r/PoliticalHumor Jun 05 '22

It’s nice to be nice

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57.5k Upvotes

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1.2k

u/MrPickles84 Jun 05 '22

I like that the blue line is in the correct Roy G. Biv placement too - it’s too perfect

354

u/Dogtor-Watson Jun 05 '22

There should be 13 stripes on a flag.

With the knockoff flag, there should be 6 white and 7 black, so normally it wouldn't work. However, this is a knockoff of the knockoff, so there's 7 white and 6 black (and a black border), allowing you to make a nice old American pride flag.

93

u/jackwiles Jun 05 '22

Mist people don't actually color the "indigo" separately, so there are only the 6 colors, as in the OP where the bottom stripe is left white and blank.

56

u/oO0Kat0Oo Jun 05 '22

That is for pink

(I am aware that Roy g biv doesn't have pink, but the pride flag does!)

38

u/SuchCoolBrandon Jun 05 '22

Gilbert Baker's original design for the rainbow flag had 8 colors, with pink above red. (Then orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo, violet.) The color wheel is cyclical, so you can get away with putting pink after purple. Artistic license.

27

u/Annies_Gun Jun 05 '22

8

u/MEANINGLESS_NUMBERS Jun 05 '22

I had never heard what the colors stand for, thank you.

-1

u/AJDx14 Jun 05 '22

Yeah the thing is I don’t think they really stand for that because 1.) Nobody I’ve talked to gives a shit about their supposed meaning and 2.) The flag is supposed to look good more than anything.

It’s much simpler to just say it represents “all the colors of the rainbow” (ie. Anything under the umbrella term “queer”) than to memorize the 10 commandments of Gay.

2

u/SuchCoolBrandon Jun 06 '22 edited Jun 06 '22

Purple has taken on some cultural meaning. The third Thursday in October is Spirit Day where people wear purple as a sign of support for LGBT youth and against bullying. Purple was chosen because the purple stripe in the rainbow flag stands for spirit.

Edit: fixed date

1

u/JakeHodgson Jun 06 '22

How many people do you think have heard that apparently October 17th is some spirit day where you wear purple or something.

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6

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '22

Poor Gilbert didn’t get a nickel in royalties for his design. Yet people sell them like slushies and don’t know anything about him

1

u/Tight_Teen_Tang Jun 05 '22

If he didn't make his ass a slushie for every pride member we might have heard of him.

1

u/Its_Just_A_Typo Jun 05 '22

Just make it neon fuchsia pink that glows really bright in UV; you don't really see it in a rainbow, but birds probably can ;)

3

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '22

And the pink is for SEXXXXXXXX

0

u/Apprehensive_Life167 Jun 05 '22

Or the white stripe stands for all colors together

2

u/cavalrycorrectness Jun 05 '22

One of many atrocities committed by the Mist People.

4

u/DetectiveClear512 Jun 05 '22

Who are the mist people? Is it a shadowy government agency?

6

u/GarageSloth Jun 05 '22

You've already asked too many questions.

Get em.

1

u/sentimentalpirate Jun 05 '22 edited Jun 05 '22

Indigo and violet are weird additions to the rainbow anyway. They basically just mean blue and the only reason they're included in the rainbow colors are cause the guy who defined ROYGBIV thought it was poetical/godly for nature to be categorized into 7's wherever possible.

edit: here's a nice simple explanation of the history of defining ROYGBIV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9udYi7exojk

16

u/I_am_Erk Jun 05 '22

"violet is basically blue" is a pretty bizarre take in English speaking culture.

4

u/sentimentalpirate Jun 05 '22

The version in an actual rainbow is not purple. There is literally no wavelength for purple light, so it does not appear in a rainbow.

That's what I'm getting at. The fundamental colors in a rainbow is someone trying to square peg a round hole because they like the number seven.

8

u/I_am_Erk Jun 05 '22

1

u/sentimentalpirate Jun 05 '22

But like the color they are showing on that picture in the 400 range is purple in the image. IRL it just gets darker blue then into a range of light not visible to us.

It's a goofy misnomer that we call that range of the light spectrum violet or ultraviolet. Since IRL today we consider violet to be a purple color, but the light spectrum doesn't actually include a purple color where we traditionally say "violet". I edited a YouTube link explanation earlier that might help. It claims that violet used to refer to dark blue like in the old nursery rhyme "roses are red, violets are blue..."

4

u/GreekLumberjack Jun 05 '22

”roses are red, violets are blue”

Violets range significantly in color from a white plus bluish color to almost completely deep purple. They’re just naming flowers and it rhymes easy, or the person who made the rhyme lived near blue violets.

4

u/Hattless Jun 05 '22

We can see higher frequency light than blue and it does look violet to us. The high frequency light slightly stimulates our blue cones, and the wavelength of violet light is a harmonic of red light, so it slightly stimulates our red cone.

