Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Universe Pale Turquoise, On Average

Posted by timothy on from the slashdot's-cosmic-color-scheme dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "AP is reporting that the average color of the universe is a "sprightly" turquoise-green. If only they'd known before the new iMacs came out! Link is to Salon.com."

3 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Color swatch according to the article by ghamerly · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ok, so I accidentally hit "submit" for the above when I meant to hit preview. Obviously color doesn't work in slashdot. Here's a link to what this looks like: http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~ghamerly/universe_color.ht ml

  2. Re:Little known fact by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The website you're linking to says that it is correct to claim that the color of the Sun is green because the Sun's peak wavelength is in the green part of the visible spectrum.

    Bullshit.

    Start with any light whose energy is broad on the spectrum, add a low energy but very narrowly focused spike of green, and these guys would call the color "green" because of a single spike on a spectrogram. Color perception is computed by an integral of intensity over wavelength, not by looking at the highest intensity peek.

    Please stop trying to be interesting by repeating misleading nonsense that is only true when distorting the most technical jargon.

  3. Isn't it obvious, really? by PhilHibbs · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They're talking about the visible spectrum, which is a slice out of a much broader range of frequencies. If you take an arbitrary slice out of an evenly distributed set of data, you would expect the average to be right in the middle, which is roughly where turquoise lies, so surely this is statistical nonsense.