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Just so you have some reference in case it matters, the Caribbean is for my room, while the purple is going to be for a bathroom that I don't believe actually has a window. I think I was able to find both the colors you were talking about, and a third one, which looks like it might have some applicable coloration. And a fourth one, now that I look. Actually, we got five here. All right, I'm going to send a picture with the various dark colors. I'd like your opinion on them. I'm forming mine right now. Okay, knowing what I'm going for, and understanding that I don't mind the darkness, because it's either going to be not in use, or lit by bathroom fixtures. Just give me your opinion, or rather, sorry, not your opinion, your analysis, based on what you've heard about my inclinations and opinions.

M: Thank you for including the spectral stuff. Stuff that goes outside of the subjective bubble that I didn't want to get trapped in. Okay. Let's have a hypothetical where we want to stay within the bare family of paints. Would I be able to make any kind of particular mix modification to get it to go closer towards the PPG color? If that happens. And then, having mentioned the whole 3000K lighting situation, what other kind of applied situational lighting elements should I take into account for either color given their usage? As a separate example to show what I'm talking about, my father had an office that he wanted to be a vibrant yellow, but in application kind of ended up looking like the fire engine yellow that you see sometimes as a variant on fire trucks. I don't think we ever figured out exactly why that transition was made from the color sample to the... actual usage, but I'd like to avoid having a similar oddity occur once the aqua gets put up or something like that.

M: I didn't want to say something because I didn't want it to influence your analysis, but I'm wondering how much of a part the finish will come into play, or did come into play with the example I gave. You know, what gets reflected might give overtones, especially if you've got a window to a forest somewhere. That was my guess at the time. I just never really thought it entirely through besides a first guess. But there was a pair of windows that opened directly out into a very green situation that I thought might have been picked up by something that was a little bit too shiny. Given the rooms and the external lighting, I don't think that would come into play much with either of my situations. But as an expanded idea, I was wondering if the finish might have a significant impact on the result. My first impulse is to go with either a matte color or an eggshell enamel for both. But I'm willing to listen to arguments against that, given the situation. Like if, I don't know, if it turned out that a flat would actually be more in line with a bathroom, or would look gross and sweaty when there was water out. I can see both of those possibly being a factor, but I don't have enough actual experience with it to be able to say one way or the other. And as far as the color adjustment goes, what would that mean in technical terms? I know that the mixing involves taking, you know, some real-world equivalent of an RGB, or more appropriately CMYK, and then shaking it up. But often I have a feeling that the person running the shop has not much more understanding of what those values actually mean than I do. So I need to be able to explain myself if that happens. Because I'm fine with the hue, just with the, again using computer terms, with the lower brightness, but the same hue and even the same saturation. I just don't know how to get there from where we are right now. Also, in terms of spectral things, I feel like I should know this, but where does sunlight come into play? Like, does that supersede any kind of situation, or is it actually able to be tied into this conversation correctly in terms of spectral analysis? As I'm reading through your message, we have cream toler—cream towels to go in the bathroom. Will that have a significant effect? I know it's just an accent, but accents usually change the perception somewhat. And just as a side note, I'm fine with the bathroom feeling heavy. I'm not looking to actually spend massive amounts of quality time in there, as long as the darkness feels comfortable.

M: For me, there's only one mid-sized window, and I'm trying to put up a set of blackout curtains, so it won't really make too much of a difference, but I'm wondering about the other stuff that doesn't involve the external influences in terms of coloration. Like, I'm not going to have the degree of green that's being talked about in the example, and I couldn't even if I left it wide open and it was brightly lit 24-7. It's actually facing the neighbors, so the primary color coming in would be neutral in terms of hue just because of a neutral-colored house taking up the majority of the light that could be reflected. That being said, because of the blue, I was going to try and go with something that was a little bit more wood, particularly because I'm having a hardwood floor. That's a separate question I wanted to ask in terms of the best way of making sure that the hardwood and the wooden shelves that I intend to put up around the room don't contradict each other. Like, I know that I can't hope to get an exact match without custom-building both from the ground up and from materials that I find myself, so I'm trying to figure out how to get that effect best because I prefer a matte finish at least as the dominant factor. But it's not like I'm going for the raw lumber look, although that would be not unacceptable. I'm just trying to figure out how to color coordinate so that it doesn't look, you know, a little bit off. I'd rather go with two different shades of wood than have that minor, you know, difference that always irritated. I think it's as a side effect of using or being interested in technology so much. Some kind of internal preference that anything that isn't computer or interactive stay one reflective level and anything I need to touch stays shiny. As I'm talking about it, hell, it might even have been shaped from playing video games where the background is, at least back in the day, was usually of one visual nature and the stuff you could pick up or otherwise interact with was another to a sufficient degree that it was visually notable but describing it was really difficult without a circular reference to itself or another video game. And I've got another topic to address. I'm trying to figure out the window setting. I'm thinking blackout curtain. Maybe even using two bars, because the window is maybe knee-height to head-height. The bottom might be a little further up. Like I said, it's a mid-sized window, not a floor length or another long rectangle. It's largely square. And I was thinking that maybe actually using two bars. And because they're blackout curtains, my first instinct has been black. But with this shade, I'm having difficulty visualizing a texture of black that would go well with it, no matter what the finish of the paint was. Like it's too dark. And it would need to not clash with the wood, no matter what shade it was. I think I know what you're going to say, but I'd like to make sure that I'm right before I start talking about it more. In terms of the lighting, I think that we're going with LEDs completely. If that makes a difference. I know that there are different, I think he said CLIs or something like that. I'll try and determine what we have and make sure that we can change it if necessary. But yeah, we're not going to be having many, if any, classic filament bulbs.

