April 18
I'd opened the window last night because it was so nice out and I was glad I had. Over the winter the dorm got kind of stale, but now there was a nice fresh breeze coming through and the first thing I did was stick my muzzle up to the window and got a good sniff of the air outside. Then I got dressed in my flight gear and took off.
I wasn't all that far above the trees before I did my first loop. Then I flew over the neighborhood to Aric's house but his truck wasn't there and that worried me a little bit. I tried to put it aside; I knew machines broke sometimes and maybe Winston had but he was clever and probably could have fixed it.
I shouldn't have looked, because that bothered me on my whole morning flight and on my way back I flew over his house again and it still wasn't there.
Peggy still wasn't back, either. She probably would have had her boyfriend take her right to class, unless she had a duffel bag like the one that she took to the resort, then she would want to leave that in our room. Or maybe it was still in the trunk of her car.
It was no good getting worked up so I tried to push them to the back of my mind and worry about the now. At breakfast, I wasn’t being very social until Christine started stealing little bits of everybody's food to build a little display on her tray. She had a wall made out of shredded wheat and a house of toast and a path made out of bacon where the sausage link worms could travel. Then she brought down her fork and stabbed one and ate it and said that she now understood what it was to be a god.
Christine is a very strange person.
She cheered me up enough that I forgot all about Peggy and Aric for most of breakfast and didn't start thinking about them again until math class. And then I had to push it aside again because we were still talking about Lorenz Equations and how important they were. Instead of using the markerboard, he lowered a movie screen and showed us pictures of the equations being drawn out, and that really helped to explain how it worked and how the spirals formed on their own eigenplanes, because you could actually watch the lines being drawn and see how they were behaving.
Where it really helped was when he started changing the values, which changed the spirals. At some point he said that if they went out they would intersect and he showed us a picture of them which looked like two interconnected loops. But what was really neat was how when he showed us a movie of the lines being made and they made their own spirals for a while and then suddenly started looping around the central point on the other side.
When he explained how that system worked in water, my ears suddenly perked up. He said that if you imagined a big sphere of water with a heater on the bottom and a cooler on the top, and just then it clicked for me why the spirals would do this, because air was the same way and the hot air wanted to go up and the cold air wanted to go down but it got complicated because one blocked the other, so one went one way and the other went the other way and there were all sorts of eddy currents and stuff where the two interacted and that was what the equation was about.
Then he took his neat little graph-maker and showed us how the most minor difference would make different results—but they were predictably different. The two lines started off the same and then they got different after a little while, but no matter what they always wound up together on the two eigenplanes. That, he told us, was called sensitive dependence on initial condition, and he said in our next class he was going to explain to us how we couldn't measure the initial condition.
Peggy was back for lunch and I wanted to ask her if she'd seen the dreamcatcher I made for her but I didn't because maybe she didn't like it and was too nice to say anything so I thought I'd wait until she said something about it, but she didn't. I couldn't tell if that meant she didn't like it or if that meant that she hadn't seen it yet.
She told Christine that her boyfriend had taken her to the Great Wolf Lodge, which has an indoor waterpark. From her description, it sounded like it would be a very fun place to go. It was way up near the top of Michigan at a place called Traverse City and I knew that there was a big bridge near there called the Mackinac Bridge and I asked her if she had seen it and she told me it was too far away for her to see from Traverse City.
Professor Amy talked more about language relativism, explaining how color was named in different languages, and said that there were people who had entire careers just thinking about that. She gave us all a list of colors in English and said that the simple thought would be that they translated directly but that wasn't the case at all. Some languages considered blue and green two different colors, and some thought that they were the same, and the English word for the combined color (because English makes them different colors) was grue. So there were languages like Vietnamese where you had leaf grue and ocean grue. Then she said that there were other splits, like in Russian where light blue and dark blue were two completely different words, but in English they weren't.
I left class confused. Colors were colors; how could there not be the right words to name them? Who was in charge of coming up with a language that didn't know the difference between colors? I guess that Professor Amy's explanations made sense, but it still seemed like an oversight to me. You'd think that even if they hadn't noticed what they'd left out at first somebody else would have added it in later.
I spent dinner pondering that, and I finally came to the conclusion that people would only name colors if they mattered to them, just like other stuff. Earth ponies had a lot of words for plants and soil that we never used, and unicorns had their words for spells, and of course we had our words for clouds and sky and I guess to an earth pony they don't need to know exactly what kind of cloud it is and I don't need to know what kind of dirt it is and neither of us need to know about spells. So maybe for some people it wasn't as important to be specific about colors.
