Talk:Indigo

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Contents

[edit] Colors Corrected on Page

No worries now!

[edit] Wrong Color

Indigo is not dark purple as the article shows. It's more bluish, and that is not a matter of perception either. Take a look at all the other indigo stuff on the web, including google images. Books are another good source. Check it out.

The dark purple thing is wrong and bad reference. I made a comment about this on simple english wiki. - Steve

[edit] NOTICE

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Indigo_plant_extract_sample.jpg

[edit] Rounding for HSV values

  • HSV was:
   * H: 275
   * S: 100
   * V: 51

now

HSV    (h, s, v)    =  (274, 100, 50)

Off by 1 :-/ probably I'm rounding differently than the gimp. let's see...

Okay, I fixed the programme, added rounding off properly. Kim Bruning 13:59, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Indigo isn't a color

Indigo is no more a color than any other dye. I suggest that Indigo redirects to Indigo dye, since it really isn't a color. Also, I think it should be removed entirely from the colors footer, since it is not a color. --Ctachme 16:33, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Nah, it's both a color and a dye, but more used as the color. (Many colors are named from dyes, or plants that exhibit the color. How many people know that mauve is the name of a plant?) --Jerzy(t) 16:39, 2005 Feb 8 (UTC)
Of course it's a colour. Jimp 30May05
There are an infinite number of colors. Indigo is one of them. Your box of crayons probably (unless you had the box with only 8 colors) had yellow-orange. Yellow-orange is a color between yellow and orange. We just don't have a good name for it.--RLent 20:56, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
Yes, there is a name for that color; amber. Georgia guy 22:47, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Indigo

Does anyone have any opinions on whether indigo is a real spectral color?? Studying the history of the color article, I got that indigo was removed from the color spectrum and the wavelengths. Does anyone have any opinions?? 66.32.255.91 15:17, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

  • "Real spectral color" is a loaded expression.
    • Yes, there is a wavelength that stimulates the human eye in a way indistinguishable to the brain from the way that indigo dye's characteristic organic compound (or mix of compounds?) does.
    • However, much like red or green, all humans except those (e.g. painters) who have in effect nurtured an obsession with color use "indigo" to refer to a range of wavelengths, and in that sense the question asks whether the endpoints of that range are the real dividing points between colors. The simple answer is that there are no real dividing points.
Real answers are much more complicated. There is very strong evidence, from comparing color vocabularies of (non-constructed) languages, that each culture (i suspect we are really talking about those that haven't yet gotten sophisticated at developing synthetic dyes) has an implicit agreement about how many colors there are, expressesd in its vocabulary of colors. (WP editors are likely to recall a conlang (whose name i shan't mention) that has a single word spanning both blue and green.) That color vocabs should differ is not too earth-shaking, IMO. (For anyone surprised by this, i offer the information that the German words for "orange" and "violet" come from Arabic and Latin; think about the implications of that.) What is more surprising is the evidence that those vocabs don't seem to be freely chosen, i.e., that at some fundamental and universal brain level, blue and green really are more alike than, say, green and yellow. With, IIRC, the one exception of Russian, all the variations can be explained by assuming that everyone's brain has the same hierarchy of color distinctions, and that a culture in effect determines its language's vocabulary of colors by a single "decision": namely how strong a difference between colors to require before giving those two colors separate names. "Here's a palette of the world's colors, how many do you want to be able to make distinctions between? OK, i just shredded the bottom of your culture's copy of the color palette; here's the top five swatches, just give them each a name and you're good to go. Huh? What other colors are you talking about? There are only five colors as far as you're concerned; the ones i just shredded are really just shades of these 5."
I assume this is discussed somewhere on WP, with some sort of list. If anyone has been there and can give me a link to save my searching, i'd be grateful.
--Jerzy(t) 19:44, 2005 Feb 8 (UTC)

[edit] Removed Cyan Reference

I stripped this:

Curiously, he did not choose a more significant color also producible by the indigo plant, the complementary color to red, now called cyan.

because

  1. There's nothing curious about it; our article explains it adequately, or nearly so.
  2. This sentence is not about established knowledge, but a form of original research, into why he omitted it.

--Jerzy(t) 19:44, 2005 Feb 8 (UTC)
Ah, i read hastily: cyan instead of indigo, so the Seven argument is irrelevant. Do we know anything of the availability of the various dyes in his time? Does my absorption-lines story cast any light [chuckle!] on this? Did he defend his choice in print?? --Jerzy(t) 05:45, 2005 Feb 9 (UTC)

[edit] Indigo, here we go-oh (Newton)

I'm confused by the bit that says "He [Newton] named seven colors specifically to link them with the (known) planets, days of the week, notes in the octave, and other lists that had seven items.

An Octave has eight notes.

