Bees and things
20 October 2006 00:05![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enismirdalToday or last night, one of the bee arenas got knocked so opened up a small gap (yes, it's duct taped together so isn't always a perfect seal). Therefore, our lab meeting was interrupted by, "There's a bee on your shoulder!" and "Hey, this one landed on Van Gogh's Sunflowers!"
Although it overran by an hour because we were having a good debate, mostly. We were talking about how bees categorise colour, and if they do at all, and how to test it. However, the main fact that seemed to emerge was that colour categorisation is a bit of a fable. Mostly when we categorise colours as "red" or "green" or "blue", it's simply a product of the way the sensitivities of our cones work, not some mystical universal product of language or human cognition. Or that's the theory.
Meeting with me and supervisor also overran by an hour. Because we were discussing project ideas and other things. I now look like I may end up doing stuff on bees foraging in forest understorey type conditions. Behavioural data, yay! This also follows on nicely from a paper my supervisor did in about 1999 where they analysed the flora of some places in Germany. (*ponders fieldwork in Germany...can it be justified, is it useful?*) So there is keenness and optimism.
One of the other PhD students in the lab also likes Die Prinzen. She's actually one of the English ones - our lab is about 40% German, 50% English and 10% Canadian, or so my rough reckoning suggests. It's good. We should have a German day, have supervisor import German wine from Würzburg, eat Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte and play German music all day. *bounces*
In the evening, since I'm still being careful with my Injury of D00m, which has turned out not to be a hernia as the swelling has receded, I skived off Aikido and went to the SciFi movie night instead. We watched The Incredibles. I ended up having to run back home to fetch my lappie, since the SciFi lappie wasn't playing the DVD. And then projector chose to be special and deprive us of magenta. Since I refused to sit for 10 minutes while lappie restarted so we could try a different port on the projector, and everyone else agreed (as we were already 45 minutes late by then), we watched it in 2 colours. This is a bizarre experience. The Incredibles' costumes were classy grey, which I think is an improvement. The magma looks a lot less scary when it's yellow-green rather than red-orange, hehe!
It was so very weird how intense the red experience was for the first couple of minutes after we finished the DVD and put the lights back on. It's funny...red is not my "favourite" colour, per se, but if I had to ditch any of my cones, the red ones would be the ones I'd be most desperate to hold on to. I just find the world looks lacking without red!
Although it overran by an hour because we were having a good debate, mostly. We were talking about how bees categorise colour, and if they do at all, and how to test it. However, the main fact that seemed to emerge was that colour categorisation is a bit of a fable. Mostly when we categorise colours as "red" or "green" or "blue", it's simply a product of the way the sensitivities of our cones work, not some mystical universal product of language or human cognition. Or that's the theory.
Meeting with me and supervisor also overran by an hour. Because we were discussing project ideas and other things. I now look like I may end up doing stuff on bees foraging in forest understorey type conditions. Behavioural data, yay! This also follows on nicely from a paper my supervisor did in about 1999 where they analysed the flora of some places in Germany. (*ponders fieldwork in Germany...can it be justified, is it useful?*) So there is keenness and optimism.
One of the other PhD students in the lab also likes Die Prinzen. She's actually one of the English ones - our lab is about 40% German, 50% English and 10% Canadian, or so my rough reckoning suggests. It's good. We should have a German day, have supervisor import German wine from Würzburg, eat Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte and play German music all day. *bounces*
In the evening, since I'm still being careful with my Injury of D00m, which has turned out not to be a hernia as the swelling has receded, I skived off Aikido and went to the SciFi movie night instead. We watched The Incredibles. I ended up having to run back home to fetch my lappie, since the SciFi lappie wasn't playing the DVD. And then projector chose to be special and deprive us of magenta. Since I refused to sit for 10 minutes while lappie restarted so we could try a different port on the projector, and everyone else agreed (as we were already 45 minutes late by then), we watched it in 2 colours. This is a bizarre experience. The Incredibles' costumes were classy grey, which I think is an improvement. The magma looks a lot less scary when it's yellow-green rather than red-orange, hehe!
It was so very weird how intense the red experience was for the first couple of minutes after we finished the DVD and put the lights back on. It's funny...red is not my "favourite" colour, per se, but if I had to ditch any of my cones, the red ones would be the ones I'd be most desperate to hold on to. I just find the world looks lacking without red!
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no subject
Date: 19 Oct 2006 23:06 (UTC)It certainly can and is.
O:)
no subject
Date: 19 Oct 2006 23:14 (UTC)no subject
Date: 20 Oct 2006 04:46 (UTC)As for wine - random fact: my granny lives in in a little village that's actually known for its wine.
And if you like "Die Prinzen", you might also like the "WiseGuys". I could put together a CD and mail it to you... as soon as I get back from home, get my butt up and my comp to comp-ly. *g* Interested?
no subject
Date: 20 Oct 2006 07:34 (UTC)no subject
Date: 20 Oct 2006 07:43 (UTC)no subject
Date: 20 Oct 2006 07:39 (UTC)*dashes off to work*
no subject
Date: 20 Oct 2006 07:46 (UTC)no subject
Date: 20 Oct 2006 08:51 (UTC)Need more information!
(I've always been interested in colour, and have apparently a very highly developed colour sense to compensate for my otherwise crap eyes...)
no subject
Date: 20 Oct 2006 17:46 (UTC)There's a tribe in Irian Jaya called the Dani who don't differentiate linguistically between any colours except black and white. So scientists thought this was fascinating and asked some Dani to participate in experiments where they compared how Dani learned and remembered colour compared to Americans. They concluded back in 1972 that the Dani could learn to differentiate or recognise colours as well as an English speaker in spite of the linguistic differences. However, apparently the evidence has been reexamined more recently and called into question, but I'm not sure what was concluded.
There's been some recent research on a tribe in Papua New Guinea who speak a language called "Berinmo". In this language they have only five basic colour-naming terms (English people apparently use 11 main ones), and they categorise colours quite differently. They have these two colours called "wor" and "nol", that to me seem to be "green that's more like browny green" and "blue-y green tending towards blue" respectively. Experiments showed they could tell wor and nol apart more easily than they could tell green and blue colours apart (in English speakers, the opposite is true). Apparently, however, their categorisation does make sense in terms of physiology too.
Plus, wor and nol are good for classing leaves as edible/inedible, I think I read at one point.
The papers we were looking at in our lab meeting were two by (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16402268&query_hl=4&itool=pubmed_docsum) Christa Neumeyer (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16235101&query_hl=4&itool=pubmed_docsum) and colleagues where they looked at goldfish colour categorisation. It turned out that when goldfish grouped similar colours together in an innate sort of way, it tended to be because the colour coincided with a peak in the sensitivity of their cones, which does suggest a physiological or neurological basis to the phenomenon, since fish don't speak! Also, interestingly, fish have a sense of yellow - they categorise a group colours between red and green and learn to respond accordingly, as opposed to just seeing a "green-red" like "blue-green" that is sort of an amorphous continuum.
I suppose what we need is to find a linguistically distinct tribe of people with a radically shifted red or green sensitive cone and see whether their natural colour groups fall in different places to those of humans in more typical cone properties.
Or try bringing up some babies to learn to categorise colours according to some completely arbitrary system(can't see that one getting through ethics, hehe).no subject
Date: 20 Oct 2006 08:49 (UTC)