When I got back to my room I saw that Aric had sent me a telegram; he'd said that he was too tired to go to Durach but that I could come over after it was done and to just let myself in because he would be in bed. So I wound up excusing myself early because I really couldn't concentrate on the game, and I flew over to Aric's house and let myself in with his hidden key and then went up to his room.
He was fast asleep, so I climbed into bed next to him as quietly as possible so that I wouldn't wake him up and then I snuggled up against his side. I was a little mad that he had gotten back so late and hadn’t called me and was asleep instead of playing with me, and I was tempted to lift up the covers and see if I could wake him up the fun way, but I didn’t. I just closed my eyes and let the familiar scents of him and his room fill my senses until I was asleep.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/A_Trajectory_Through_Phase_Space_in_a_Lorenz_Attractor.gif
In Japanese, grey is literally "mouse color"
7309192
But more commonly "ash color."
No, silly! A Grue is what eats you when you go into the darkness.
orig05.deviantart.net/b523/f/2012/050/0/5/you_are_likely_to_be_eaten_by_a_grue_by_nmajmani-d4qbkrg.png
Huh. I thought that there was some controversy over whether or not there were actually significant differences over words for colours, or if it was just a slight difference.
7305254
Right, I bet they would have a very interesting conversation.
7309163
Ooooh, the perception of colours is a fascinating topic!
Some points to consider:
- The average, standard human has three types of colour receptor in their eyes - one that responds to red, one to blue, and one to green. (It is no coincidence that computer screens build colours from these three).
- We tell colours apart by how much each type of receptor responds to it.
- People without one of the three receptors are colourblind (in one of three different ways)
- It is possible to be colourblind and never notice - at least until high school.
- There is such a thing as a tetrachrome - someone who, due to a quirk of genetics, has four colour receptors in their eyes, and thus can differentiate even more colours than a normal human.
- Tetrachromes (among humans) are always female (the colour receptor genes are on the X chromosome) (this is also why males are more likely to be colourblind)
- Most tetrachromes never find out that they are tetrachromes (they've always been told that this colour and that colour are both red...) Because of this, it's hard to know what percentage of females are tetrachromes.
- The mantis shrimp has sixteen different colour receptors in its eyes. It would consider a tetrachrome severely colourblind.
So. I wonder how many different types of colour receptors Silver Glow's eyes have? Can she differentiate colours that human can't?
7309291
Shortwave and midwave infrared would make evolutionary sense for a pegasus. Shortwave distinguishes clearly between cloud types (water, snow, ice). Midwave reveals cloud and sea surface temperature and can be used for thermal imaging in darkness. Overlaying images from the visible spectrum with infrared images results in very interesting (visible) colour shifts.
Sweet Celestia, filly, ponies not named Twilight Sparkle aren't allowed to be this socially awkward.
Just ask Sweetie Belle and Rarity about the differences between colors if you want examples.
No, Sweetie, that's cinnamon, I want the red fabric.
I can definitely understand how different cultures' color perception would seem odd to a pegasus. After all, we've seen the Cloudsdale weather factory manufacture each color of the rainbow separately. Plus, when your species's pigment proteins allow for literally every color under the sun, you're going to have a wealth of color words just to describe one another.
7309163
Or, as I like to think of it, the wings of the chaos butterfly.
7309231 Light Lamp.
7309428 From DoghouseDiaries and XKCD
thedoghousediaries.com/dhdcomics/2010-03-01-12bf011.png
(Frighteningly enough, my wife can identify each of these)
I've read that eye size depends on wave length of the light it is meant to see. Earth's air is transparent only to certain wavelengths. This is why even a whale's eyes are only a little bigger than ours & a mouse's eyes are way larger than you'd think.
Insects can see UV light but can't see red. This is why there are few naturally red flowers (they had to be bred).
blue and green two different colors, and some thought that they were the same, and the English word for the combined color (because English makes them different colors) was grue <- wha ? first i thought that it was a fance way of saying grün, but that would be green.
then i thought more about it and ... well blue + green = other shade of green, because green is mixed out of blue and yellow.
i hope Silver finds out about the more fance color names like peach and stuff
also HTML code supports a great list of naming colors too
back in school i tried to make a list of all "named" colors that worked without hexcode
I suddenly get the feeling for some reason that Silver Glows relationships are all about to come to a head and she is going to find out so much about how humans handle it.
I was sligthly confused about the Lorenz equation. What I got by making research on the internet was the Lorentz and Lorenz equation, wich isn't about spiral and system, but rather about gazes' polarity.
I found it under the name of "attracteur de Lorenz"; Lorenz's catcher. I found it funny that we pass from dream catcher to Lorenz's catcher.
My color blind friend and I had a really interesting conversation about color. It didn't go very far but it was still interesting.
