The name of the colors

I recently created the library xkcdcolornamer.js, which allows you to get the name of any RGB color. You can see an example of its use by clicking on the color below to modify it and see its name.

It seems that humans are not very good at naming colors. This is not an easy task, as it involves assigning discrete categories to a continuous spectrum, and intermediate tones can vary according to our perception.

The controversial dress and a couple of quantified versions

In the image above, you can see the dress that became so famous because no one could agree whether it was white-gold or black-blue. To the left is the original version, and in the middle is a version of the image using only the 256 web colors standardized by SVG 1.0.

For the right version, I took each pixel of the dress photo and replaced them with the closest color out of the 256 most used in English. The top ten are: green, blue, purple, pink, brown, red, light blue, turquoise, grey, and orange.

This list does not include colors like white or yellow. This is because I generated it using the xkcd color survey, in which 222,500 users named randomly chosen colors. As can be observed, it's not the best palette for compressing an image.

While this method has some statistical issues (the color range of each screen varies, men are overrepresented, and the average of a set of colors is not usually the most representative color), it gives a good idea of our limited ability in naming colors.

Color spectrum using only the top 50 most common names

The 50 most named colors.

One reason might be genetic influence. Beyond colorblindness and similar alterations, not everyone perceives colors in exactly the same way; in fact, we don't even see colors exactly the same with our left and right eyes.

Another important factor is cultural influence: our language greatly affects how we understand color. It's surprising that in the Iliad, Homer described the sea as having the color of wine, and he made no mention of the colors blue and orange in his poems.

In general, language limits—or expands—our view of the world. For example, the Australian Thaayorre tribe has no relative direction terms such as left and right, and speak just in absolute coordinates like north and south. This in turn made them have a great orientation.

All these factors make our way of seeing colors not too apropriate to represent images with the smallest palettes possible, but it still the way we speak. Which is why it was strange taht there's nothing else available to name colors using our peculiar palette.

By the way, that dress is gray and no one is gonna convince me otherwise.

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Emergence and Xenobots

About a month ago, the University of Vermont published a research on Xenobots, "living robots" capable of moving in a direction and self-repairing if damaged.

These organisms are composed of two distinct 'pieces': myocardial cells —the heart's muscle tissue— that contract periodically involuntarily, and skin cells with a purely structural function. Both were obtained from frog embryos.

A team of computer scientists at this university used a supercomputer to find configurations capable of moving longer distances in a period of 10 seconds. Each of the configurations was a three-dimensional mosaic of these cells, the result of which is no longer a frog.

Figure about the Xenobots assembly

For now, it's an early test far from large-scale manufacturing, and the most effective configurations were manually replicated by a surgeon with tweezers and miniature electrodes. However, the authors imagine that as bioprinting advances, they could have many applications.

In the future, creatures of this type could be used to clean plastic from the oceans, eliminate radioactive contamination, or deliver medications to specific parts of the body. But above all, it's a first step towards understanding their collective behavior.

Although they have been trained with the goal of moving forward, this has allowed their individual behavior to be modeled. However, when many of these creatures interact with each other, emergent behaviors arise that are not easily predictable, such as spinning in circles.

This phenomenon, known as emergence, has aroused concern within the scientific community. Emergent behaviors, so difficult to predict, are a very recurrent theme in science fiction.

MicroBenders autoreplicated (Futurama 6x17)

There is a popular global catastrophe scenario known as gray goo. In this hypothesis, the development of certain self-replicating technology spirals out of control until it exhausts all the planet's resources.

In this case, there's no need to worry, as the way xenobots have been designed deprives them of many functions necessary to stay alive for more than a week. Or at least that seems to be the case.

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Radios around the globe

Radio Garden is akin to a Google Earth for radio stations, allowing you to explore live sounds from different parts of the planet.

Radio.garden view centered on Europe

This project began in 2016 as a conceptual experiment for a Dutch research project with a simple idea: take online streams of AM/FM radios from around the world and place them on a globe.

Since anyone can add a station, the map has grown rapidly. Although there are still more stations densely packed in Europe, some can be found in the most remote places on the planet.

It's very visual and invites you to explore the sounds of the world in the same way Street View tempts you to get lost in the streets of other countries. There's a list of favorite stations where you can add the ones you discover.

Over time, I have added some music radios to this list that I usually listen to, but there are also many conventional radios that might be good for language practice.

If you find any other interesting radio stations, feel free to leave them in the comments. I'm still looking for a lofi station to replace that YouTube video with the same 8 hours of music on loop.

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Net neutrality

Hace unos meses contraté la línea de móvil con Vodafone/One, con un contrato que ofrecía la tarifa Zero Rating. Básicamente, consistía en no contar en el consumo de datos algunas aplicaciones de mensajería: Telegram, Line, Whatsapp, y algunas más.

En su momento me pareció muy buena idea, podría usar los bots de Telegram para no consumir datos al descargar vídeos de YouTube, canciones, o convertir archivos a otro formato. Y no me di cuenta de la cara oculta de esta tarifa.

Supongamos que mañana diseño un nuevo servicio de mensajería, con muchas funcionalidades, tan bueno que merecería estar en el top de aplicaciones descargadas. Un gran número de usuarios no lo descargarán, simplemente porque con otras alternativas no consumen datos.

Y puede ir a más. Eligiendo qué aplicaciones tienen permitido hacer tal cosa y qué otras no, estamos abriendo la veda a estrategias como la de MEO en Portugal.

MEO offer with packages separated by apps and websites

Gran parte de la belleza de Internet reside en su neutralidad. Para que podáis estar leyendo mi web, los bytes van desde mi servidor doméstico hasta vosotros siguiendo el mismo camino que seguirían al usar Google o Facebook. Sin embargo, al matar la neutralidad en la red, se está permitiendo la creación de autopistas de peaje, vías rápidas que obligan a las webs a pagar cierta cantidad a las operadoras para poder funcionar a la máxima velocidad.

Estas prácticas están prohibidas en la Unión Europea, aunque en España la interpretación ha sido bastante laxa. Seguramente os suenen casos de operadoras que bajan la velocidad a usuarios que utilizan descargas P2P o VoIP, o que directamente las bloquean.

Esta semana en EEUU se está decidiendo algo parecido. Muchos usuarios están haciendo todo lo posible por evitar que la nueva ley entre en vigor. Y allí las acciones de algunas operadoras han sido bastante más malignas. Por ejemplo, AT&T censuró un directo de Pearl Jam por las críticas de su cantante al en aquel entonces presidente George Bush.

En definitiva, podemos decir que estamos mejor que la mayoría, aunque podríamos estar mejor. Y siendo prácticos, existe otra neutralidad en la red que merece más nuestra atención, la App Neutrality: Google y Apple comparten un duopolio que les da potestad absoluta para decidir incluir o no incluir ciertas aplicaciones en sus stores, y colocarlas en una posición más alta o más baja en el ranking.

Y también podríamos hablar de la Search neutrality, aunque eso da para otro post.

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A large picture visualizer

Ever opened a large image like this one and struggled to view it comfortably due to zoom issues?

Ian Gilman has come up with a solution. With OpenSeaDragon, you can turn a large image into a map that allows gradual zooming with your mouse wheel. Click on the image to see the result:

Before OpenSeaDragonizing

The source code is publicly available and can be embedded in a webpage.

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