Earth Hour

Earth Hour is tonight, between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. local time. It’s a chance to have a direct experience of energy conservation by turning out electric lights and turning off appliances.

This Week in Bank Failures

Bank loans for highly leveraged financing arrangements are larger than ever, and federal bank regulators are openly worried. In an uncharacteristically blunt statement accompanying a proposal for revised regulatory guidance on the subject, the Fed, OCC, and FDIC said that banks were often ignoring underwriting standards and taking excessive risks with leveraged credit. Among the risks that banks are not necessarily considering, the regulators said, is the risk of being left holding the bag if hedge funds or other investors backed out of a financial arrangement that a bank was underwriting -- exactly the kind of scenario that is more likely to occur during a financial crisis or other period of rapid market changes.

Financial distress, shady dealings, and corruption are not news at banks in Iran, but now the Auditor General there says top government officials are in on it, possibly including the president and his chief of staff. At issue are improper letters of credit and fabricated collateral documents. The president’s office has publicly warned that a thorough investigation or audit of the suspicious pattern of banking transactions could lead to a collapse of the country’s financial system. Iran’s finances have been under stress in recent years, mainly because of corrupt activities connected to the country’s security forces.

Four of Spain’s regional banks, which previously combined to form Banca Civica, have now been bought out by CaixaBank to form Spain’s largest bank. The combined bank has €342 billion in assets, deposits of €179 billion, and 14 million customers. The merger occurs after a change in laws designed to speed up bank mergers. The hope is that this will strengthen the banks as Spain enters a new recession. With unemployment already at 23 percent, the economy was expected to shrink 1 percent this year, and that was before this week’s austerity budget announcement. Banks in Spain are in financial distress because of an excess of lending, including €1.8 trillion of bank loans for an economy that is not really functioning on that scale, but officials said today they did not believe another bank bailout would be necessary.

Meanwhile, another Spanish bank, Santander, has begun closing duplicate branch locations in the United Kingdom. It will close 4 percent of its locations to consolidate operations after a series of acquisitions. Santander says there will not be any layoffs as a result of the branch closings.

In Washington, D.C., a former board member of DC Federal Credit Union is barred from working in banking after the NCUA determined that he disclosed confidential financial data. The prohibition order follows a four-month investigation. Leaks of financial data are not uncommon, but the NCUA took quick action in this case after initial reports made it appear that the credit union was bragging publicly using protected information.

Credit card processors are warning banks of a large-scale security flaw or breach, which the Secret Service and security analysts are looking into. Details are vague, but more than 10 million card accounts with transactions that took place in January and February are believed to be affected.

There was one bank failure tonight, Fidelity Bank, based in Dearborn, Michigan, with 15 locations in four counties of eastern Michigan and $750 million in deposits. Fidelity Bank had been tagged by regulators for some time. Its financial distress was blamed on its portfolio of commercial real estate loans in a time of declining values in commercial real estate. The failed bank is not to be confused with the many other banks elsewhere using the Fidelity name.

Deposits have been transferred to Huntington National Bank, which inches closer to its stated goal of becoming one of the three largest banks in Michigan.

The NCUA on Monday liquidated a church-affiliated credit union in Charlotte and Clarkton, North Carolina. Shepherd’s Federal Credit Union had 1,397 members, mostly members of Unity, the Way of Holiness Christian Church. The credit union had been operating for only two years. The NCUA sent checks to members for their insured deposits.

Red, Green, and Blue, part 5: Color As Emotion

I’ve explained why there are three main colors, why the colors are specifically green, blue, and red, and why, among these colors, green is the most important color, blue the second most important, and red third. But I am afraid none of this is much help in explaining one of the bigger questions about color: why colors are so directly linked to emotions.

We know from experience that green, blue, and red, and all the intermediate hues, trigger emotions in ways that white, gray, and black, and the neutral colors that are variations on gray, do not. Somehow the rods, the retina cells that detect specific colors, have a pathway to emotion that the cones, the retina cells that primarily detect lightness, darkness, shape, motion, texture, and shadow, do not share. Perhaps it is merely that with all the cones do already, triggering emotion too would be too much to ask. Or, there may be something about color that connects to the primal sense of place, and from there to everything that may be associated with a place.

