tar

tonylang, You are back to this single cell thing, which does not seem required to me. How things going with the fruitfly, by the way. Did you kill it yet, without hurting it? If this single cell thing is at the basis of your argument, you best find it, to proceed. Because it makes zero sense to me, as to why this EC cell is required in the first place. It does not even seem workable or possible, so the lack of such a cell would completely dash your theory. Since the failure to find this cell would falsify your theory, looking for it (and finding it does not exist) seems to be your best chance of falsification, so an exhaustive search of the fruit fly should be your main concern. I don't think you have any basis to make continued flourishes around this basis (baseless in my book) premise, until you find an EC cell. Regards, TAR So this "spark of life" you think you are going to find in a single master cell, that controls the whole organism, and contains the POV consciousness? I think not. I think your search is as fruitless a search, as looking for the single spot in the brain, where "I" resides. It takes the whole complex to make an "I", in the same way as it takes a view to have a viewer. You can not be separated from a thing, unless you have a thing to be separated from. In my book life grabbed form and structure from a universe that otherwise tends toward entropy, and passed the pattern along to its offspring. Its the pattern that is the crucial part, the working complex, the machine through which a life that wants to continue its pattern emerges. Exactly NOT your way, where there is a ghost in the machine. Where a soul floats around the place and inhabits hosts. Exactly NOT your theory.

saw a chart that had red LEDs sensitive to light in the 645to620 nm range and red-orange LEDs in the 620.5 to 635 range so whatever the system of LEDs sensitive to certain wavelengths or LEDs sensitive to wide ranges of wavelengths with color filters infront of them, if the subject is absorbing 620nm wavelengths which is sort of a slightly orange red, the RGB value is going to be high in blue low in red, and sort of low in green. Lets say R32 G64 Blue 228. This is the same hue as 0 32 196 which has an WT-TAR value of B/G 6.1 More exposed you might get 52 84 248 but that is still the same hue with a blue to green ratio of 6.1 to 1 my mistake I looked at LEDs and thought CCDs. You are right, its done with filters infront of CCDs. I will have to think out that linear aspect. Overexposed is probably an issue because 255 255 255 wouldn't tell you a darn thing. once any one of the CCDs, like if its the blue in my example, is maxed out, more light will reduce the B/G ratio, as adding 50 50 50 to 52,84,248 gives you 102, 134, 255 (no 298 possible) which is B/G 3.8 So Klaynos, you are absolutely right. Over exposer is a big issue.

Klaynos,, But if you have an absorption band at 620 nm and you shine white light on the subject, the hole is still going to be at 620 nm, it does not matter how much white light you shine on the subject Regards, TAR or how wide your aperture is open 235 135 35 is still the same hue as 200 100 0 those numbers are not supposed to show what a hole at 620nm would look like in RGB. I will have to figure that.

Klaynos, Fundamentally flawed, but not because of shade. I showed the glare and shadow did not matter, and you have a particular hue, a particular two color ratio in a band on a bee....or I might have showed that, had we done the 36 point check. Arete said that was a moot point though, since we would find a range of hues within the same species, that would overlap with the range existing in another species. The problem is the color of the light illuminating the subject, and the processes in the camera, network, computer and screen that arrive at an RGB value for a pixel in the first place. The R/G value will change if there is just a little more short wavelength light in your flashbulb then in mine. Regards, TAR

Gator, Another way to think of it, is that if all matter and time was created at the big bang and we are made of matter, then we (or matter that later became us) were actually AT the location of the Big Bang, and although that location has gotten a lot bigger since, its still the "same" location. And when you say the universe always was, you might be considering some other term, like the cosmos or god or existence or some other concept that allows a universe to become a universe in the context of this greater concept. I could not argue with you about the nature of this greater concept, as we have no access to it, other than in our imaginations and the ole imaginations can come up with just about anything they need. But in reading your thread title, I recalled a logical bind I never have found a way to get myself out of. That revolves around the definition of "observable". What are we calling observable? That which we will ever get light from, or that which we will get light from, that is emitted today, in a universal now sense of the word today. The reason for my question, is the thought, that if light leaves a star on the other side of the Milky Way today, you and I will not see that light for 100,000 years. That is a thousand lifetimes, so are we considering that star observable or not. We are currently observing the CMB or material that just cooled to below 3000K over 13 billion years ago, and that material has had 13.7 billion years to become quasars and galaxies that have undergone 2 or 3 generations of star formation, and is sitting out there, 45 million light years away in a state where light from a star in that region's galaxy that emits some light today, in this direction will NEVER reach the Earth or the area of the Milky way...yet we are seeing that area of space today in the form of Cosmic Microwave Background. So I am never sure what is meant by "observable" parts of our universe. In the one sense, a human can not see further than the end of his nose, as light takes time to get here from everywhere else, and in the other sense, we can see all the way back to the beginning, and hence should be able to "observe" everything there is between there and then and here and now.. Regards, TAR sorry 45 billion lyrs away, not million