7307680 Not exactly, but if they were the agricultural system wouldn't crumble. Their importance in the grand scheme has been reduced, so I guess some are extra snooty and pompous to make up for it.
7308550 Yeah I think your second bullet point reason is also how I see it. She could possibly be in that mindset also.
Ah, the Great Wolf Lodge, I really need to visit that place. Especially since I've been to Traverse City once before!
I hope Aric isn't up to anything that could get him into serious trouble...
7310426
If we go back to February 16 [philosophy is like poetry], we find...
I always did wonder about that.
7309554 http://www.w3schools.com/colors/colors_names.asp
7310856 "JUST DO IT!!!"
731064 We're also talking about Earth ponies.
Also, what does that diesel engine produce as a byproduct of its operation.
And we discovered electricity a fucklong time ago.
I think it's lazy.
At least she's not boring.
he
I think there's one in the Wisconsin Dells, too.
7310856 It's working!
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengwar)
7310886
They have lots of sand in Iceland, it's just all black. They wanted a beach that is the right color.
7310745 so my next question is what information needs to be conveyed? what you have makes sense from a linguistic perspective. It is more accurate for saying words. So if magic is saying words and stuff happens than this is exactly what you need. But if you view magic as a fundamental force of nature, then it's going to have to be described radically differently than if it is linguistically. Any natural language is going to be pretty much worthless if you want to accurately and concisely describe how magic interacts with energy and matter. While the first is a valid option, to me it feels out of place in a modern society and I feel that a scientific approach is way more powerful.
7310704
Indeed.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Herman&defid=6413163
7309163 maybe another good thing to reference
(Really, his whole series on linguistics is good stuff)
7310886
That sounds horrifying, I wonder of modern medical knowledge could emotionally restore such an injury... do we have emotional restorative surgery?
If a person carries around a memento of a loved one, just so that they can remember what it was like to love, are they wearing an emotional prosthesis?
sudden sex change of the maths teacher.
I get it! Blue-green algae aquaculture is gruesome!
Which is kind of funny because all the mice that I catch in my house are brown on top and white on the bottom.
7309231
Which is why it's logical to cast magic missile at the darkness.
7309234
From what I understand there is significant differences, what the controversy is is whether or not that changes a person's perception of the world. Historically (and I'd have to look it up) not all basic colors were even named (in ancient Greek the sky wasn't blue because there was no 'blue' for it to be). And I think some languages don't have words for certain colors even now.
7309247
Maybe like in Enter a Solider. One could hope, anyway.
7309291
It is, although strictly speaking it's not what cultural anthropology class concerns itself with--that is, this is about what colors are called, not how they are perceived.
Two fun facts: I applied for a railroad job once and before you even filled out the application they gave you a red/green colorblind test. Fail, and you couldn't get the job.
And I had a friend in college who was red/green colorblind and had to paint a red bench green. Unfortunately for him, the two colors were almost the exact same value, so when the paint dried he couldn't see what he'd painted and what he hadn't.
I'm wondering now if someone could come up with a test for it? Not sure what the test would be, but it seems that it might be possible.
She's close to human in her vision, which I'll admit is laziness on my part. I think it's plausible, given the size of their eyes, the fact that they're arranged for binocular vision, and how colorful everything they see (like other ponies) is. But . . .
Real horses have dichromatic vision, and every time I get to the point where colors come up in a story I remember that, but by then it's probably too late to recton in corrections. Still, I totally want to do that in a story sometime.
dev-wordpress-storage.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/VAR12.jpg
What I need to do beforehand is find a program where I can change images to 'horse view,' because otherwise I'm going to make a complete bollocks of the descriptions.
7309368
In this story her vision isn't that much different than a human's, but I would like to do some more research along those lines for a short fic one day. I don't think that they would 'see' clouds so much as 'feel' them with their pegasus magic; but midwave might be very useful for them. Actually, while I know that horses are dichromatic, I don't know if they can see things that are off our visual spectrum.
7309414
Sure they are!
7309428
7309485
Thus settling the debate about whether indigo is really a color or not.
What would be even funnier about that is if they were dichromatic like real horses and couldn't see their own colors.
.
That sounds about right, actually.
7309554
Are they?
illinoislighting.org/graphics/c-visible.jpg
There aren't really clear dividing lines on the visual spectrum, so we classified (historically) what was what based on what we saw and how we interpreted it. Some languages use completely different words to describe blue and green; others don't.
Depends on if it's an additive color or a subtractive color: if it's additive green and blue are both primary colors.
Ponies love peaches.
7309555
Maybe. . . .
