Graduation day.

[hazeii]

A north wind, cold and strong. Biting when squeezed between earth and sky, the autumn sun providing little offset. Fingers and toes growing numb, and as the trail before me turned into the trail behind, the problem expanded to fill my head.

Just how many colours are there in a rainbow?

Comments

[arealhighlander]

ooo, at least 12 I counted one day when I had feck all else to do.

[lucifein]

Nice to see you are still about, you skye boi you!

~HS~
Luci xxx

[arealhighlander]

ooo tis youuuu, forgot abouy that persona LMAO!

Winters started here on skye, fecking cold n wet! Tho Im due in Egypt next week for work, wooooo!!

Heat, sunshine, NO rain!

[hazeii]

Oddly, your comment makes me jealous.

There are times when the idea of having to better to do than sit on a remote Scottish island and count the colours in a rainbow seems highly appealing!

[dsblw]

As many or as little as you want handsome.

[lucifein]

Are you my twin? I was going to say as many as yor eyes will let you receive. Lol!

~HS~
Luci xxx

[dsblw]

Your twin? grin, I dont believe we have had the pleasure.

[hazeii]

You do, however, have something in common.

[ex_pipistre]

7 with a bit of blurring and many shades thereof..or none cos a rainbow is really an illusion.... :p

[hazeii]

Seven by way of the Rats of York, then? :)

An illusion, yes...but a beautiful one.

The most reductionist answers I could come up with was none, because there's only wavelength, and ~2*10e28 (visible spectrum ~300nm wide, divided by the Planck length 1.616*10e-34).

The whole thing was started by sheepthief, but it got me thinking about how we categorise things. Wavelength defines the colour, yet we categorise into red, green, blue (and mixtures thereof) because of the way our eyes are wired up...I rode around the countryside trying to imagine what it would look like if we had 20 colour receptors in our eyes, rather than 3.

[ex_pipistre]

you should get some of those insect glasses then- they're an experience!
our brains are very definitely not wired up for compound vision!

colours always confuse me because even though they seem like something that should be really simple people always categorise them differently...yet a rainbow is *supposed* to have 7 colors. and when does a shade become a distinct colour?

[hazeii]

Interesting thought! I wonder if humans can adapt to them (you may know the classic experiment of getting someone to wear inverting glasses for a day or two...the brain eventually learns to flip the image, then when you take the glasses off everything is upside down again). Compound lenses may be a bit beyond the normal homo sap. though (however, lower life forms like lawyers and politicians may be able to pull it off

[teatagg]

Ask the pot of gold.

[hazeii]

If only I could reach it...

I trust all's well with you, you've been kind of low-profile on LJ for a while now!

[teatagg]

Ahh, its one of those things that cannot be reached unless you don`t try.

See my email, plus well, I suppose I`m just a little detached of late so am limiting my LJ presence to other peoples mutterings:-)

[hazeii]

Detached like a Zen master, in fact :)

[aoakley]

Two, if you're as colour blind as wot I am. Yellow and blue.

[hazeii]

I did wonder about how colour-blind people saw them...I sort of figured that red-green would result in seeing brightness one side and blue on the other.

The colour-blindness thought led me to thinking what it would look like if we had more than 3 colour receptors in the eye....say 20 or so.

[aoakley]

I heard that some native South American peoples can see into the ultra-violet. As I understood it this was genetic rather than drug-induced, and also extends to some South American rodents. Unfortunately I can't find anything about the human form on Google, but then I didn't look too hard.