What colour should a cheap mattress be?
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- Опубликовано: 12 авг 2023
- From 'Jet Lag: The Game', Sam Denby, Adam Chase and Ben Doyle face a question about a bland bit of bedding.
LATERAL is a weekly podcast about interesting questions and even more interesting answers, hosted by Tom Scott. For business enquiries, contestant appearances or question submissions, visit www.lateralcast.com
GUESTS:
Sam Denby: @Wendoverproductions, / wendoverpro
Adam Chase: / adamhchase
Ben Doyle: / thewheatgerm
HOST: Tom Scott.
QUESTION PRODUCER: David Bodycombe.
RECORDED AT: The Podcast Studios, Dublin.
EDITED BY: Julie Hassett.
GRAPHICS: Chris Hanel at Support Class. Assistant: Dillon Pentz.
MUSIC: Karl-Ola Kjellholm ('Private Detective'/'Agrumes', courtesy of epidemicsound.com).
FORMAT: Pad 26 Limited/Labyrinth Games Ltd.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: David Bodycombe and Tom Scott.
© Pad 26 Limited (www.pad26.com) / Labyrinth Games Ltd. 2023. 
Развлечения
Already people have made "Ben Doyle Burgundy" (#b8402e) and Dead Bees (#d3db35) which is astoundingly fast. Also the fact that D3DB35 not only spells out "DED BES" but is a desaturated, slightly darkened yellow is an incredible coincidence.
knowing what people online can be like, someone definitely played around with using E and 3 interchangeably until they came up with a good color. I dont expect that to be coincidence
@@cooltv2776 also choosing to spell dead as basically "ded" to get both red and green at about the same value (d_) is not coincidental.
@@lforlight I mean, that's just how Adam wanted it spelled so it sort of is coincidental.
Dedb33 is also a shade of yellow- funnily enough it got named the same day this video came out
@@thespankmyfrankI think they heard how he wanted it spelled; then messed around until it got a good "dead bee" yellow.
Especially considering it was done after this video came out.
Tom's ability to interpret hex codes into approximate colours is a wondrous skill.
Well I mean, that is pretty basic skill as long as you have a basic understanding of hexadecimal colors
It's something you pick up when doing a lot of digital design work.
Web devs be like: It’s my time to shine
@@dyenttrue. And to explain how to figure it out: a hexadecimal color code is a 6 digit code, with 16 possible digits: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F (this is in order as well). The first 2 digits are the red values, the middle 2 are green, and last 2 being blue. This would basically be the same as using the RGB color scheme, since 2 digits of hexadecimal gives you a possible outcome between 0 to 255(00 to FF). (At this point, it will get a bit more complicated) typically, you only need to look at the first value of each color to estimate it. For example, to put this to decimal, if you see 614, you can simply look at the first digit, 6 and estimate it to be 600. With this, you can figure out how much of each color there are; the lower the number, the less of that color, the higher the number, the more there is with that color. In the video’s example, “BA”, for red, can be looked at as B, which is a pretty high number. “DB”, for green, is higher than the red value, so there is a bit more green. Finally, “ED” for blue shows that there is even more blue than green, showing that the color will be more bluish, with some tint of green.
Same here. Web code etc for years
Converting a hexadecimal colour code into three colour channels is simple. Figuring out what those three channels look like together is incredibly impressive.
I imagine after bodging your way through hundreds of HTML colour attempts would eventually give you a little intuition in colour theory.
@@MrSonny6155 I've been doing it for a decade and only have a very rough understanding of it. I know that the closer the three channels are to each other, the grayer the output. Lower values are darker, higher are lighter. I also know certain combinations, such as green + blue = cyan (red inverted).
Being able to do what Tom did here requires more than just working with HTML and colour codes. You have to actually learn some colour theory which is something different entirely. I'm guessing Tom delved into it from his time working with websites.
@@sorrynotsorry8224 you already have all the info to get it yourself, you just have to think about it for a while and put it all together. You know that higher is lighter, closer numbers=greyish, and green+blue=cyan. So you should know that 00FFFF is cyan. so 00DBED is a bit darker cyan. you also know that D and E are close enough, that DADBED would be grey with just a little hint of blue/cyan. BADBED would be something between 00DBED and DADBED, but closer to the latter, so you get a greysish cyan.