Like and RGB value. A subject doesn't "have" an RGB value, we assigned it one. Thread,' Looking for the answers in the photos displayed on a smart phone might be like looking for flawed steel girders in a bridge by finding the cracks in a model of the bridge. The one does not properly represent the other. The one looks like the other, but the model isn't even made of steel much less have a flaw in the wood in the exact spot that the flaw in the steel is. However, there may be some useful information obtained by the camera, after the light from the image has gone through filters and processes. The light absorbing molecules in the subject still may give themselves away based on what the camera records. And our technology is pretty good, wonderful engineers and designers have be working on ways to get that picture on the screen looking just like the real thing, in the fastest times. So even though you are going to have to loose something with an analog to digital conversion and the image processing and "optimization" and so on, there is still a lot retained. After all, you can still look at the thing and say its an oak tree. There might be enough of the original data represented in the image to work with it, still. Regards, TAR

String Junky, That is an excellent point. As I am seeing a pattern develop, looking at pixels, I am not necessarily looking at the pattern in the animal or plant I took the picture of. I could be picking up a pattern imposed by the image processing of the camera or the computer building the screen presentation on the computer, not to mention the potential influence of a rebuild of the data, after being compressed for efficient transmission and storage as you so aptly point out. If one was to actually study the pixels for their biological meaning, one would probably NOT want to do it on a smart phone, where the meaning behind the pixels has been processed and may well not contain the original information. If one wanting to study the meaning of the color presented by the original subject, and one had the choice, they should go with the largest uncompressed image available, and suffer the longer download time, and larger storage requirement to gain a more accurate picture of the wavelengths absorbed by the subject, without picking up the characteristics of the lossy compression systems. For instance lets say the compression system looks at an area, finds an average WT-TAR R/G hue value for the area and just stores and transmits that number along with a short description of the limits of the area. Then at the other end, during the rebuild process the program knows to fill that area with randomly generated pixels that fulfill a normal distribution around a transmitted avg RGB pixel, yielding an area that "looks the same hue" but might not have a single pixel that is of the same value in the same position as it was on the subject. In such a situation it would not be surprising that you could deduce a pattern of an average hue that all the pixels distributed around, because that is exactly what the decompression algorithm created for you. In short, with the loosy compression, the exact arrangement of data is sacrificed for a shorthand version of the data and the aspects of the original data that you find the most important might not be faithfully reproduced. You might wind up making a claim about the pattern extant in the subject that is actually an artifact of the system that brought the image of the subject to you. Regards, TAR

Whatever Theory, Everybody here, helped you a lot. Challenging an idea is the best way to improve it, and make it more workable. That is my self imposed job on this board. To make good ideas work better, and to challenge ideas that don't work. I have this theory on ideas. They spread like wildfire. Even in the old days, when all we had was telephone and ham radio, you would hear a joke from somebody, and then later that day hear the same joke from somebody that had no connection to the first party that you knew of that lived in another state. But the theory goes on to say that good ideas are instantly incorporated into everyone, that is exposed to them's thinking. And bad ideas are simply discarded as not workable. A good idea will come around again, strengthened and more workable. A bad idea will just go away. Because its not workable. It doesn't fit. So test your ideas. If they work. Give them a tougher test. Regards, TAR besides...you are not the first to notice the importance of color, nor investigate how and why we see it, and how to make equipment that records it, and play it back A lot of good ideas and thinking about color had to have happened BEFORE you put your cursor on a pixel and saw a number...don't you think?

