Blue Book

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After 12 years of waiting, I have found the answer to the color-realism question I asked in a poem and kept on my Hue Angles blog site (https://hueangles.blogspot.com): Does color lie in the world or in the mind? Answer: “Blue is not out there, and it is not inside us either. The radiant blue of a cornflower is a kind of collaboration between us and the plant.” The origin of this quote is Kai Kupferschmidt’s book, Blue: In Search of Nature’s Rarest Color [The Experiment, 2021], p. 7. Kupferschmidt holds a degree in molecular biomedicine from the University of Bonn, writes for Science magazine, and lives in Berlin. The pertinence of the sentence I quote is in no way constrained by his restrictions of subject matter to the color blue or to the reciprocal communication between humans and plants. I hope it might quiet the din of debate between realists and subjectivists in philosophy.

 

Heartened by the author’s simple resolution of the realist question in color, I backed away, for a moment, from the book—which a close friend had just given to me. It is a small but physically dense 216 pages, adorned on the inside with color layout (mostly blue) with full-page completely blue separators between the chapters. The hard cover is entirely colored in subtly different shades of blue (except for a peacock on the front), and even the page edges are a dark blue. Receiving this object, I felt as if I were receiving a mystical talisman like David Lynch’s blue key in the movie Mulholland Drive.

 

Hoping to understand this object better than I understand Mulholland Drive, I thought, what’s the big deal about blue? Kupferschmidt made some assertions about blue that seem to be oxymorons—that blue is ubiquitous (e.g., the blue sky) and rare (e.g., blue lobsters). Then I checked how many Hue-Angles articles have “blue” in the title. The answer is four, not including the present one. In comparison, green appears in three Hue-Angles titles, seven colors appear in one or two titles, and no other color is mentioned at all. From the example of Hue Angles itself, I was forced to acknowledge the plausibility of Kupferschmidt’s assertions, even if they seem self-contradictory.

 

So, I started to read. The five simply titled chapters are logical, clear, and interesting.

 

STONES deals with the development of inorganic colorants, including chemistry and historical connections. Kupferschmidt makes clear that the search for the perfect blue led not only to Prussian blue as an artist’s tool, but also to discovery of hydrocyanic acid—used to kill millions of people. There is more than one side to the color blue.

 

SEEING discusses the anatomy, physiology, and psychophysics of color perception. The author covers a vast domain and makes the subject look easy by his clear language and organization. For example, he explains the Blue Dress by invoking color constancy. (I would have said “failure of color constancy,” but that is a quibble.)

 

PLANTS discusses color as a collaborative language to communicate with animals (and with us). Also, the chapter emphasizes that most plants have colors that are determined by molecular reactions to light, not by diffraction off structures (as is more common for animals). The author observes that green light is reflected from plants, and we see the light because it is available and useless to the plants. From a plant’s point of view, the green part of the spectrum is a “green gap.” But still in Kupferschmidt’s text, the color blue predominates, from indigo to the coal-tar blues, from cornflowers to the unattained grail of the blue rose.

 

SPEAKING emphasizes the cultural dependence of color-name boundaries, as studied by Berlin and Kay. The chapter begins with William Gladstone and ends with political correctness.

 

ANIMALS talks about structural colors, and most of the examples are birds. The chapter argues convincingly that the success of structural colors lies in their invariance with respect to lighting/viewing geometry. This is ensured if the precise diffractive structures are mixed with apparently random perturbations that have a hidden regularity. We only recently came to understand this subtlety.[1]

 

The book has two main themes. (1) blue is a special color; and (2) one should give blue the attention, appreciation, and awe that it deserves. Much of what the author finds special in the color blue is anecdotal or otherwise not amenable to quantitative study; it certainly lacks a specific point-by-point comparison of blue with other colors. Nonetheless, he has devoted his non-working life to compiling an impressive array of historical and scientific matter that will have wide appeal. He travelled far to acquire these things.

 

Early in the book, the author uses a cryptic comment to command a reader’s thoughtful attention (much as does a Zen koan[2]), The comment is this (p. 34): “It is […] no accident that accidents have played such an important role in the history of color. The reason? So far it has been nearly impossible to predict with any certainty what color a particular substance will have without making it.” For example, the same process and raw material can give rise to either ruby or emerald. The color can be considered an accident. But the fact is that many such accidents happen in pigment preparation; that fact by itself is no accident. It is the sensitivity of the coloration mechanism to detailed orbital energies. The author applies similar logic to explain the many years of exploration preceding the discovery of Prussian blue and later blue pigments such as YInMn as late as 2009. The author uses the device of non-accidental accidents to fortify his argument for the specialness of blue.