That would seem to be the case, based on the name octave, but there are actually only seven "kinds" of notes. Consider the C Major scale. The notes in this scale are C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. Note that the first and last notes are the same, but an octave apart. (It could be argued that the upper C is in fact the bottom note of the next octave.) —Bkell 08:17, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • An octave is the fundamental interval or frequency ratio in music. (Other intervals based on counting notes in the major (or occasionally minor) scale are also important: thirds, fifths, and sevenths are frequently mentioned, and many of us can immediately recognize the difference between major and minor keys by hearing a major third or a minor third.)
The problem starts with not having realized early enough that "none" has a number to go with it. The ratio between two adjacent Cs is called an octave because that between adjacent notes of the major scale is called a second. What's a first? The relationship between a note and itself. (Duh??) If medieval choir directors had studied Arabic mathematics, they might have called a first a "zero-th" and an octave something like a heptave.
The special status of 8 can also be explained in the fact the ear (er, i mean brain) likes to hear not a major scale of 7 different notes, but of the 7 followed by the higher or lower version of the first note: the sequence of the first 7 notes sounds incomplete; the so-called ear is waiting for that last "shoe" to drop.
--Jerzy(t) 19:44, 2005 Feb 8 (UTC)
  • I find the Seven thing very plausible in light of Newton's IIRC well documented pursuit of alchemy, a very metaphysical attempt at science.
But i also recall a physics teacher who probably didn't know abt Seven; this teacher's story was that
Newton did a pretty decent job of resolving the solar spectrum (no arc lamp as substitute or comparison until decade of 1800s, and he needed as intense a source as he could get), and found what are now understood as solar absorption bands: narrow, relatively dark interruptions of the spectrum. He found dark (or at least faint) bands, more or less distinct, at places he was willing to call boundaries between adjacent pairs of colors in the ROYGBV spectrum, and convinced himself that they were "real" boundaries between colors. (I don't know how well he resolved them, but he'd have been able to extrapolate from his experience of improving resolution as the quality of his prisms and perhaps lenses improved, and to visualize the likelihood of the weak bands potentially resolving further into dark bands. "Hey, the sun itself doesn't know these colors, i'll bet there just aren't any such colors." Note the sun (not earth) was his center of the solar system and probably the universe, and probably very metaphysically charged. And even without that significance, IMO the idea of varying hues within a "real" color that is separated rom other colors by bands corresponding to missing "nonexistent" colors, is very appealing to the human desire to draw boundaries.) But there were these two dark (or faint) bands between blue and violet, too pronounced to ignore, or too awkwardly spaced to ignore one and not the other. So he decided there was a seventh color between B&V, and declared the "real" colors to be ROYGBIV, giving indigo the status we are now discussing, based on his whacked-out assumption that the dark lines were in some sense reflecting something fundamental about color distinctions.
(IMO this is not inconsistent with the Seven story being essentially true.)
If this is true, IMO this article should discuss it as well as what's already there, perhaps linking to something already in another article. Again, if anyone has been there and can give me a link to save my searching, i'd be grateful.
--Jerzy(t) 19:44, 2005 Feb 8 (UTC)
I agree... this is a very plausible explanation and I would like to see it be included in the article if it can be verified. --Ctachme 05:56, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Indigo known??

Is the word indigo a well-known color term in any way independent of teaching ROYGBIV?? Georgia guy 22:00, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

No, people only ever know indigo solely because of ROYGBIV, it is virtually never used in everyday usage. In my opinion it really it is no more a color than any other dye because of this. --Ctachme 02:03, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
If Indigo is not a color, then NNE is not a direction.--RLent 17:38, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Is indigo bluer than violet

According to Newton's spectrum, it is, but according to Wikipedia, it is not. The color Wikipedia says is indigo is a shade, and can be converted to a hue by lightening it, and when I lightened it with Microsoft Paint, I got the color 147 0 255. Wikipedia says violet is 139 0 255. Any comments?? Georgia guy 21:34, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

In case you can't tell, indigo doesn't really exist, therefore people try to make up where they think it would go, and they don't always guess close to what it is "supposed" to be. Theortecially, it is supposed to be between blue and violet, but in real life so few people know what it is that anyone can get by by making it whatever they want in that part of the spectrum. That said, the colors that are used at wikipedia come from the X11 color names. However, whoever compiled that list (nobody really knows) really hadn't the slighest clue what they were doing. --Ctachme 22:43, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Ctachme, have you not read the rest of this discussion page? Indigo does exist. It is a valid color. Kat, Queen of Typos 10:35, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Japanese external links

These are probably very helpful if you read Japanese:

so maybe someone who does might want to copy them across? --Phil | Talk 10:11, May 9, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Between blue & violet

Based on Wikipedia's color standards, indigo is not between blue and violet, see above for details. However, there is a color that is between blue & violet according to Wikipedia's standards; guess what it is?? Persian blue. Georgia guy 23:26, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Indigo Children

I removed the short spiel on 'Indigo Children' as it was patent nonsense/unscholarly Snarfevs 08:00, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

See Indigo Children

[edit] Indigo in Doom

Removed part relating to the game Doom, as it is irrelevant. It's the equivalent of saying that the Protoss are yellow in Starcraft; it has no place here.

[edit] Indigo can't be reproduced on a computer screen

Why does the article say indigo can't be reproduced on a computer screen? What with 32 million colors, I would think that's ridiculous. In answering this please don't simply reply "it doesn't exist." Kat, Queen of Typos 00:41, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

That paragraph was added by User:Ashley Y; I consider it nonsense, and have thus deleted it. --moof 15:26, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Shades of Blue

I noticed that Indigo is in the category of "shades of violet". But according to the article, it is somewhere between violet and blue. Therefore, it seems to me that it ought also to be in the category of "shades of blue". I have added the category info. (You can remove it, of course, if you violently disagree...) SpectrumDT 11:47, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Out-of-place paragraphs

I removed the following paragraphs:

Indigo is also the Spanish name for India, which is one of the earliest known places to have used the Indigo flower as a dye for clothes. Other areas to use Indigo dye in the ancient World included Egypt and Greece.

The British in India during the Raj often forced locals to plant Indigo in their fields for use in English mills for dyeing cotton. Growing Indigo in a field contaminates the soil for certain other food crops. This led to famines in many areas of India during the British Raj.

These really belong in the articles about the dye and/or plant, rather than color, but I forget at the moment if there's some arcane procedure for moving data to another article, and am sleepy. Good night! Lusanaherandraton 07:02, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Indiglo

I don't know if the see also for Indiglo belongs in this article. I thought about removing it, but I could see how someone searching for Indiglo could have ended up at this page by mistake. PaleAqua 21:05, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

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