M: You keep throwing me off with the term blue. Go with aqua. Whether it's true or not, that's how I perceive it. And I don't mind the idea of high gloss or reflectivity. It just has to have a reason for existing instead of just being an accent choice. Yeah, I think in order to have a black that would work in this room for me, it would have to be, like, a hypothetical black. Something that almost entirely absorbed light to the point that the texture didn't matter. And I don't think that exists, and if it does, it doesn't exist in a way that you can just casually put it up for curtains. Thanks for watching! Now that I've mentioned it, I'm wondering what kind of feedback loop is going there and where it started. Do I prefer the visual parts because of playing games, or was I better at playing games because I used that kind of visual identification? Thank you. At Home Depot, it looked like all of the blackout curtains were... ...equally capable of blocking light due to whatever was contained inside of them. You know, whatever diffusive film or straight-up thin opaque material. But I would be hesitant to go with a cream anyway, because there's two ways to look at it. One, match it with the bathroom tie-it-in. Or, two, avoid it because you don't want that kind of tie-in. Honestly, I might have to go with an appropriate cream anyway, given the lack of broadness and because of the darkness of the color. Even a medium tone would start to fade in, unless it were a contradictory hue. I don't mean as in gross combinations, but it would have to be like a middle maroon or something like that... ...in order to not appear to be in that area of either blending perfectly in or gently contrasting. You know, that's an area where... I like the reason why you don't blend a middle-level blue with a middle-level gray, because they don't quite join and they don't quite contrast. You're misunderstanding the use of the two rods. I'm saying one above and one below. The setup I'm looking at is a sturdy rod. Sturdy grommets, I think they would be. Something that a caveman wouldn't break. The problem is that kind of setup in order to work well has to be set up kind of loosely. Otherwise it... I'm trying to think of a phrase to describe why it doesn't feel right. It's that it's... In order to tug cleanly, there can't be too much tension, I guess. Right? But if it dangles, it can reshape itself in a way that allows for a little more practice or something, especially in the loft. So I was thinking I have one bar at the top, which gravity provides tension towards, and then a guide at the bottom placed so that it doesn't tug the material down tautly, and ideally goes through every grommet without actual contact when it's hanging. That prevents opening and closing from letting it flow around in ways that create, for example, that little crack that a sunbeam always manages to come through and hit you in the eye.

M: A sidetrack question. There's this bit of quote-unquote trivia where it says something along the lines of the Greeks didn't have a word for blue and they just called everything green. Now is that true or one of those things that sounds interesting but is incomplete and they actually did have a word they just didn't have a specific shade in mind. I'm asking because I hadn't really thought it through other than catching it in passing but just looking at it the idea that they were because okay the argument the shallow one at least usually goes you know they were surrounded by the ocean yes but in reality that's kind of a greenish color so they didn't really have a need for blue and everything could be described as variations on it. And again I accepted that in passing but then you look at the sky on a piercing blue day you think that it's just that much more blue in the Mediterranean and say wait that can't be fucking right. All right sidetrack over. As far as the colors go, my ins... Sorry, I accidentally hit something. Had to make sure I wasn't interrupted. My instinct is that it has to do with the, uh, what I'm talking about is the inability of aqua to effectively mesh with certain shades of gray or whatever. I feel like it probably has something to do with the color it would turn into at grayscale. Am I backed up by online information and facts, or am I going in the wrong direction? I'm not saying I'm right, I'm just wondering if I have given a brief, if incomplete, version of the reason for the problem. Meshing aqua with mid-grays and other shades, like a middle brown. Because it can't just be the hues, although that might play a part, or the lack thereof, because there's a reason why, quote, black goes with everything, unquote. I'm just kind of poking at the idea. I'm having to stay around so I've got a few minutes to go into a little bit more detail than I actually need for the project. With the curtain, what if I could find a deep maroon? Something analogous to the purple, but not close enough to actually command the eye. Or close enough to seem like a knockoff of the purple. Because my problem is that I can't think of anything that works with the aqua well enough, but yet doesn't demand attention, given the function of covering or outlining a giant hole in the wall. Even the most sensory delicate cream is going to be a key feature. Sorry for the pause, it's... What am I apologizing to you for? You're getting the text version. I paused because I was just ruminating on the idea that there are so many colors, yet when you're trying to think about something like this, you revert to kindergarten, when really the superclasses are the primary and secondary colors. And all that rich descriptive language for thousands of different colors, at the core can be traced back to like those six primary or six basic colors and a black crayon. At least when you're trying to brainstorm for things. It feels... It's like when I try and brainstorm about colors, I end up feeling disappointed in myself for not being more creative, I end up going towards the same colors, and then I end up feeling, after processing that reflex, some degree of disappointment with the world that in actuality, when you're trying to match colors, yes, there's a lot of subtlety available in the second or third order choices, but at the first order, it's all six colors and brightness. Anyway, getting back to it, even the cream would, if not draw attention, it would still be a distinguishing feature. There's no way of fading in without going for an attempt at a precise matching of hue for the curtains, and then making sure that it's got a significant enough texture that any slight discrepancy is thrown off by the variation in specular and shadowing levels. I don't know. It's kind of a dark horse, but if I could find it, an appropriately dark maroon might be an acceptable compromise between that light-absorbing black and constantly going back to the off-white basket. If the room were to be constantly empty or minimally display full, then it might be worth trying to maintain the established color palette with no additions. But I was already actually thinking about going with a darker maroon as the bed linens. And whatever color that is, there's a quilt my mother made that will go on it that is multiple shades. So maintaining the color palette is, in terms of color integrity for the room, more a matter of not interfering than pure maintenance of the palette. Oh damn, that reminds me. Okay, you actually can help me with this besides giving me a place to record it so maybe I remember before it becomes too late. And it might be an argument for um going with the maroon now that I think of it and the nature of the question that started to sprout earlier but I haven't said anything about until now. I was thinking that what I want on the floor is half of it to be on a custom-bound um thin rug like maybe a couple millimeters thicker than a tatami mat that I intend to be an off-white as a kind of contrast that separates the room into two um mental areas. The carpet that stuff gets piled on, etc., and the hardwood which is kept clear and clean and has a chair to sit on or small sofa. Still got to work on that too. But the point was that the color was going to be an off-white and I realized that matching those with the curtains either directly or at least in terms of going together would be necessary. And what I was going to ask was that was whether if it is a custom covering would it be better to first make the rug and then adjust the curtain to match because if I'm going with the thin blackout style there would be more of a limit than if I were just making them myself out of a material which could be um could have more of a color variety but would also be thicker and give a different feel to the room. Would it be better to go that direction or would it be easier to