I was driving home with a friend Wednesday night and she was rather confused when I stopped at a green light, studied it for a second, then continued on through the intersection. Turned out she didn't know I was colour blind. I had to explain to her that I look a the traffic lights and know if it's green, orange or red by top, middle and bottom, then had to explain that at night time, if there's not a street light to outline the box around the lights, and there's not a car in front of me (if the car went through and the light hasn't changed by the time I get to the light I know it's green) I have to stop and have a good look.
Since then, she's been amazed about it and asking the same questions over and over (the other colour blind people out there will know just how fusturating this really is). While I explained in the best way I could what I "saw" (Eg, close shades look the same, but sometimes I can see there's a difference but don't know which one's which etc. etc.) but she still couldn't get her head around it, so I went on a search for a website I'd seen months ago where you upload a jpeg and it will spit it back out in the way that a colour blind person would see it, and it was simple as that. So, for anyone who's interested, http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckImage.php is the site. For reference, deuteranope is the most common form of coolour blindness, which I have. I think the only problem with the site is that you cannot "scale" the intensity of the blindness. For example, someone with light colour blindness can't tell the difference between red and green but can tell the difference between dark green and brown, wheras someone who has very strong blindness (such as myself =)) will have trouble with all close shades, ranging from Pink/Blue/Purple to Pink/Red/Green to Yellow/Green/Brown and everything inbetween. Just to make this flying related, I sometimes also have problems with blue & green (depending on how light it is and the shades on both coloures). During my training I remember my father telling me to "pull the green lever as far back as it will go", intending to teach me about the trim, so I pulled the "green" lever as far back as it would go and we were going down at a good 10 knots =) Dion Baker -- <timmo> you know what i hate <timmo> errors that wont go away <Guilty> So you dislike children too
_______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list [email protected] To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