Whatever Theory, You don't have to speak to String Junky that way, on my behalf. In fact you shouldn't speak to String Junky that way at all. In fact I should not have spoken to him the way I did. He and Arete are long time, well respected experts on this board. If they are trying to keep a little order and sense in here, it is perfectly proper, and we should listen and learn and not let our "prides" get hurt. After my initial reaction to String Junky's comment I have had time to think about it, and Arete's comment, and they are right. We, you and I are trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The horse is dead, and we are trying to beat it back to life. After many pages, we really have not gotten anywhere. I am of the mind to give it a rest, for now. I still like your method. I still like my additions to it, and the hue number determination. But we are about done here, and I do not wish to alienate people I like and respect. I will not be testing the bees. Regards, TAR

Arete, I realize you announced yourself as having been in the species IDing business, so I am sure you know what you are talking about, and color alone will not do, to ID species. I am just interested in finding out how far WT's theory goes, and WHERE it fails. And where there might be a useful application of the ideas we are coming up with here. I just took offense at String Junky talking like everything we are doing here is a waste of time. Whatever Theory has learned a few things, I have learned a few things and seen some interesting hue consistency, even where shade varies greatly. Whatever theory's theory is faulty in several ways, as we have pointed out to him. He is adjusting his claims, accordingly and has not even clearly stated yet, what those claims are. And several others have gotten something out of this as well. I don't find the blind soldier comment useful or sensible. Regards, TAR For instance, it made me think about the cuckoo bird and other mimickers. If a mutation of the Mclr molecule and amino acid variations and so on are responsible for color variations down through evolution, how does one species arrange to have the same mutation that the species they are mimicking had? Are there just a finite amount of Mclr mutations and amino acid arrangements, that every species would possibly cycle through, and the ones that worked to some advantage would stick and the ones that didn't would just die out.? or are there ways a cell can manufacture a protein, or copy a protein that was ingested by the host, or otherwise introduced to the organism, not through the genes but through the environment in some fashion? After all there might be a reason for the ole saying, "you are what you eat".

String Junky, You don't find anything interesting about the data points I presented? No interest in seeing what 12 points and 18 points and 24 points will bring? Regards, TAR

String Junky, The fact that species cannot be accurately delimited by color alone was decided upon years ago. Possibly before 24bit color. I am just checking Arete's claim based on WT's theory, a smart phone app I just got the other day, and the undercolor reduction method newly described, to come up with an ACTUAL R/G number for the bands on bees that Arete brought to our attention as being of the same color, and as examples of why speices can not be IDed by color. If we can successfully read the ACTUAL R/G number off of bee 3 and off of bee 8 and they are different numbers, then we can take the test to the field and see if a different picture of each species, 3 and 8, yield likewise, different identifiable numbers in that band. A reasonable test of Whatever Theory's claims against Arete's claims. One claim or the other will have to be adjusted, based on the outcome of the challenge. I take offense at you saying I am blindly soldiering on, in the face of scientific fact already established. I am trying to falsify WT's claim. Is Arete's claim somehow immune from falsification, just because nobody has yet falsified it? Regards, TAR

Arete, I suggested to WT in a PM that we try to falsify his theory by each doing a 36 random point check of that band in each of your 8 bees. I asked that he tell me if he is game, before I do the work to come up with the data points and the calculations. I have not heard from him yet, but I started the trials, and here is the first trial of 6 random points, from bee 3 and the same from bee 8, along with WT's "high red" and "low red" triplets. Notice my random picks found a higher red in the one bee than he found, and a lower red in the other, but he was staying away from dark areas and glare areas, and I just picked on a loose 2x3 grid basis. I had picked a single triplet from each bee, just to get a feel for which bees might be the closest My single pixel quick check yielded 1.7, 1.7, 1.6 , 2.2, 1.8, 1.5, 1.9 and 1.6 respectively. I picked 3 and 8 because they looked like they would be likely to yield close to the same number, when WT did his 36 point check, and I did my 36 point check. Interestingly 6 points suggested there may be an identifiable color difference in the bands between 3 and 8. I am interested in WT taking up the challenge, I will continue to post random triplets and R/G numbers as planned, and I encourage others to run a similar 6 point, 12 point, 24 point or 36 point check on at least bee 3 and bee 8. If we all can agree on a single number for the band in bee 3, and a single number for the band in bee 8, it won't prove the theory, might falsify it, but might indicate that further testing is in order. 1st trial of Six point random check Bee 3 band R184 G119 B18 R165 G101 R/G=1.63 TAR Data for band 3 174|112|3(R/G= 1.6)| , 169|103|17(R/G=1.8)|, 178|118|26(R/G=1.7)|, 209|141|32(R/G=1.6)|, 179|117|0(R/G=1.5)|, 192|124|31(R/G=1.7)| average TAR points 1.64 WT Data for band 3 104|73|20 (R/G=1.6), 185|124|49 (R/G=1.8) average WT points R/G=1.7 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bee 8 band R153G99 B32 R121 G67 R/G=1.81 TAR Data for band 8 162|111|20(R/G=1.6), 165|103|16(R/G=1.7), 153|100|46(R/G=2.0), 126|78|20(R/G=1.8), 182|112|52(R/G=2.2), 128|91|38(R/G=1.7) WT Data for band 8 141|91|29 (R/G=1.8), 213|159|97 (R/G=1.9). WT together R/G=1.8

