• Question: what is your favourite colour and why

    Asked by zuhra11 to Chris, Emily, Martin, Natalie, Tamsin on 22 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Martin Coath

      Martin Coath answered on 22 Mar 2010:

      Hah – LOL I had a little bet with myself that this question was going to come up! 😀

      I love the exact shade of blue on a kingfisher.

      http://www.cardsunlimited.com/bulkview.php?id=common_kingfisher

      We have kingfishers around where we live and sometimes you get e good view and sometimes you just see a quick blue flash! Amazing!

    • Photo: Emily Cook

      Emily Cook answered on 22 Mar 2010:

      purple. It’s a bit red and a bit blue and it suits me.

      I suppose technically, being a physicist,I should say ‘indigo’ as that is more technical – but purple is my answer.

    • Photo: Natalie Stanford

      Natalie Stanford answered on 22 Mar 2010:

      I quite like purple. No particular reason why!

    • Photo: Chris Cooper

      Chris Cooper answered on 22 Mar 2010:

      Red – but being colour blind I have no idea why! Maybe serendipity as I work on blood now?

    • Photo: Tamsin Gray

      Tamsin Gray answered on 23 Mar 2010:

      The really bright turquoise-blue colour that you get around the bottom of icebergs floating in the really clear water down here.
      I also really love the colour green when I leave antarctica and go back to spring in the UK.

Comments

  • Moderator - Sophia commented on :

    Hi Chris, what sort of colourblind are you? My Dad is red/green colourblind. When he was young my Grandfather refused to believe in colourblindness and said my Dad was just too lazy to learn the colours!

    As a child I was fascinated by the thought that the world looked totally different to my Dad – I was constantly asking him what things looked like they were the same colour.

    I was really excited to find this site (http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/) where you can see what the world actually looks like to people with different sorts of colourblindness.

  • Photo: Chris

    Chris commented on :

    I have a version of red-green. But I think of myself as colour-different not colour blind (ha-ha).

    The biggest problem is the red laser pointers that are de rigeur at presenations. They appear really dim to me compared to the rarer green ones.

    For my PhD I had to purify a green protein and separate it from a red one. I can do this all right, but a PhD student I knew in St. Andrews had it worse then me. So he had to ask his friends. One day they for a joke told him the red one was green and he threw 1 weeks work down the sink! Aren’t we scientists nice to each other?

  • Photo: Chris

    Chris commented on :

    Sophie – thanks for the site. Of course it is hopeless for someone who is colour blind! It doesn’t give me a way of looking at the world how you see it!! Mind you I think more web pages should use the sites that check for how they will look like to a colour blind person (yours by the way is fine – very clear).

    http://www.webaim.org/articles/visual/colorblind.php#designing

    • Moderator - Sophia commented on :

      Well I guess to show you the world the way the colour-ordinary see it, they would need to give you new pigments and cones, so it’s a bit much to ask of a website:-)

      But I know some people have suggested that some forms of colourblindness can be useful – e.g. for spotting camouflaged animals, so perhaps that’s why it’s persisted in the population. So yes, colour-different!

      And I’m glad our website is clear for you:-) It’s a high priority for us that the site works for as many people as possible and no-one is excluded. The usability people who helped us design it are very big on accessibility, so they will have checked that kind of thing.