"I'm interested in the fakeness of all those colorful photographs of the universe that we've been looking at all these years."

I said, in the course of contemplating what Maureen Dowd said about Robert Redford's hair and after reading that "There are no 'natural color' cameras aboard the Hubble and never have been. The optical cameras on board have all been digital CCD cameras, which take images as grayscale pixels." I also tweaked "the atheist Christopher Hitchens" for "burbling about 'the color and depth and majesty' of the Hubble photographs as he urges us to see the revelations of science as more awe-inspiring than the old stories told by religions." I exclaimed: "But the color is fake! The purveyors of science, like religionists, can scam us too."

Reader Gabriel Hanna emails:

To say that something is a scam [is] to say it is dishonest and done for financial gain.  

Now, technically, I did not say the color in the Hubble photographs is a scam. I said it was fake, and then, in a separate sentence, I stated a generality — "The purveyors of science, like religionists, can scam us too" — which is my standard warning to pay attention and be skeptical.

Astronomers, it is true, are largely taxpayer-supported, they are using the Hubble images to convince people to pay for astronomy. But the other element of a scam is dishonesty, and I do not agree that the Hubble images are dishonest — or if they are, they are no more dishonest than any photography.

Light is inherently greyscale, there is no color in it.  Light has only frequency.  Human eyes are sensitive to three sets of frequencies, and the human brain interprets these as color.  All cameras have to "fake" color in the sense that you accuse Hubble astronomers of faking color, because a machine cannot record a subjective human experience.

Hubble, like any digital camera, records numbers that correspond to frequencies of light.  The colors are put into the images by the algorithm that converts the numbers to an image.  In a film camera the data is collected and stored chemically and the developing process does what software does for digital cameras.

When a photographer adjusts white balance, or shoots in sepia, that is "false color" in the exact sense it is for Hubble images.  We do not call that dishonest in the case of digital photography, and it is not a scam even if the photographer sells the photographs.  Like digital photography, most Hubble images are boring, and for public consumption astronomers select the beautiful ones in the same way that a blogger takes hundreds of shots before she gets one good enough to post. Like digital photography, brightness and white balance of Hubble images might well be adjusted, or colors altered in the same way as shooting in sepia, but if we don't call it a scam in the one case we ought not to call it one in the other.

It is especially unfair in that Hubble extends human capabilities to non-visible wavelengths.  It seems very unfair to say that honesty demands that all radio or x-ray astronomy images be rendered in flat black because humans cannot see those colors, and to do anything else is a "scam."

But I stand by my warning. The scientists do want our money, as Hanna concedes. And people like Hitchens call us to replace religion with science because science is so beautiful. If scientists, seeking dominance, punch up the beauty of their images, we must take that into account as we analyze arguments and implicit pleas for money that are based on the beauty of what they are showing us. The art photographer — processing the camera's digital file — is forthrightly guided by aesthetics. The Hubble images can be presented as artwork manipulated for aesthetic pleasure, but to the extent that they are not — as in Hitchens's argument — it is rational and scientific to catch a whiff of scam.

Color-strip test, late afternoon version.

Mid-morning version here.

De-yellowifying the off-white.

We got a lot of advice from readers when we talked about paint to go on the walls of our newly floored room, and yesterday we got 4 samples and painted them on the wall in 2 places. The colors look very different at different times of day. They were chosen from a brochure with over 100 white/off-white swatches. All 4 that we have here are at the lightest 2 of 6 levels.

"Why is Facebook blue?... It’s because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green color blind..."

"... blue is the color Mark can see the best."

That factoid begins an article about the use of color in branding, which does not otherwise involve the topic of designing color images with knowledge of how it looks to people who see some but not all colors. The article gets into assertions about what women like and what men like. Both respond to blue and green and are repelled by orange and brown, but women go for purple, which men don't like, and men like black while women dislike gray. That's sort of interesting, but it's much softer information than the hardcore physical reality of red-green color blindness.

Is there software that lets you check what your design looks like to someone who's red-green color blind? One answer, I guess, is stick to blue. But it seems to me that there are many blues, including blues that lean toward red (before you'd say purple) and blues that lean to yellow (before you'd start calling it green). A person who's not red-green color blind might think that's a really lovely blue at the very point where it might look ugly to a person with red-green color blindness.

I've been thinking about this topic a lot because I've been losing my sense of smell, to the point where I'm smell-blind — anosmic — in some sectors of the sense of smell. It would be one thing to have no sense of smell at all, like complete color blindness. But when you have partial perception, you care about the part that you have, but you'd like a good experience with it, but other people, who may be providing the experience, don't know what it's like for you.

Purchase of the day.

From the February 16, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

Mario Kart Racing Wheel for Wii (2pcs Bundle) (Bulk Packaging) by Ebest (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.97)

85704 Campus.org Poly Color Jackets - 6 Pack, Assorted Colors by Smead (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.45)

LifeStraw Personal Water Filterby Vestergaard-Frandsen (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.84)

ch ching:

T-fal Actifry Low-Fat Multi-Cooker (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $16.72 )

Microsoft Office Home and Business 2013 (1PC/1User) [Download] (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $17.60)

Hoover Linx Cordless Stick Vacuum Cleaner (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $11.92 )

... and 28 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers. Or as Barack might say, "Nothing about using the Althouse Amazon portal tonight should increase your family budget deficit by a single dime."

Only I'm not even lying.

So suck it up, load it down, fry it deep, sip it slow. If you like it, you better put a jacket on it. And WEEE!!! Thank you.