Empirical Zeal

I recommend this reading: https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of-the-world…

Great Radiolab episode. On a related note, the Crayola-fication of the world [1] and XKCD color survey [2] 1. http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of-the-wo… 2. http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

I found both really interesting. Whereas the xkcd article (http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/) goes into some detail into one experiment, the original article has a wider scope and touches on several experiments, the xkcd experiment being one of them. Also interesting is the follow-up article about how language is used by the brain to distinguish between different colours (http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/11/the-crayola-fication-of-the-wo…

Indeed, Part 1 of this post was all about that, and is definitely worth reading too. http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of-the-wo…

This is the article I remember reading about the linguistical evolution of distinguishing different colors that discusses it well and shows examples in different cultures http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of-the-wo…

Reminds me of one of the first articles I ever saved to Pocket (when it was still called Read It Later) - The crayola-fication of the world *http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of-the-wo…

Woohoo! They’re using the image I rendered a few years ago of the world color survey chart (http://www.empiricalzeal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/wcs-chart-4x.p… instead of the old photograph everyone used to use (http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/grid.jpg), which was extremely misleading.

"The population is not uniform, yet our sample is? SOMETHING IS WRONG." http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/12/21/what-does-randomness-look-like… Finding a cluster doesn't necessitate a bias.

The problem with building massive hypothesis on human cognition based on findings like http://www.empiricalzeal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/reactiontimele… is that there's no mention of just how many folks actually participated in the study. Much of 'evolutionary psychology' is based on really complicated mathematical models fit to very small samples, or no sample at all, expanded upon by lengthy blocks of meandering prose. Just-so stories are a literary genre, not a science.

If you read any Chinese/Japanese literature, for example Buddhist or zen texts, it is very common to encounter very weird uses of the words blue or green-- because they mean things that somebody used to these distinct categories will classify nature according to these boxes. Trees are green, bodies of water blue -- even if that is more complex than that, some pines can be very blue, rivers or lakes can be much greener than blue, etc. Some translators avoid this issue by always using the term "blue/green", which is really awkward, and I couldn't find any explanation for it before learning about "the crayola-ification of the world" [0]. Before I thought that was a poetic literary device. It is really hard not to think of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis when learning about this. At the same time, taoist philosophy tends to point out that misery comes from our mind's discriminating eye; everything is categorized in boxes, good and bad, concept and not-concept. Maybe having more categories is better from a technical standpoint, but more difficult to handle from a spiritual standpoint? At the same time, this spiritual view tend to see man as needing to overcome his beastly nature, and thus this added technical discrimination is not burden since it is simply part of the path towards a higher level of consciousness? [0] https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of-the-world…

This post was really interesting and made me think a bit differently about color names (I think to an even deeper extend than the xkcd survey post from a couple years ago). I also found the first comment [1] quite interesting, namely this part: For example, ao in Japanese comes from the dye plant, ai, which as a dyestuff covers the whole of the blue-green portion of the spectrum. Some cultures have what might at first seem to be peculiarly chosen "basic" color names until you learn their associations with the culture's central food sources or dye plants, or precious commodities. The color name that covers both blue and green in many native languages of the American Southwest is also the name for the stone, turquoise. (In cultures where a staple food is poisonous when green and edible when red, you can be sure there are names for green and red.) In our own history, we have a very similar example to the "blue" traffic lights of Japan: "orange" didn't enter English as a color name until the 16th century, after the fruit itself was first brought to England, quite late in the evolution of our color vocabulary, which is why we still refer to "red" hair. [1] http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of-the-wo…

You say "mature", I say "reached the limits of efficient flight in 1963" (http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/10/12/can-we-build-a-more-efficient-… We're nowhere near what we can do with computing, but we are with airplanes. Safe, cheaper and boring may be an artifact of the physics of flight in Earth's atmosphere, combined with an intertwined US defense and aerospace industry. Why should we let corporate and government interests "unring" the general computing bell? Why should we let corporate and government interests stuff the genie of democratic publishing back in the lamp? General purpose computing hardware got super cheap by way of the mass market, and mass production. General purpose programming got cheap and universally available by way of mass communication. In 1983 a C compiler on VMS cost some thousands of dollars. Today, GCC and Clang and Pcc are free, and they do optimizations that Tartan Labs could only dream about. That's a hugely different path than the carefully-cultivated air travel industry took. I think you're underestimating the effects of the FAA and the DoD on how air travel looks today.