Tony Lang, "Natural phenomena are separate only in the minds of people who misunderstand the holistic character of nature in this universe." That statement is in direct opposition to my philosophy and worldview, and also in contradiction to your POV consideration. If you have a point of view, BECAUSE you are a living being with a definite here and now, there cannot be "people" that have an immortal POV and less enlightened individuals who have a POV in error. The fact that you are here and now, allows you to witness the rest of the universe in exactly the time lag, speed of light as a limit, way we experience it. You cannot claim both "no separation" AND a POV. It is flat out contradictory. Either you are mortal, or you are immortal. Evidence is in favor of you being mortal. Sorry. Regards, TAR Certainly the universe is flawlessy connected together, and you and I both have the same universe to call our own. Same Big Bang, same generations of stars, forging heavy elements, same first life on Earth as a predecessor cell to later life. Same Lucy as our great great....great great grand mother. Connected no doubt. Holistically no doubt. Entangled no doubt. Amazingly wonderful, loved and belonged to, no doubt. EC cells that can instantly move a particular primordial YOU from a fruitfly on Earth to a Zquibish on Calamay in Andromeda? Rubbish. No evidence, no way to falsify, makes no sense type of rubbish. Regards, TAR Years ago, musing on what makes an individual, I thought of an ant colony as one body, who's operative "cells" were connected by chemical trails, rather than sinew and flesh and muscle and bone. A city of people, can likewise be considered, or a country or a united world. In the chaos theory, Mandelbrot drawing, type of way, an "objective" view of the universe would not require nature or "life" to have a particular size. The pattern just may repeat on a larger scale, or a smaller. Knowing that one entity is made up of many other entities, and one entity is just a single component of a larger entity, does not make you one with the universe, anymore than you were already one with the universe, before Mandelbrot made the drawing. And a quantum entanglement experiment, does not make you immortal, any more than you were, when you were 13, and knew nothing of the experiment. Regards, TAR

Strange, Talk about unrequited love! Regards TAR

Mondie, So, might it make sense that a particular yellow, that had a particular WT-TAR hue might exist in both the flower and the associated bee? Regards, TAR Once we come up with a standard method to arrive at a repeatable number. Whatever Theory or someone else will have to see what those pictures of yellow bees on yellow flowers tell us.

Whatever Theory, Finding the high and low red, gives you too wide a range, and to pick a number directly in the middle might not be the best way to represent the color. Especially because you don't know if the other colors are going to work in the same manner. That is why I chose to avg the numbers individually, but use numbers from the same randomly selected triplets, to do it. No selection bias. And suppose you "missed" a pixel that had a higher or lower red than you selected. Anyway, whatever system you use should come up with some number, some one number that any person or program would arrive at, by looking at the same patch. Otherwise, you have nothing to put in the database as the number for the color of the band on that species of bumblebee. On the pipette program, I forgot to mention a step. I downloaded your picture of the bees to my desktop and emailed it as an attachment from my gmail account to my yahoo account. Then I opened the email on my smartphone and downloaded the attachment into my gallery. The pipette program had a plus button that you push which allows you to bring a picture from your gallery into the pipette program. Then you position the part of the picture you want to inspect, zooming in, if you like, and hit a little "lock" button up on the upper right of the screen. Then you will have the little circle above where you touch that displays the RGB value of the thusly targeted pixel. Regards, TAR