@@sorrynotsorry8224 He's done some language videos back in the day surrounding color, so it might've stemmed from that!
@@Reversinator❤and also, I imagine, the colour library video
Please do more questions like this. This was more of a riddle rather than the usual "know this obscure history"
Tom brilliantly demonstrates how humble and grounded he is at 7:53 when he says “that is the exact opposite of cool, but I’ll take it.”
Having checked the website, I can confirm Tom is technically wrong about there being a color named after him, there are actually 21 colors named after him
Edit: 3 hours later and there’s 27 now
Edit 2: it’s now been a month, and it seems that some of the colors were removed, as there’s only 19 now
That still makes it so there is A color named after him so he isn't actually wrong.
Unless you interpret it as one and only one color named after him.
@@liningpan7601 I would agree with you, but the used the word "a" instead of "the". If they used the word "the" they would be refering to one and only one color.
OMG #d6482f is great
There's also a color named after Lateral! And for Ben, yes there's also 4 shades of Ben Doyles, most of them submitted then this video went up. Kinda like how you agreed on red.
Ah the never-forgotten nightmare of a client dropping a colour swatch on your desk and saying 'I want the background to be this colour' back in the day. My best friends were a 200dpi handheld scanner and an early colour picker to get me 95% of the way there. I feel your pain Tom.
Colour Decoding with Tom Scott! That is literally so cool that you could deduce the colour like that Tom
There was a round of questions on I'm Sorry, I haven't a Clue' called 'whats that bar code', that had a similar vibe.
As soon as Tom started to mention the hexadecimal values for colors, I instantly remembered having done similar things in plain text editors to change colors. To me, that just felt like a treat. Nice question! It took me longer to guess that, but it was satisfying to have the answer explained.😊
I've always loved that the team Tom gets to do captions color codes them. Makes it SO much easier to follow
The colour decoding is one of those things that sounds more impressive that it actually is. It’s exactly like Tom described and there’s nothing particularly difficult about it. So long as you can count up to 16 you can figure it out yourself.
To simplify the problem, let’s imagine that colours use decimal encoding and go from #000000 to #999999. If you have a colour such as #123456 you first split it into individual components: 12 for red, 34 for green and 56 for blue. To make calculations easier, round each number which produces 10, 30 and 60. And that gives you that the colour is around 10% red, 30% green and 60% blue.
In computer graphics, it’s more natural to use hexadecimal so colours actually go from #000000 to #FFFFFF. However, the same principle holds. For a colour such as #BADBED, split it into components: BA for red, DB for green and ED for blue. Now, round it to just the first character which gives you C0, E0, F0¹. The only missing piece now is that A=10, B=11, C=12, D=13, E=14 and F=15. With that we can see that the colour is approximately 11/16 red (so roughly 2/3), 14/16 green and 15/16 blue.
Because all the components are high, the colour is close to white so very pale and washed out. And because there’s more blue than green and more green than red, it’s cyan
¹ Dropping the second character from each pair also gives good enough results. Nonetheless, to round just remember that 8, 9 and letters are over half way so 18 rounds up to 20 and 17 rounds down to 10.
This explanation is excellent, very clear and thorough. I disagree with your implication it's easy and unimpressive. It still requires a fair amount of memorization and is a skill not many people would have reason to develop. Being able to pull it out of thin air impresses me!
Yes, I was actually surprised to be able to follow him and see his logic!
@@Tine_of_Nice_Dreams There's not much to memorize that most people wouldn't already know. Most people are already familiar with "RGB" to mean "Red, Green and Blue", and I feel like most people who have done much techy stuff are familiar with hexadecimal being from 0 to F, so you just equally distribute the 6 characters between those 3 colors in that order and get red as BA, green as DB and blue as ED
@@hopperelec It still involves a fair bit of color theory, to know which colors in which proportions would yield which color/shade -- and that requires a decent bit of memorization.
@@vedal1358 Normally yes, but tbf, this example really was quite easy.
With all three values being in the same range and at the end of the spectrum, there wasn't that much knowledge about colour theory required. It's just all three colours being very similarly light and the one with the highest value being slightly dominant.
It would be far more difficult if the saturations were more varied, although I'm sure Tom would've been able to figure it out as well.
I like that how Tom Scott was designing and building websites 20 years ago is basically how I maintain mine today - still standards-compliant and accessible, though!