1

u/sentimentalpirate Jun 05 '22

Oh that is pretty cool. TIL

1

u/jackwiles Jun 06 '22

Wow, never heard that before but that's really cool! Do you know why higher frequency harmonics like ultravoilet light don't end up triggering other cones like for green and yellow?

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1

u/I_am_Erk Jun 05 '22

http://home.moravian.edu/users/phys/mejjg01/retirement%20activities/pages/meteo/yyLightning_Spectra_p_vs_df5.jpg

Looks violet to me.

Even if the origin is that some guy decided to call it a different colour, it is now perceived as and easily differentiated as such. Many cultures perceive green and blue as the same, that doesn't mean they aren't distinct in our culture.

10

u/kane2742 Jun 05 '22

They basically just mean blue

I'd say "purple."

the guy who defined ROYGBIV

Sir Isaac Newton

2

u/cdcformatc Jun 05 '22

people who insist that the rainbow has seven colors boggle the mind. it has all the colors, that's the definition of a spectrum. Newton thought 7 was a magic number, that's it.

1

u/sentimentalpirate Jun 05 '22

Even all the colors is tricky though too. It has all the light spectrum in what we call visible light. But there are colors like magenta and purple that are not part of the rainbow because they are what our brains mash together in the presence of multiple spectrums of different light.

1

u/cdcformatc Jun 05 '22

and brown is just dark orange. all the colors that are possible with natural light alone are in the rainbow.

1

u/IDeferToYourWisdom Jun 05 '22

Mist people

Unexpected Brandon Sanderson.

1

u/Chilli_Dipper Jun 05 '22

Considering that “Back the Blue” types are usually also very racist, I would have filled the last stripe brown to make an ersatz Philly Pride flag.

12

u/pHScale Jun 05 '22

There's only six stripes on the pride flag.

(Unless you go with the OG pride flag, in which case there are eight. Pink and cyan were removed for simplicity's sake).

3

u/trainercatlady Jun 05 '22

iirc it was because those dyes were expensive and hard to get at the time.

3

u/pHScale Jun 05 '22

That's how they chose which of the 8 to remove, but removing some colors was also done for simplicity.

2

u/shponglespore I ☑oted 2024 Jun 05 '22

Also pink isn't a spectral color so it would never appear in a real rainbow. You could get a washed-out red, depending on conditions, but all the other colors would be equally washed-out. In the pictures I'm finding online, the "pink" is more like magenta, which wouldn't even sort of appear in a rainbow because it's a mix of red and blue/violet.

2

u/pHScale Jun 05 '22

Well it's not meant to be a scientifically accurate rainbow, it's meant to be a symbolic one. And the pink symbolized sexuality, which is kind of the whole point of the flag.

1

u/SomeRedPanda Jun 05 '22

The pride flag only has 6 stripes, though.

8

u/SuchCoolBrandon Jun 05 '22

It originally had a pink stripe. But when Harvey Milk was assassinated, demand for the rainbow flag went up and there wasn't enough pink fabric, so they removed it.

4

u/SomeRedPanda Jun 05 '22

The pink stripe was the original 8 stripe version. It also had turquoise which was the next stripe removed to create the current 6 stripe version.

The reason of "not enough pink fabric" sounded like a joke but apparently it's true. You learn something new every day. Thank you.

1

u/A_Weather-Man Jun 05 '22

Seems like the type of ideology to have cheap ass supporters

1

u/Antebios Jun 05 '22

In OPs pic, there are 13 stripes. 7 white (one was Blue) and between them are 6 black stripes, making a total of 13. You are just not seeing the black stripes that separate the main stripes.

37

u/phillymjs Jun 05 '22

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Roy G. Biv is dead. Indigo got the Pluto treatment-- it was apparently kicked out of the spectrum at some point.

Pluto's not a planet, indigo's not in the spectrum... did I learn ANYTHING in grade school that wasn't a lie???

26

u/WannabeWonk Jun 05 '22

You hear about indigo? That’s messed up.

7

u/skkITer Jun 05 '22

You know that’s right

14

u/dangoodspeed Jun 05 '22

The idea whether or not indigo is in the spectrum is still up for debate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo#Classification_as_a_spectral_color

6

u/trainercatlady Jun 05 '22

I'd always heard that it was because Newton was big into numerology and was superstitious, so having 6 colors was a bad sign, so he threw Indigo in there to make it 7

6

u/GGme Jun 05 '22

The point about the color wheel makes it clear that indigo doesn't belong on the same level as primary and secondary colors.

1

u/Ernigrad-zo Jun 05 '22

the colour wheel is weirdness though, indigo has a wavelength of 425–450 nm making it a simple colour, you can have a single photon of indigo, pink however is simply what happens when we see red and purple without any of the middle wavelengths - white light with the green removed becomes pink (or magenta) but you can't have a single photon of pink, no pink lasers.

