Ezra Butler

The Thought of Gold WebColors_Final_FINAL.newsletter

newsletter.colorphilia.com/the-thought-...

Update

Now, I’ve completed the series about the history of web colors.

One item on note, besides for the indigo elephant in the room, a majority of the colors were initially created to provide optimal sampling of the entire spectrum of color.

They were given ill-fitting names. People then changed the colors to fit the names. Which likely ruined the optimal sampling.

Borrowed Colors Scroll down for a lot of color.

I completed a short series in the Colorphilia Newsletter about research I’ve done over the past month into the origins of web colors.

newsletter.colorphilia.com/borrowed-col...

Based on a wholly unscientific analysis, I write subjectively superior social media posts after drinking a bottle of wine.

Oh look, a blogpost I completely agree with.

On the Origins of Web Colors The case for intelligent design

I did more research about the origins of web colors.

newsletter.colorphilia.com/on-the-origi...

This is tangential to my issue regarding the obsession about the serial comma. At times, it is useful, at times unnecessary.

Applying it wholesale disregards the actual content of the list. Sometimes you may wish to subtly suggest a relationship between two items, even by just omitting the comma.

Ok, there were major problems* with the Lisbon Inquisition, but it did inadvertently help introduce tomatoes to the English-speaking “New World”** colonies.

And tomatoes are delicious.***

* its very existence, for starters
** this term is an admitted misnomer
*** factually speaking

It’s always awkward reading my own writing years later. I have so many edits to make.

From “Einstein: From Celebrity to Symbol”

Not as if you need more ammo, but you may like these.

bsky.app/profile/ezra...

Einstein: On Cooperation In a speech given at a university in Davos, Einstein said, “Nothing truly valuable can be achieved except by the unselfish cooperation of many individuals.”

ezrabutler.com/einstein-on-...

Einstein: From Celebrity to Symbol Years before Andy Warhol imagined his idea of the mass-produced celebrity, Albert Einstein became a celebrity, partially by accident.

ezrabutler.com/einstein-fro...

Einstein: Creation and Destruction When people in America first heard of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, they were terrified.

ezrabutler.com/einstein-cre...

The Atomic Einstein Project - Ezra Butler These are the essays that were created for the Atomic Einstein Project in October, 2020.

In 2020, I researched and wrote 4 essays about #Einstein for an art project I called “the Atomic Einstein Project”.

If you read them, you’ll see how pro-human, pro-curiosity, pro-empathy and pro-artist Einstein was.

ezrabutler.com/tag/atomic-e...

Who were Sir John Herschel's blue test subjects? The inventor of the cyanotype used the annual literature yearbook "Friendship's Offering" as the source of many of the images he experimented on.

Because this is considered "original research" (which it is), as no one had apparently connected his experiments with engravings from the annual publication of "Friendship's Offering", this information can’t be put on Wikipedia.

newsletter.colorphilia.com/who-were-sir...

In November, the History of Science Museum in Oxford was kind enough to let me peruse their collection of Sir John Herschel's experimental cyanotypes.

I had found it curious that he mostly made images of young women.

Subsequently, I was able to discover the sources of a majority of them.

I say “salve” instead of ”ciao” when I want to sound a little less vulgar.

Carnevale, Urbino

Just a snippet of my linked experiment.

Moneyballing Threads I ran an experiment on Threads to see if I could get 1M views in a month. I achieved my goal after 4 days.

After leaving Twitter, I spent the past few years on Threads and am now, for all intents and purposes, done with that platform as well.

I think we need to rethink the whole idea of feed-driven social media, which assigns too much relevance to the new.

ezrabutler.com/moneyballing...

This entire period is fascinating to me because I was a latchkey MS-DOS kid so no VT240 or even X11, and I was about to write that we didn’t have a color monitor until windows 3.1, but I distinctly remember that Foxpro (where I wrote my first db around age 9 - ‘89 or ‘90) was a shade of blue.

If I’m not mistaken, the VT-240 was one of the first “terminals” which was designed to have a local “server”, ie, they weren’t designing this for traditional dumb terminals, but personal computers.

But yes :) I wanted to visualize the palette, and I thought, this feels like a colorblind nightmare.

As a followup to my newsletter yesterday, I was going through the HLS colors in the 1984 VT-240 programmer reference manual, and I realized that they were using a 120° shifted hue spectrum: with blue (our 240°) being 0°, red (0°) being 120°, and green (120°) being 240°.

#color #research #tech

Dante’s Inferno?

How did indigo become violet? Indigo became violet in the 1990s because of Netscape's co-founder.

I had assumed that indigo became violet because of ROY G. BIV.

I was wrong.
It turns out to be so much worse.

The co-founder of Netscape, James Clark, was one of the founders of SGI which released a violet-colored computer in 1991 called the Indigo.

newsletter.colorphilia.com/how-did-indi...

Rethinking Pink. A dispatch from Madrid, about Vilnius, Paris and Toulouse.

And here is a newsletter I wrote about pink.

newsletter.colorphilia.com/rethinking-p...

Color Researcher Develops Theory to Solve Millennia Old Mystery about Lithuanian Blue How did they make blue glass beads in Lithuania in the 1st century?

Here is that time I developed a theory discovering a new 2000 year old color in Lithuania.

newsletter.colorphilia.com/lithuanian-b...

How Appelblauwzeegroen became Teal in Belgian Dutch. Finding the hidden message in the "apple-blue, sea-green" hue.

Here is a piece I wrote about the origins of the word “appelblauwzeegroen” (teal) in Belgian Dutch.

newsletter.colorphilia.com/how-appelbla...