Quotulatiousness

May 4, 2010

The lesson, kids, is don’t ask for colour advice

Filed under: Humour, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:04

A colour survey gone very wrong:

Thank you so much for all the help on the color survey. Over five million colors were named across 222,500 user sessions. If you never got around to taking it, it’s too late to contribute any data, but if you want you can see how it worked and take it for fun here.

First, a few basic discoveries:

* If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.
* “Puke” and “vomit” are totally real colors.
* Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
* Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.
* A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.
* Nobody can spell “fuchsia”.

Overall, the results were really cool and a lot of fun to analyze. There are some basic limitations of this survey, which are discussed toward the bottom of this post. But the sheer amount of data here is cool.

And a selection of miscellaneous answers:

5 Comments

  1. The list of “color names most disproportionately popular among men” is hilarious.

    I would not have gotten very far in the survey. In response to the intro question “If you know, what is your monitor’s gamma setting?”, I typed FYNQ.

    Comment by Lickmuffin — May 4, 2010 @ 12:37

  2. There is definitely a puke colour. I can tell you that first hand. Although, the actual shade varies depending on what the urchin just ate.

    Comment by Da Wife — May 5, 2010 @ 08:14

  3. I found it amusing that some folks differentiated between “puke” and “vomit”. They must have more active social lives, in the British teenage sense.

    Comment by Nicholas — May 5, 2010 @ 08:29

  4. Come to think of it, at least one of my former employers had a “puke” colour defined in their documentation standards. That may say more about the management style than I originally thought.

    Comment by Nicholas — May 5, 2010 @ 08:30

  5. I think puke and vomit is differentiated depending on the extreme of the colour. If it is just slightly awful it is vomit. If it is really horrible it is puke. Just like when you were a kid and discovered bold and italics. If it is just cool you would just bold it. If it is like OM EM GEE THAT IS SO AMAZING, you would bold AND italicize it. Perhaps even make it a 74 font size.

    Comment by Da Wife — May 5, 2010 @ 11:43

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