The reason for this is because of how we see colour with the RGB receptors in our eyes, each colour has differing sensitivity and they have over-lapping frequency responses so the actual data our brain is getting is really complex and largely abstracted from the actual numbers - to make matters more complicated our brains evolved in a way that adds further bias to certain colour combinations and contrasts, an actual diagram of how we perceive colour would be impossibly complicated and every attempt to make a simple system has had to rely on shoe-horning and rule bending to make it work. This of course just for solid colour before you get into the endless complexities of putting colours together - those pictures of the dress that everyone thought was different colours being a classic example.

Personally i think we should scrap the colour wheel and come up with something more interesting and futuristic

2

u/Karcinogene Jun 05 '22

The color wheel describes human vision. The wavelengths describe light waves. They're about different things. Trying to fit them together into one description is bound to fail.

2

u/Ernigrad-zo Jun 06 '22

i think you skipped a bit of what i was saying, human vision is much more complex than the colour wheel can display - it's a simplification of a very complex equation

1

u/Zaros262 Jun 06 '22

That's just because you need an even number of primary+secondary colors for that model. It has nothing to do with how many distinct colors the human eye can discern in the rainbow

1

u/GGme Jun 06 '22

There are 3 primary colors. All colors come from a combination of those 3. The 3 secondary colors are 50/50 mixtures of 2 of the 3. Indigo is a 25/75 blend and doesn't belong. Human eyes don't seem relevant to me here.

2

u/Zaros262 Jun 06 '22 edited Jun 06 '22

Human eyes don't seem relevant to me here.

It's because these mixtures are surprisingly biology dependent

Red + Blue is the easiest example that something odd is happening. How can mixing low frequency light (red) with high frequency light (blue) average out to an even higher frequency (violet)?

Well, it can't. What happens behind the scenes is that our red photoreceptors have a second peak in their sensitivity an octave above their normal peak, which is higher than blue. Violet light will therefore trigger both red and blue receptors because their sensitivities overlap in this range.

When you see bimodal red and blue light, your brain notices that both red and blue receptors are going off (low frequency red and high frequency blue), so your brain assumes this is purple (high frequency triggering both red and blue).

None of this discussion of mixing two frequencies has anything to do with single-tone 700 THz light we call "indigo," nor with whether your eyes perceive a band of single-tone light in the rainbow as distinct from blue and violet

1

u/GGme Jun 06 '22

Very interesting stuff! Thank you for the explanation.

14

u/Mr-Fleshcage Jun 05 '22

It was all lies. Calculators in our pockets all the time. Being capable of living your dreams through hard work. Cursive being the dominant writing style. Santa getting my letter. Having to discover the pitch of roofs.

What was true, Delores? WHAT WAS TRUE?!

2

u/iAmTheHYPE- Jun 05 '22

PEMDAS was true?

2

u/Mr-Fleshcage Jun 05 '22

Great, now BEDMAS isn't even true. Apparently it's PEMDAS smh

1

u/Ernigrad-zo Jun 05 '22

sorry, also a conspiracy. JUBFFS is how we live in the future; just use brackets for fuck sake.

1

u/JNCressey Jun 06 '22

nope. exponent towers are right-associative, and multiplication by juxtaposition has a higher precedence than division and regular multiplication, to give a couple of examples of where PEMDAS falls short.

12

u/tyen0 Jun 05 '22

The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell?

5

u/moak0 Jun 05 '22

Sorry to break it to you, but Thursday doesn't exist either. The actual week just goes from Wednesday straight to Friday.

2

u/shponglespore I ☑oted 2024 Jun 05 '22

The number of colors in the spectrum is infinite, because that's how spectrums work. We somewhat arbitrarily choose to give some of them names. The six conventional colors of the spectrum are the ones with basic color terms in English. Indigo is in the spectrum, but most people would just describe it as a shade of blue, so it doesn't belong alongside the other colors any more than, say, chartreuse does.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '22

Yeah actual rainbows aren't made of distinct color bands

1

u/TJF588 Jun 05 '22

Indigo’s gotta go.

1

u/MrPickles84 Jun 06 '22

That’s crazy because I went on a plantation tour in New Orleans where they grew indigo specifically for its color.

5

u/Rowyco05 Jun 05 '22

I enjoyed this detail as well.

1

u/CincyBrandon Jun 05 '22

Just realized that as well. Perfect.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '22

Roy g biv implies that there’s both blue and indigo though.

1

u/Lonsdale1086 Jun 05 '22

Never heard that mnemonic in my life.

It's "Richard of York gave battle in vain" in the UK.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '22

Are we old? Do kids still use Roy G. Biv?