7309585
I was slightly confused about the Lorenz equation. What I got by making research on the internet was the Lorentz and Lorenz equation
Lorenz Equations
I hope that helps: I don't know anything about math at that level, so I can't really explain more.
7314142 Thanks, but as I said in the second part of my comments, I found it, just under a different name (like that wiki article calling it Lorenz's system)
7309753
That was one conversation I never thought of having with my colorblind friend.
7309850
Exactly! Plus especially to a pegasus who primarily lives in the clouds, and doesn't always concern herself what what goes on on the ground.
7310404
Second bullet point is pretty much spot on.
I've done pirate shows in Traverse City, but never been to the Great Wolf Lodge.
Not this time around.
7310671
He legit just went down to Winston-Salem with David to make a delivery.
7310859
As well you should.
7311059
7311183
That's true: Christine is not boring.
Oops.
I think it's kind of a chain: I think there are a bunch of them.
7311418
Man, you'd think it would be cheaper to just paint the sand.
7311746
Do you think I should change it? Back in my day it was handfuls, and that made a lot more sense because the hand opens further than the mouth.
7311707
You may not be wrong there, either. I don't tend to think of things from a mathematical viewpoint because I suck at math; I think of them from a words-on-the-page perspective because I'm pretty good at that. Maybe I need to reconsider exactly how and why unicorn script works.
7311832
Yeah, I just subscribed to his channel. I did get some info from that particular video, as it happens.
7311835
An emotional trepanning might fix the emotional subdural hematoma.
Perhaps. Hmm, how far can this metaphor go, I wonder?
7312846
That can happen at a liberal arts college. Luckily I was easily able to correct that little mishap.
7313640
<groans>
Some more or less relevant stuff that I stumbled across today:
https://www.opticalexpress.co.uk/magazine/dividing-a-nation-an-insight-into-human-interpretation-through-colour-illusions
This is a very interesting article about the different perceptions of color. http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2
Basically it suggests exactly what you've stated: cultures that don't place enough significance on a color to even name it become unable to even see it.
Most Tetrapods are tetrachromates. Are nocturnal subterranean ancestors lost 2 cone-types, leaving only blue and green receptors. In oldworldmonkies like us, a gene-duplication of the green-receptor lead to the evolution of new red-receptors. Bellow is typical color-response for a dinosaur:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/BirdVisualPigmentSensitivity.svg
As one can see, ore feathered friends have for visual pigments and can see into UV and perceive it as a 4th primary color. When Q/Discord created Equus, he uplifted ponies and added avian components, so maybe, ponies, or at least pegasi are tetrachromates. Pegasi may also detect polarization, as many birds can detect polarization.
Cephalopod, like the octopus, can perceive color, but lack distinct visual pigments (they have 1 pigment sensitive to everything from UV to infrared). This was a mystery, but we now know that they use chromatic aberration for analyzing color like a spectroscope. Cephalopods can also detect polarization.
I remember doing this sort of maths back in 2nd year. I can't imagine why anyone who does maths at that level would also do poetry and philosophy... Maybe that's just the engineer in me talking.
7325475
That's interesting--I feel that people who use colors more frequently (like artists, for example) perhaps also learn more color differentiation than your ordinary mortals.
We generally put in the color of a car into the information at the shop, and there have been times when the two of us have disagreed on what color it is.
7348812
I think this kind of shows a limitation of language in describing it--I mean, they can 'see' it, they just can't understand why it's different or special. Which, I admit means that the don't see it, but they do see it . . .
Similarly, there are cases of blindsight, in which everything works except the optic center in a person's brain, which means that basically, the brain can't tell you what it saw. But--there's a second vision center, in the 'old brain,' and it can see things just fine--so, in one particular case, a man who was blind was still able to navigate a hallway loaded with obstacles (the researchers told him there was nothing in the hallway), and he denied stepping over or around anything, even though he very clearly did.
7455445
For the purposes of this story, pegasi can't see UV or polarization. I would like to write a story where they can, or else where most/all of the ponies are actually dichromatic, but I need to do a lot of research on colors before I can pull it off well.
Also, Discord, eh? I've heard a lot of headcanons on how ponies came to be, but the Discord idea is a new one on me. Incidentally, reminds me of this song:
7674835
I think it is. Although from what I've heard, a lot of universities kind of focus you in one particular direction. I doubt that the ponies would think like that. Math and poetry and philosophy are all equally important.
7679954
Heh.
The first story I ever wrote traces the creation of Equestria all the way back to an entity known simply as Draconiquus, who created Equestria, all the tribes, and finally, because he was lonely, a son named Discord.
Everything goes downhill after that.
7309493
Several of the things that calls "purple" look blue to me.