get the curtains and then correct the rug to go along with those? Now if I went with the maroon there would still be the interest in avoiding a contrast but it wouldn't create that potential chicken or the egg loop of which is better to start with. And just as a passing comment on the wrap-up about the feedback loop, I'd argue that as long as you shape the definition of almost correctly, everyone dislikes almost matches. It causes a kind of dissonance mentally that you can hear when you have, what would you call that, like a breeze differential or an audio differential of just enough to cause dissonance. But the funny thing is, while what you're talking about in terms of game design is true, what I'm referring to is more of the, uh, maybe PlayStation 2 and before paradigm, where resources were scarce enough that an item that was interactive had a definite visual feel that was different from everything else. Like, I'm not sure if this is an actual example because it's been a while since I played it, but I know that at least in other RPGs there would be a situation like in Final Fantasy VII where the pre-rendered items might attempt to look like they were using the same engine as the stuff that moved, but you could tell the stuff that moved because it had that freshly rendered feeling that made it pop out from the background as long as you knew what you were looking for. And some games actually took advantage of that, you know, knowing that there would be this distinction. And I don't know if it was accidental or if it was on purpose, but there'd be occasions where they either got lucky or arranged stuff so that the effect was minimized for some of the more particular secrets. Like, on one end of the scale you would have a chest or something that obviously could be opened, but also because of how it was rendered you knew it would do something if you poked at it. And most games had this to some degree and and likely they were aware of it and maybe the best ones even incorporated it in their level design, but it was necessarily true outside of a few specific situations such as the old LucasArt Monkey Island type adventure games where everything was focused on making everything look pretty to a degree that interactivity was rarely indicated and often masked by how things looked. Like, something which intellectually should be interactive in other games you knew it wasn't going to work. Like a light switch in the background wasn't going to work, and if it did work there would be both the design and engine required difference in how it was displayed. But with the LucasArt ones, you know, 10 pixels might intellectually indicate a switch, but because gamer minds weren't tuned to the intellectual version and instead were looking for the obvious pixels that showed interactivity, it would actually blend in subconsciously.

M: Just before I start, when I say maroon, I'm talking about one with the same luminosity drop as in the bathroom, or perhaps even more. Chosen with care, of course, I understand the whole idea of red versus blue clashing that you're trying to bring up. Okay, starting with the blue. That's one of the reasons why I made a note of it at all, is because I think that this came up in the idea of perception having something to do with what you're prepared to perceive, and how, you know, depending on how you describe it, certain cultures didn't really have the capacity to see certain colors as distinct because they didn't think of it as being distinct, or how as a child develops, it stops trying to process certain sounds because they aren't important to the language that they're learning. Okay. And I think that's what we're talking about here. It's like the color palette was shifted the same way that, like, Asian music is shifted. So, to Western ears, it sounds not bad, but it doesn't sound right, and it's difficult to articulate why. And I don't even mean that as a binary. It's not that it sounds wrong, it just doesn't sound right. I am curious, though, if they did have a word for the distinction, because, like, right now, the skies are clearing, and I'm seeing that powerful powder blue, and I'm wondering how you would be able to use, even with a palette shift in terminology, how you'd be able to describe that color as being equivalent to olive leaves. Like, I know that there are a couple trinary color description patterns that computers use, but that's strictly numeric. I'm talking about, you know, how do you poetically, in Greek, describe the piercing robin's egg blue of a clear winter sky using the same terminology you would for what we are calling a rich green living plant. Because I know that greens are highly variable, but I don't see any any way of applying adjectives as I know them to a color category in a way that lets me say that the powder blue of a winter sky and the deep, vibrant green of a healthy plant are in the same category. Like I can understand on a conceptual level what you're saying about the idea of color not being a distinct idea, but instead being wrapped in with, what was it, texture and other things that we separate. I can conceptually grasp that. What I can't see is how, well, maybe I can a little bit. They were, as far as we know, the first guys to really go about trying to do these things in a way that would lead to the first versions being a little murkier. But I still can't see what kind of adjective set could be applied to whatever color category we're talking about that would connect foliage to blue skies in a way that was continuous. As far as the black supposed to go with everything idea, the reason why we're having a problem with the idea of applying it as a curtain is because unless, like I said, unless it absorbs light the the ore is otherwise really particular. It's not going to be black. It's going to have a lot of gray involved, which comes back to the problem. As I'm thinking about it, a sufficient texture, preferably small but most importantly busy, might function. I'm not going to try and force it. I'm just saying in theory it could work as a curtain, but it would have to be definite enough that the highlights were more of a white and a hue-neutral white, you know, completely desaturated, that it didn't go into the problem of grays. And I don't mean literally white, but you know, sufficiently bright enough that it doesn't appear to be a mid-tone gray and a texture that was sufficiently busy enough that the majority of it did stay black to some degree. I think what you're saying with number three is that my darkness idea works, but another important part I haven't mentioned is that I have to make sure it was desaturated enough not to become a dominant element. In computer terms, don't just lower the brightness, but lower the saturation to a point where it still is recognizably, perhaps even vibrantly, red. But, or more importantly, the deep maroon that I'm thinking of, so that it's complementary, not a clash. I think in Part 5, what frustrates me about it, what makes it depressing, okay, what makes it depressing is the realization that at the core, you know, there's only a few categories. It's kind of how, if you get disillusioned with people, you realize that however varied the human experience, it does seem like there are, for the most part, a limited number of categories of people, so if you try and change things, you only have so many options, unless you get really lucky. With the colors themselves, though, it goes from being that kind of basic depression into more of a perceptional frustration. I try, and when I'm considering things, I try to randomize my choices as much as possible, because I know what my favorites are, but a lot of them are due to habit as much as actual appropriateness, like in color choices. I'm often nicely surprised if I try something that I wasn't expecting, and two wrongs end up making a right, because I say, I don't like this, and I'm not sure about this choice, but hey, put them together, and they worked. The frustration comes with trying to do that, but with such a small basic number of choices, I end up reinforcing my habit of second-guessing myself. So I'll end up in a situation where I can't tell if I wanted to, for example, choose purple because it's my favorite, or choose purple because I haven't chosen it very often, because it's my favorite. It involves keeping track of something that I can't tell, and I want the variety, but I don't want to have that desire for variety end up with me basically choosing my least favorite choice, because I'm afraid I'm not choosing it often enough, because it is my least favorite. That was convoluted, and I hope it made some sense, and that the transcriber doesn't break things up in a way that makes it difficult to explain, on top of already being difficult to verbalize.

