What has Krugthulu been up to lately?

He’s been pimping his book, End This Depression Now!.  He’s been getting a lot of publicity lately and has been on a book tour in Europe and here.  I found this youtube video of Paul giving a short presentation on his book and doing a Q&A in Cambridge, MA.  For an economist, he’s very entertaining and funny.  I like his upbeat optimism.

Here’s hoping his book is wildly successful and that the working class (that would be all of us not living on our investments, O Best Beloved) encounter him in their travels across the media spectrum.  I fear he is a tiny voice in the wilderness unless he hits #1 on Amazon.

Disclaimer: You don’t need to order it from Amazon.  You can buy it at Barnes and Noble.  I saw it there yesterday.  You can probably get it at the Princeton Book Store, if you’re so inclined.  Or iTunes.  Whatever frosts your crockies.  I only mention Amazon because their top ranked booklist tends to get a lot of attention and maybe some economically and politically naive person might stumble on it.  Let’s not make this a diatribe about how evil Amazon is as a corporation or, you know, foolish consistencies, hobgoblins and all that.

{{rolling eyes}}

AND I WEAR NIKES!

So there!

(about an hour but it goes very quickly if you’re doing other things while you’re listening)

Nifty little color game

I’m wasting time when I should be painting.  Speaking of painting, have you ever made a paint color boo-boo?  I once painted my office the wrong shade of green.  I thought a nice shade of bright green would cheer up that north facing room.  While the name of the paint color is long forgotten, the result was so vibratingly bright acid green that it gave me negative afterimage.  Back to the paint store I went and came back with Sassafrass Tea(?) and immediately started painting over my mistake.  Then a weird thing happened.  Sassafrass Tea rolled on red.  It was green in the paint can and red on the walls.  Either the fumes were getting to me or my retinas were burning out.  Would I have to paint it a third time??

When it dried, it turned out to be fine but it made me understand the hues that go into paints can really make a difference and it’s not until you layer them on top of each other that those differences become noticeable.  I also learned that if you want to tone down a color that is too bright or fluorescent, choose a similar color with more red in it.

So, how good is your color sense?  According to X-Rite, “1 out of 255 women and 1 out of 12 men have some form of color vision deficiency.”

To find out how well you can discriminate between colors, take this handy test.  It’s fun and only takes about 5 minutes of your time.  Your challenge is to arrange the color blocks in order from left to right.  0 is a perfect score and 99 is, um, problematic.

And here’s mine:

Finally something I’m good at, even if there’s no way to making a living at it. But it probably explains how I *finally* managed to find just the right shade of cream for my bathrooms that wouldn’t offend either the tile or the marble.  No mean feat.  It makes me think that having the requisite number of rods and cones is not enough. You really need to train them and make a lot of mistakes along the way.  It looks like there are studies that back this up.

I don’t know if there is a trick to this but once you have all of your colors lined up, scan across the row and if any of them “pop out” at you as if they are in 3D, it’s probably in the wrong place.  Moving it left or right by 1-2 spaces should fix it.  Keep scanning until none of them pop out.  Also, another oddity was when the colors were all lined up correctly, I saw the spectrum clearly and the dominant hue seemed to drop away.  If that makes sense to you, the lineup is probably right.