color perception

Technology Connections explains why brown is not a spectral color but a context-dependent perception, essentially dark orange seen against brighter surroundings.

SciPy 2015 talk by Nathaniel Smith and Stefan van der Walt on choosing a new default colormap for Matplotlib. It covers why Jet misleads, how perceptual color spaces work, and how viridis was designed.

Captain Disillusion's comedic, fast-paced explainer on how color works in cameras, displays and video. It covers the biology of color perception and what it means for screens.

Vox explains the Berlin and Kay research showing that languages around the world tend to invent color words in the same order. It walks through the hierarchy and the debate around it.

Neuroscientist Beau Lotto runs the audience through color and pattern illusions to show that perception is shaped by context and evolutionary history rather than being a direct readout of the world. The talk is playful and hands-on, and it argues that the brain interprets ambiguous signals.

MinutePhysics explains that computers store brightness nonlinearly, so blurring and blending colors in raw RGB gives wrong, dark results. It shows why mixed colors, such as in gradients, look off.

Technology Connections explains the early history of analog color television, from the 1954 start of modern color broadcasting, and how shadow masks work in CRTs. It is the first in a series on how analog color TV works.

The UK DVSA's one-minute guide to the hazard perception part of the driving theory test, covering when to click and how to score well.

Vsauce explores qualia and whether different people experience colors the same way. It draws on color blindness, Mary's room, the explanatory gap and subjective experience.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues in this TED talk that evolution shaped perception to track fitness rather than truth. He uses evolutionary simulations and the Australian jewel beetle as examples.

A one-minute clip from Richard Feynman's 1979 Auckland lecture in which he answers whether you see an object or only its light. It is a short, playful take on perception and on the use of philosophy.

The 8-Bit Guy reviews the Color Maximite 2, a modern ARM-based computer that boots straight into BASIC. He shows what it can do as a retro-style machine.

Technology Connections explains how RGB light and color work, from hue and saturation to color vision and how objects appear under different lighting. It uses a studio setup with colored lights to demonstrate the effects.

A Technology Connections video on JVC's LCCS, a display hybrid that cycles a color LCD shutter over a monochrome CRT to produce field-sequential color without dots or stripes. It builds on his earlier videos about analog TV and compatible color.

Tom Scott explains why a vivid pink pigment by artist Stuart Semple cannot be fully shown on a screen, and touches on the dispute over exclusive rights to the blackest black pigment. It is a short explainer on color gamuts and pigment politics.

A two-minute BBC Horizon clip demonstrating the McGurk effect, where what you see of a speaker's mouth changes the sound you hear.

A short clip, titled Orwell Comes to America, on reasoning and perception. One HN user links it repeatedly as the science showing human minds are bad at reasoning and do not see reality as it is.

Vsauce explores whether people in past decades really looked older than people of the same age today, or whether photographic and cultural factors make them seem so. It draws on old photos, yearbooks and perception research.

Zig creator Andrew Kelley's RedisConf 2020 talk on modeling data flow with asynchronous I/O in Zig. It explains how Zig's async/await avoids function coloring, and Loris Cro demonstrates OkRedis, a zero-allocation Redis client.

A BSidesLV 2013 talk from the Sixteen Colors project on archiving the ANSI and ASCII art scene. It traces the scene's evolution from BBSs to the NFO and IRC era.

Veritasium explores why time seems to speed up as we age, covering chronoception and several competing explanations beyond the common proportional-theory argument.

Bisqwit writes a raytracer from scratch in C++ for DOS, rendering in the 16-color VGA palette at 640x480. The video also covers color quantization and ordered dithering.

Neural-network upscaled, 60 fps, stabilized and colorized version of 1902 footage of the Wuppertal Schwebebahn suspended railway in Germany. The source film comes from MoMA. It gives a vivid view of an early-1900s city and a train system that still runs.

A hands-on comparison of how jet fuel, diesel, heating oil, kerosene, avgas and gasoline burn and what color they are. It shows that gasoline ignites more easily than jet fuel.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth argues in this TED talk that perception is a controlled hallucination: the brain constantly predicts the world and our shared agreement is what we call reality. He also touches on the construction of the self.

A motorcycle safety video on the SMIDSY (sorry mate, I didn't see you) accident, explaining the perception and optical illusion that makes drivers fail to see riders, and how riders can spot the signs and avoid it.

Matt Parker explains the history behind NTSC television running at 29.97 frames per second rather than 30, tracing it to the backward-compatible addition of color. He walks through the arithmetic behind the odd ratio.

A NOVA documentary with neuroscientist Heather Berlin exploring the subconscious and what drives our decisions. It uses sleepwalking, anesthesia, improvised rap in an MRI and game theory to probe how much of the brain's work is hidden.

The trailer for Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old, a WWI documentary built from restored, colorized archival footage and BBC interviews with British soldiers.

A Technology Connections video essay on how analog and digital clocks shape different mental models of time, with the minute hand acting as a progress indicator.

Technology Connections experiments with filtering white and colored LEDs to make holiday lights look less garish. He explains why narrowband LED strings look harsh compared with incandescent bulbs.

The original invisible gorilla awareness test by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, in which viewers count basketball passes and often miss a gorilla crossing the scene. It demonstrates inattentional blindness.

The 8-Bit Guy explains the color limitations of 1980s computers and consoles such as the NES and Commodore 64. It shows how sprites, attributes and palettes shaped the look of old games.

A Climate Town episode on who uses America's water, particularly Western water. It looks at agriculture such as alfalfa and animal feed, and at water-rights rules that discourage conservation.

FortNine's tongue-in-cheek guide to why drivers fail to see motorcyclists and how riders can make themselves more visible. It touches on perception psychology, including the role of saccades.

Part 2 of the IROS 2011 keynote by Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson on Google's self-driving car. It shows how the car perceives its surroundings with a lidar point cloud and recognizes traffic lights and pedestrians. The audio is poor because it was recorded on a pocket camcorder.

A BBC Horizon clip demonstrating the McGurk effect, where the same audio sounds like different syllables depending on the mouth movements you see. It shows that people integrate visual speech information into what they hear.

Footage shot in New York City in 1911 by a Swedish film company, upscaled to 4K and 60 fps with neural networks and optionally colorized. The creator notes the colors are artificial and added only for ambiance.

A Technology Connections video weighing LED streetlights against high pressure sodium lamps, covering efficiency, color, cost and light pollution. It is a follow-up to his earlier explanation of why street lights are orange.

Denis Shiryaev's neural-network-upscaled, colorized 60 fps version of film footage shot in Paris between 1896 and 1900.