M: As I'm starting reading, I think the problem I'm having, and the reason why I said that I started going off on that tangent about them being the first ones to really try to officially categorize stuff, is that having designed really much smaller systems than a language before, you start with the idea of simplicity, and from their philosophy and other writings, it seems like they believed that the world was simple and the complexity was a superficial lack of knowledge, which I can kind of go along with. But you start with the idea that simplicity is the same thing as small numbers. The reason why I'm simultaneously willing to believe it, but have difficulty understanding it, is that again, it was smaller systems that I was working with, but when you start realizing that there is, if nothing else, a sensory difference, like a different method of taking things in between, for example, the hue of something and the texture of something, I find it hard to believe that people who are trying so hard to be categorical, didn't just say, wait, wait, wait, maybe we're going about this all wrong. I mean, it might not have caught on, but you'd think there'd at least be one philosopher out of all the crazy ideas that have been recovered, and that's just the ones that have survived. So I imagine there were crazier, or just differently crazy versions that haven't survived. But my point is, there must at least have been some philosophical discussion of whether more variety was necessary in the area that included what we call color, even if the language did not expand as a result of that debate. And if it didn't, I'm wondering what else went on, because again, these were guys who were trying to question everything. And so a situation in which oversimplification would lose information, I find it hard to believe that it wasn't somehow addressed, even if it wasn't according to the paradigm that I'm used to thinking in. Again, because I've had that problem with systems designs, whether or not you make a special case or you just realize you fucked up and start over with an additional category, because your examples... hold on I have to send a message. Don’t respond until I finish the next one.

M: Anyway, because your examples dot dot dot...Hold together until... Well, they hold together with what you were describing, in terms of the olive and the ocean and all that having a similar shade and texture and specularity and all that. But in a modern... not just in a modern sense, but I think in any sense, of the examples you gave, the sky is still the odd man out. And once something stops working, or starts having to be a special case every time, you got to start wondering. And I don't understand if they didn't start wondering why it is that it doesn't seem to... why it always has to be made into a special case. I mean, can you come up with, if not a poem, some kind of clues or something that could demonstrate... I mean, I know it would be translated and might make the concept a little bit difficult to put it in English. I'm just trying to find something I can get a terrible book. Because even your description, from my perspective, is somehow... not annoying, but my ability to identify the visual achievement is changing. Like saying color was a property, given a, uh... current perspective on... programming stuff, to me, makes it sound like, well, yeah, but it doesn't mean... it just means that that becomes a subcategory in which there should be... indistinct attributes the same way that, uh... classes can have properties, even flexible ones. But that they generally are... by enumerations or something, in a way that lets... people use them correctly. So it's just, I need something that I can... really... grab hold of. And so far, the approaches have... worked to really let me... completely rock the difference. Yeah, with the decision between cream and maroon, on an aqua background, the idea that it will never be invisible is kind of a given. It's a mid-enough tone that it's just a decision of whether I'm going with high-brightness version or low-brightness version from that level. I think with the texture black, maybe I was going in the wrong direction. I think it could be made to work if the black had the appropriate maroon overtones in its reflection, trying to maintain complete hue neutrality. You're right. In practice, it might have a problem. But if it could be coordinated in a way that comes in the opposite direction from the mortises we're making, about the luminosity of the purple getting deep enough that it makes us black. Well, if I'm trying to black, then what I'm looking for is something that highlights itself as being a complementary color instead of a desaturated version that I was going at earlier. And with number five, you're right. I've seen it briefly and explicitly put down. It won't help me. I won't do it when I feel like it. It still is a chase against the desire for novelty. Not just novelty, but inspired novelty. Like looking at the stuff we usually make people confused to make lunch, which might have some deeper variety, but boils down to either a super sandwich... And suddenly realizing that, at least with your current ingredients, you've got the perfect stuff to make, I don't know, um, some kind of savory cake, which, even if it's not consistently appealing, will be good every once in a while, just for the variation. You could call it a kind of optimism that won't go away. Because every time I think about dealing with some sort of color coordination, I approach with that same kind of hopefulness for inspiration. And every time it gets broken because there are no new colors. And there can be no new colors.

