• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Gist; inuit
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.680.3341; http://www.elementsmagazine.org/archives/e9_3/e9_3_dep_triplepoint.pdf

I want to call your attention to a problem with the use of colored fi gures in professional papers and oral presentations. The diffi culty is the inability of many folks to distinguish some colors or, in rare cases, any colors. Recent examples are the well-written and informative papers in Elements by Filippelli and others (December 2012) and Yoshida and Takahashi (June 2012). I am unable to distinguish between the various colored patterns in some of their fi gures, being red-green color blind. I know from many years of experience that those with “normal ” color vision are unaware of this diffi culty or pay it little consideration, just as those of us who are right-handed pay little heed to some issues associated with the sinistral. Fortunately, with color blindness, there often are simple solutions to the problem. For example, rather than using O and O to dis-tinguish apples from oranges, patterns with or without colors, such as 9 and O, will do nicely. This also eliminates the need for making col-ored copies. Color blindness in many cases is not a signifi cant encumbrance, but it is fairly common, certainly common enough that authors of technical papers should consider it in their presentations. The fi rst written report of color blindness appears to have been by chemist/physicist John Dalton, who, in 1794, reported on this phenomenon in himself and his brother (see Dickinson et al. 1996). John Rosenfeld, my colleague at UCLA, is a world-class petrolo-gist and optical mineralogist; like me, he is red-green color blind. Perhaps 10 % of human males are so “endowed ” (e.g. Dawkins 2004, page 154); females show this trait far less commonly, because both X chromosomes must be affected to result in color blindness. Curiously, most humans, birds, fi sh, and rep-tiles and some marsupials have superior color vision, whereas most mammals do not. Some groups of humans, including the Inuit, appear to have nearly no color blindness, whereas in some populations, a signifi cant percentage of men and women are completely ...