Colorful Transportation

My apologies for a short newsletter. I've spent the past few weeks engrossed in some original research into the 17th century origins of the color wheel and, completely unrelated, the 15th century Italian woad trade. While neither is ready for a newsletter, I wanted to share something else I've been thinking a lot about.

A perpetual curiosity of mine is how and why we name things like transportation lines. There are often systems that the casual tourist may name not realize, like bus lines with a certain prefix traveling north-south, while a different prefix travels east-west. Or one format for intracity usage and another for intercity travel.

Or there may be mixed taxonomies, like in the NYC subway system, where trains have both associated colors and letters or numbers, and even shapes, with the colors indicating the general route and the letters frequently identifying if it is an express or local line.

Red Line, Green Line

I've been thinking about this recently because of the bus route between Pesaro and Urbino, operated by Adriabus. There are two busses, with color names: Linea Verde (the Green Line) and Linea Rossa (the Red Line).

There is something very funny about these, namely, the green line travels from Pesaro to Urbino, and the red line travels from Urbino to Pesaro. The only indication about the specific bus are the initials LV or LR.

There is no special green or red symbol to signify the specific bus, nor is there any real need to differentiate them. They travel in two different directions.

I am completely flummoxed as to the utility in having two different colors, one from the trip from A -> B, and a second for the trip from B -> A.

Transportation Games

I enjoy sudoku, which is a game in which every row, column, and 3x3 matrix needs to include all the numbers from 1-9. For a while, I was playing every day whilst riding the bus to the library in London.

One day, I wondered about the mathematical construction of each game board, because I was interested in converting the game to nine colors (as opposed to 9 numbers), and seeing if it became easier or more difficult for people to identify patterns.

In other words, can people complete sudoku boards more quickly if they were colors? I would imagine that if they were 9 random letters or symbols, the game would be more difficult. Even if one had to count the pips (like on a domino or die), I'm assuming that after a while people would simply be recognizing the patterns and not be counting each number or considering the number.

So you can imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered a new game last week, Hue9: Color Sudoku, created by an independent Spanish game designer, David Cardena Formoso, for iOS, which allows you to play Sudoku using colors. Over my initial casual analysis of my own simple gameplay, I seem to be able to solve puzzles slightly faster with colors than with numbers. Please note that I would not enjoy to have to try to name the colors I'm playing with and I am, admittedly, a sample size of 1.

This is not a paid advertisement, I personally paid for a one-time subscription, and would encourage anyone interested in the game in doing the same.

With Hue9, it is interesting to note how even choosing an alternative spectrum of colors may affect your speed of solving, at least at the beginning. It may make take a bit of time to familiarize oneself with each spectrum.

Train Maps

There is something quite nice about looking at the various train maps from different cities (NYC Subway, Berlin S-Bahn, London Tube, Paris Metro, and Chicago El, Madrid Metro.)

I could probably write several thousand words about each of these, with tales of trips and more, but I'm bringing these to remind the reader how much color is helpful for humans parsing complex information.

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