M: I'm not calling it a fatal counterexample. Obviously, they had a frickin' civilization that worked without it. I'm just saying that, before I get into actually reading your message beyond that... ...part about the fatal counterexample... ...I simply find it hard to believe that people who argued about what we think of as the most basic stuff... ...to the point that when you look back you say, dear God, what were they thinking sometimes? That they didn't have anyone sitting there saying, you know what, maybe these things that we think of as being part of the entire texture... ...are in fact a subcategory we could maybe, I don't know, call colors or something like that. Like people now critiquing without criticizing how the Empire State Building was built, you can have a proper respect for it and still be trying to either, in that case, improve on what was done in hindsight after decades of learning, or, millennia later, try and figure out if what's been presented is the entire truth, or if there were a minority fighting uphill against people for whom it worked in general to try and claim that colors were worth identifying in their own right. As at least a subcategory, if not a separate category entirely. And backing away from the debate nature of things, it's just an interesting concept that I would want clarified, because when you bring up the idea of them thinking of it as divine, it makes me wonder, both for them and for people in general, if it actually did look different because they thought it should. A lot of human vision seems to be tied into interpretation, not just subjectively, but from the ground up. Like in another silo we were talking about light cones. And any attempt to find a universality even at that tiny level seems to be met with biology just being vague about things. So as well as trying to pin down, or as I was putting it, find a toehold, that lets me try and connect to the concept that they built a civilization on, but that I can't seem to grasp, isn't just a response to what seems to me to be a minor linguistic shortcoming, it leads into an entire curiosity about how much your perception really can be modified, assisted, or thwarted by societal expectations. I mean, if you've been told since birth that instead of the Western Christian god of love, combined with scientific analogies occupying our entire physical space, so that you believe that maybe there is a god, but actually trying to find him is impossible, if instead you're told that your gods are literally in the sky, humanly capricious, and might show up at any moment, what would that kind of person be seeing in their head in a way that to me would require concussions or medication? Plus you put into the construction this idea that yes, humanity may have had this genetic potential for millennia, but on the other hand we have had a lot of physical changes that are measurable in that same amount of time, so while these people might have been having really deep and consequential thoughts in particular cases, it goes back to the perception thing again, but on almost a genetic level, were the majority of people capable of distinguishing to a degree that would allow for that kind of subcategory to become a specific, simply in an intellectual level. Hell, at that point it makes you wonder if even the intelligent people sometimes seem stupid because on some technical level maybe they actually were a little bit. I mean just in the last century and a half when they've had the idea of intelligence quotients and things like that, they've found that to be subjective and to keep, well if you want to be cynical maybe not lately, but they kept having to adjust that intelligent quotient to renormalize things, simply because people were becoming measurably more intelligent or at least society had developed them to be more receptive, and that was just over a few decades, over a few millennia. On one hand you want to say that people back then were just as smart as a reflex, but in a world where in a mere 40 generations you can go from a circuit that does nothing to a circuit that starts to detect audio, or in 40 generations you can start breeding a wolf into at least something golden retriever like, why would we think that humanity wouldn't have some sort of simultaneous degree of shift, if not in pure nature, at least in degree from the schmucks that were writing 3,000 years ago. And your examples, as I move along to number two, they don't contradict, at least, what I was just saying. Like, the idea of saying, since data is unreliable, maybe for us you can say that that's true, but in this specific, what creates a color is actually perfectly reliable to the point that we use it to measure things. I mean, isn't there something about cesium atoms and vibrations in a way that's kind of akin to wavelength used now to measure time and maybe space? Colors were perfectly reliable, but instead of saying, what is reliable in the senses versus what isn't, even if they didn't have the ability to get into the nuances that we did, instead of believing that maybe they had over-categorized, it seems like at least the guys who got recorded instead said, this data is all tainted because some of it is. It's kind of funny how we pretend like these guys were constantly brilliant instead of human beings, and if I'm right, maybe not even really that great of a set of human beings. I mean, the guys who came up with this might have been of average IQ today, but they were in a situation where those average IQs might have been paired with a personality and a lack of distractions to a degree, that instead of chewing on model trains, they chewed on facts, found that they could find notoriety doing so because no one had before, and went in that direction and made just as many mistakes as an average IQ or even modern high IQ person would. We act like they're sacrosanct instead of being human. And when we do acknowledge something, it's like a societally accepted acknowledgement of a single thing that is supposed to be the exception that proves the rule, instead of thinking, well, they had some good points, but maybe you shouldn't base your life on the entirety of what they thought because they were at least uninformed, and they might not actually have been consistently brilliant. The only one who you could consider maybe basing it around would be if you looked at Socrates and thought, well, he thought everyone was an asshole and always asked questions, so even if he was of average intelligence, he did so with an intelligently consistent methodology instead of trying to declare that everything was right. Now when you say that the philosophers said it was the area of poets, painters, and rhetoricians, that's kind of my point. Those guys didn't really seem to have glommed on to the idea either. I mean, I was expecting at least some sort of distinction between you know the sensation of the green blue of olives and the ocean versus the piercing blue asher of a sky that's cleared after a strong rain. I mean, that phrasing is poetic, and I'm surprised poets didn't jump on that in a different form perhaps, but at least making the distinction. Like I said, it might have been an actual societal perception thing, but it just seems odd to a degree. And honestly, I call a little bit of bullshit, given what has been argued by the philosophers that we have access to. The idea that being precise about things that have no readily apparent value was somehow a waste of time doesn't seem to have applied in other topics, just ones where they didn't think that it was, you know, really their bag. And that's why I'm asking if there's any lesser-known philosophers who actually did talk about this stuff. Because I can see the modern equivalent of political commentators saying something along the lines of, you know, that's just sports so we shouldn't talk about it, when in fact something about these sports that they're dismissing is indicative of a political separation that would be more readily apparent if they hadn't been dismissive. In number three, I think I'm understanding enough to have an awareness. It just feels weird to try and put myself in that headspace, like one that isn't even monochrome, but one where you can be aware of the colors. And on the objective side, they would necessarily have been aware of the colors just because of the whole red, green, and blue cone thing going on the eyeballs. But being aware of it, and yet not thinking of it as being any kind of significant. I can almost picture it but it feels weird in a way that doesn't just align to other times when I've tried to think in the same way as other people, and it's just felt weird because it wasn't my way of thinking. Like I said, they would necessarily have noticed the colors. And every time I'm trying to come up with an analogy that I might have, it falls short because, like I was saying, it would be like someone who lives indoors not being able to see the kind of motion a hunter would