The funny thing is, I have seen mattresses that color. My first thought was the cheap, thin, plasticy mattresses you find in a dorm room. In my experience, those are usually in the blue/green color family or a mauve-ish pink.
It hasn't been 30 minutes and someone already named a color after Ben Doyle...
Earlier today when listening to the podcast I went on the site and named one colour Sam Denby. Turns out there's a couple there already with that name....
On behalf of people who write html in notepad(++), Nicely done, Tom!
Also, it reminded me of some challenge for the Rosen score - you have to win a chess game where your first few moves were on specific files (columns) - that is "a" to "h".
So some of the challenges are "egg", "egg egg", "cabbage", "dead beef", "headache"
I mean... I started 21 years ago in Notepad, then soon moved to Notepad++ and stayed there for a very long time... but then I graduated college and got into the professional space, and my new colleagues introduced me to VSCode, and I will never go back to N++ 😂
4:00-4:42 - 42 seconds of utter brilliance
4:43 - "Nope"
#CEAAE5 (ChEApmAttrE55 with invalid letters and the extra 5 removed) was my guess before #BADBED was revealed. I had "lilac?" for the wrong one fairly quick and "light cyan?" for the right one slightly before Tom worked it out. Tom's description pointing out the extra blue is better though. Also I had to scribble thoughts on paper, but I didn't cheat. And yes, #CEAAE5 is actually a shade of lilac, so suppose I can give myself an unofficial bonus point or something.
I'm very impressed that Tom could do that, as a fine display from an elder of the internet, and I'm very glad the three guests were all suitably impressed as well.
Shit you just made me feel OLD! 😂
I remember using computers when graphics was still very high end, and _colour_ graphics was something you only did in very low resolution, unless you happened to have bought a slightly used CRAY-1 through the classified ad in the 1981 April issue.
The bad bed color guess is total wizardry
This is not exactly what Tom did, but I've been working with graphic design for years, and I just realized could do the colour conversion trick with RGB codes because that's what I've always used on projects! It's really crazy what your mind will hold on to. I have no idea what I had for dinner yesterday 😆
Hex codes are basically just RGB codes, yes
RGB codes are 0-255. Hexadecimal 0-F (16 digits) makes 0-255 when using a 2-digit number (FF=255)
That's a bad comparison. The conversion thing is an ability you have learned and repeatedly trained. The dinner thing is just an irrelevant memory.
I am very happy that even though I still write HTML and CSS with text, my IDE has a color picker and even shows a little square next to every hex code with the color
Tom translating the hexadecimal code and it being correct just caused the science communication equivalent of when they cut to Croydon Boxpark at a football tournament after England’s scored and everyone’s pints fly in the air. Truly exceptional stuff!
🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺
I kinda wanna see the extended cut of Adam just namin colours and see if it takes him longer to reach the answer than Tom took xD I dont think he wudve said a pale greenish blue or pale turquoise heh
I just love the jet lag crew's chaotic energy. Please never leave the entertainment industry - you're gold!
This was great! Love the Jet Lag Boys and Tom's snipe at the end was awesome ❤
The hexadecimal code thing gets used in programming too. I don't know if it still does this, but one C library that I used to use, when you allocated memory from the heap and then freed it, the debug library would fill the buffer with 0xDEADBEEF so that if your program blew up, you see that in a memory dump and know immediately that you were trying to access memory that had been freed. The was another 4-byte hexadecimal code that was common too but I don't remember what it was or where it happende.
Microsoft uses 0xBAADF00D, and Android uses 0xDEADD00D
I had one that filled it with 0x2BAD
I've also seen 0x7FBADFAD. The advantage of this is that when interpreted as a floating point number, it's NaN, so if you try to use it in a calculation, it blows up instead of giving you a subtly wrong number.
In the '90s writing HTML was the newest thing you could possibly do on a computer. I vividly remember standing with my highschool friends in the middle of a park, stoned, guessing what hex value the sky was.
I'd say it's something like #66a0ff. (I haven't checked what color that is, but it seems right-ish to me. It's also 2AM and I have fl.ux on, so I couldn't see blue even if I wanted to check 😝)
Tom, I think you missed your true calling as someone who decodes color codes or talks about color theory, because that was unironically one of the coolest things I've ever seen someone do. Thanks for the treat!
