Kistaro Windrider

RGB displays are designed around average human rods and cones. Audio compression is designed around psychoacoustics — what the brain notices vs. filters out in sound, so compression can selectively damage the part your brain throws away anyway.

I have never seen science fiction acknowledge how fucking weird our MP3s must sound and how bizarre the color gamut of photographs on a luminous RGB or reflective CMY(K) display surface (including printed paper) must be to space aliens.

the entire history of paint mixing is like that to some extent. and we don’t necessarily need space aliens for this, human tetrachromats and birds with wider color gamut sensitivity exist

Dec 20, 2024 at 10:36pmWeb
Show threadIrenes (many)Dec 20, 2024

@kistaro agreed

we saw a Zarf review of a puzzle game point this out decades ago, and it's stuck with us ever since

Show threadCanageekDec 20, 2024

@kistaro it's very fun when you actually bump up again it's the edges of this in the real world. I made a disprosium compound that under some light sources looks colorless, and under other light sources looks purple.

I was very confused when I came into the lab and all of a sudden the colorless compound I've been working with for several days with purple and I couldn't think of any chemistry that would have caused this change (they replaced our bulbs with LEDs overnight)

Show threadCanageekDec 20, 2024
@kistaro (if you want to research more about this it's known as the Alexandrite Effect)
Show threaddoephinDec 20, 2024

@Canageek @kistaro even just glasses can do it. Due to chromatic aberration and the way modern traffic lights are made, if I look at them out of the corner of my eye I can see *under* the lit light

Like

*red light*.......*actual bulb over here*

Show threadBen AvelingDec 20, 2024
@kistaro it was mentioned in an Isaac Asimov story, the aliens (Martians in caves, iirc) made incorrect assumptions about human eyes based on the inefficient spectrum of the hero’s light source (which was of course state of the art for when the story was written)
Show threadacbDec 21, 2024
@kistaro To a cat or dog, all human music is bass music
Show thread[tj] - knows what your packets are thinkingDec 21, 2024
@kistaro this is a bit of a plot point in “A deepness in the Sky” which is a wonderful book
Show threadAndresDec 22, 2024
@kistaro There's also the possibility that as we ourselves evolve (and climate change or other external factors may help us along in that), we lose the ability to view our own historical media. Imagine humans 500 or 1000 years from now being able to recover data from some kind of (cdrom? hard disk?) drive and trying to make sense of images, videos, and music when their aural and optical receptors have changed quite a bit.
Show threadWillDec 22, 2024
@kistaro The Mote in God's Eye has a throwaway paragraph to this effect: the alien Moties are showing their human guests some of their art, which looks thoroughly weird, and have a good chuckle when they learn that human vision turns the spectrum into a circle (or something like that, it's been years since I last reread it).