Tony Lang, "Making a distinction between the position-of-view of a cell or a simple association of cells and the heterodyned composite POV of an emerged individual is a tenuous endeavor fraught with uncertainty absent the principles described in the instantiation hypothesis." Do you notice that making a distinction between the position-of-view of a cell or a simple association of cells and the heterodyned composite POV of an emerged individual is not a requirement outside of the instantiation hypothesis? Regards, TAR if implementing the theory is a tenuous endeavor it is an indication of some falsifying aspects that you should take as such Not my fault for being ignorant of your theory. Your theory is faulty. You can't use terms and rules that you made up, to critique your own theory. That is circular crap and I am sure it is not allowed.

Mondie, Then why would flowers be different colors? They don't even have eyes to detect a hue at all. It seems mutations that change the Mclr molecule, or whatever wavelength absorbing molecule a species has, can be selected for or against not based solely on a mate liking the display, but based on the effect the color change might have on OTHER species, that might pollenate a flower more, or keep a predator from eating you, or any other survival tendency the mutation might provide. Regards, TAR maybe that bumble bee coloration is very effective at having clover grazing animals, NOT step on you, AND blends you in with the yellow flowers you're feeding on, against the watchful eyes of hungry birds

Tony Lang, So, how is the fruit fly experiment working out for you? Have you isolated the EC cell? I doubt it. It does not make any sense that there would be such a cell, that is YOU. When you find this cell in the fruit fly take it out, killing the fly, and sending the fly's soul to planet Xircon. Then travel to planet Xircon and see if you can find a viable life form there, that has the dead fruitfly's soul. Boy, that would be a fruitful experiment. Your insights number 1 and 2 don't even make sense together. How do you transfer an ID that has already moved onto Planet X to another viable host (a frog), here on Earth, that already has a POV, when all you have in your hand is a dead cell from a fruitfly? TAR

...Later I recently obtained a Samsung S4 smart phone and joined the 21st century. Yesterday I installed a free app from Play Store called pipette that lets you pick a picture in your gallery, zoom in on a section, lock it, and then move your finger around, and a little circle rides above your finger, and the RGB value of the pixel in the center of the circle appears below in decimal and hex. I saved Whatever's version of Arete's 8 species of bees and performed the TAR modified version of Whatever's color code method, to obtain a different R/G value for bee one's band and bee two's band. I zoomed in, so the entire single bee was in the picture, locked it, and entered 6 values into an Excel spread sheet, that totaled and averaged each color, subtracted the Blue average from each average, and divided red by green. For bee number one I ran the six point trial 4 times and got R/G= 2.1, R/G=2.0, R/G=2.0 and R/G=2.1. For bee number two I ran the six point trial 4 times and got R/G=1.8, R/G=1.9. R/G=1.8 and R/G=1.8 This is a technique that requires some more trials to verify that it results in the same number every time the same area is checked, but it looks to me, at this point, that bee one's average hue on that band is going to be close to R/G 2.05 and bee two's avg hue on that band is going to be close to 1.83. This amounts to a 24 point check, but it looks like it might provide an identifying number. I did not retain the numbers for bee one's trial but the last thee sets of 6 for bee two's lower light band, yielded these three average hues. R143,G86,B25 R141 G91,B27, and R142,G88,B21. Those numbers should yield R/G 1.9, 1.8 and 1.8 if I figured and recorded right. For instance, the first would be after subtracting R25, G25, B25... R/G 118/61= 1.934 rounded to 1.9. Try it. Regards, TAR

