☞ Milton's Rainbow

Colors, Language, and How We See the World

“Image depicting the Story of Noah, with the rainbow of the covenant.” (1608)

The history of how color is perceived and used in literature throughout time is a rich one, and one that I cannot do justice to fully.

However, over the years numerous curious theories have been proposed to account for such curiosities as the fact that Homer refers to the ocean in the Iliad as the “wine-dark sea” (could the Greeks not see blue? Or was shimmery quality simply something they prized more? Or something else entirely? See this article and this book for so much more).

That was why I was delighted to discover that John Milton in Paradise Lost describes the rainbow as having only three colors:

Over the Earth a Cloud, will therein set
His triple-colour'd Bow, whereon to look
And call to mind his Cov'nant: Day and Night,

This is from the end of book 11 which alludes twice to the three-colored rainbow.

One reason for the three colors is provided in an old version of Paradise Lost, which notes that it is likely due to the three primary colors from which all other colors are derived: red, blue, and yellow.

And this was all before Isaac Newton: I recall that the apparent reason we consider the rainbow to have seven colors is due to the numerological and mystical notions of Newton, who is responsible for many insights into optics and color.

Isaac Asimov had a very different take on the three-colored rainbow: rather than connecting it to the color palette, Asimov used it as evidence of Milton luckily anticipating the three colors in the retina for how all color vision operates. From Asimov’s Annotated Paradise Lost:

But perhaps it might be related to how people used to view rainbows? At least one ancient philosopher-poet, Xenophanes, considered the rainbow to consist of three colors: purple, red, and yellow (strangely, I discovered this tidbit in the paper “Semantic Meaning of Colours in John Milton’s Poem Paradise Lost,” which appears to fail to discuss the description of the rainbow in this epic poem).

To be honest, I don’t know what to make of all of this. Were the three colors Milton alludes to simply several “primary” colors from which all other combinations were made, as noted above? Or did contemporaries of Milton consider the rainbow to have three main colors? Was this related to Milton’s blindness? Was Milton making a clever allusion to something and I completely missed it? Or something else entirely? Regardless, I will continue to dwell on this triple-colored bow and the meaning of its arc across the sky. ■

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Another Font Project: Katznelson

Related to my typeface creation hobby, I am also working on a Hebrew typeface called Katznelson, after Berl Katznelson, and inspired by the idea of combining Krisper and ShmulikCLM:

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Lev Grossman has a wonderful exploration of the Arthurian enchantress Nimue:

The funny thing about Nimue is that precisely because she’s handled so loosely and carelessly that she ends up feeling more like a real person than most of the Arthurian pantheon.

This pairs well with my essay awhile back on “the messiness of reality and stories.”

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The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 Who would have won the Simon-Ehrlich bet over different decades, and what do long-term prices tell us about resource scarcity? “The fact that we produce far more materials than we did in the past, yet prices have barely changed, suggests that contrary to Ehrlich’s prediction, we’re not close to running out of these materials any time soon. That is what brings me closer to Simon’s worldview.”

🝳 Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes: “So ultimately, the glass box aesthetic became popular not only because modernist architects liked it, but because it made buildings cheaper to build, and because developers gradually realized that ornate, highly-detailed exteriors weren’t particularly compelling to renters or to their investors. And once that aesthetic was in place, risk aversion and cost considerations kept it in place.”

🝤 Overlooked No More: Karen Wynn Fonstad, Who Mapped Tolkien’s Middle-earth: ‘She was a novice cartographer who landed a dream assignment: to create an atlas of the setting of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”’

🜹 Wikipedia Searches Reveal Differing Styles of Curiosity: ‘Mapping explorers of Wikipedia rabbit holes revealed three different styles of human inquisitiveness: the “busybody,” the “hunter” and the “dancer”’

🝊 Evolution and The Knightian Blindspot of Machine Learning: “In dramatic contrast, biological evolution routinely produces agents that thrive within an open world, sometimes even to situations that are remarkably out-of-distribution (e.g. invasive species; or humans, who do undertake such zero-shot international driving). Interestingly, evolution achieves such robustness without explicit theory, formalisms, or mathematical gradients.”

🜸 Lynch and Mystery: John Higgs has a fascinating exploration of mystery (scroll down for that section).

🝖 Let’s Play Jewish Geography! “This is a huge world, with billions of people. It’s easy to feel like a grain of sand, insignificant. Then you play Jewish Geography and learn the incredible ways we are connected to each other. It’s soul-nourishing.”

🝊 A Brilliantly Detailed Map Of Medieval Trade Routes & Networks

🝳 Earth Detecting Earth: “If an extraterrestrial civilization existed with technology similar to ours, would they be able to detect Earth and evidence of humanity? If so, what signals would they detect, and from how far away?”

🜹 The Sims Turned Players Into Gods. And Farmers. And Vampires. And Landlords. “As the virtual dollhouse turns 25, the game designer Will Wright explains how The Sims was a sandbox for the American dream.”

🝊 Chimes at Midnight: “It’s been an idea for over three decades. How did the clock that will run for 10,000 years become a reality?” On the Clock of the Long Now.

Until next time.