bloodyrosemccoy: (Padparadscha)
bloodyrosemccoy ([personal profile] bloodyrosemccoy) wrote2009-01-22 01:04 pm

Octarine

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!

[identity profile] padparadscha.livejournal.com 2009-01-22 11:03 pm (UTC)(link)
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.

[identity profile] gwalla.livejournal.com 2009-01-23 06:12 am (UTC)(link)
The color from out of space!