point of view

a telling social experiment is to ask different cultures "how many colors are there in the rainbow?" e.g. Japan has seven colors in their rainbow, the US has six (ROYGBV), Germany five, Russia, the answer apparently differs from one person to another.

the actual number of colors in a rainbow is much greater than the 256 colors defined by 8 binary bits, or the 65,536 colors defined by 16-bits, or even 16,777,216 colors defined by 24-bits. the colors in a rainbow are continuos - so there are an infinite number of colors in a rainbow within the visible spectrum.

yet each culture has an answer to this question that they teach their children.

which is right? which is wrong?

it's so big of us to see the absurdity of this right/wrong question when the issue is this trivial - and when we have a higher perspective. yet within each culture - this truth is real: e.g. what would be the seventh color in the american ROYGBV rainbow we could add? or which one should we remove to be compatible with Germany's five? consensus would be quite distant.

different ways to parse truth. to make finite that which is infinite.

i was traveling through Germany last week. their national color seems to be mustard yellow. concurrently, or maybe consequently - the whole rest of their color pallet is whacked to my eye. their red's are just a bit off, their blue's likewise... at least to the eye of my world-view. in taste, i think their colors are richer than the primary colors / red white and blue of my land, and i thoroughly enjoyed the differences. but i was amazed when i came across this set of houses...

to think they have the same rainbow we have!