Editing 2537: Painbow Award
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==Explanation== | ==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 | + | 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 | + | 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 increases further. Red and green in close proximity make the power levels hard or impossible to distinguish for those with {{w|Color_blindness#Protanopia|protanopic colorblindness}}. 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. |
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. | 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. | ||
− | + | 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 navy blue, dark blue, and midnight blue for first, second, and third respectively, even though most people would perceive these as being the same or very similar colors. 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 and yellow for 2<sup>nd</sup> and 3<sup>rd</sup>, respectively), 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' | |
− | + | ==Trivia== | |
+ | * When originally uploaded, the caption used the phrase "color gradient" rather than "color scale" | ||
==Transcript== | ==Transcript== | ||
− | :[A | + | {{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}} |
− | : | + | :[A graph named 'Figure 2' with two axes is shown. The vertical axis is labeled 'λ' and the horizontal axis is labeled 'θ (phase)'. On the right side, a bar labeled 'Peak Energy' is shown, with colors starting from black, to green, to red, to green, to yellow, and to white from bottom to top. The center of the graph is a messy shape with ugly gradients from these colors.] |
− | + | :Caption under the panel: Every year, disgruntled scientists compete for the Painbow Award for worst color scale. | |
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− | :Every year, disgruntled scientists compete for the Painbow Award for worst color scale. | ||
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{{comic discussion}} | {{comic discussion}} | ||
[[Category:Comics with color]] | [[Category:Comics with color]] | ||
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