Category: Art

The Best Color Scale? Not Rainbow

Image from Borland and Taylor (2007).

Even though rainbow color maps look pretty, Borland and Taylor (2007; pdf) argue that they’re rarely the best choice for showing data.

The rainbow color map confuses viewers through its lack of perceptual ordering, obscures data through its uncontrolled luminance variation, and actively misleads interpretation through the introduction of non-data-dependent gradients.

–Borland and Taylor (2007): Rainbow Color Map (Still) Considered Harmful in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

They recommend the much more boring (but visually useful) greyscale and bi-colored schemes, for things like temperature maps and so on where the data is continuous.

A pretty, but not very informative, rainbow color scale.

Music of the Fibonacci Sequence

Tool‘s Lateralus has the Fibonacci Sequence embedded into it. Ms. Wilson tells me that some of her Algebra II students were able to detect it out after listening to the song (a few times), but this video has the highlights where the sequence occurs.

↬ Ms. Wilson

Monet’s Ultra-violet Vision

Monet's two versions of "The House Seen from the Rose Garden" show the same scene as seen through his left (normal) and right eyes.

The eye’s lens is pretty good at blocking ultra-violet light, so when Claude Monet (whose works we visited earlier this year) had the lens of his eye removed he could see a little into the ultra-violet wavelengths of light.

Monet’s story is in a free iPad book put out by the Exploratorium of San Francisco called Color Uncovered (which I have to get). Carl Zimmer has a review that includes more details about Monet and how the eye works.

↬ Joe Hanson

P.S.: All of Monet’s works can be found on WikiPaintings, a great resource for electronic copies of old paintings (that are out of copyright).