Acronyms trip us up. AI: you think you’re about to learn something about Artificial Intelligence, but it’s Amnesty International. RGB is one I have to worry about, when making colored illustrations – should I be using Red-Green-Blue mode, or Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black, CMYK?
And then I come to another mention of RGB – but no, it’s RBG, and everyone knows that means Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She’s the great spirit who said: “If I were queen, there would be no death penalty!”
It’s a tragedy that she herself couldn’t have lived for a few more months. Without her, devoted lifelong campaigners like my friend Abe Bonowitz may be struggling on up an even steeper hill.
Here’s RBG again – but no, it’s apparently also a familiar way of referring to a place that’s now just down the river from me: the Royal Botanical Gardens, at Kew, the world’s most prestigious place for the conservation and study of plants.
The RBG scientists have issued a report, yet another of the accumulating dire reports on the way Nature is going. Forty percent – forty percent – of the world’s plant and fungal species risk extinction.
The emphasis is on the loss of plants, known or undiscovered, that might be useful to humans. And yes, if certain nations think there may be plants yet to be found that could serve as aphrodisiacs or cure warts, they may go easy on mowing down heir forests. But that’s not the main point.
At Kew, a golden lotus banana, sacred to Buddhists, planted to stop erosion, and every part of it from flower to root is used for food, wine, honey, medicine, or textile.
Himalayan yew, once widespread over southeast Asia, now 90 percent reduced by over-harvesting for the pharmaceutical industry: it contains an anti-cancer drug.
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
RGB and RBG are easily confused by people like me because they both start with R, but using the letters without the R in front could lead back to astronomy: GRB, gamma ray burst
RGB are the primary additive colors, that is, components in light.
Mixing all three, you get white light.
Or mixing green and red, you get yellow.
I learned this with vivid surprise and certainty from a light machine lent to me; it had red, green, and blue lamps with rheostats.
Your television or computer screen consists of red, green, and blue point-like emitters.
CMYK are the primary subtractive colors, that is, for reflective surfaces, such as paper.
When light strikes paper and is reflected into your eyes, you get the light minus the wavelengths that the surface absorbed.
The RGB and CMYK colors are complementary to each other.
My diagram was made in Photoshop by drawing the patches of red, green, and blue, then copying this rectangle below, then hitting a Photoshop key that reverses all colors in the selected area.
Thus the red patch became cyan, the green patch became magenta, the blue patch became yellow, and the white surround became black.
I inserted little bits of the complementary colors in both halves so as to show that they can also be seen as steps between the primaries of the other kind – maybe that was a bit confusing, shouldn’t have done it.
RGB are along the spectrum: if you look at any spectrum, such as that of a star’ light, you can find those colors (in intensities according to the composition of the light).
You find some cyan, where blue and green overlap, and some yellow, where green and red overlap.
(And some orange where yellow and red overlap; I’m not sure why we perrceive more steps in that area than in the area between green and blue.)
You do not find magenta, because it is a mixture of blue and red; it is the revers of the middle of the spectrum.
It does remain a mystery, so far, to me, that we do start by thinking of yellow, not green, as the middle primary color between red and blue.
I don’t know whether this might be cultural (other cultures, or languages, divide colors in different ways; Navajo, ancient Greek, andm I believe, Japanese tend to merge green and blue), or possibly because there is more of yellow than green in our natural light from the sun.
I embarked, a long time ago, on writing a book whose title would be “Color Clarified”.
Then halted on realizing that the subject is almost endlessly deep and that I did not have enough depth of scientific knowledge.
I made the complementary-colors diagram as a supplement to this scene in my “Lyme Maze Game”: http://www.lymaze.com/complement.htm If you hover on that picture, you should see one kind of color reverse into the other.
This (very much unfinished) website was made with the now superseded application called Dreamweaver, which has some capabilities better than WordPress; let me know if it doesn’t work for you.
Indigo is an interesting color, blue-black, almost not a color at all. Right now I’m in a mood indigo.
Agreed. Black and blue. How appropriate.
As a young lad, I was taught that the primary colors were RYB (red, yellow & blue). The RGB has always seemed peculiar because in the old system blue was a product of yellow and blue. I suppose it makes a difference whether the colors were observed in paint versus transparently, as in through colored filters.
You meant to write “green” was a product of yellow and blue. I think the primary colors are still red, yellow, and blue. I did notice that Guy’s 2 pallets do have red, yellow, and blue in both diagrams.
Somehow printers can mix the RGB or CMYK to get all the colors. Probably has something to do with paint vs. transparency, like you said.
Yes, thanks. As you thought, I meant Yellow+Blue = Green.
I’ll take this opportunity to share my favorite RBG story. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia were good friends and huge fans and afficionadi of opera. Scalia was partial to Verdi, RBG to Wagner, but they didn’t let this difference of opinion divide them. They would go to the Washington Nation Opera at Kennedy Center together, and they each had occasional supernumerary (non-singing) roles in opera productions. RBG and Scalia had diametrically opposed legal philosophies, and they often delivered vociferously dissenting opinions. And they were good friends.
We could all learn something from them.
Friendship is indeed possible between conservatives and liberals. I have remained friends with several liberals despite having had heated political discussions with them. On the other hand, some of my liberal friends have chosen to end their friendship with me because of my beliefs.
It seems that conservatives are more tolerant of liberals than the other way around. I do not want any harm to come to my liberal friends, though i do want to beat them at the ballot box.
That evidently is true of your friends. My general observation is the opposite. Conservative spokespersons and media are characteristically shrill and intolerant about those who disagree. I was amazes to find the word “liberal” used often in America as if an insult. The reasonable tone of Scientific American’s article endorsing Biden was characteristic, as was for example the New York Times editorial back when it pointed out that Kerry was the clearly better qualified candidate. It’s true that some left-wing factions allow themselves intolerant language, including of each other.
“Kerry was the clearly better qualified candidate.” LOL! You’re killin’ us! I suppose that the Mullahs in Iran would agree. After all, they got a very nice payday and deal when Kerry was Secretary of State.
I’m surprised big pharma isn’t planting huge crops of Himalayan Yew. On the other hand, If people would stop polluting their bodies with medication, vaccines, sucrose, preservatives, nitrates and growth hormones in meat, there would be far less need for paclitaxel.
Great sound bite’s context:
Second-year student Greta Wiessner asked Ginsburg whether she has ever presided over a case in which no legal interpretation could lead to a just outcome. Without skipping a beat, Ginsburg responded, “Death penalty cases.
“If I were queen, there would be no death penalty, but I’m part of a collegial body,” she said. “When you’re a member of a collegial court, there is a strong tug for a middle ground and away from either extreme. I think what stops us from attempting to project our own will is those other eight on the court; I wouldn’t want them to be king, so I must accept that I am not queen.”
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/features/justice-ginsburg-talks-hope-the-death-penalty-and-the-future-of-women-s-rights
Thanks for sharing this. What a profoundly democratic perspective. I hope we get to the point where as a body politic we decide to abolish the death penalty.
Don’t forget .RPG rocket propelled grenade,RDG the railway code for Reading , RHS Royal Horticultural Society etc .