Monday is a light brownish, Tuesday black, Wednesday blue, Thursday ochre, Friday dark blue, Saturday white/silver, Sunday black.
January blue, February brownish, March is black and white, April green, May black, June yellow, July darker yellow, August dark green, September ochre, October blue, November brown, December black.
Thanks for the word synesthesia. It led me to Lexical-Gustatory. I always felt some words have flavors. Like sweet/spicy/savory etc so for me January sweet, February coffee like taste, March spicy, April custard, May light sweet, June sweet, July sweet, August/September/October/November/December- no specific taste. certain words have a very specific taste. For example word Christmas reminds me of Eclairs pastry(i don’t remember having eclairs on Christmas, so don’t know where that connection came from).
Now I know the name for this condition.
Like if it's Monday, do you see light brownish everywhere throughout the day? Or is it when you see the word "Monday" written out that the color comes to your mind? And/or if someone says the word "Monday"? If it's Monday and I tell you "want to grab lunch tomorrow", do you see black?
If I tell you that Monday in Japanese is pronounced "nichiyoubi", do you see light brownish when seeing "nichiyoubi" now?
Actually I lied that was Sunday, Monday is pronounced "getsuyoubi" - do you see light brownish when I write "getsuyoubi" now? If not for Japanese and you've learned a foreign language, how long until Monday in that language was light brownish?
Questions coming from legitimate curiosity! I really want to understand what you mean by "Monday is a light brownish". If someone asks me to come up with a color for say March, light green comes to my mind instantly - probably because of the association with spring (same with eg Christmas and red, or January and white) but I don't think I would say that "March is light green", so you're probably talking about something else.
> Like if it's Monday, do you see light brownish everywhere throughout the day?
No. If I think of Monday, for example when planning the week, there's a color association. It's also not very bright, but more "a feeling of the color". However, the color has been extremely consistent over the years. If I think of October, like "this person's birthday is in October", there's an association with blue. It's not like the word is colored. It's a mixture of the color and an abstract concept of a month. Hard to explain.
> Monday is pronounced "getsuyoubi" - do you see light brownish when I write "getsuyoubi" now?
If I think of the concept of Monday, the language doesn't matter. I'm native German and "Wednesday" and "Mittwoch" have the same color, even though the first letter is different and letters have their own colors. If I see "getsuyoubi", I focus mostly on the first letter "g" and that gives me a sense of a color. But the first letter and the month names or weekday names don't match necessarily.
> If someone asks me to come up with a color for say March, light green comes to my mind instantly - probably because of the association with spring
Maybe the way how that color comes to your mind instantly is comparable, but it's not as straight forward as "summer = bright, winter = dark". Interestingly, the 4 seasons don't have a very strong color association for me, months have a way stronger association. I don't even know where that color association comes from. Since the color palette seems to be limited and rather mute, I don't think it's because of a specific calendar or something I had as a child. I can only say that the colors in my mind are instant and stay stable over years.
Edit: Thinking about it: numbers don't have a strong association either, but ranges do have. Sometimes not very clearly. 0..10 nothing, 10..20 something blackish, 20..30 bright, like my color for March, 30..40 black or dark blue, 40..50 some kind of brownish orange, 50..60 more red, 60..70 white/grey, 70..80 blueish, 80..90 black, 90..100 grey etc.
Color palette is rather limited for all associations. Mostly black, white/silver, dark blue, dark green, yellowish-beige, orange-brownish with some slight variations.
I read about a study a while back in which researchers brought in a person who had synesthesia and asked him to identify the exact colors associated with 500 different random numbers drawn from a range of up to a million. (He did not know what numbers they were going to ask for). A year later, they brought him back, and he repeated the associations almost word for word.
I guess he still could have done it with eidetic memory or a PAO-style system, but it was still pretty impressive.
I'm pretty certain that mine don't come from a calendar, because the colors are a bit odd and Tuesday and Sunday both being black is quite unusual for any calendar.
Having read plenty of Dr. Oliver Sacks (e.g: Man Who Mistook Wife for Hat), there has almost-certainly been a savant ("idiot," or not) with this actual ability – and nobody knew how it worked (it just did), similarly to the documents Sacks-patient that immediately knew how many toothpicks were on any table (in the hundreds-to-thousands)... but could otherwise not talk.
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To explain this with a DCC metaphor:
NEW ACHIEVEMENT: All prime numbers now glow bright orange, including entire mobs (if they contain prime number of living members). This includes those cute little toes of yours, Carl. Don't question this, it just is.
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My favorite Sacks patients were the non-verbal aphasics laughing at Nixon's public TV appearances (because they were experts at telling if people were lying [by laughing at non-verbal cues]), otherwise disconnected from society.
Had them as a kid. A canvas in beige that spanned my whole view and was the entire world. There was an invisible opponent and we played a game. You filled half of the seemingly infinite canvas with black or a dark blue. Then the other person until no beige remained. I always lost.
They injected crypto donate buttons below, for example, tweets to make them look like twitter had a donate option. The sites were sent over https, it was mitm
> It is us who are a "special kind of paranoid." Justifiably so, I would contend.
It's not even that. The average HN user would gladly use it even if it was privacy-invading. Just like they use Gmail every day and have no qualms to upload gazillion private docs to OpenAI and Anthropic.
In 10 years? I predict that healthcare, education, legal services and transporation won't change in a meaningful way at all. People will go to a doctor, kids will attend school and aim to graduate, legal services will still be done by lawyers and decided in court. Transportation will still depend largely on what exists right now or is being built right now. There won't be self-driving cars in every city, only in a few, probably more in the US and China, fewer in Europe, probably close to zero in the rest of the world.
And how do you think will the post-scarcity affect the daily lives of most people? My prediction is that most people even in 30 years will still work for a wage, and probably still around 30-40 hours per week, because these gains of post-scarcity won't be distributed evenly. It will mostly make a few people very very rich.
> In 10 years? I predict that healthcare, education, legal services and transportation won't change in a meaningful way at all.
"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." -- Bill Gates, in The Road Ahead.
I’d guess that education will hardly be recognizable in 10 years. Bad news for number of teachers employed, but AI is going to result in a huge increase in the number of 15-year-olds with a PhD’s level of knowledge and abilities in their heads.
There are more statistical issues. I drew a person from 1984, living in Germany and recalculated their life several times. In almost all cases, their mother died while they were in their thirties, often both parents. This is simply far from reality.
Exactly. It’s a collective action problem — every car dropping off a kid incrementally endangers the kids walking to school, so if there is no enforcement whatsoever, we’d end up with everybody driving, and a situation worse than in US schools (because Swiss schools were largely not constructed with drop off zones in mind, and retrofitting them would be difficult with our land use patterns).
In my experience the kids form a peloton walking to school but there are adults walking with the youngest such groups. E.g. this website (never been to this town, just seems representative).
You can track bounce rate and ad spend in a GDPR-compliant way. What wouldn't work is retargeting individual users via tracking pixels without their consent.
January blue, February brownish, March is black and white, April green, May black, June yellow, July darker yellow, August dark green, September ochre, October blue, November brown, December black.
Thanks for coming to my synesthesia TED talk.
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