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"If I were to given an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose within the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. But it is not just a wonderful scientific idea. It is a dangerous idea."

--Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

One of my coworkers is colorblind. She's also unlucky enough to be one of the rare colorblind women. In a way, this is handy: it's nice to be able to take this into account when designing graphics and charts. Callouts on pie charts, for example, are important.

It's also a source of fun stories, like when a fellow member of a wedding party told her, "there are pink and gold versions of the shoe you need to buy, but DON'T get the pink ones." (Oh, that's helpful.) She tries to look for the labels on the bottom, she says, in case those list which color variety describes the shoes. And in my favorite quote for the day, she says "if the crayons don't have the wrappers on them any more, I just refuse to play with them."

But I'm surprised, honestly, that no-one has addressed this problem, since there's an easy solution. After all, almost everyone's got a cameraphone nowadays. It ought to be pretty simple to write a Java applet that shows (via graph and numerical readout) the RGB values in the center of the camera's view. It's not perfect, but at least it would give the colorblind a way to compare.

How about it, science?

For my own future reference: Dr. Richard Lewontin of Harvard on race as a social construct.

Actually, after looking over Lewontin's Wikipedia entry, I may have found a new hero.