Recently, I’ve seen quite a few things online having to do with colors (or colours for my non-American friends). First, there was the incredible WNYC’s Radiolab show on colors, which you can listen to for free:
It goes over several things related to colors and science, including the history of how we figured out what the rainbow is, how we get pigments (and one interesting one in particular), and how we have seen and described colors throughout history (and why there’s no blue in the Iliad or Odyssey).
There was a follow-up to that show on the blog, also, about seeing the colors in our world better:
Then, of course, there was the two part blog post series on the blog Empirical Zeal called “The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains,” which mentions the Radiolab show, and builds on certain parts of it, especially the last part. How we see and describe colors is an incredibly complex thing, and different cultures have done it in different ways throughout history. Some cultures don’t even have the colors we have. Some simply have “warm” and “cool” color descriptors. It’s fascinating:
And, of course, a couple infographics about color, one from KISSMetrics and one from UltraLinx: