Color blind - friend of man (Ministry of Health is not right)

It so happened that I had to plunge into the topic of color rendering disorders for almost 40 years already. And it’s not that I have been driving a car for more than 15 years without problems, and not that some shades of flowers do not allow me to enjoy the beauty of the world, and it’s not that my relatives and friends sometimes don’t understand why I occasionally call colors "alien names" ...

The Internet is replete with articles on color blindness, full of medical terms and a description of cones, which some people don’t have in their eyes, often written by those who themselves can’t evaluate how this works (or rather, it doesn’t work for some).



Thanks to the achievements of modern science, people with the "supposedly" (below I will write why this word is here here) impaired color reproduction has the opportunity to look at the world with different eyes. True, so far this opportunity in Russia (especially not residents of MSCs and St. Petersburg) is quite difficult to implement. The appearance of glasses such as Enchrome, OxyIso, Pilestone can help with some forms of color blindness, but the price and the lack of a wide variety impede the development of progress in Russia.



Anyone can find articles on the models of these glasses, tests, results where people cry with happiness on the Internet - but this will not be about that - but a little about another aspect of this problem.



Since childhood, I saw all the basic bright colors - 6 Soviet pencils and guessed a rainbow in the primer with my eyes closed, with my back to the easel, on one leg, holding a whisk in my hand. I was genuinely surprised when my mother showed an imported set of 30+ GDR pencils, which were slightly different, but, in fact, drew the same lines and, probably, even then sadly thought that her son did not distinguish colors. Perhaps this is not a problem of color blindness, many male representatives do not know such flower names as fuchsia, magenta, nude, just as women cannot explain what the Snow Queen color is (the owners of our VAZs will understand).



In my youth, I didn’t give a damn deeply and highly about the highest bell tower on Rabkin’s tables, and I put a big shovel on the oculist’s tests, calmly saying that I don’t see your pictures — all that I needed was beautiful (the sky was different from the grass, people from monkeys with difficulty, but also somehow shared).



But, when it came time to get the rights, I had to work hard, to get some pictures (since they were usually shown only 3-5). At that time, I began to wonder why we were being put into a conditionally “inferior” category of people, because I couldn’t crash into a brick wall with the words: “I thought nothing stood there”.



There are some factors that drive us into a corner (I advise you to think, maybe someone has interesting ideas and their vision on this):



1. Traffic lights - from the height of some scientific genius, they thought that the wavelength of red, yellow and green is ideal for a traffic light (you can see better in the fog), because these colors go at the beginning of the rainbow - they don’t give a damn about someone (and this a few percent of people) have problems. For example, Microsoft doesn’t give a damn about this - to make the design and themes of Windows in blue-and-blue tones, they thought up a long time ago just thinking about those who have problems with color rendition. And okay, the traffic lights would have made them bright like felt-tip pens for first-graders - sometimes there are such pale colors that it’s hard for me to see (for example, in bright light (I can’t mix it up, because the color order doesn’t change in vertical traffic lights), something is burning there or not.



2. Optometrists - the tables of Rabkin and Ishihara do their job - they reveal color blind people once or twice, very smart scientists even added a few pictures that all people see. Their purpose is to catch simulators. You want to leave the army, you are afraid that you will be sent to the digging and explosive forces of the flying and motorized rifle division, where you need to sail and quickly distinguish a tree from your commander in your sight - and in all seriousness you say that you cannot distinguish a single picture - you cannot here it was - part of the pictures is seen by everyone (both lame and with a balalaika) - therefore they will still be sent to casemates. Here, an interesting moment immediately pops up, which for some reason no one notices (including doctors and the valiant Ministry of Health) - in some pictures it is written in warm black - people with deviations see one figure / figure, and all normal ones see another. Read this phrase and think a little - did anyone wonder if color blind people see something that normal people don’t see? The word "supposedly" at the beginning of the article just refers to this part of my story about real people with limited visual abilities. I won’t be surprised that medicine can comment on this phenomenon in this way - since 5% of people see one thing, and 95% (and this is the majority) is different, then 95% of people are healthy and 5% are sick. For information - the fact that many copy-paste the data of the dense Soviet medical encyclopedia no longer corresponds to reality - after tightening the vision requirements for special equipment drivers, it suddenly became clear that more than 20% of the male population did not see pictures in circles, which, according to doctors apparently means that if the driver on the road sees a poster with circles and doesn’t read the number 13 on it, it’s a problem (you need to urgently take away the rights). I wrote about this to the Ministry of Health, but they ignored me, apparently putting a big and thick ... calendar with photos of color blind scientists on me. One more comparison can be attached to the same point - we believe that our eyes are normal, and the Chinese have narrow. Based on the above logic about Chinese color blind, there are an order of magnitude more on the planet, so their eyes are normal, and we (since we are a minority) are just not normal, but large, i.e. we are all double-eyed and this is a deviation from the norm ...



3. Experience - in my opinion, only 5% of people (or even less) understand what color blindness is. Healthy people often think that color blind people see black and white, some of them believe that there are also shades of gray. The more literate they are also divided into two categories, because after reading clever articles about cones in the eyes everything falls into place - a person either does not see red and green, or yellow. Instead of them, apparently, he sees something gray or empty (perhaps objects of this color are transparent to them). In fact, everything is more interesting - just as there are no two identical people (we don’t count Dolly’s sheep for a person), two identical people do not meet with color rendering problems. To make the effect even the notorious 95% of healthy people do not see everything the same way - the flawed rounds of Rabkin and Ishkhara are not intended to reveal this, therefore this theorem has not yet been proved.



I think enough lyrics and whining - I propose to go to the most interesting. The fact that I can always distinguish a red tomato from a yellow sun in the sunshine always suits me. The fact that I can’t make out the circles of Rabkin and in low light (or when the subject is small) dark green from dark brown does not prevent me from living, I don’t consider myself to be a hibakusa from Hiroshima. And at work, I wrote a lot of scripts in PHP working with color graphics, and in MS Office all the colors are signed, and in MS Paint there is a dropper and scissors to paste any color out of 16 million (all the same, as Microsoft loves color blind and helps them - I think you can write a separate article - "Microsoft loves everyone, we will help as much as we can").

By the way, in addition to what I indicated above, I often confuse shades of gray with shades of pink (but somehow I distinguish flamingos from a wolf, and by smell, and even when I sleep) and some transitional colors of red, pale yellow , green, brown, in general, a whole range of incomprehensible shades.



Friends and relatives like to point their fingers at some muddy objects and ask what color they are. Despite the fact that I can’t clearly define the color, I can still see that this color is different from other objects (even if the colors and shades are only slightly different). True, if the objects are small, then not always (for some reason, the differences are better seen if there are a lot of colors).



So, having tried a few points for color blind people, I was surprised to note for myself that out of 6 models of three companies, the most color changes were achieved with only one model (and almost the cheapest one). It’s logically clear that all these glasses weren’t taken out of the fantastic Narnia’s closet, the principle of their operation is extremely simple, they transform / enhance the brightness of the spectrum, but they cannot improve / enhance the entire range of colors, and therefore, depending on color reproduction violations, they may or may help or to worsen or not manifest itself at all (to work just like sunglasses). This was confirmed by the words "clearly seeing", who have no problems with color reproduction and donning such glasses they don’t notice anything special, all colors remain the same, only slightly darkened.



It struck me that I began to see some things very clearly - all red objects became brighter, almost orange, all blue and blue shades became bright blue - and in the subway I began to see people in red and blue clothes so clearly that they became stand out from the crowd, red cars began to stand out very much like bright orange from a whole series of cars. Plus, pale yellow and light green have become a little brighter.



But for me it was a shock that in the tables of Rabkin I stopped !!! see some things. Yes, I began to see some pictures (but not all and not even most), but part of what I saw was gone. And this (arguing as doctors of all countries and peoples) means that when I go on a bulldozer and suddenly I see something as round on the road as one of Rabkin’s tables, and with a figure that only a color blind person sees (and I see it without glasses ), then in the glasses that make me a real person, I will not see anymore and most likely I’ll crash - this is such a life paradox.



Along with optical illusions, there are color illusions when the brain somehow processes colors in a different way, regardless of how you have color reproduction.

The most famous is the picture with cells of the same color (where cells A and B are the same) - color blindness has nothing to do with it, for some reason everyone cannot see that the colors are the same







Having come across one article on the Internet, I found confirmation of my ideas that color blind people (I won’t speak for everyone, because we are all different) then it turns out that they also see something that normal people don’t see. For example, against the background of gradients, "sighted" can not distinguish some drawings, here is an example where I clearly see 6 others either do not see anything, or see only the bottom oval of the six (on the right is what only the elect see, of course in colors, not BW) :







Here's another interesting circle on the background of the daub that I see, but others do not see (on the right is what the followers of King Dalton see):







Moreover, in the same Paint, with copy-paste and God's help, I tried to write the word SOAD (the truth turned out to be crooked, apparently the hooks like my eyes grow out of the hidden area of ​​the body, and not like ordinary people)







Without glasses, I see clearly all my man-made brainchild, putting on glasses is a meaningless daub of pixels, which of course will lead to an accident on the road if some color blind person accidentally throws a figure of a similar color and shape onto the asphalt.



