LtStorm (10:50pm Sun, May 24, 2009)

Bunny (10:33pm Sun, May 24, 2009)

It still freaks me out that nothing is holding planets up - visibly.....what about space?!

Anthropocentric viewpoint again.  Since space itself has no gravity, you must recall that there's no need to hold things floating through it up.   

That's even scarier..... have you seen balloons just EXPLODE MID AIR?! Not to mention that's clear sky, just pressure......space has huge ROCKS and stuff whizzing around it!

Quote

Bunny (10:33pm Sun, May 24, 2009)

* Bunny suddenly feels very small and vulnerable and hopes the planet doesnt suddenly "drop" *

You wouldn't notice if it did.  Well, until the Sun grew tiny and the planet grew cold. 

Hopefully too many G's for my body .

Quote

Bunny (10:33pm Sun, May 24, 2009)

But seriously, space is black when it's just space.

Right, but that's an empty vacuum.  Space is not an empty vacuum.  There's lots of things flying around it, especially energy-wise.  Totally empty vacuums don't naturally exist.

Wait, that's like me saying the sky IS white, because hell, it isnt empty either

Quote

Bunny (10:33pm Sun, May 24, 2009)

Just because you can average light doesnt mean it is that colour - besides, we cannot truly measure space (surely?)

What?  Measure what about space accurately?

Its expanse. We can't measure infinity. Therefore we can't ACCURATELY measure how full of light it really is to get a colour.

Quote

Bunny (10:33pm Sun, May 24, 2009)

so how do we know what we're averaging it against. We don't even know how many light emitting things are out there yet...

...Averaging it against?  What do you mean "averaging it against"?  While we don't know how many light emitting sources there are out there, nor have we seen all of them, we know the average distribution of the ones we have seen, and that's what was taken as the average.  Unless the parts of space we haven't seen deviate drastically from what we expect (and I do mean drastically), there's no reason to expect the average color of the universe to change significantly from beige.  It'd require we found a source of a single, or couple, of colors of light that drastically outweighed that of the trillions of the stars we've already seen. 

There could be some reeeeeally empty or overcrowded parts out there...

Bunny (12:21am Mon, May 25, 2009)

That's even scarier..... have you seen balloons just EXPLODE MID AIR?! Not to mention that's clear sky, just pressure......space has huge ROCKS and stuff whizzing around it!

...Are you being intentionally obtuse?

Balloons are held together by the surface tension of the material they're made out of, and inflated by an overpressure inside of it that is greater than that of the atmosphere surrounding them.  Earth's atmosphere is adhered to it by gravity.  The entire planet is a lesson in density.  The most dense portions (rocks, other minerals) sit at the bottom, with the next most dense (water) resting on top of it, and the least dense (air) sitting on top of that.  Of course, on such a large scale there are forces that churn these up on local settings, but overall it holds true.

And yes, there are plenty of huge rocks whizzing about through space.  But most that were going to hit the Earth have already done so at some point in its 4.6 billion history.  We've made enough revolutions around Sol at this point that we've vacuumed up most of the debris that'd get in our way.

Bunny (12:21am Mon, May 25, 2009)

Hopefully too many G's for my body .

Well, there might be, as it'd take a total suspension of the Laws of Physics for the Earth to drop suddenly.

Bunny (12:21am Mon, May 25, 2009)

Wait, that's like me saying the sky IS white, because hell, it isnt empty either

But the sky is blue.  For most of the day.  Because it absorbs orange light, and thus appears as the complementary color of orange, which is blue.  It appears as pink/orange/red in the morning and evening because of the sharp angle the sun is hitting it at relative to us, but that's getting deeper into optics.  Either way, the sky isn't white.  Its constituents appear as blue primarily.

Bunny (12:21am Mon, May 25, 2009)

Its expanse. We can't measure infinity. Therefore we can't ACCURATELY measure how full of light it really is to get a colour.

Current theory holds that the universe isn't infinite.  While we can't "accurately" measure it, we can come up with a very good approximation based on what we know thus far about the universe.  If we do stumble upon something that drastically changes this approximation, then, hey, we learned something new.

Bunny (12:21am Mon, May 25, 2009)

There could be some reeeeeally empty or overcrowded parts out there...

Doesn't matter how much empty space there is.  As that's...empty space, and isn't generating any light, it doesn't contribute to the color of the universe, other than I guess dulling the luminosity if you want to consider that too.  Either way, there's already a name for overcrowded parts of the universe; galaxies.

What was this debate about again?

LtStorm (03:03am Mon, May 25, 2009)

...Are you being intentionally obtuse?

Intentioanlly obtuse, sorry lol.
I know how balloons are and etc, I'm good.


