In case anyone wonders what Aristotle's color system was, I found this great page that explores historical ways of modeling and thinking about color:

http://www.huevaluechroma.com/071.php

This is an excellent resource. Thank you. Explains very clearly the pre-history of color systems.

Two other refs....

Kuehni, Rolf G., and Andreas Schwarz. Color ordered: a survey of color systems from antiquity to the present. Oxford University Press, 2008.

And Handprint.com

The guy that runs handprint probably knows more about color than any man alive.

Wow, Handprint.com is incredible.

I needed to spend some time clicking around to figure out what was where, but then just spent half an hour learning about which hue is actually the warmest (there is no universally accepted answer, but a common theme is scarlet).

Maybe it's just that I've subconsciously absorbed the scientific method, but I find it unbelievable that Aristotle had a theory based on a trivially false model where colors are all formed by mixing black and white. In Ramon y Cajal's Advice for a Young Investigator, he claims that Bacon's scientific method was just descriptive of an inherent human process. That felt true to me at the time. Did we really just make guesses and call them truth until the 1600s?

On the other hand, white light does contain all of the visible spectrums. Maybe Aristotle had seen prismatic diffraction and considered it beyond his powers.

>Did we really just make guesses and call them truth until the 1600s?

It does seem that way! There may be a Dunning-Krueger selection bias at work here - people who admitted ignorance were not remembered, while people who confidently asserted things were treated as authorities. Religious institution surely bears some blame in Western culture - notions such as "skepticism" and "seeing for yourself" were culturally suppressed for nearly 2000 years.

It seems this book's colours were hand-painted, but I might as well mention two famous mid-C19 examples of colour printing, when (IIRC; I am not an expert) high-quality colour printing was still very expensive and rare:

* the "Sobieski Stewarts'" dodgy Vestiarium Scoticum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestiarium_Scoticum

> It was from Eilean Aigas, in 1842, that the brothers at last published their famous manuscript, Vestiarium Scoticum . It appeared in a sumptuous edition limited to fifty copies. The series of coloured illustrations of tartans was the first ever to be published and was a triumph over technical difficulties. These illustrations were executed by a new process of ‘machine printing’ and, in the words of a scholar writing fifty years later, ‘for beauty of execution and exactness of detail have not been excelled by any method of colour-printing subsequently invented’.

> Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland"

* Oliver Byrne's colour edition of the first six books of Euclid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Byrne_(mathematician)#B...

And why not throw in Shadows From the Walls of Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_from_the_Walls_of_Deat... with its samples of intensely green arsenical wallpaper?

Coloritto or the Harmony of Painting (1720) is interesting as well: https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/colorittoharmon0...

Amazing how much the Dutch language has changed. I'm a native speaker and that text is very hard to decipher for me. The hand writing is beautiful but very hard to pick apart to begin with. And that is made a lot harder by the many spelling, vocabulary, and grammar changes to the language. I tried to read a few sentences but couldn't make much sense of it. I suspect I'd still have a hard time even if somebody typed the text with a more legible font. I guess, a modern translation with original drawings would actually be an interesting thing to read for a lot of historians and designers.

That's an interesting point to ponder. In France, there are constant calls to spelling reform and such. Of course, spelling and grammar as they are are incredibly annoying and backwards, but anyone with good command of them can read any text as far back as Rabelais (writing around 1510), and even Middle-Age French such as Villehardouin (writing before 1200) is perfectly readable with some effort (I've done it, without having more than 2 courses in Ancient French, back in the 80s -- you at least need to know that there are declensions, with 2 cases, and how they work -- OK, knowing some Latin definitely helps too :) ), it's getting really difficult IMO only with _Les quatre fils Aymon_ ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Sons_of_Aymon ) and prior works (roughly before 1100).

If curious, there was at least one previous submission about this:

A colourful book (1692) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7702850 - May 2014 (8 comments)

Recently read: "Secret Lives Of Colour" by Kassia St Clair which was very interesting from a historical perspective. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the old chemical engineering (vats of vinegar, urine, lead, etc).

Very cool. I was grumbling about the absence of a straightforward .PDF download, but there actually is one, if you click on the "Impression ou telechargement du fichieres" (sp?) button at the bottom of the online viewer window.

It's relatively large (336 MB), though, and much of the content is text that looks like it was handwritten in Elvish. The image of the title page shown at the openculture.com link has been color-corrected nicely, so the actual document looks significantly duller in comparison.

Several years ago I copied the javascript function reproduced below from a HN comment and turned it into a shortcut in my browser called "Remove floaters":

javascript: (function () {var i,elements=document.querySelectorAll('body *'); for (i=0;i<elements.length;i++) {if (getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position==='fixed' || getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position==='sticky') {elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]);}}})();

Some sites get upset but most don't. I'm very grateful to the original programmer who came up with this code.

I only tested that on this site, but I've been looking for something like this for a while. I thought there would be plenty of extensions to do this automatically, but I've never found one. "Popups", "overlays", now "floaters" is a new term to me, is there a more conventional name for the whole class of "junk that pops up when you try to read a website"?

Google the phrase kill sticky for various snippets of code that can be placed on your bookmark toolbar.

In practice, you end up needing at least two or three different buttons to handle different sites. The one I usually use is

   javascript:(function(){(function()      
   {var%20i,elements=document.querySelectorAll('body%20*');
   for(i=0;i<elements.length;  
   i++){var%20p=getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position;
   if(p==='fixed'||p==='sticky'||p==='-webkit-sticky')   
   {elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]);}}})
   ()})()

I picked "floaters" because that is one of many en_GB slang terms for a piece of excrement floating in a toilet bowl. cf turd etc.

I will now rename my shortcut to "dump floaters". Dump is en_GB for the act of delivering floaters and also a slang term for "get rid of". So I unleash a bit of JS with a name that simultaneously means to create or remove a lump of shit, depending on how you decipher it.

That seems quite appropriate.

Ha! I appreciate the update. I'll rename mine accordingly.

When I clicked I thought this said 1962.