Friday Hodgepodge

Four Things

I'm outta here until next Wednesday for the long holiday. I wish everyone a happy Memorial Day and I thank my fellow veterans.

1. Tetrachromacy, super-human color vision due to having four independent channels of color information (as opposed to the usual three), has been getting lots of popular attention lately. Common among some animals, it is thought to exist in as much as one percent of the human population:

Concetta Antico is a painter and art teacher with genetic tetrachromacy. Growing up in Sydney, she says, she was always "a little bit out of the box," alone in her own visual dreamland. She always preferred the kaleidoscope of colors she saw when she looked at the natural world. But nobody else seemed to see it quite like she did. So she decided to paint what she saw. "I'm sure people just think I'm high on something all the time," she said, "but I'm really just high on life and the beauty that's around us."

Antico leaned into her impressionist euphoria. She opened a teaching studio in California. Then in 2012, genetic tests revealed an explanation for Antico's preferences and the way she saw her world. She's a genetic tetrachromat.

This has gotten enough attention, in fact, that my daughter surprised me recently by telling me about it and claiming to be "a tetrachromat."

We haven't officially looked into that possibility, but she bases her claim on a test she took over YouTube.

I know, I know -- but I'm not going to pooh-pooh this out of hand. Her art reminds me a little of the description and the image in the article. And, although tetrachromacy would be just one explanatory possibility, she does have a long history of instantly spotting things the rest of us can't find too easily.

2. Possibly Related, Part I comes from the realm of computing humor: "If Programming Languages Were Futurama Characters and "The Javascript Holy Trinity." From the first:

Kif Kroker is... JavaScript

Timid, bashful, easy to exploit. All sorts of weird, but generally well meaning and unexpectedly competent. Can't shed loyalty to and is often left to clean up after Zapp. Lacks any internal structure; has a camouflage reflex and a number of other surprising capabilities, but just... doesn't seem very appealing.

The second, a visual gag, very well illustrates the proposition that, "JavaScript is as convoluted as Christian theology."

3. Possibly Related, Part II: I have heard of lists like this before, but here's an update, because I didn't feel old enough today, and have a feeling you don't, either.

To the Class of 2022:

The Toyota Pious Prius has been on the road for twenty years of the world being about to end in a decade. (Image by Kārlis Dambrāns, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)

• Outer space has never been without human habitation.
• They will never fly TWA, Swissair, or Sabena airlines.
• The Prius has always been on the road in the U.S.
• They never used a spit bowl in a dentist's office.
• "You've got mail" would sound as ancient to them as "number, please" would have sounded to their parents.
• Mass market books have always been available exclusively as Ebooks.
• There have always been more than a billion people in India.
• Films have always been distributed on the Internet.
• The detachable computer mouse is almost extinct.
• The Mir space station has always been at the bottom of the South Pacific.

But take heart. In your dotage, you may feel up to the task of contributing to this open call for recordings of obsolete sounds.

4. The Orange County Register not so long ago came up with a States to Move to for Californians fleeing their state for a better combination of affordability and sanity than is currently available there.

Top was Washington, bottom Louisiana. Based on an n of 1, the list would seem to be to be accurate: I personally know a family that tried moving to Louisiana. They didn't last long, and are now back in California.

-- CAV