Whatever Theory, I gave you a plus on the bees. I had honed in on the same stripe, as a potential differentiator in terms of color, and am glad you went after it. But, we still have to work on the "ratios". There is something important there, but we have to call it right, and call it consistently to see what it is that is there. For instance in your low red triplet of R95, G48, B12 you figure an r/g ratio of -47. That is true that there is a difference of 47 between R and G but 95/48 is not -47, it is 1.97916, so if you are going to state an R/G value, related to that triplet, you might state that it is 2.0 (if we round to one significant digit to the right of the decimal point.) The high red triplet you found for the first bee was R204, G159, B119. You stated the R/G ratio was -45. But 204/159 is (rounded) 1.3. As you can see, the R/G ratio changes significantly between the numbers in the low red triplet and the high red triplet...but the relative amounts of the red and green do stay the same, in terms of the undercolor reduction we were talking about, or to put it another way, the low triplet might be close to being a lighter shade of the same hue that is represented in the high triplet. To see the relationship between Red and Green, lets take out some white light, from the triplet. We are starting with R95, G48, B12, so lets take out R12,G12,B12, leaving us with R83,G36,B0. Here the R/G value is 83/36 or 2.3. The high triplet was R204, G159, B119, so lets take out some light...R119, G119, B119, leaving us with R85, G40, B0 which is an R/G ratio of 85/40 or 2.1 If you took 36 samples of the color in that band of the first bee and performed the same R/G ratio calculation and averaged the results, you might come out with an R/G 2.2 hue to describe that band. One thing you might do, short of the 36 is take 3 samples and arrive at a number. then take a different three (random)samples and arrive at a number, and then average the two. Then take a different three and come up with a number, and average the three together. Does not matter how, but see if the R/G ratio, tends toward 2.2 or 2.3 or 2.1 or 1.9 or whatever, but it should tend toward some number. Since we have computers and the RGB value of each pixel is already recorded, once an area is defined, you could add up all the red values, divide by the number of pixels in the area and get a Red value, same for Green, same for Blue. Then which ever value is lowest, take the light out Rx, Gx, Bx that would zero out one of the colors, and then take the larger of the remaining numbers, divide it by the smaller of the remaining numbers and you would have an R/G value or a G/R value or an R/B, B/R, or a G/B, B/G value. Two samples obviously are not likely to show a single number, as in the first trial of the system we got R/G 2.3 and R/G 2.1, but using the system, if you were to take ALL of the pixels in the area, you would come up with only one number. The question would be, can you come up with this ACTUAL average ratio, by taking the high red triplet and the low red triplet, finding the ratio between the two strongest colors(after taking grey out, to leave just the two) in each triplet, average them together and get the ACTUAL average ratio...or do you need 3 or 5 or 10 or 36, or 100 or 1000 random samples to get the ACTUAL average pixel in the target area. Let's try the WT-TAR scheme on the second bee. The first bee yielded R/G 2.2. The second bee has the low red at R81, G50, B30. Taking out white light we get R51, G20, B0, or an R/G of 2.6. Taking the high triplet for the second bee of R161, G94, B10 and removing R10, G10, B10 we get R151, G84, B0 or an R/G of 151/84 or 1.8...Not enough info to call the one number (bee one's band number) identifiably different than the other (bee two's band number). In fact 2.6 and 1.8 average out...to 2.2. Maybe we just identified a certain amino acid substitution variant of the Mclr molecule present in both bees, but we didn't give that band on bee 1 a different WT-TAR number than the band on bee 2. To find the ACTUAL average hue on the band we need more sample triplets. Enough to be satisfied that averaging ALL the pixels would give us the same number we arrive at, by averaging the B/G of the low red triplet and the B/G of the high red triplet. Regards, TAR although I do get R/G 1.7 for bee three, (1.6 and 1.8) so maybe the 6 species do each have a different ACTUAL R/G number for that band. We need more numbers for one and two, to be satisfied we have the ACTUAL average hue of the band for each, and to determine if those numbers alone could differentiate the species.

Whatever Theory, The amount of numbers we have is considerably reduced, if we go by tint and not shade. If we go by "ratios", R220 G40 B148 has the same hue as R200 G20 B128 or R180 G0 B108. So the conventional, one number representation of R/B 1.7, represents a whole bunch of shades of the same hue, thus putting all those many numbers under one identifiable shade and reducing our 16 million "different" RGB values to a much smaller stable of hues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone Is an example. The "spot colors" that Pantone makes out of 14 base pigments total 1,114. Many of these, especially the "creamy" ones with white pigment in them, can not be produced with Cyan Magenta and Yellow. So the hues that I could "come up with" by using the undercolor reduction principle are a very limited number of hues, that would not allow for a different number for each species. Better however to work with 100 or 500 or 1000 identifiable hues than to just say the flower is purple, or the butterfly is black and white. And even if you only had 100 different hues, 2 color areas would still give you 10,000 combinations. Three color areas would give you 1,000,000 and 4 color areas would give you 100,000,000, so even if you loose the 16,000,000 colors in favor of 100 hues you might still be able to have enough unique 4 or 5 color codes, for each specie. You have to nail down the scheme though, and come up with the rules of how to come up with a single number for a color patch that has all sorts of different RGB triplets in it. It has to be such that if you analyze a patch, and I analyze a patch, we come up with the same number Mike would come up with, and even more importantly, the same number a smart phone would come up with, if it executed the instructions we gave it, to come up with a number for the color of the patch. Regards, TAR

