

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Half-of-the-Women-See-More-Colors-than-the-Rest-of-the-People-58351.shtml

[biomekanic.livejournal.com]

I get the thing with beige, supposedly my car is beige*, but it looks silvery to me. Everyone else says "beige".

*and not "badge" as I first wrote.

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

Yea, I found out about the extra receptor when I asked a friend what color she would call a wall, taupe or a pale aubergine? She replied 'ummmmm beige. Do you see UV or something?'. So I started researching odd ways to see. Lots of them are on the X, and you have one of those :D.

[biomekanic.livejournal.com]

There's a 4th cone mutation:
Red
Green
Blue
and
Red/Green

Centuries ago, back in the early 80s, OMNI had an article about it. They included a color test, I came up positive. It appears that human eyesight is shifting to become more color responsibe for unknown reasons.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Fascinating!

This actually makes me wonder something: I'm guessing I'm not a tetrachromat (though it'd be fun to take a test), but there are some colors I see in my synesthesia that I cannot duplicate outside my head. They're all sorts of bizarre combinations of colors I do see, so I didn't think of them as new colors, but now I'm wondering about that.

There was a synesthete case study who was color blind (they didn't specify what kind of color blindness) and claimed that some of his synesthetic visions were in "Martian colors." So I guess it's more evidence for the wiring.

[ravenofdreams.livejournal.com]

Test is here: http://www.blogadilla.com/2008/06/08/are-you-a-tetrachromat/

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

The color from out of space!