Halloween Botany - Mander

What?
Botanically speaking they are correct.
How is a pumpkin a berry?

With great effort, I imagine. A pumpkin is also a squash.

Pumpkins are cool

That’s because the scientific definition of berries has little in common with the colloquial one. That doesn’t make either wrong, they are just used in different contexts
We really should rename botanical berries to something else.
The thing is, there is for sure some Latin technical term that you can use. And it’s still close enough to berries to call them that.
Oh probably, but I don’t speak latin. Most people don’t speak latin; there’s like 1000 people in the world maximum who could hold a conversation in latin.

I love it.

I know you didn’t mean it, but this has the, “Do I LOOK like I speak Latin?” Energy and as a American, I’m all about that.

Lucky, I mean it is exactly the opposite way! Teach me some local languages, like Cree or Dene, maybe something Inuk.

I guess I am telling people to speak English though, aren’t I? Well it’s good to keep updated on the colonizer tongue I suppose.

Now get off my native grass lawn!

I appreciate the skittles reference
Is it a skittles reference or is it a reference to purple not being an actual color and thus not a part of the rainbow?
the heck do you mean purple is not an actual colour??
Purple, the color directly between red and blue, is a creation of your mind interpreting a band of light that triggers your red and blue sensing nerves, but no green is sensed. The actual band of light we can see goes from red to green to blue. Purple doesn’t fall between those colors, meaning it wouldn’t be included in a rainbow, and isn’t any “pure” light you could see, since it doesn’t fall on the spectrum.
What is violet at the end of the visible spectrum, then? We call the higher wavelength stuff ultraviolet, and violet looks purple to me, so I’m having trouble reconciling this stuff with what you’re saying.
We call it that but our eyes see the far end frequency as a colour that only very slightly activates blue sensitive cone receptors and no others. For red sensitive cones there is a slight bump in the high end frequencies also that makes it possible for them to look violet as it activates the blue sensitive and a bit of red sensitive receptors but a much purpler purple is made by combining high and low frequencies
There is evidence to show that violet does actually weakly activates red cones too. This is because the violet light starts creeping up to double the frequency of the lower end of the red sensitivity, and so it can actually successfully activate it very weakly. There are other factors that can lessen or even fully negate that effect though, it’s all kind of fuzzy.
Violet is dark spectral blue, added as a separate color by people who wanted 7 not six colors in the spectrum

You’re thinking of indigo.

Red

Orange

Yellow

Green

Blue

Violet

That’s 6.

Perhaps it was the number I misremembered. There definitely is no violet in the spectrum
Your definition of color is based only on human perception? Is purple a color for a mantis shrimp?
Definition I’m using is any color that can be expressed as a single wavelength of light. Purple cannot be, since it’s actually two wavelengths simultaneously.
Perceiving it as a color seems more practical though. It’s not like we look at “red” and think “ah yes, a single wavelength of light”

ah a similar explanation to why yellow is not an actual colour either

the silly explanation that has no effect on how we perceive, use, or think about colour. sigh why are the people responsible for those studied calling those colours not real? Why not just colours resulting from mixing other colours like the artists have done since the invention of paint?

Sorry for the confusion. Yellow is a single wavelength of light. We perceive it with the green and red receptors in our eyes, but it is a single wavelength. Purple isn’t a single wavelength, but two that are being interpreted as a color.

That was the distinction I was calling out.

and that is why i didn’t say the same explanation, but similar

both, in my opinion, suffer from the clickbait disease “YOU CAN’T SEE YELLOW 😱” (directly, because to see it you use two light receptors combined) “PURPLE DOESN’T EXIST 😱” (as a single wavelength colour because as opposed to the other colours of the rainbow it uses a combination of red and blue wavelengths)

i don’t blame you for either of course, i’m just expressing my general annoyance with the phrasing of both science facts

Mould this not disqualify any mixed color? We only have receptors for three colors, and if we’re arguing that. If purple isn’t a color because it’s actually two mixed together, that should also mean colors like orange, yellow, cyan, magenta, atc are also not be colors by that definition right?

This is 100% incorrect. Not in terms of science, but in terms of a qualifier of what a colour is. Just because a colour doesn’t exist on the rainbow spectrum, doesn’t mean it’s not an “actual colour”.

What you’re referring to is the definition of colour specifically by physics. There are other professional fields and areas of science that use different qualifiers for colour. I work with color everyday and I can with certainty say that purple, pink, rust, teal, and sky blue are all colours.

Kind of like how different fields have different definitions of entropy or different cultures have different names for snow. It’s all dependent on the framework you use and ignoring every other framework is wrong.

Like binaural beats for the eyes?

Don’t let them pee on your Cheerios. Purple is a color, just like magenta, pink, cyan, brown, and all the other “not in the rainbow/ROYGBIV” colors.

Gatekeeping colors, I tell ya. Don’t let 'em get you burnt sienna with rage.

I believe it’s indigo not purple there.
Correct. Initially, Newton didn’t have indigo in his list for the visible spectrum, but he wanted seven colors instead of six because it matched up with the number of notes in music (and because he liked the number). So at some point there was discussion of removing indigo entirely because it’s kinda just a shade between blue and violet that the human eye just isn’t as good at distinguishing compared to the other colors. But the neat thing is that what people back in Newton’s time called blue and indigo is more akin to what we today call cyan and blue (they know this by looking at his labeled drawings of the light scattered by prisims). Now the spectral colors are: red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and violet.
Visible spectrum - Wikipedia

and thus not a part of the rainbow?

Colour need not be on the rainbow. Colour is the human experience of colour which includes purple

Our minds don’t care whether a color is pure or whether it is a mix. We see those colors.

Like the berries there are technical definitions of colour that don’t mesh with the common definition

Seeing the creator writing “actually” instead of “oh yeah?”
Pumpkin pie also rarely is made with pumpkin, it’s usually squash
Pumpkin pie is always made with squash. Many times those squash are pumpkins
Pumpkin is a squash
Having made pumpkin pies for decades, this is true. Pumpkin is a squash.
Pumpkin pie is gross. Apple is the superior turkey-day pie.
but what about boo-berry?
Ah! A person of rare and refined taste!

This feels like a case where botanical science should just have picked a different name. If you invalidate everything people think of as a berry and then tell them a dozen things that are clearly not berries are, in fact, berries, you’re just making the word berry meaningless.

Berry means a tiny, usually sweet, fruit-like growth from a plant. The kind that is usually picked in bunches. The kind that you use to make smoothies. That’s a berry.

Botany did us all a disservice by choosing the word “berry” to mean “a specific thing which invalidates everything you think is a berry.” Just call it something in latin ffs.

They did. It’s Baca. Which means berry. Or maybe cow. Naming stuff is hard
Naming would be easier if we collectively review the names every few years and retire the BS.
Well cooking terms and botany terms are not the same. Any non reproductive part of a plant is vegetable. But in cooking we have a completely different idea of what vegetables are. This really doesn’t matter because most people are not botanists and those who are probably know the terms. The only people that care are quirky internet people with debates about weather or not potato salad should be considered a cake or something.
“Weather” is a nice ultimate touch
Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.