OT: Re: Units??

[Carroll Grigsby]

On Sunday 03 December 2006 10:17, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Sunday 03 December 2006 05:25, Anne Wilson wrote:

>>> snip

> >Which brings me to a related problem.  When getting a colour listing
> > in a terminal I find the blue on black almost impossible to read. 
> > I'm sure there must be a way to lighten the blue, but my poking
> > around so far hasn't found it.  Any ideas?
> >
> >Anne
>
> Basicly, that's a human eye problem, Anne.  Blue is only 11% as
> bright for the same energy in as white.  Green is 59%, and red as we
> get it out of crt phosphers is not only shifted toward the orange to
> make it brighter but is still only in the 30's someplace then.  For
> those with some color blindness, blue is often very poorly seen. 
> Even for those with excellent color vision like me, its still a poor
> choice in terms of readability.
>
> Interestingly there was an article in one of the sci journals about a
> year ago that discussed bird vision, and it conjectured that at one
> point, their dinosaur inherited eyes were much wider bandwidth than
> our eyes today, with an additional 4th sensitivity peak reaching well
> into the ultraviolet, effectively giving them 4 color vision.  This
> is still true of the birds considered more primitive today in fact. 
> These same birds have dyes in their feather coloration that make them
> highly visible to a potential mate whose 4 color vision can see them
> quite well, but much less so for the average predators more limited
> eyes, many of whom we mistakenly assume to be color blind.  They are
> not, anymore than our color-blind people are as they, like us do see
> two colors, a dim blue bandwidth and the much more visible
> green-orange peak.  It was a very interesting read.
>

So what we need is a literate parrot, preferably with a USB 2.0 port. 
Off to google...

-- cmg