Saturday, December 31, 2011

An Introductory Ramble

Well, for my first blog I want to do something fairly interesting.  Perspective is what I'm thinking is a good place. This will be one of my more ramble-type posts since I'm not a expert in abstract things, it'll just be how I feel.
Trippy...
One thing that began my interest in perspective are people who are color blind.  My father is color blind and thus my sister's male children most likely will also be. 

Here's how it works: women have the genes X and X.  Males have an X and Y.  Basic, aye? Aye.  Now, the color blind attribute is on the X gene and it is recessive as well.  For a woman to be color blind she has to have color blind genes on Both of her X genes.  Since my father gave me his Y (making me male, hurrah!) I can't get his color blind gene from him.  However, my sister has one of her Xs with a color blind gene.  Thus, her son will have a 50% chance to be color blind.  Keep in mind, genetics is complicated, I'm no expert, and it probably doesn't work EXACTLY like this.  Nevertheless, that's generally how it's passed on.

Color blindness!  It has a few forms.  Without going into details filled with long words and crazy descriptions, there are 3 main forms of color blindness.  First and most rare, is total color blindness.  Shades of grey basically.  Most common then is the Red-Green color blindness. This is what my father has.  The next is Blue-Yellow color blindness.  This is a rather minor disability usually. In fact in some cases it can be advantageous, such as seeing camouflage.  8% of males show signs of color-blindness and only .5% of females.

Oh geez, way off topic.  What this made me think was what if all these colors we see aren't what others see?  Here's what I mean.  Think of the color red. Now think of blue.  The color you see as blue is how I see my red.  And my red is your blue.  Odd? Yes. Yes it is.  So the sky you see is blue.  However, the color I'm seeing of that is what your red looks like.  This is the basic principle of my wonderment.  However, it cannot be completely random.  Why?  Because of art.  Cool colors all belong to the same area and warm do as well.  Even without training you can see these colors fitting well together, right?  A cool light blue and a warm dark red don't fit that well together. Which means that colors can really only be as you see them and reverse of how you see them.  By that I mean the spectrum is reversed and my cool colors are what your warm colors are.  Then it would still work. 

Other than color, I'd like to talk about happiness!  What is happiness?  Now that question could and has filled books.  Tons of philosophers from Aristotle to John Stuart Mill have looked into happiness extensively but none can really come to an agreement.  Though, thinking about it it is almost as if they agreed it is not properly definable in more modern philosophy and moved onto ethical issues.  One of my favorite ethical standpoints (from an ethics class I barely remember - I'm going to read the books I had on my own now) is Utilitarianism.  The main contributors are considered to be Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.  The principle behind utilitarianism is "the greatest happiness principle".  Basically, what is right is what will cause the greatest happiness. However, this requires a strong definition of what happiness is.  For example, Jeremy Bentham was much more about the chemical reaction in your brain that causes happiness.  However, J.S. Mill suggested that poetry was greater than any physical sensation.  I'm actually amazed I remember as much as I do from a class over a semester ago where I never read anything because it was so easy I didn't have to.  Now I want to read the books to understand better. Hopefully I can have someone else read them and talk about it with me.  Anywho, perspective, it's key here.  I think that's enough for now.  My next blog will probably be a review of a game.  I'm thinking Sequence..

Until next time,
Brilliant Baritone