Editing 2537: Painbow Award

{{comic
| number    = 2537
| date      = November 3, 2021
| title     = Painbow Award
| image     = painbow_award.png
| titletext = This year, our team took home the dark blue ribbon, better than the midnight blue we got last year but still short of the winning navy blue.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by MELLLVAR - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

This comic makes fun of the sometimes-displeasing color gradients used in the figures for scientific papers by suggesting that the scientists picking them are in competition to use the least-pleasing gradient. The title of the comic is a portmanteau of "pain" and "rainbow" suggesting a humorous name for terrible gradients.

The gradient here showcases a collection of unintuitive and unhelpful decisions. Starting from the top, white fades down into green, which then fades into red (passing through brown in the middle instead of yellow, indicating {{w|subtractive color}} mixing instead of {{w|additive color}} mixing, for no obvious reason). The red then turns ''back'' into green as the intensity decreases further. Red and green in close proximity make the power levels hard or impossible to distinguish for those with {{w|Color_vision_deficiency#Protanopia|protanopic color vision deficiency}}. This confusion is repeated at lower power levels, where blue transitions to black and then back again, before finally transitioning back into white. The highest and lowest recorded power levels have the same color value, which is less than ideal. That [[Randall]] is aware of color blindness and the problems this causes has been revealed in other comics like this one [[1213: Combination Vision Test]].

Although it's possible (for someone with full color vision) to interpret data from this graph from context clues - the white that fades to green is high-energy white, while the white that fades to blue is low-energy white - there's no benefit to doing things this way, and a lot of downsides. Additionally, there are regions in the color scale where the color changes very rapidly, which creates the false appearance of an edge in what is likely a smooth function.

Because the color scale includes black, representing just over 20 unlabeled units, it is possible that the graph axes, labels, and perhaps even the comic's caption represent measured values. Because they don't blend continuously with the negative space around them, this appears unlikely.

Real-world analogues to the Painbow Award include radar meteorology charts, where different types of precipitation have different color schemes that can overlap and blend in confusing transition zones.

The title text takes the concept of bad color combinations further, suggesting the use of <span style="color:white;background-color:navy;">navy blue</span>, <span style="color:white;background-color:darkblue;">dark blue</span>, and <span style="color:white;background-color:midnightblue;">midnight blue</span> for first, second, and third respectively. These are the names of three similar [https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_colornames.asp HTML colors], and, as [[315: Braille|sighted readers]] will be able to see, there is very little difference between them. However, the choice of blue(s) may be a direct play upon the association of the {{w|Blue Riband}} (a.k.a. "Blue Ribbon") and/or {{w|Le Cordon Bleu|Cordon Bleu}} (likewise, but this time direct from the French) awards, extended in common use for excellence across a much wider range of competitive fields.

For rosette-rewarded competitions (e.g. livestock parades, dog-shows, etc) the first prize ones are commonly blue (red for 2<sup>nd</sup> and either yellow or white for 3<sup>rd</sup>), though it may not be logically obvious to someone unfamiliar with this, perhaps more used to yellow depicting the 'gold standard, first place' indicator or red as the most alerting hue in some other ranking situations. Where a depicted award schema ''is'' directly gold/silver/bronze-influenced, however, the gold and bronze 'metallic off-yellows' can sometimes be more confused with each other than with the mid-level desaturated 'silver'

==Transcript==
:[A figure of a graph is shown, the figure has a number as if used in a paper. The graph has two labeled axis but without any units given. The Y-Axis has 15 ticks of equal length, the X-axis has 21 ticks, with every fifth double the height of the other. The graph displays a messy shape with color gradients, with a bright spot to the right of the shape aound the middle right part of the graph. This bright spot is surrounded by mainly green and red, with darker colors at the edge, and the rest of the graph white. On the right side of the graph there is a labeled bar with the scale of the color gradient. To the right of this are numbers indicating what the color represents. The color scale begins at the bottom with white, then goes to gray/blue, to black, back to blue, to gray, to green, to dark red, to red which fades via brown in to green, from where it fades slowly from darker green to lighter green ending up as yellow before going back to white again at the top.]
:Label: <u>Figure 2</u>
:Y-Axis: λ
:X-Axis: θ (phase)
:Scale label: Peak Energy
:120
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:[Caption under the panel:]
:Every year, disgruntled scientists compete for the Painbow Award for worst color scale.

==Trivia==
*When [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/archive/e/ef/20211103203044%21painbow_award.png originally uploaded], the caption used the phrase "color gradient" rather than "color scale"

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Charts]]