Tom, the council has just returned with the verdict and I'm sorry to say, I truly am. That was cool.
To me guessing the synonym thing was the clever bit, figuring out hexadecimal RGB is just routine, they are just numbers.
That was genuinely cool!
Hexadecimal numbers aren't that hard to calculate, even less so to estimate (especially for anyone with coding experience), but pulling on your old old/unused knowledge like that is still impressive. Also, The idea on how the name might relate to the HEX codes was really well done!
i'd love to hear more stories about Tom's early days in web design and coding
Stopped by while listening to the podcast, what Tom did for cheap mattress was amazing and awe inspiring.
Exciting to see Jet Lag on Lateral!
Not the first time either.
When Tom locked down #badbed, I was doing the color conversion right along with him. HTML 4 for life! 🤓
I also still use HTML 4.0
HTML 4.01 Transitional for me. Eventually updated to 4.01 Strict.
Who else memorized the w3 `/TR/html401` url?
@@cedarmyers6709 I think I am on the same version: but have not actually updated my website in years.
Okay, but like... HTML5 has so many nicer features! 😁 I can't imagine rooting for any old web dev standards... remember before fetch() existed in JS, and we had to use XMLHttpRequest, but IE didn't support that, so to be cross-browser with async requests you had to invoke ActiveX for the IE users? But every version of IE and Windows had access to different ActiveX plugins, so you needed to feature test like 5 different ones in nested try...catch blocks just to define XHR before ever using it?
...I'm so glad we're not in 2002 anymore 😂
Just checked the website - love that the top latest name is a "Ben Doyle Burgundy"
After we got #BADBED and Tom started trying to figure it out I paused it. I also figured it out in my head. Taking about 10 times as long as Tom did.
This podcast makes me so happy
That was super impressive, Tom!
Truly one of the coolest thing i've witnessed
OK now Tom has impressed me - that was a WOW !!!! moment
That answer was cooler than i expected
I like how the photo of guest Sam looks like it’s been put though a hdr filter 5 times
I love that people are so impressed by being able to work out color codes in your head, but it's just basic color theory and knowing hexadecimal numbers.
The actually more funny thing is that hospitals, shelters, jails, and asylums used to (might still?) deploy mattresses covered in light blue to green heavy vinyl for easier cleaning, so the color actually checks out (and those things really were (are?) horrible mattresses) [source: Years of volunteer work]
Tom said that, yup
As someone who's ever owned cheap mattresses I could've told you it was light blue
I think this Is going to be my favorite episode ever!!
Tom Scott is the smartest man in the world.
It's fairly easy to do in principle, but would have taken me about twice the time.
That’s taking Lateral to another level!
Exactly TOM SCOTT i can do that too for similar reasons .... as well as having worked in video using a slightly different system and having to convert the two
Tom, you are a genius, and incredibly entertaining!
See, because I knew "Purple" mattresses was a company, that it was a rival company throwing shade.
tom being able to work out colours from hex codes is so cool. id love to learn that but i bet it takes a lot of practice
I was napping just like you were Tom, I started in the 70s in DOS them loading BASIC compilers and working hex for don't design, colour, outline, full, line weights etc...I was watching that whole process on screen in this face!😂
Tom is hilariously humble about doing a literal superhuman feat.
I got close to Tom's answer by a different route. Cheap mattress makes me think institutional (hospitals, prisons, etc), and the colour that came to mind was a pale grey/blue.
#badbed is more blue than grey, but pretty close.
There are even 2 tom Scott's red's on that website :P
This was so much fun because I could look at the answer first and see them working it out from that perspective ^^
I've come across a few people online who have Hex Colour wizard skills and it is pretty funny.
Similarly, I can actually decode ASCII in my head (and used to be able to do QR codes)
oh yeah about losing qr codes, i used to be able to decode deflate streams in my head but i lost it
Okay, manually decoding QR codes in your head is extremely impressive!
Being a Notepad HTML person year ago, I just loved this, makes me feel Old now though! ❤
They said it in the clip and I'll say it too. That was truly like watching Sherlock figure something out.
Literally One of the coolest things anyone's ever done.
I LOVE how Tom's brain works! The storage of redundant information, to be recalled years later when in becomes relevant for something like this = 👌
#dedbee and #deadbe are both viable colors. They’re a faded pink and a slight lavender tint, respectively.