 

At the start of the SEEING chapter, Kupferschmidt delivers his over-arching message through reference to a scene from the TV show The Simpsons. Homer Simpson, after declaring himself “not easily impressed,” lets his attention wander and exclaims, “Whoa! A blue car.”  Although Kupferschmidt acknowledges the humor, he muses that “even the sight of a blue car ought to amaze us” (p. 53). To end the SEEING chapter, he echoes “Whoa! A blue sky.” The substitution of “sky” for “car” recalls the opening lines of the book, recounting the Apollo 17 astronauts’ awe upon seeing the Earth from space. The ensuing photograph of the Earth (called The Blue Marble) is famous and is often a point of departure for a lecture warning us that we have a clear responsibility to save our planet. Kupferschmidt does not give this lecture, but instead determines “to look out into the world more often, as if I were seeing all its colors for the first time, and to say to myself, ‘Whoa! A blue sky.’” (p. 82)

 

Having solved one philosophical problem to my satisfaction, Kupferschmidt’s book raises other questions: How can one sustain the enthusiasm of seeing colors as if for the first time? Why is blue so special? 

I see this book as a report of and homage to Kupferschmidt’s personal spiritual journey in search of blue. For more about this journey, please read the final section, HERE WAS BLUE. I won’t spoil it for you. I also wish him well.

 

Michael H. Brill

 

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[1] The rainbow colors that we see when we look at a diffraction grating (like a CD) are one type of simple structural color. But they are very sensitive to the angles of lighting and viewing. Peacocks and Morphos butterflies pull some three-dimensional tricks with their structural color so that the color is constant over some range of angles. [John Seymour]

[2] A paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence on reason and to force them into gaining sudden intuitive enlightenment.

“Koan.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/

 

How to Stay Awake in Standards-Body Meetings

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Having recently returned from Committee E12’s ASTM 125^th Anniversary Celebration in Conshohocken, PA, I examined the promotional button that had been given to the attendees. It was plain and unassuming: black-and-white printing of the logo, the occasion, and the catch phrase “helping our world work better.”

 

“Can’t we jazz up this outreach?” I thought. Even our current members find it hard to stay awake in some of our sessions.

 

I am the Vice Chair of Committee E12 (Color and Appearance). Also, I am the Acting Chair. My friend Jack chairs three of E12’s thirteen technical sub-committees. My friend Hugh does intensive work in all the sub-committees. We are all aging out of the ASTM, leaving no successors. A ballot is upon us. No wonder we are thinking about outreach.

 

On behalf of the ISCC News, Jodi Baker recently asked several of us to write a progress report on the activities of E12. As a first exercise, I found out that E12 originated five standards in the past ten years. The standards themselves do not give the impression of a crescendo of purposeful activity: Two of them pertain to retro-reflective materials, one is a statistical algorithm, one is a color-difference formula, and one is a well-used color-order system.

 

Such metrics as the number of standards per decade do not get to the heart of ASTM’s progress, but Jodi’s question surely got to the heart of our outreach problem.

 

 By its nature, standards bodies are difficult to glamorize. A documentary standard represents a consensus between companies to combine their products, say, by company A (making spectrophotometers) buying components from company B (making lamps bought by company A to use in its spectrophotometers). Smooth commerce requires compatible complementary functions. On the other hand, too much collaboration begins to look like a monopoly, which is illegal. A delicate balance must be struck between not enough consensus (e.g., railroad gauges don’t match when they come from opposite sides of a country) and too much consensus (monopoly). In general, a standard does not come close to the bleeding edge of research because research is what distinguishes companies and grows their profits. Research is usually a corporate secret.

 

Because standards are consensus documents and not news reports, standards bodies are slow in their visible production, and color science particularly shows this tendency.

 

Without glamor, how are we to sell standards-body membership to our youthful successors? I think we must see standards bodies as a public work, allowing parts of a product from different companies to be assembled according to a public understanding.  A documentary standard represents an open covenant among companies who declare compliance with the standard.

