Wow. Color-coded terrorism alerts. I’m reminded of the big, colorful displays at the entrance of National Forests, showing the fire risk. Actually, not a bad idea, to be honest …
… but the execution sucks. The color progression is completely counter-intuitive. At least, if you’re thinking of the rainbow (which is the spectrum most folks think of) it is.
The problem is, they wanted to use the green-yellow-red model, which most folks know from traffic signals. Green = safe, Yellow = caution, Red = danger. But three stages was not enough. What to do, what to do?
Well, choosing Orange for the level between Yellow and Red makes sense. A nice blend.
But what to put between Yellow and Green. Yellow-green? What an unamerican color. Only folks with Crayola 64-packs would recognize that one.
So we’ll put in Blue. Never mind that Green is a combination of Blue and Yellow, and therefore it is a goofy choice. Better (or fitting) would have been Blue as the lowest level, Green as intermediate between Blue and Yellow (duh). This would have worked because, frankly, we’ll never see the Green (lowest) level in our lives. Blue would then be unused, some sort of azure dream to aspire toward. And, meanwhile, we could have gotten some Green time, and all would have been well, and art students and spectrologists and pedants like me would have been perfectly happy.
Dammit. Mix up your colors, and the terrorists win ….
Interestingly enough, the yellow light on signals was originally to signify “clear the intersection.” As in. “don’t proceed into the intersection now”, as opposed to “gun it and hope the red light camera is still turned off.”