Archive for September 24th, 2004

Sloppy journalism

Friday, September 24th, 2004

OK, the Mirror toady tickled another pet-hate which allowed me to do a bit of ‘moan-therapy’:

To: r.sayid -at- mirror.co.uk
From: me

Interestingly your article on parents helping kids with their homework
itself contained an error in the answer to one of your questions. You
asked 'What are the primary colours?' and gave the answer 'Red, Blue and
Yellow'. This is actually incorrect. The correct answer is 'Red, Green
and Blue'. This can be verified by looking closely at your computer
monitor or TV screen and noticing that all the colours are actually made
up of red, blue and /green/ dots. Similarly when selecting colours in a
computer programme you have red, green and blue sliders.

For more information see [1]. Quoting:

  A primary colour is a colour that cannot be created by mixing other
  colours in the gamut of a given colour space. Primary colours may
  themselves be mixed to produce most of the colours in a given colour
  space.  Traditionally, the colours red, yellow, and blue are considered
  to be primary pigments. This is simply incorrect, however.

There do exist the 'secondary' or 'subtractive primary' colours which are
cyan, magenta and yellow which are often (again, incorrectly) stated to
be red, blue and yellow when talking about pigments. Indeed your own
paper is printed using the three colours cyan, magenta and yellow so how
can it claim that the primary colours are a totally different set?

Perhaps Mirror journalists shouldn't help their readers with their
homework either. :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_color

--
Rich Wareham
Signal Processing Laboratory
Univsersity of Cambridge Engineering Department