 

Keeping our standards in order requires vigilance, and that is where younger people can make a substantial contribution. We need our standards to be prescriptive (unambiguous in interpretation), current (not obsolete), and driven into existence by commercial necessity (not by the pride of authorship of a few individuals). Right now, ASTM and its volunteer members are working hard to achieve this vigilance. Users and technical contacts of each standard are continually reporting errors back to the originating technical committee, who then revises the standard to correct the errors. That measure improves the standard’s prescriptiveness. Each standard is reviewed for revision or withdrawal every 5 years. That addresses the concern about obsolescence. Finally, a standard announces no individual authorships (although internally ASTM retains lists of contributors so periodic awards can be made). Anonymity of authorship was intended to reduce the incentive of pride-of-authorship. (That measure is not entirely effective, as Danny Rich humorously noted in an ISCC paper from about 2010.)

 

So, how do you keep awake in a standards-body meeting? Do the necessary job, knowing its general importance, (To fortify my resolve, I have found it helpful to chew on coffee beans.) Also, get into lots of contentious technical discussions at the meetings. I have learned a lot from such discussions at ASTM.

 

I invite you to get involved in ASTM activities (including individual and organizational membership). Please go to https://www.astm.org/get-involved/membership.html.

 

Michael H. Brill

 

The Minefield of Color Ownership

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When overseeing the intellectual-property process in a company devoted to color, one regularly is asked whether a color can be “owned” by dint of trademark or copyright. The stock answer is no for copyrights and a qualified yes for trademarks. Whenever you select a color for a product or its packaging (or a company’s logo), you must carefully avoid colors that are already trademarked by one of your business competitors. It is a matter of legal opinion whether a business is to be regarded as your competitor. If so, then as far as your business is concerned, these colors are essentially owned by the trademark-holders. If you use the trademark colors (in any of a broad range of contexts), the owners are likely to sue you, which will surely be expensive and also block the sale of your product until its color is changed or until the court case is resolved.

An article written a decade ago[1] describes several trademarked colors: John Deere green (or, more saliently, a specific green and yellow), Target red, T-Mobile magenta, UPS brown, Tiffany blue, University of Texas burnt-orange, University of North Carolina blue, Home Depot orange, Caterpillar yellow, and 3M purple.

 

The stock answer to our initial question is a bit too simple, as we will now show. What follows might be considered too much information, but we will proceed anyway.

 

How do you know you have picked a safe color? As metrologists, we naturally seek refuge in measured numbers. We’d like to define a quantified color space (accompanied by an agreed-upon illuminant/observer for object colors or a white point for emissive displays). Within that space, we’d like to know where the property line is that delineates colors that are owned from colors that are free to be used.

 

Surprisingly, however, color-trademark litigations proceed with no quantitative evaluation, only the verdict of a jury in a courtroom under available light and in the context decided by the lawyers. Even the system of color names (often Pantone colors) has no rhyme or reason.

 

It looks as if color space has turned into a minefield of ownership (perhaps worthy of the double entendre “mine” field). One of us (HSF) has had personal experience as an expert witness. Here are some details.

 

Only three things may be unqualifiedly trademarked in the United States: a brand name, a logo or a slogan. Trademarking a color alone is available  only under very limited circumstances. Colors that are functional (e.g., the color of a medicinal pill that is used to identify the drug) or colors that are purely aesthetic are not trademark-eligible.  If a trademarked logo is colored, the color or color combination is included as a property of the logo. Thus, a color may become associated with the brand, as say Coca-Cola red or John Deere green. That immediately raises the question as to what are the protected tolerances around a logo-protected color? The answer is that there are no formal guidelines. That will be decided by a jury who will be instructed to find an interference if they think the intent of the color choice was to imitate the trademarked logo in the consumer’s mind. Obviously, the farther you get from the trademarked color, the better your chances. 

 

There is another way in which a color may become protected by law. Although it is not registerable, a product’s “trade dress,” which is its overall appearance including color, design and markings, may be claimed for protection against others duplicating it. A good example is the Coke bottle. That distinctive shape and the green glass constitute Coca-Cola’s trade dress. Notice that no other cola company uses green glass. Yet almost all breweries package at least part of their output in green glass. 

 

That raises another issue. Trademark protection applies only to the product lines or industries in which they are granted. You are free to make your product in John Deere green if your product is not a tractor or farm machinery. What if you had a product that wasn’t a tractor or farm machinery but could possibly be made by John Deere---say, a mailbox? You probably should go to John Deere and license the green and yellow combination from them for mailboxes. They will give you an exclusive for mailboxes in their green and yellow, and farmers everywhere will rush to buy your box. 