But the rocks and stuff I was serious about. Didnt we have some sort of meteor shower or two earlier in the year? I dunno how big those rocks are, but it is scary to think that sometime there could be one big enough to really take us out.

Quote

Bunny (12:21am Mon, May 25, 2009)

Its expanse. We can't measure infinity. Therefore we can't ACCURATELY measure how full of light it really is to get a colour.

Current theory holds that the universe isn't infinite.  While we can't "accurately" measure it, we can come up with a very good approximation based on what we know thus far about the universe.  If we do stumble upon something that drastically changes this approximation, then, hey, we learned something new.

Sort of like how we measured density and population in biology? Cut out a square and counted the dots so to speak? I don't know how accurate that is, to be honest.

Quote

Bunny (12:21am Mon, May 25, 2009)

There could be some reeeeeally empty or overcrowded parts out there...

Doesn't matter how much empty space there is.  As that's...empty space, and isn't generating any light, it doesn't contribute to the color of the universe, other than I guess dulling the luminosity if you want to consider that too.  Either way, there's already a name for overcrowded parts of the universe; galaxies.

What about the asteroid belt? Isnt that all overcrowded with rock?

Look what I found:

It's beige

Lilienthal (09:36am Mon, May 25, 2009)

What was this debate about again?

Lol I could split it

I am on the side of black and white You can go all white or all black and you standout. Even in art I prefer black and white over colors. Black and white are just very, very bold to me. 

I guess it depends on whether you're talking about light or pigmentation (like paints or crayons).

If we're talking about light, white is all the colors. We can't say the same about paints being all the colors mixed in and turning white. In light, it's only "white" and "lack of parts of white". Pigmentation treats both as colors, though. White and black mix and behave just like any pigmented medium, so to say "it's a shade, not a color" kind of comes off as a little pedantic.

But I say...if you can see it, name a visual aspect like that, then yes it is a color. Black is a color. White is a color.

It's sort of like insisting that cold doesn't exist, because cold is the absence of heat. Somebody who's freezing to death should have a right to say that it's cold.

Or asking, "What's your favorite flavor of ice cream? Frozen cream doesn't count because it's not flavored." If you can taste it, that's a flavor.

Why bother asking if you're just going to put limitations on what people can say, and how they express their experience? Do you want to get to know somebody better, or not? Is this just like a poll or a census for research and you can't abide anybody introducing variables in a number-crunching task? That last bit, I can understand.

In any art class you will ever have, or take on any level of schooling, the teacher will tell you that black is a shade and white is a tint.  Outside of the art world I'm not sure it much matters because people will continue to call them both colors.

I like to do things the old fashioned way and mix my own colors when I paint. I have the Primary colors and a tin of black and white for lightening the colour or darkening it.

Anyhoo, that's my twopence worth on the subject.

hoodoowytch (03:25pm Fri, Jun 20, 2014)

In any art class you will ever have, or take on any level of schooling, the teacher will tell you that black is a shade and white is a tint.  Outside of the art world I'm not sure it much matters because people will continue to call them both colors.

I like to do things the old fashioned way and mix my own colors when I paint. I have the Primary colors and a tin of black and white for lightening the colour or darkening it.

Anyhoo, that's my twopence worth on the subject.

Ooh, actually, I read somewhere that even considering pigments rather than light, we've been doing primaries wrong all along. The real primary colors aren't red, blue, and yellow. They're magenta, cyan, and yellow.

I suppose the casual color-seer would consider magenta just another sort of red and cyan just another sort of blue, but apparently they create much purer colors when mixed than what we've been taught in kindergarten.

In the language of computer programming, I just adore hex codes. They behave exactly like light, with higher values closer to white and lower values closer to less light, that is--black. There are six digits in a hex color code. Once I figured out that the six digits stood for RGB with two digits for R, two digits for G, and two digits for B (Red, Green, and Blue, the sections of a rainbow!) and that the first two stood for magenta and yellow (which make red), the second two stood for yellow and cyan (which make green) and the third two stand for cyan and magenta (which make blue), then it all became much easier. Whoever thought the hex code system up was really cool, because it's become very intuitive.

And, on a website, I'd count white and black as colors because the coding for those has to be present in the program that's running.

Wow, Bravebluemice, I have never heard of anyone who couldn't see ANY colours. That has to suck. 

I can't imagine seeing the world in only black and white. That just sounds so weird. I bet learning your colors in school was real bitch. The closest I can come to imagining such a thing is to watch any of those old black and white movies or TV shows. 

Kind of sad really...although I suppose gory stuff doesn't look quite as bad. I could see where lack of ability to see or distinguish color could make a job in forensics a little less gruesome.