Yeah hi, can you explain to me, the hypothetical person who asks these unlikely questions about oddly specific topics on all FAQ pages, what do you mean when you say that your brain is actually wired differently than the “neuro-typical” person’s brain?

Sure, excellent question. Just read the rest of these.

I’ve only been on the website for under a minute, but I like these colors; why does this website use these three colors?

Well picking a good color begins by overcoming your urge to pick your favorite color and crank the intensity all the way up. We want colors that are in harmony with each other as far as physics goes, and that’s a fascinating topic for another day. I’m an engineer so I’m going straight to the tool – to the color wheel calculators! But hold on, before we get ahead of ourselves, don’t forget about color blindness and its increasing prevalence in the human genome which is deteriorating with every passing generation. We wouldn’t want to – no, we shall not – build a website that is difficult to navigate for people with a visual impairment. Fortunately in 2024 accessibility is as simple as going to the World Wide Web Consortium at www.w3.org. That’s not a shortened link; it’s just the shortest URL you have ever seen. W3 “develops standards and guidelines to help everyone build a web based on the principles of … accessibility…”. Opening up our pdf of the Color Universal Design Handbook, we pay attention… pay attention… ok, microwave that coffee real quick once – it got cold for the third time. Pay attention to this Handbook -> Heading 1 Perceiveable -> 1.4 Distinguishable -> 1.4.3 Success Criterion – Minimum Contrast is 4.5:1.
Well hey, that’s great news! 7 is greater than 4.5 and I’ve always thought 7 is the best number so that’s gonna be our contrast.

Shoot, contrast is an analog number, but a computer’s digital so we’re going to have to convert that to RGB which is hexadecimal. Actually no, that route is frought with peril. You know what would be better is HSL hue saturation lightness since we know the contrast ratio is the ratio of lightness between black and whatever color we pick. Picture it this way RGB is like a 3d etch-a-sketch – a cube where you have three dials for X,Y, and Z. HSL on the other hand, is different; it’s a cylinder with three dials. You’re in the middle of a color wheel so turning left and right different degrees changes the Hue. Then for saturation picture the further something gets in the distance, the color starts to fade to grey. And then the up and down axis is just brightness. If you slide down to zero you’re in a well and can’t see. If you slide to the top you’re staring at the sun and only see white. Awesome, now to lock down our first dial. We get to pick any hue we want without changing contrast ratio.

Picking your primary hue is a hunnert percent personal preference; I’ve always been drawn heavily toward purple. Like whenever I get to customize anything by choosing a color, I end up around a wavelength of around 420 nanometers. According to scientists at MSU 420 nm is right on the edge of indigo and violet.

Ok, so we’ve locked one dial bringing us down to two dials and we all know how great humans are at operating two dials. Arcades, jet fighters, wipers and turn signals… We’re looking for a color wheel(s) with HSL, just pop open six or [bradtip text=”seven tabs” tooltip=”given the choice between 6 and 7, ALWAYS choose 7″] and start closing out the ones that don’t do HSL even though you specifically added that to your search term! Lotta great color wheels out there but I gotta say this one is the most versatile, really astonishing in its utility, it’s like a whole toolbox: https://convertingcolors.com/hsl-color-180_60_40.html

Now here is where we’ll have our work cut out for us because of the way humans perceive light. You see, there are people out there who would claim that magenta isn’t a real color. What they mean is that inside your retina, your cones pick up a range of wavelengths – as high as red and as low as violet, but there isn’t a wavelength that exists in the cosmos that is magenta. What we perceive as magenta has actually been your brain taking a 50-50 mixture of the highest color it can see and the lowest color it can see and just inventing one more color. Or in terms of HSL you can only see 270 degrees but you invent a quarter of the color wheel – from pure red to pure purple, for free and it works! Praise God for that! It’s simply amazing that the human mind has the capability to track in real time the stream of photons coming in, spread them out by frequency, project them in high resolution onto a virtual (exists only in your personal consciousness) visible spectrum, then wrap it onto a the construct of a wheel, in order to gain one more color at an early enough age that even a toddler can point at the color that “doesn’t exist” on a leaf or flower and say it’s pretty.

What this all means though is that my chosen hue has me right at the end of the spectrum, somehow being both lower frequency than red and higher frequency than violet. And what that means is I’m right at the edge of light mode and dark mode color at 50% saturation. But that’s why we chose HSL over HSV because you can lock in that second dial, saturation. Crank that puppy up to a hunnert percent to get all the color possible and all that’s left is the final dial. Lightness. The dial that adds pure brilliance! Push it too far and your chosen color is diluted. Don’t push it far enough and your colorblind older brother can’t tell the figure captions from the hyperlinks. It will require that precious balance between my quest for purple-ishness and my quest for making the website readable for as many people as I can. I’ma go with an L of 67%. Twice as much light as dark.