because they aren't attuned to it. And it feels like that's close. But color is everywhere. Everywhere and indicative to a degree that even if you didn't have terms for it, I can't quite comprehend the concept of not having it as at least an appropriate abstract for comparison. Like, if something is infected, maybe you don't have a word purple. But I can't believe, I can believe, but I can't quite grok the concept of not trying to at least call it plum colored instead of just calling it infected, which I think would be the adjective that you're saying they would use. And if I'm wrong in that specific, I think it kind of indicates where it starts to feel like they might have had an actual mental lack of capacity or something. Like not stupidity, but just something not engaged. Or that we're weird in that we have got these, you know, mental sub cycles. And that somehow, where they where I see a bright red stop sign right now, they would have seen something a little bit distinct, but muddier and irrelevant. Interesting. And again, as I'm reading number four, we get back to the potential snobbiness of the philosophers saying that they couldn't be separated. Again, I'm saying that it sounds like a lot of their stuff was an attempt to do things that, you know, we know are no longer, are impossible. You know, in the future, it may be proved possible, but they were trying to disentangle qualities that we have shown at least are directly corollary, if not inseparable, or just different words for the same thing. So when they say that they could take something apart, it's hard not to read that as saying they don't want to, that they don't care whether or not it is. I mean, like the flavor separated from food idea is a good parallel. Yes, food has a flavor, but the description of that flavor is something that, even if it can't exist universally, you know, or rather, if it can't exist physically in that form, is sufficiently descriptive to be important. I mean, Plato was the guy who was talking about the shadows as though they were important to understand, even if it was to understand that they weren't exactly the thing. And I think it was him and another guy who kept talking about perfect forms of shit. Even if that shit never could physically exist. So the idea of saying that there can't be something sounds more like someone pretending something they're not interested in doesn't matter than an actual examination and dismissal of a concept as not being viable in the way that the world is understood at the moment. And I think the reason why I'm getting frustrated is because of how you try and describe where my experience is. I can acknowledge that I privilege you and separate dimensions, but what I would claim to be universal in anyone who's trying to think about anything, maybe not to my degree, but is the idea of information maintenance against the threat of collapse or loss. I think I do overemphasize that, but an emphasis on that is exactly what causes learning, whether it's now or back then. And the idea that being dismissive of potential information somehow coincides with people who are supposed to be the great learners and great thinkers is just, it's contradictory to me, it's anathema to the idea of actually being curious about the world. It doesn't even have to be finite. Now, I've got a better way of putting it because I understand the idea of, you know, centuries of work on the idea of finite sets and venturing into the idea of infinity and finite sets of infinity and all of that. But hell, even that isn't exactly lost to them. You know, I think there was at least one guy who was working on the idea that infinity exists on a one-inch line as long as you count it correctly or something like that. If it wasn't exactly that, infinity was not lost to them. So the idea of, you know, finite versus infinity shouldn't have fazed them enough to dismiss things. Man, I didn't expect to be tearing into Aristotle today. But yeah, however smart he was, he also was limited in experience to a degree that I have a feeling he would be a better arguer, partly because it seems like he was likely better on his feet. And that's just an average communication thing I have a lack. And because his world was so bounded necessarily by what society could see at that point, that he'd be able to plant his feet not because he was right, or even because he was stubborn, but because he lived in a world where definite instability was thought to be impossible. At which point he becomes just as stubborn as the sports fan who consistently believes their team is the best despite every year losing.

M: Okay, good. At least it wasn't a consensus, just the loudest people making the decision over the people who wanted more detail. That seems to be a commonality, no matter when you are. I am wondering, though, what kind of language Democritus was using in order to describe whatever version of color he was talking about, or was he more general and the color idea would have come from his idea if it had been more broadly accepted and explored? And I'm also wondering what their artists did when they were painting. Like, was it thought of as being some sort of witchcraft or something, determining the colors and generating them, or what? Because without the correct definitions, or even the capacity to have words to describe them, how would you ask for... how would you say to someone, can you hand me that color? No, not the green, the blue. I just don't see how it would happen. Maybe that's the reason why the weirdness feels, you know, unique. It's because, yes, there is the privilege of hue, of course, but it's tied into so many of the things that we use to make our life easier, like color-coding, or things like that, or indicating a stop sign. And that partially is privilege, but also this idea that if you're going to have an artist painting something, how the hell do you tell them that it's the wrong shade for the, I don't know, the rose patch or whatever they had? Or that the irises need more blue if your descriptive words all have elements of texture and other associated relative terms connected to them? And I don't just mean that rhetorically, I mean that literally, what kind of language would the artists use? I kind of understand what you're saying about the sky in terms of my thinking of it as a surface rather than the domain of the gods. I think I understand, but I'm wondering if I can try and take that another step and say it was almost like an interactive television screen. I don't mean that in every sense, but in that they didn't think of it as being necessarily connected to what was going on here, but instead as a broad window into the domain of the gods in which anything could happen, maybe there was some regularity and it would, on a regular basis, throw shit at them as rain and lightning and snow and other things, but that it wasn't expected to follow the same rules because it was television. It wasn't supposed to follow the same rules anymore then. A guy jumping out of a 60 mile an hour car on TV is expected to splatter like a human would in real life, but instead rolls and gets up and keeps fighting. In Part 4, when I'm talking about biology and evolution, I know I'm not talking about the kind of biological divergence which creates new species. I'm talking about the kind of thing that happens to dog breeds as opposed to the hybrid chili peppers I just grew. As I understand it, the hybrids, their seeds are going to produce genetically varied things based on its parents or whatever was used to make the hybrid. So it's unpredictable, yes, but I'm differentiating that from, for example, if you were going to crossbreed a chihuahua with a pit bull. If you do that, while genetically the structures are there in a way that could contain anything that was common to the wolves from which all dogs are derived, the actual available selection is going to be limited. That is what I mean by development and that shorthand sometimes into evolution or parallel words. What I'm saying is that at that point, you can even think of it not even as being a change but simply a reduction of potential noise. Like as baseline, no question that you could, if you had the right equipment, crossbreed someone from then with now. The difference is that when things worked, certain genetic combinations stopped happening, perhaps in a way that allowed for cleaner development instead of the genetic grab bag that had not been filtered as much at that point. So again, like with dog breeds, at that point it would have been closer to the wolf situation, while now it would be more like the pit bull-chihuahua combination where theoretically anything wolf could show up, but in practice, you're only going to get the subset of chihuahua possibilities and pit bull possibilities combined. And in doing so, it might, through the wild recombination, throw out something that looks like a dachshund or something like that. But when you're breeding pit bull with pit