Some of the mood of a color is a reflection of our physical experience of the color: reds, warm and quick; greens, strong and abundant; blues, cautious and expansive. But more than this, we may latch on to seemingly arbitrary colors with emotional intensity. There are the colors of sports teams and commercial brands and even the colors of the U.S. political maps. These maps have been in widespread use for only 12 years, but their red and blue have entered the political lexicon. The same may happen next with the dispute over the color of money: green or gold? In these cases, it seems that colors do not cause emotion so much as anchor it. The emotion comes first, and then we look around to see what colors are present and what they mean.

This connection between color and emotion may be a particular human quality. Dogs, for example, see colors but don’t seem to care much about them. It was barely 20 years ago that researchers determined that dogs see the same colors as humans. It took so long to find out because dogs do not easily attach any emotional meaning to the colors they see, particularly when the colors are just the color-coding typically used in color experiments. Humans, by contrast, almost automatically look for meaning in color-coding even when there is none.

Some of the emotional responses to colors can present a problem, but there are too many colors, and too many contexts in which they appear, for anyone to go through all the colors one by one and reprogram their responses. What may help, instead, is to look at way the problem color is connected to all other colors by connecting the color back to the original color, green. Every color is a variation on green, or a balance of green and other colors, or a contrast to green; those are the qualities of the color that originally gave us the ability to perceive that specific color. Fitting a color into this story can make the color seem less singular, and more like a branch selected from the tree of color.

Red, Green, and Blue, part 4: Green or White

In the traditions of physics and mysticism, the source of all color is white. Here, I am saying that the base color of human vision is green. I am not meaning to contradict physicists or mystics. White is indeed a color of special cosmic importance. It is only on Earth and in the human experience of light that green is the first color.

Pure white is a mathematical definition that is particularly useful in physics, describing energy in which all wavelengths are equally represented. Among many other uses, pure white is valuable as an approximate description of the light given off by the sun. To mystics, pure white is the encapsulation of all energy and all information, and by extension, a completely absence of bias, point of view, and falsehood.

Alas, pure white is something we as humans will never see, at least not with our eyes. To begin with, the approximately pure white light of the sun does not make it to the ground. Only a relatively narrow band of wavelengths can make the trip all the way through the atmosphere to sea level. Ultraviolet is mostly filtered out in the ozone layer, so those wavelengths are absent in the “pure white” sunlight we see. Infrared is filtered out all along the way, and is not so well represented by the time sunlight reaches the ground.

The “pure white” light of the sun, by the time it reaches us, is light that has been through a series of filters to take out these wavelengths here, and those wavelengths there. It is still pure enough as far as we are concerned when we look at it, but in a larger sense, it is light that has been colored by its past experiences.

Sunlight at ground level is the light of the visible light band. And that means it is not much more than the light we know as green.

Sunlight as we see it on Earth, or any other white light we see, is merely green balanced out with blue on one side and red on the other. This is the white we see when we seen sunlight on Earth, or a white flower, or the white background of a computer window.

When you look at a spectrum graph of pure white light, it shows as a smooth, level line. But humans see white not as a matter of smooth or even, but merely as a matter of balance. Anything can look like a perfect white, if its spectrum is strong in green and about equally strong in blue on the left and red on the right. There can be extreme spikes and gaps in the spectrum, and we can’t easily tell as long as we are relying on our eyes.

In the extreme case, the white of a color video display is literally three narrow bands of color, one red, one green, and one blue, together representing about one fifth of the wavelengths of visible light. We can’t readily tell and don’t particularly care that four fifths of the wavelengths we are able to see are missing from video white. If we see green balanced out with blue and red, we will call it white.

This is all I am saying when I say that white comes out of green. Taking a broader view, it is easy to see the way that green comes out of white. When we look at green plants, we are seeing the approximately pure white light of sunlight which has been filtered through Earth’s atmosphere, then selectively reflected by the plants. In its physical production, this green is indeed nothing more than a reduced version of pure white.

I believe we see green so well because green is so important on Earth. But that, of course, is only a theory. The derivation of green from white is a physical effect that can actually be measured and demonstrated.

