Let's Get Weird Part 2 of Sideways 8

Let's talk about flavors, colors, symbols and grocery stores, again? I feel like there's a pay off at the end of this one, so try to make it all the way through.

So let's start with Grocery Stores...I know we already did this. And I know grocery stores are not solely beholden to directing the customer to the product they want. They also want to place things, so that the customer buys more, and they also want to place things, like in the local stores place, maybe where those things stay fresher. Like having the cancer bread next to the refrigeration section. But let's continue to think about solving the customer finding the thing he wants problem.


What kind of symbols are universal? What could we use? What about flavors? Is the squinty faced emoticon (><) the universal symbol for sour? Do all cultures make that face, for sour, I mean sans people with like synestesia or something. I don't really have a lot to say about flavors, but organizing a grocery store around flavors sounds interesting.

 APL is a programming language that uses symbols. Like literal ones, not like some data structure concept.

 One thing in universal symbols I do want to share, is colors. Color's are interesting. Color's have meaning.(And as an aside, my favorite web safe color is cornflower blue, and it's not because it was featured in a 1999 movie release, heavily) They don't just have meaning, they have universal meaning.

We know that colors are universal in their interpretation, because cultures name them in the same order:

 Stage I: Dark-cool and light-warm (this covers a larger set of colors than English "black" and "white".)
 Stage II: Red
Stage III: Either green or yellow
Stage IV: Both green and yellow
Stage V: Blue
Stage VI: Brown
Stage VII: Purple, pink, orange, or gray*

Basic color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution.


Why do I know this? Because I am friends with a web developer who studied comp science and linguistics. Which isn't all that uncommon because linguistics, is important in AI. And also I know this, because Tyler knows this.

 "My shoes are not purple, mother. They're oxblood."

Color's sometimes identify ethics. What color is the background of this blog again? No for real, I suffer from a minor color blindness where I can't tell green from grey. Lots of men are colorblind in some capacity though.  I still can't tell what color the background of  daringfireball.net is. I also own a pair of pants I can't match with anything to save my life.

I think that most of you get, that I don't give a shit about the grocery store problem. And that clearly "Let's get Weird" is subtly, slowly, but with intention making it's way to something that is about hacking. But let me drop some not so subtle, "What this is really about" on you. Most of the knowledge I'm trying to impart in the let's get weird series is novel, and we tend to think of novelty as just some unique little thing that's interesting. We have to stop thinking like that. Novelty is how breakthroughs are made. Novelty is a snag in the universe, and when you find something like that, start pulling. Rip the universe apart.

In neurology we know that new and novel experiences help strengthen dendrites. Things like brushing your teeth in the dark.

So be smarter than me. Go figure out how one of these "novel" things isn't so much novel as it is a corner piece to the puzzle of the universe.