They also say that color blind people better see the shape of objects behind camouflage tents / nets, since they are not bothered by a splash of camouflage colors (by the way, in the forest, mushrooms and berries against the background of colorful autumnal mixing of grass and manure foliage I most often determine only by shape - well against brown-green-yellow-coniferous-deciduous mash, I don’t see brown hats of boletus and strawberries). Great news, because during military operations, the country's leadership can safely put together several platoons of combat color-blind reconnaissance troops, which, without special points and tables by Rabkin, will be able to identify enemy enemy tanks.



Perhaps I will be able to shake the society of the sighted and color blind even a little more by showing these pictures. The Internetophile community says that opinions are divided, in the first picture someone sees white-pink sneakers, someone else is turquoise-gray, and in the second - the dress is white with gold stripes or blue with black. In the third, everyone sees red berries, although there is no red color in the photo. Well, to understand whether the puffer jacket is blue or black, they say, only that simpotyazhka who wore it.













All this can be found on the Internet, read interesting comments (and even see the essence of physiological processes that mock our eyes on Wikipedia).

What it was all about - the epilogue of melodrama, so to speak. Those who see everything and sleep peacefully will think that there are a lot of letters in this essay. For such people, this is the usual discharge of a heap of letters from the soul, just as I, for example, do not care about those who are allergic to navel spools - they are a minority, which means we are healthy, and they are deviations from the norm if an article about this appears I probably will not read.



Those who don’t see anything are also probably not interested, they can also write an article, insert gray pictures, they are not going to drive, they don’t collect mushrooms - life is beautiful without our pink-pearl tears and snot.



But for those who have faced similar problems, who are oppressed by the Ministry of Health and those who see everything even with their eyes closed, I think it will be interesting to read that they are not the only ones. A little more, and the Chinese will take a broad communist step of size 48 to meet us, aliexpress will replenish with high-quality glasses (and not with the fakes that are now there) and for a decent price we will have access to glasses that will help us to look into the shameless eyes of nature, which has endowed us with superpowers to watch through camouflage nets, but they don’t allow to distinguish a stone from, I apologize, cow cow in the forest.



From the point of view of IT, those who are interested in digging into Rabkin’s pictures are an elementary way for those who don’t see to see what is painted on them. Download and install the Irfan View program, open any spherical rabkin daub (from the browser, use the right button to copy the picture or, in a difficult case, use the Windows Scissors tool to cut it and paste it into Irfan). And then the most interesting thing - we select in the Irfan menu Image -> Swap color channels and sort through different options, the picture will change colors and oh, miracle, we will see what all people see, but we don’t. What is interesting for all color-blind people is that a picture with a circle that people with normal vision cannot see can not be converted so that they cannot see the circle (it’s time to redraw the big medical encyclopedia). And I also noticed that some of Malevich Rabkin's squares do not change their essence when changing channels, i.e. they aren’t visible to me (I have not found a logical explanation for this yet) - okay, I don’t see anything deeper than green in the rainbow (more precisely, I see bright colors, but I swim in all shades and pale colors), but when the colors change to blue and the numbers do not appear - this is very strange (with other replacements, the numbers become visible).



Here is an example: 1 and 6 are initially visible, and when changing channels 3 0 and a triangle with a six.







image



Of course, as I see it, the "sighted" on both must see 3 0 6. It’s just strange that on the right picture 1 disappeared, it is not visible behind the triple. Why the Ministry of Health does not say that since normal people do not see a unit, then they should not be allowed to drive a car - a mystery. Perhaps it can be put on a par with conspiracy theories such as blood donation for vampires (since the volumes of blood donated and required are not comparable) and collapse of the cervical vertebra (atlas) when turning the head during childbirth by modern obstetricians ...



Who read to this place - congratulations! Perhaps a few minutes were spent not in vain and at the appointments with the optometrist during medical examinations you can ask them tricky questions ... In the near future I will write a program that will form a text that is visible only to people with impaired color reproduction - the reaction of normal, “all-seeing” people will be interesting. Perhaps this is how we will learn to distinguish Reptilians from Earthlings ...



All Articles