English questions

[Lērisama]

How would you usually refer to the Tuesday before Lent starts¹?

I call it pancake day or Shrove Tuesday. I prefer the latter, but the risk of it not being understood is distressingly high.

Me too. I suspect this is a dialect thing, as I'd never use any of Travis's names, and wouldn't have recognised ‘Fat Tuesday’¹, or ‘Pączki Day,’ and only barely know Mardi Gras as the same day, rather than an excuse for a carnival in some parts of the world²

¹ I could have probably worked it out, as I know just enough French
² Of course the two have the same origin of do/eat all the fun stuff before Lent, but still

[Travis B.]

How would you usually refer to the Tuesday before Lent starts¹?

I call it pancake day or Shrove Tuesday. I prefer the latter, but the risk of it not being understood is distressingly high.

Me too. I suspect this is a dialect thing, as I'd never use any of Travis's names, and wouldn't have recognised ‘Fat Tuesday’¹, or ‘Pączki Day,’ and only barely know Mardi Gras as the same day, rather than an excuse for a carnival in some parts of the world²

¹ I could have probably worked it out, as I know just enough French
² Of course the two have the same origin of do/eat all the fun stuff before Lent, but still

Conversely, I barely recognize the names "pancake day" or "Shrove Tuesday". (Out of context I would not have realized that "pancake day" is the same day as Mardi Gras.)

[Lērisama]

I always find it curious that "fuchsia" is typically pronounced /ˈfjuːʃə/ and not /ˈf{ʊ,uː}k{siː,sj,ʃ}ə/ in English, when normally in English StG <ch> is borrowed as /k/ and a /j/ is typically only inserted for <ü>/<ue>...

I always assumed it's a spelling pronounciation where the very odd ⟨chs⟩ is read as ⟨sch⟩, which is of course also common in German loans, although that might be influence from the common misspelling as *⟨fuschia⟩,

[linguistcat]

I grew up with a graphic designer mother, so I knew terms like fuchsia since early childhood. But my main connection with fuchsia these days is from a webcomic involving aliens with a social hierarchy based on blood color, fuchsia or tyrian (sometimes treated as the same, sometimes the latter being a subtype of the former) being the highest.

[Travis B.]

I always find it curious that "fuchsia" is typically pronounced /ˈfjuːʃə/ and not /ˈf{ʊ,uː}k{siː,sj,ʃ}ə/ in English, when normally in English StG <ch> is borrowed as /k/ and a /j/ is typically only inserted for <ü>/<ue>...

I always assumed it's a spelling pronounciation where the very odd ⟨chs⟩ is read as ⟨sch⟩, which is of course also common in German loans, although that might be influence from the common misspelling as *⟨fuschia⟩,

Mind you, the standard pronunciation of 'dachshund' in the dialect here at least is /ˈdɑksən/ [ˈd̥aksʲɘ̃(ː)n]...

Edit: According to Wikipedia it can end in -/hʊnt/, -/hʊnd/, -/ənt/ but I always found it notable that I never heard it pronounced with a stop in the second syllable here (because I'd want to pronounce it /ˈdɑkshʊnt/ [ˈd̥aksʲhʊ̃ʔt]).

[jal]

Magenta is one of the four colours of the CGA on the original PC. Fuchsia is the colour of the outer leaves of the fuchsia flower.


JAL

[alice]

Magenta is one of the four colours of the CGA on the original PC.

A strong contender for "worst palette ever".

[Travis B.]

Magenta is one of the four colours of the CGA on the original PC.

A strong contender for "worst palette ever".

The only colors other than black and white being cyan and magenta? What were they thinking?

[zompist]

Magenta is one of the four colours of the CGA on the original PC.

A strong contender for "worst palette ever".

The only colors other than black and white being cyan and magenta? What were they thinking?

That was only one of the modes of the CGA. Judging from the pictures on Wikipedia, all the palettes were awful. Though the black-white-cyan-magenta palette does have a retro charm:



BTW Wiki also says the "light magenta" was #FF55FF. (Only two magentas were provided, the other being #AA00AA.)

[Travis B.]

They would have done much better with the classic Amiga black-white-orange-blue (yes, the Amiga could do far more than this -- when it first appeared it had practically the best graphics of any machine within the budget of the average person -- but Commodore chose the black-white-orange-blue color scheme for earlier versions of Workbench because that is what apparently showed up best on cheap color TV's repurposed as computer monitors).

[Man in Space]

Is the construction go (and) + VERB ossifying into some kind of imminent future? It can have a connotation of immediacy in imperatives (“find him” vs. “go (and) find him”) in the first case.

[Raphael]

A strong contender for "worst palette ever".

The only colors other than black and white being cyan and magenta? What were they thinking?

That was only one of the modes of the CGA. Judging from the pictures on Wikipedia, all the palettes were awful. Though the black-white-cyan-magenta palette does have a retro charm:



BTW Wiki also says the "light magenta" was #FF55FF. (Only two magentas were provided, the other being #AA00AA.)

AAAAaaaaaaahhhhh my EEEEYEEEES!!!!!

[jal]

The only colors other than black and white being cyan and magenta? What were they thinking?

