Roy G. Biv

This came up in conversation at an event on Xmas Eve. It is an acronym to help you remember red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet which are the colors of the rainbow in the order they appear. I suppose there is also infrared before red and ultraviolet after violet but human beings cannot see infrared or ultraviolet. I had a college class on color as a piece of my associates degree in multimedia, and I learned that in additive color's scope (light coming directly to the eye, as in computer monitors) the colors all have different wavelengths and the actors towards the front of the list I've just given come to the eye in a quicker, more direct path than the ones father down the list which wave back and forth more.

This allows a red shirt to look orange in low light. The orange is lingering over time more than the red. Well, actually that is an example of subtractive color honestly. Subtractive color as a paradigm has to do with light bouncing off of things back to your eye, such as the things printed on pieces of paper. Paints and inks really only have colors of their own insofar as they set rules as to how light bounces off of them and back to your eye to convey color. That silly high school art class you had where you made a color wheel and they told you that the primary colors are "Red" and "Yellow" and "Blue" should be taken with a grain of salt as these more appropriately correspond to the Magenta, Yellow, and Cyan in the CMYK of subtractive colors respectively. (The K is for blacK.) The subtractive colors to some degree cover white paper to make white paper something other than white. Mixing different things makes for different colors. To get an eggshell off-white you are not applying any one of the colors 100%. Also:

• Sound waves wave back and forth even more than ultraviolet light, making sound travel considerably slower than light.
• The four CMYK colors of the subtractive paradigm are replaced with RGB colors in the additive paradigm. The colors are Red, Green, and Blue and if you crank them all up to full blast and put all three together they mix to make white. Turn them all down to nothing and you get to black of a monitor that is powered off. Different levels and different combinations make different colors.