Press Enter and the machine informs us that the hex value is #CC69FF. In human speak that’s red most of the way up, green set to hex 69 out of 255, blue all the way up. The exact value that gets my particular web color compliance is 69. I kid you not, change it to 68 and put it in any color checker and it’ll fail compliance with paragraph 1.4.3 Minimum Contrast with 6.99:1, but if you change the color by one single data bit, you pass with 7.03. And 7 is the best number.

From there, you copy and paste that number into a color wheel that gives complementary colors, that’s where it recommends this nice blue, almost the color of my eyes, but I remember as a kid there being other kids in school who couldn’t tell blue from purple. And the teacher yelled at one of the kids for that assignment because he made the sky purple. And I don’t think we should ever punish a child for being born with cones that cut off at a frequency slightly lower than the rest of us! To solve that problem, we’re gonna split the wheel into three, that’ll give us a gorgeous aqua #69FFCC, and #FFCC69 which is a really ugly yellow. I’ve been a Green Bay Packers fan since Brett Favre put on that ugly yellow uniform as a starter in 1992. 31 years is long enough to put up with a color so ugly they call it gold to make it sound better.
OK now, let’s put those answers into the contrast checker from earlier https://www.siegemedia.com/contrast-ratio#%23000000-on-%23000000 and we get contrast ratios of 14.09 [https://www.siegemedia.com/contrast-ratio#%23ffcc69-on-%23000000] and 16.77 [https://www.siegemedia.com/contrast-ratio#%2369ffcc-on-%23000000], respectively, which passes by exactly double. Makes sense, since we were aiming for twice as much light as dark.
Anyways I hope that answers your question if you’re still reading. The contrast ratio needs to stay higher than 4.5, 7 is the best number, and if you want to know how your website will look to various groups with various types of color blindness, click this link. I think they look pretty good (show the screenshots as a collage in one figure)

If not, it’ll answer a broader question of how it can take a person with ADHD a workday and a half to choose a color, and a minute and a half to choose the colors that go with it.

What’s with the plethora of squirrels?

This story is 100% true and it’s partly a confession. I’m not entirely proud of the amount of time I spent attempting to build a virtual hive brain to produce squirrels that are stable enough to produce a few hundred banner images, but unstable enough to not repeat the same few boring scenes. Yes, I’m talking about Stable Diffusion. I had it running on my own hardware with the vision of producing squirrel banners endlessly and delightfully. The only problem was in January of 2024, Stable Diffusion was a horror show, so the picture were always 90% there, but with ruined hands and noses.
I literally had a folder on my desktop when I built this site called “squirrels” and another folder called “dragonflies”. And by the time I reached the subfolder “unsorted squirrels” it had 930 pngs in it. Again, this is not a joke I’m making up, I sat down that day and sorted 930 squirrels with the delete key and more subfolders labeled “great marble”, “great branch and background”, “tail with no squirrel”, and “squirrel with perfect hands and feet”, thinking I could composite them or run masked edits.
The moral of the story is, if you have the hyperactive type of ADHD, make absolutely sure you’re not investing a solid two months of spare time into a rabbit hole, if said rabbit hole continues to lead to dead ends. The easiest way to tell is when your time-saving idea has cost more time than you can ever get back. Once I figured that out, ChatGPT released a subscription service and the squirrel problem was literally taken care of overnight. Anyways I hope that answers your question if you’re still reading. If not, anyone who is reading must have had that same question, so thanks for asking it.

Hey, you talk like you’re some kinda expert on women. Do you think you’re some kind of expert on women?

For the last 18 years I’ve lived with three women which makes me more knowledgeable on the topic of women than 99% of men according to my calculations. The United States Census Bureau’s Men’s Fertility and Fatherhood: 2014 Table 2 states that among all men over 15, 23% have two or more children, 12.6% have three or more, and 5.4% have four or more children. Of the 10.4% that have exactly two children there is a 1 in 4 chance that those two children are both girls. Of the 7.2% that have 3 children, the odds of having two or more girls increases to 1 in 3. The odds after that are a mystery to me so I’ll give that last 5.4% a fair shot and assume anyone with four or more children has two or more girls. My calculation assumes that the number of men even able to compete with me would be men that live with their wife and two or more daughters. That same report counts the percentage of men that live with all of their minor biological children at 20.6%, so the only men that stand a chance are (10.4% x 25% + 7.2% x 33% + 5.4%) x 20.6% = 1.1%. and I’m quite sure I’m at least average in that remaining 1.1%.

Who are you?

That’s not important. But if you think my name is important for some reason, I already gave it to you. At the start when we met, along with the name of my employer.

That’s the only clue you get. Be gone!