"If you encounter a number higher than this, you're not doing real math."
Digital Marketer : Statistician : Sociologist
Somehow I missed this post on the XKCD blog back in August, but it's a classic. Helps me understand why guys in pink shirts always call them salmon. Here are a few basic discoveries, but suggest you read the entire post here:
First, a few basic discoveries:
If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.
“Puke” and “vomit” are totally real colors.
Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.
A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.
Nobody can spell “fuchsia”.
Overall, the results were really cool and a lot of fun to analyze. There are some basic limitations of this survey, which are discussed toward the bottom of this post. But the sheer amount of data here is cool.
I am currently a Product Strategist at iCrossing in charge of Business Intelligence. Formerly, I was the Manager of Advanced Analytics. I'm a marketer, mathematician, sociologist, student of the web, crafter of my own social network, amateur knitter and potter, people watcher, Red Cross disaster volunteer, and warrior against clutter.
I do all of this from Salt Lake City, UT. Don't knock it until you've lived here!
