Why is the sky blue? And is it a feminist issue?

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I'm pondering.

I realize this is kind of a facetious thread to start, but apparently, that's all fine and dandy. Please, do spend your time and energy with detailed answers ... I'll just lie back and ignore.

I see the sky as pink but, then, I was born liking the colour pink. I read somewhere in some specious article that I am unable to quote, that all women, especially billionaire Oprah Winfrey, see the sky as pink because they are shit at sports and grope men's arses in nightclubs but don't expect to be punched for it.

petula - my dad is colour blind. When he's being particularly irritating, he decides this is a major form of oppression he nobly struggles under, which none of us could understand. Before getting my mum to cook him dinner because he can't manage that stuff.

CK - that all sounds very wise. I agree.

LRD does he have an "i wasn't allowed to be a pilot" speech?

actually i have met a man who really felt that colour blindness had truly blighted his life, and in a sense it had because while he was very successful in other ways he hadn't been able to follow his dream. it was really sad

No, he just gets narked when mum points out some colours don't 'go' for the rest of us.

so you definitely carry the colour blindness gene then LRD? 50/50 if you ever have a son then i suppose

Oh, that is really sad.

Sorry, I didn't mean to be light about something that's serious ... more just having a moan about how oppression is suddenly oppression when it's stopping men do something, but completely unremarkable when it's women.

Oh, I suppose so. I don't know how it works genetically.

no don't worry i feel the same way, i was worried that my own comment re the pilot was facetious!

Not at all.

Though, in character, I should probably take it as evidence of your bias and ask you if you would treat a woman in such an appalling way as you treat men. Then I could claim green was oppressing me with educational privilege and have a crack at bertie's homophobia, as if gay men don't have it hard enough ...

I once had a massive argument with a boyfriend about whether a mosaic we were looking at was brown or purple.

I've argued about whether something's blue or purple.

Ooh ... if little girls go through the 'pink' phase, do you think we genuinely get conditioned to see shades of colour differently? I know people who grow up in different countries do.

it's on the X of the XY chromosome pair, so if your father passes on the X gene (which he has done, because you're female), then you definitely carry it. you have XX, so it's 50:50 which one you pass on to your children (either male or female). if they are male and have the colour blindness gene, then the Y they get from their father can't counteract it, so they are colour blind. if they are female they won't be colour blind, because they have the X from their father to counteract it if you have passed it on. unless their father is colour blind, then you would have a colour blind girl

I have always wondered why pink and red are separate colours but light blue and dark blue aren't.

I blame the marketing people.

Or maybe Kasparov.

Pink must be quite recent in the language, I think. I don't think there's a Middle English word for it (though things can be dawn-coloured and that sort of thing).

petula - oh, good to know. Thank you.

I've often pondered how you explain colour to a person who's been blind from birth. What is "blue"...?

On top of that philosophical challenge I read something the other day that said that quantum physics is actually explicable, the reason we think it's not is we're looking at things wrong. Which I interpret to mean the sky isn't actually blue...

Light blue and dark blue are different colours. Cerulean and navy.

But no one ever says "light red", do they? It's red or dark red.

Like there's no light black - that's grey.

Oh, the sky isn't blue. It just looks it. I accept this as true without understanding fully.

But yes, would be interesting. I suppose it's analogous to texture? What I'd like to know is how memory works for someone who is blind from birth, because presumably they use other things to trigger memory, but do those triggers inhabit the same brain-space as colours do for us?

(It always annoys me that surely, if we know we can all remember things despite some of us being blind and some not, some of us using visual cues and some not, that shows the brain is immensely more plastic than could possibly support a binary male pattern/female pattern of thinking).

from my etymological research (google) it looks as though the word pink may come from the flower (dianthus)

so it's using the things that appear that colour to describe the colour (like orange)

Really?! That's so cute.

colour blind people are almost always asked "what colour is the grass". they will reply "green" because they know this as fact, it's a point of reference. in fact, if they're red/green colourblind, they're probably judging the things they see in those colours according to how close to grass-coloured it appears to them, even if it's nothing like green grass colour to someone who isn't colourblind

S'true Bland. I blame the patriarchy

Also marketing. I think that was a good call.

i would blame farrow and ball too

I've been told by very colour blind people that they do find it a bit frustrating having to distinguish between two very similar sludgy brown colours just because other people can see them in a different way.

I have heard that some people (more likely to be women, I assume it's on the X chromosome) can see more colours than others. There's an online test I did once that determines how many colours you're capable of distinguishing. Not colour blindness as such, more subtle.