bull or chihuahua with chihuahua, that possibility is infinitely reduced because the combinations of genes and the neighbor genes or whatever have been, in practice, reduced from the original wide basket. So they are technically the same species, but they are a different breed. And so, getting back importantly to what you said, maybe there was no meaningful genetic difference in the structure, but what is currently available would be maybe not refined, but it would have gone through another 3,000 years of categorization, maybe. The breed would have been refined. I don't know. I'm not sure if I'm getting the language completely right here. Do you understand what I'm saying? I don't know. Moving on to the codes, the training might shape things, but the difficulty I'm having lies in the idea that, okay, as a parallel, let's say the ancient Greeks and modern person were exposed to the same background noise all their lives. a, uh, something like a, um, regular pulse every 37 seconds of something that wasn't even unpleasant, but was a definite thrumming noise that was detectable and whatever. At least one modern person would have identified it and started trying to track it down, found the source, etc., etc. Now, 3,000 years ago, they might have simply called it the heartbeat of the universe or something and moved on. But importantly, there still would have been that auditory stimulation that they took as a given, even if they hadn't explored how to describe it. And that's what I mean about not understanding why the cone stimulation would not lead to even a dismissive, explicit label. Accepting it as a given is one thing. Ignoring it completely is another. Like they didn't even come up with a story about it. They couldn't have. I know that there's the idea of the rainbow and all of that, but for them, from what you're saying, it wouldn't have been a spectrum of color. It would just be this thing that appeared in the sky, and they didn't really care about the fact that it was always the same order. These assholes who kept talking about geometry and logic and things like that didn't care that the same order appeared in the sky every time. It just, it doesn't connect. There's something missing. Like, I see no tension between coherence and stability versus information preservation. If you don't know what you're stabilizing, you can't be stable. If you can't speak clearly, you can't be coherent. And I mean that technically as well as verbally. And with Aristotle, I believe that he was smart. I'm saying he was necessarily smart for his time. He was not necessarily smart for this time. He was the first guy coloring on the page. At least, the first one to do so in a way that other people stopped and said, hey, this is smart. Maybe we should save this page and use it later on. At which point, anyone coloring on it had to work around what he had or work through it or maybe sometimes even erase it. And the claim is, even if it's justified, most people haven't taken the time to examine why it would be justified. I certainly haven't. I've read like a couple books that contain the entirety of his work. The entirety of his work is my point. His entire life's important shit. It's like reading the obituary of a boring person. If you dig deep enough, you can make their life sound exciting without talking about the years between intelligence when he was potentially just sitting around scratching his ass, eating olives, and occasionally checking to see if his checks had cleared. I could be talking about either the obituary or Aristotle at this point. Histories are significant, but also taken with a grain of salt because writing was difficult enough that any kind of record was being made by someone to a purpose. So honesty likely took a back seat to actual intent of either demonizing or canonizing the person. We don't even know that the world was stable. The written version looks stable, but the New York Times often makes a fucked-up world sound like at least it can be grasped, even if it's extreme. I mean, the claim that he would be brilliant now, that one I find difficult to swallow. Again, intelligence has been measured. Any measurement we have of intelligence has been improving simply for the last century. In order for him to be brilliant now, he would have to take that times 30 and still be brilliant. I'm not diminishing his accomplishments. I'm saying he fucked up enough that you have to say that maybe he was the first kid scribbling on the fresh page. A brilliant child at the time, perhaps. And if he had been born in this time, perhaps he had the structures to be similarly brilliant. But the person that he was would not necessarily be brilliant in this time. And to call him brilliant, in spite of the fact that between him and Plato and their regular ebb and flow of philosophical thought being tied into complete adherence to Aristotle or Platonic items or approaches, instead of either of them approaching a yin and yang acceptance, to call him brilliant when half the time he's thought to be wrong in an absolute form, and I think of him as being only 50% complete, that's not even a passing grade.

M: Here's a geometric term I think that they'd be able to understand. Obtuse. Unless you're saying that they didn't have terms for loud and soft, those also are nomos, not physis. And yet, they decided that it was worth categorizing, right? I know part of it is perception, but I can't argue with them, and that isn't helping things. I'm having to argue with people backing up people that can't confirm them, the people who would back them up. So, habit means that the people backing up Aristotle and Plato will always think of themselves as being right by default, not understanding that they are no more secure factually than I am, at least from the null hypothesis. There may be more information that I don't have which would prove them or myself right, but from that null point, there is nothing tipping the scale in either direction, except for a bunch of other people betting on one side. Like, I'm having to plant my feet and dig into something that I only hypothesize now. I'm still trying to hold it arm's length mentally, because centuries of adoration have attributed to both Aristotle and Plato, who I don't believe can simultaneously be entirely true, some sort of godlike status to the point that in order to put forth a minor case against them, I have to grab with both hands the concept that they were complete fucktards, simply to work against the current. With number two, yeah, that does make sense... ...artistically. I'm just wondering if they literally referred to the Lapis or the Malachite, or if they actually had some sort of shorthand that they used, which in practice, if not acknowledgement, could be thought of as parallel to color. Because, I mean, at least two of those are modifying adjectives, and at least with Lapis, a good subset of artists would know I was talking about a particular blue. I don't think you're resolving the rainbow issue in a definitive way, because I feel it still begs a question of... you don't have to think of them as colors specifically in order to recognize a pattern. I mean, even if we assume that somehow their society and perception had literally left them all colorblind and everything appeared monochrome, there still would have been that pattern. The same way that I'm... that... well, I think I have the term for it. But the same way that someone looking at a houndstooth pattern, they might not know what the name of that pattern is or how to describe it in terms of its shape. But if they were referring to it when talking to someone else, they would at least acknowledge that the pattern was there. And at least a couple people likely would do something along the lines of trying to come up with ways to describe the substructures of the pattern. It might not be accurate. It might even be incidental. But again, going back to audio, if once a day, if once a day, the mountain next door suddenly played the William Tell Overture's intro, this was a daily occurrence, I could see people investigating and trying to explain the sudden noise and resonance and source and all that. But at some point, if just to describe the item or a particular point in the riff, if someone would do something that started describing notes, maybe not with any kind of particular accuracy, maybe just with that one part, which, you know, and this is where it would start to form an actual language, even if they didn't think of it as significant. They might describe it as that one part near the middle, which feels completely distinct from the others. And from that, you might come up with the word tone and higher or lower because of how quickly it made your teeth vibrate or something like that. The language would develop because of noticing the pattern, even if you didn't think the pattern was significant. It just seems like... I've seen this in you. I've probably done it. I think I know I've done it a couple