It's a purely technical decision. The CGA only has 16 KiB of memory, so with a resolution of 320x200, there's only room for 2 bits per pixel (so 2^2= 4 colours). The CGA itself only has 16 different colours, in the so-called RGBi colour space. That means 1 bit for red, green and blue, and an intensity bit making the colour brighter. Since the CGA doesn't have any colour mapping (it was made as cheap as possible), of the four bits of the colour space, two bits are hard-coded in the two bits in memory, and the two other bits are programmed in different registers. This means that when the register bits are set, this influence the entire picture, whereas the two bits in memory influence the colour of pixels. Now, if you have RGBi, you can pick any two bits to reside in memory, and the other two in registers. You can try all combinations, but the one that IBM choose was having red and green in memory, while blue and intensity are in registers. The cyan/magenta/white/black palette has blue set to on in the register*, the green/red/yellow/black palette has blue off. These two palettes do seem to make the most sense, having red and blue or blue and green in memory gives imho worse results.

*00 in memory is always the background colour, typically black, regardless of the blue and intensity bits.


JAL

[jal]

AAAAaaaaaaahhhhh my EEEEYEEEES!!!!!

It's a thing of beauty.



JAL

[zompist]

AAAAaaaaaaahhhhh my EEEEYEEEES!!!!!

It's a thing of beauty.



JAL

Yeah, these pictures are improved by showing them smaller, thus at higher resolution. The parrots picture looks better that way too.

Come to think of it, I can import it that way here. (Well, more that way. phpBB doesn't seem to do image scaling.)

[zompist]

*00 in memory is always the background colour, typically black, regardless of the blue and intensity bits.

I can't help expanding on this, since I find it interesting and many people don't realize it.

If you turn off your monitor, it's probably black, but not a deep black, since it's affected by the light in your room. That is the black the monitor will display: there is nothing the device can do to make it blacker.

Yet it does appear blacker in an actual image. That's because of your eyes, not the monitor: our eyes enhance contrast.

The effect is even more noticeable with older TVs, which were often gray when turned off.

The same effect enhances printed photographs: the printer can't get a whiter color than the paper itself, but your eyes make it look brighter next to other colors.

[Raphael]

This discussion reminds me of my main standard complaint about standard-issue desktop monitors: They're usually inclined towards the, from the user's perspective, "distant" side of the desk. And with an LCD monitor this, at least in my experience, has the effect that you can see the lower parts of whatever the screen is showing more or less the way you're theoretically supposed to see it, but in the higher parts, the darker parts of what you're seeing are a good deal darker than they'd "normally" be.

[Travis B.]

The only colors other than black and white being cyan and magenta? What were they thinking?

It's a purely technical decision. The CGA only has 16 KiB of memory, so with a resolution of 320x200, there's only room for 2 bits per pixel (so 2^2= 4 colours). The CGA itself only has 16 different colours, in the so-called RGBi colour space. That means 1 bit for red, green and blue, and an intensity bit making the colour brighter. Since the CGA doesn't have any colour mapping (it was made as cheap as possible), of the four bits of the colour space, two bits are hard-coded in the two bits in memory, and the two other bits are programmed in different registers. This means that when the register bits are set, this influence the entire picture, whereas the two bits in memory influence the colour of pixels. Now, if you have RGBi, you can pick any two bits to reside in memory, and the other two in registers. You can try all combinations, but the one that IBM choose was having red and green in memory, while blue and intensity are in registers. The cyan/magenta/white/black palette has blue set to on in the register*, the green/red/yellow/black palette has blue off. These two palettes do seem to make the most sense, having red and blue or blue and green in memory gives imho worse results.

*00 in memory is always the background colour, typically black, regardless of the blue and intensity bits.


JAL

Even with just two bits at their disposal they could have done better though -- as I mentioned, probably the most sensical 4-color scheme is black-white-orange-blue.

[jal]

Even with just two bits at their disposal they could have done better though -- as I mentioned, probably the most sensical 4-color scheme is black-white-orange-blue.

No, because like I said, the bits are fed directly into the RGBI monitor, there's no translation. Orange isn't even a colour a CGA monitor can display. It's limited to the 16 CGA colours of black/dark grey, dark/light blue, dark/light green, dark/light cyan, dark/light red, purple/magenta, brown/yellow*, light grey/white. There's a very interesting article here that goes into the CGA colours in deeper detail.

*The CGA monitor has special circuitry to half the intensity of the green signal before displaying it in case intensity is off, producing brown instead of dark yellow. Clone monitors that do not have this circuitry display dark yellow instead.


JAL

[Travis B.]

Even with just two bits at their disposal they could have done better though -- as I mentioned, probably the most sensical 4-color scheme is black-white-orange-blue.

No, because like I said, the bits are fed directly into the RGBI monitor, there's no translation. Orange isn't even a colour a CGA monitor can display. It's limited to the 16 CGA colours of black/dark grey, dark/light blue, dark/light green, dark/light cyan, dark/light red, purple/magenta, brown/yellow*, light grey/white. There's a very interesting article here that goes into the CGA colours in deeper detail.

*The CGA monitor has special circuitry to half the intensity of the green signal before displaying it in case intensity is off, producing brown instead of dark yellow. Clone monitors that do not have this circuitry display dark yellow instead.

I am fully aware of how CGA works -- but the matter is that a combination of a simple LUT combined with the special circuitry you talk about could be used to arrive at a black-white-orange-blue color scheme (orange could have been "dark yellow" instead of brown).