Question of the day.

[Vizth Hal]

0

Ok I'm going to turn this into a little game.
I'll post the question and we'll see who can come up with the best answers.

The answers from the book will be in spoiler tags under the question (yes i got these from a book) for you to lol at as well.

Lets see if you can come up with a better answer.

New one every day, and they're 106 questions.

Are there any undiscovered colors?
~Sir Michael Cummings, Biggin Hill

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Spoiler

I have been furiously mixing paints ever since this question
appeared in last month’s issue and am astonished and
proud beyond measure to be able to announce that I have
discovered what I believe to be an entirely new color! By
mixing blue paint and red paint, I have come up with a
wonderfully rich, regal hybrid that is somehow warmer and
more mellow than blue, and cooler and more elegant than
red. I call it “Simon,” because my name is in fact Simon. I
am enclosing a swatch of pure Simon for you to reproduce
in your magazine—perhaps on the cover?!?
~Simon Sayers, Durham County

[Ed note: We’re not entirely sure, Simon, but we think you might
have made purple. Thanks for trying, though.]

Not to be disrespectful, but this could very well serve
as a kind of prototypical stupid question, much as
Donald Rumsfeld’s words about “known knowns”
and “unknown unknowns” have become bywords for
political bluster and obfuscation. The way the human
eye reacts to the light it receives determines the colors
we see. A point often made is that we can never be sure
that while we agree something is “brown,” we are seeing
the same color. In theory I might receive a blow to the
head and wake up seeing completely different (or
“new”) colors but never know the difference. Synesthesia
is interesting in its implications for this— it results mostly
from neurological trauma. In the USSR one Yuri Zherkov
survived a plane crash near Katerinapol and afterwards
saw colors in musical notes. Taken to the National Soviet
Gallery, he was able to play many of the great paintings there
in astonishing improvised arrangements on the piano. He
had always been tone deaf, however, and his later attempts
to paint the great Russian composers’ works were met with
critical revulsion, official anger, and banishment to a Gulag
for anti-Soviet aesthetic tendencies, where he died of potato poisoning.
~Greg Maresh, Cubbling, Alaska