times, maybe once or twice even knowingly. My parents have detectably done it. It happens all the time in the media. It sounds like someone not knowing what's going on and not wanting to discuss it because they don't have an idea of what's going on. Like every argument you've given while acknowledging the whole hue privilege thing still seems to be people avoiding an awkward topic rather than actually fessing up that they're not quite sure what's going on up to and including being dismissive of it as irrelevant. The one variation being those few guys who thought of it as being something resultant rather than actually involved in the process. But again, they might have gotten there eventually, they just were not really held up as being bastions of intellect or whatever in the way that A and P have been canonized. In number five, I thought of a metaphor that might help. To express what I'm talking about, I mean. This is freshly made and incomplete, or at least potentially incomplete, so bear with me. Let's say you've got 1,000 magical sets of bingo, that is, the randomizer and the six things and whatever. Now, it's a finite set. Keep that in mind. Now, the magic part is every time six balls are selected... No, we're not going with... Sorry, I should... The bingo thing is for the visualization of the selection idea. What I'm thinking of is the lotto number thing, actually. So, what makes it magical is that after each thousand number sets are pulled, the original ball set is magically removed and replaced with an equal balance of all the numbers that were drawn. Now, in an infinite situation, this would mean that the new set would be equal to the old set because of equal probabilities. But in a finite set, that means some sort of small deviation, whether incidental or because of manipulation by someone who liked the number 17 over everything and managed to pull it a few more times because that was what they preferred. In that finite set, that finite set, the set for the next drawing would be slightly imbalanced. And that imbalance would eventually create, if not a uniform set, it would likely at least eliminate some of the original numbers, at least to a point where the probability became... became... The selection number became sufficiently small that only that any kind of elimination tended to get balanced from a generation to generation. So, like, even if it went down during one selection, there was a small enough pool that it was just as likely that it was going to be rebalanced the next draw as it was to go and start the slide into oblivion. Now, the reason this is relevant is because that's what I'm saying happened in terms of the genetics over the last 3,000 years, or what I'm proposing. It's not what I'm saying happened, but it sounds logical enough that I would want an alternative to be able to disprove it as well as either disprove it or work with it. And the disprove only if it, like, worked against the theory. Because the point is, if you managed to get hold of one of the balls from one of the previous drawings that had been eliminated, it still could be put into the... it still could be put into the mix. It still could be drawn. Perhaps it would even come to dominate depending on how probability went and what people were trying to do to fix the drawings. But it wouldn't appear without that external introduction. That's what I mean by genetic development without creating a biological separateness. It's kind of an analogy that analogy that would describe how inbreeding could happen if you were simply to go with random selection rather than exterior sources trying to game the system. But also, it importantly shows that if those forces stay constant, like the person constantly making sure that 17 stays in the mix even if probability says that it wouldn't be, if that stays constant, there still is a dropping of certain patterns, not necessarily because they were, you know, biologically invalid and led to death, but just because, you know, external selection and randomness reduced the pool in the later iterations. In number six, you're not taking my point far enough or not explaining why you dropped it because even the integration would require a recognition and definition which not only does color seem to be lacking in their terminology as opposed to this hypothetical but they are actively claiming does not deserve to be addressed. Now that might be taking it a little bit further than their actual content. I'm working against what you offered. But the entire thing seems, again, it's starting to sound more to me like people avoiding talking about something they don't understand than actual dismissal. I mean, in order to dismiss something, you have to define what you're dismissing. Here's a related question to that. How often, at least in the recorded version, does a philosopher say, I don't know? I know that's an open question and you'd only be able to find specifics. Try and rephrase that question in a way you can actually answer, please. I think the answer will be not often and contextually that makes sense. Who wants to write down that they don't have an answer when it's difficult to get anything written down? Hell, they might even have had a lot less strict perspective on what they thought than was actually written down. We can find examples of that even today on topics where you can find the context and realize the person writing was working more towards an ideal or personal agenda than actually interested in recording what went on. I just, the way it was recorded allows more for shutting the door on a topic than actually admitting that I don't know anything about it and it doesn't matter. With number seven, your distinction between his factual elements and the structure... I'll give him credit for the structure, although with that qualification of being the first kid to draw on the page. The first person to do something like that does deserve to be credited, but that also means that anyone who follows his personal philosophies outside of the structural elements is potentially following a appeal-to-authority fallacy. Just because he was good at structuring things doesn't necessarily mean that what he said with that structure was something that could or should hold up. Number 8 gets into that whole context of writing shit down. We say that it wasn't optimized for open-ended inquiry, but look at Socrates. He was, like, over-ended. Over-open-ended, however you want to put it. The idea of question-everything is not just a summary, it's like the tagline for open-ended inquiry. But that kind of stuff is difficult to record even now when you've got people like me able to record every stupid thought they have. I'm not saying this one is necessarily stupid, but there are other ones. Shit, there's one that I wanted to ask. I've got to open this up after I send this message so I don't forget. I already forgot half of it. No, I've got it back again. But the point is, what was recorded and what has defined our perception of Greek philosophy being optimized for teachability, coherence, and moral orientation is the shit that was written down by people interested in teaching moral orientation coherently. Who else was paying for this stuff to be recorded in a way that would be available 3,000 years later? So acting like it was is kind of like acting like the current Catholic bishop has a direct and personal connection to exactly what happened with Jesus and his disciples. He might be better informed, but the idea that he knows for certain is laughable. But because its philosophy is based on something that's supposed to be based on fact, we don't worry about the idea that there's a lot of lacquer that's been applied to something which might not have deserved to be lacquered over in terms of structure.

M: Where did I end up with the bathroom purple? Which one was I going with last you knew?

M: Can you go online and find an appropriate blackout curtain in Maroon? One that would fit, um, like your average, um, maybe two-foot by four-foot window. I'm not exactly sure what the average window size is, but that seems to be approximately right. It doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be close to what we were talking about so that I can get an idea of, uh, difficulty to find and cost.

M: Assume the shorter ones are found. I'm looking at the Nice Town, and part of the problem that I'm seeing is that it's got the kind of thread-through approach rather than the grommet approach. Now, I said I was going to use two bars. Are the sets of grommets individually available without the curtains? Like on a smaller scale, I've added those as eye holes or things like that to various pieces of clothing. I got bogged down because I was thinking costume, but that's clothing, and it was on stuff that wasn't costume as well. Anyway, for the double bar approach, I would assume that I would have to do that myself, so I need some valid suggestions for how to pull that off with what's available.