Red, Green, and Blue, part 3: Look at Me

Green, along with red and blue, are the three main colors of human vision. Green, as I explained, is not an arbitrary color that humans just happen to be able to see, but is the most important color on Earth. It is the center of the wavelength band of ground-level sunlight, and the core of the human ability to see. Green is the color we see better than any other.

If green is not a random or accidental color, then red and blue are not accidents either. Blue, actually, comes next. If green is the color of the ground, and especially of plants on the ground which may be almost pure green, it helps to be able to see a second color that does not belong to the ground. Having a second color makes it easier to distinguish ground from non-ground. The color of non-ground is blue.

In physical terms, blue belongs to wavelengths that are near the short end of the visible light band. If you can see blue and green, then you can tell a short wavelength from a middling wavelength, and you can tell a fluid from a reflecting surface. Fluids tend to be transparent, but whenever they are thick enough or deep enough, they are blue. Water is blue. The sky is blue.

Fluids are blue for the same reason that infrared is not part of the visible light band. Longer wavelengths, especially infrared but also red and green, are more quickly absorbed as they travel through air or water. Shorter wavelengths, the wavelengths of blue, get farther, so they are the ones you see the most of.

In physical terms, the sky may be just as green as it is blue, but green is the base color, while blue is a contrasting or dissenting color, so it is the blue we notice. It is not so important to have an enhanced ability to see the sky itself — whether it is blue on a sunny day or black at night, it is the one feature of our physical environment we can’t miss. But when the sky is reflected in water, the blue of the sky makes the water that much more visible. And water is a subject of importance. We won’t survive for much more than a day without it.

The existence of blue also makes it possible to separate gray from green. When a color is strong in green, it could be either gray or green. It is green if it is not so strong in blue wavelengths. If it is equally strong in green and blue, then chances are, it is some kind of metal or stone (a metal oxide), and this comes across as gray or another neutral color.

But if the ability to pick out colors that fall toward the short end of the visible light band is useful, it may also be useful to pick out colors that fall toward the long end of the visible light band. That, as you may have guessed by now, is where red comes in. Red, like blue, is a dissenting or contrasting color, but in the opposite direction, the direction of the longer wavelengths.

If blue is the color that leads us to water, red is the color of food. It is true enough that some of the most important food is green. Some of the most interesting and energy-dense fruits and vegetables, though, are red, or they are orange and yellow, which are colors that mix red and green, but lean toward red.

This association of red with energy goes beyond food. Energy in its more concentrated and active forms tends to be more red. Humans, for example, may come in various colors and shades, but all of our skin colors are more red than green or blue. Fire may be seen as red and yellow. Anything that gets warm enough to glow gives off infrared first, and then, if it is hot enough, red. Blue, by contrast, is more often the color of a passive approach to energy, merely absorbing it, but not organizing it.

Having red in addition to blue and green makes it possible to sort out the neutral colors. They are not all gray. They may be tan, brown, beige, and so on, depending on the strength at the red end.

We can confirm the sequence of colors in human vision, with red last in the list, by looking at genetic statistics. Deficiencies in sensitivity to blue are rare, but difficulties with red when compared to green are startlingly common. Among people with healthy eyesight, only about 92 percent of males and 99.6 percent of females worldwide have a full ability to distinguish red, yellow, and green when viewing printed documents and color-coding under artificial light. The distinction between red and green is useful, but not as fundamental as the distinction between blue and green.

If green is the base color of human vision, the colors with the least green are the “look at me” colors that stand out the best. These are the deeper blues, violet, red, and black, and any color in between. Plants take on these colors for flowers and fruits when it is especially important to get the attention of animals.

Black has become so commonplace in everyday life that it is hard to think of black as an accent color, yet it is black’s tremendous visibility that makes people choose it for so many things. You are reading this text, most likely, in black (or very dark gray) on a white background. It is traditional to show text in black on white, and for good reason. Long before there were printing presses, scribes learned that black and white was the combination of colors that lent the greatest clarity and importance to the written word. Black clothing, in a similar way, is common not just because black is the easiest color to apply to fabric, but also because black is one of the boldest and most conspicuous colors for a person to wear — or it would be conspicuous, that is, if there were not so many other people also dressed in black. Black is not nearly so common in the natural world, and where it does occur, in a black flower or the sand of a black sand beach, it is hard to ignore.