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Blue
Blue: In Search of Nature's Rarest Color | Kai Kupferschmidt
4 posts | 3 read | 1 to read
A globe-trotting quest to find blue in the natural world—and to understand our collective obsession with this captivating color Search human history and you’ll quickly conclude that we’ve been enamored of blue at least since the pharaohs. So, it’s startling to turn to the realms of nature and discover that “true” blue is truly rare. From the rain forest’s morpho butterfly to the blue jay flitting past your window, few living things are blue—and most that appear so are performing sleight of hand with physics or chemistry. Cornflowers use the pigment found in red roses to achieve their blue hue. Even the blue sky above us is a trick of the light. Science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt has been fascinated by blue since childhood. In Blue, his quest to understand the science and nature of his favorite color takes him from a biotech laboratory in Japan and a volcanic lake in Oregon to Brandenburg, Germany— home of the last surviving blue-feathered Spix’s macaws. Whether it’s deep underground where blue crystals grow or miles overhead where astronauts gaze down at our “blue marble” planet, wherever we do find Earth’s rarest color, it always has a story to tell.
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review
shanaqui
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I mostly read this on the 31st Dec, but I didn't want it to count for 2023, as that'd have had me reading 401 books in 2023. Not a nice number.

So I finished the last few pages today. It's fairly light reading, though it explains some things (like the ways we see colour) very well, and was an interesting read.

Faranae I assume that means it didn't do the weird thing some people are obsessed with Sapir-Whorf to the extreme and think that language color words mean people can't see blue? (This pet peeve gets to stay fresh for me because Japanese is one of the languages that has a word that means both blue and green. It also has words that mean only one or the other, though...) 10mo
shanaqui @Faranae It does have a chapter that touches on Sapir-Whorf, and there it says that obviously people can see and distinguish those colours, and express it when they're given foreign words for them. It does say (and I haven't followed up the source yet) that people from countries with more colour words are quicker to mentally identify certain colours (I'm way oversimplifying this though) under certain test conditions. 10mo
Faranae @shanaqui That sounds very reasonable! 10mo
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coffees
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This was a really interesting read. I did a project on the color orange before so know how muddy color history can be and getting to find out that even one of the most popular colors isn't exempt from this was fun. We got to learn about blue via #science and from multiple perspectives: how it's found in #nature, it's use (or not) in literature, its identification in cultures and language, mutations, its many meanings, etc #colorhistory #history

Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks So pretty 💙 🦚 💚 2y
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SilverShanica
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Such a wonderful, crazy look at something we take for granted every day. Take a trip through the colour blue in chemistry, physics, biology, botany, language and culture. There is so much more to this colour than you ever thought.

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SilverShanica
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I am posting one book per day from my to-be-read collection. No description and providing no reason for wanting to read it, I just do. Some will be old, some will be new - don‘t judge me I have a lot of books.
Join the fun if you want. This is day 184.
#bookstoread
#tbrpile
#bookstagram

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