 

Is there a common-law trademark? Yes, there is, but it applies only locally. You can open a store called “Jones’s Grocery Store” and you can choose the color and the typescript for placing over the front door. No one else can use that logo, even if it is unregistered, but that’s going to protect you only in your small town. Someone in the town down the road a bit, or someone across town if the town is big enough, can use the same device with impunity. Again, the criterion will be intent to imitate. 

 

Registration of a trademarked logo will, however, provide nationwide coverage, and will imply an additional benefit. You will receive protection from foreign goods that infringe your trademark from being imported. 

 

The minefield of the situation remains how close, or how far away, does your color have to be from a registered trademark to be unassailable? Pick a color that can’t be confused with the protected color or you might find out the answer to this question the hard way. 

 

Given these circumstances, the idea that a color is “owned” is defensible—no more fictitious than our deeming a condominium to be “owned” by its occupant when its defining walls are not. Furthermore, the metaphor of a minefield is not too extravagant.

 

Neither of the authors are lawyers, so the information contained here is not to be taken as legal advice. The information is intended to be a jumping-off point for further discussion within the ISCC.

 

Michael H. Brill and Hugh S. Fairman

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[1] A. Tzatzev, Colors that are Trademarked, Business Insider (29 Sept, 2012)  Colors That Are Trademarked (businessinsider.com)

The Seven Pillars of SI Wisdom

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Early metrology is sometimes exemplified by the King’s foot, a convention established in the 12^th Century by Henry I of England. The most obvious problem with the King’s foot was the need to recalibrate when the regime changed.  The underlying problem was more subtle. Any anthropocentric metric—by which I mean a metric based on human attributes or performance--- is both statistically and conceptually more fragile than one based on universal constants of nature.

 

Nowadays (https://www.bipm.org/en/home)  we start with seven precisely related constants of nature and derive from them seven reference units which are said to be all we’ll ever need.   The constants are cesium hyperfine frequency Δν_Cs , Planck’s constant h, the speed of light in vacuum c, the elementary charge e, Boltzmann’s constant k, Avogadro’s number N_A , and the luminous efficacy of a defined visible radiation K.  The basic units are mass (kilogram), distance (meter), time (second), amount of matter (mole), electric current (Ampere), temperature (kelvin degree), and luminous intensity (candela). The whole system, called SI, comprises what we might call the seven pillars of SI wisdom.  The system seems to have no anthropocentrism.   

 

But wait! The seventh constant and the seventh unit are not like the others. This seventh pillar depends not only on humanity in general, but on particular observers whose flicker sensitivity and brightness data the CIE aggregated to define the 1924 luminous efficiency function V(λ) in visible wavelength λ .

 

The history of the candela in Wyszecki and Stiles (Color Science, 2^nd ed, Wiley 1982; pp. 254-255) is quite educational.  Rather than use the whole 1924 V(λ) curve (which was to be obsoleted and conditionalized a lot in the next century), standards bodies defined the candela with only two human-related numbers: the peak wavelength (555 nm) of V(λ) and the watt-to-lumen ratio (1/683).  Interestingly, the SI does not define the candela for any light other than monochromatic at 555 nm, so, for example, I cannot ask SI what the candela count is for a given wattage of light at 460 nm.  This illustrates that any reduction of the candela’s dependence on human vision decreases the universality of SI.

 

The candela didn’t enter the SI system uncontested.  A sign of the struggle was that for many years the US National Bureau of Standards (NBS) divorced itself from all human factors including metrology of vision and other senses.  When NBS deflected responsibility for calibration of color-measurement instruments, the need for such calibration was satisfied by private companies such as Hemmendinger Color Lab.  Fortunately, NBS (now NIST) takes on metrology of a more human sort, so they’re helping to manage the seventh pillar.

 

We’ve come a long way in the standardization of fundamental constants and their units.  But one of the seven basic units of SI, the candela, is tied to a human-based standard.  Even in the newest refinement of SI, a vestige of the King’s foot remains!

 

That the SI metrologists felt forced to include a human-vision metric in one of its seven pillars reminds us of the importance of vision in our understanding of the universe. A question to ponder: Of all the five senses, why was vision salient? 

 

Michael H. Brill

Retired Color Scientist

mhbrill2001@gmail.com