Whatever Theory, CMYK stands for cyan magenta yellow and black, which are the toners or inks that are used in standard digital color printing. Toner for laser printers and inks for inkjet printers. As that complementary color experiment, where you stare at a spot without moving your eyes for 30 seconds illustrated, Red's complementary color is cyan, green's complementary color is magenta, and Blue's complementary color is yellow. Thus as that upsidedown chart I came up with a while back, showed, having a lot of magenta toner, absorbs a lot of green light. Thus, let's take a made up color R 172, G37, B122. The green number is low, which means the magenta number is high. It is possible to think of red 172 green 37 blue 122 as having a partner, or same tint, constructable out of CMY by taking White255-172red and getting 83 not red(cyan), taking 255white-37green and getting 218 not green (magenta) and taking 255-122 and getting 133 yellow. So if Mike would squeeze 83 mm of Cyan paint out of a tube, and 219mm of Magenta paint and 133mm of yellow paint and mix them up together he should get the same color purple we read as R 172, G37 B122. But, he does not have to use any cyan at all to make the same tint, as he can make black out of 83mm of cyan, 83mm of magenta and 83mm of yellow. So he should be able to make a lighter shade of the same purple, by never putting the black in. So we thought we could make the purple by using 83cyan 218magenta and 133yellow. so we should be able to make a lighter shade of the same hue by using 0mm of cyan(83-83), 135mm of magenta (218-83), and 50mm of yellow (133-83). We could check our logic by seeing if 255not cyan(red), 120 not magenta(green) and 205 of not yellow (blue) gives us a lighter shade of the same purple. So we can make that same hue, of a lighter shade with 0 cyan, 135 magenta and 50 yellow. So that is where the cyan went (to zero), leaving us 135 M and 50 Y. dividing 135 by 50 we get 2.7 time more Magenta than yellow, so I made up a conventional representation of this ratio and called it M/Y 2.7. So, one part yellow and 2.7 parts magenta, should give us that hue, and we have a single ratio, M to Y at 2.7, that gives us the hue (but not the shade) of R 172, G37, B122. But you want to work with the RGB, so lets see if the opposite logic works. Rather than taking black out to get a lighter CMY shade that we can make a two number ratio out of, let's take white out of the RGB number and get a darker shade of the same hue. The smallest number is the green number. But R37 G37 B37 is a dark grey, so we are just taking a little white out, and we should just get a little darker shade of R172, G37, B122 by taking 37 from each value and getting R135, G0, and B85. dividing 135 by 85 you get 1.59, so I made up the convention for the ratio of R/B 1.59. So to check it, to see if it make any sense and gives us a consistent hue, pick a number for Blue....38 and multiply it by 1.59 and you get 60.42 which we will round to 60 for the Red figure, giving us R60, G0, Blue38. which looks again like the same hue, only a real dark shade of it. Regards, TAR

Sunshaker, Really? Your towers are really really tall, like 4000 miles tall. Why don't you redraw the diagram more to scale, remembering that the Earth is almost 8 thousand miles in diameter and if your picture has the Earth at about 6 inches in diameter a mile high tower would show up on the circle about 1 thousandth of an inch high. Then draw your lines from tower top to tower top and you will see you can't see the top of a 1000th of an inch tower from the top of another 1000th of an inch tower just a tiny bit around the circumference of the circle. Put a penny against a tree, and put your head close against the tree, a quarter of the way around with your outside eye closed. Can you see the penny? No. Its below your horizon. Regards, TAR Now put a pencil normal to the tree and move your head around till you can see the top half of the pencil. Does it look tilted away from you, or does it look normal to the tree?