Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Thu, 8 Nov 2012 17:00:00 PST Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120210/14562417734/dailydirt-people-colored.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120210/14562417734/dailydirt-people-colored.shtml 1962, and now Crayola has a pack of eight crayons specifically called "multicultural" that includes: black, sepia, peach, apricot, white, tan, mahogany and burnt sienna. However, there are other colors that have been used to label people, like red and blue. The history of these color associations isn't so black and white. Here are just a few interesting links on how we've changed looking at colors over the years.

• Red states and blue states didn't always refer to Republican and Democratic electorates, respectively. Red and blue were frequently used to describe American political affiliations, but which color represented which party was not consistent until relatively recently (ca. 2000) -- for instance, during the Cold War, who wanted to be described as "red" in American politics? [url]
• Studies of how linguistic descriptions of color affect the way people perceive colors have rekindled the idea that language can shape how people think. And that's doubleplusgood. [url]
• Babies used to be dressed up in all white, but then little boys started only wearing blue... and girls would wear only pink. Again, this convention wasn't settled on for a long time, and it could have easily gone the opposite way (boys in pink, girls in blue). The real loss is in gender neutral colors for children's clothing.... [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120210/14562417734 Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:00:00 PDT Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110908/23433715857/dailydirt-everyday-scientific-mysteries.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110908/23433715857/dailydirt-everyday-scientific-mysteries.shtml

The physics of dried out coffee rings has been clarified. Yay! Now there's at least some reasonable explanation for why coffee drops dry out into dark-edged rings. [url]

Maybe Southwest Airlines' method of boarding isn't optimal, but compared to some Monte Carlo simulations, it's not too bad. Did it really take an astrophysicist to prove that boarding by blocks of rows isn't the most efficient way to pile into a plane? [url]

If you've ever wondered what the difference between the green-yellow and yellow-green crayons was, here is your answer. This is what you get when you stick 24 Crayola crayons in a spectrophotometer. [url]

To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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