Damn, Tom is truly built different.
A great part of this video that many wont see is that the closed captions change colors as they speak, rewatch with CCs on
BRO I was listening to this and oh my god the way Tom nailed the hexadecimal. That's some INSANE skill. I'm not sure how useful it is but it's INSANE.
Goated Lateral moment right here.
Damn that's cool and Tom's coding knowledge is very impressive. Love it.
awesome skill there, tom!
Great work Tom. Geek King!
The question sent in for Tom specifically🙂
THIS IS THE KIND OF NICHE THING I LOVE TO SEE!!!
Tom, you're cool. Take ALL the compliments, because that was IMPRESSIVE!!!
THE PODCAST STUDIOS!! lovely place
I can figure out hex codes if i really want to, but certainly not that fast. I need pen and paper or if i have to do it in my head it'll take at least a good few minutes. Tom is 100% correct that it's a fundamentally useless skill and i struggle to think of a single instance outside of this one segment of this one podcast where it's not faster and easier for me to just use a color picker.
He had pen and paper. He wrote it down first.
No Tom that was exactly the definition of cool! For this crowd. 😊
Tom Scott is international treasure
There is a shop not that far from me that sells "Mattresses of all qualities." I really want to test just how far down the quality curve they're prepared to go.
hey it's my question
Thanks for sending it in! People have loved it, as did we. (Tom namechecks you in the full audio podcast, and you're in the podcast show notes too.)
hi fullest
That was DEFINATELY cool Tom, nerd cool but still cool. I was able to work out the same way due to MechWarrior 5 and customizing the colours of my mechs. I ended up internalizing the colour codes a bit.
The only thing cooler than programmers who can translate hexadecimal colours in their head are programmers that can convert binary to decimal to hex in their head
yea that's far more impressive imo than just having a general sense of relative number values and the RGB color wheel.
binary hex is dead easy, because each hex digit is exactly four bits, you can pretty much say that hex is just a compact way of writing binary (which, combined with modern computers using 8-bit bytes, which is a multiple of four, is exactly why hex sees such extensive use in computing).
There are 10 types of people who can do that, those who can and those who can't!
Decimal is more difficult, you really gotta do some math in your head. But hex to binary is easy.
You only need to memorize 16 combinations. The challenge is learning 2-8. Some numbers are very memorable, like 3 (0011), 6 (0110), and everything above 8 really. It's much easier than it seems, just requires a bit of practice. Can be learned in a single day.
0 = 0000
1 = 0001
2 = 0010
3 = 0011
4 = 0100
5 = 0101
6 = 0110
7 = 0111
8 = 1000 (halfway point, starts repeating the sequence for the last 3 digits)
9 = 1001
A = 1010
B = 1011
C = 1100
D = 1101
E = 1110
F = 1111
@@Raphael11001 its all powers of 2, no need to memorise. (ok, it will take more brain-cpu and less brain-nvram. Memorisation is probably more efficient and quick then calculating on the fly. But who said I’m efficient or quick?). Lsb to msb 1,2,4,8 etc, or 2 to the power of 0,1,2,3 etc.
That is... incredible. Like, in retrospect,, OBVIOUSLY there's a logic to hexadecimal color codes, but Igenuinely never thought about it. And to just whip out an accurate approximation like that in like 10 seconds is just, holy cow.
7:25 This brings back memories for me... When I started (also about 25 years ago) I would use Notepad or Wordpad to write HTML, and view the code in File Explorer or Windows Explorer. I made one Web Site formatted for 640x480 and restricted myself to the 16 colour palette. I referred to it as my PC16 site, and was confident in the knowledge that any person, anywhere, on the most basic computer, could view the Web Site with no complications.
That was some serious deep geek wizardry from Tom!
Somehow all questions from Sam are just the GOATs
Either these guys are easily impressed or I’m too much of a geek. Possibly both.
I think both. As a web dev for 21+ years myself, the decoding also seemed obvious once they got to #badbed, but from the comments here it seems the way in which hex code represent colors is not common knowledge for those who haven't worked with them for years.
what's really interesting is that the particular shade of blue from #badbed very closely matches the perceptual average of the denim blue paisley pattern on the fabric that many cheap mattresses use
6:08 Tom's got a lot of nerds like me seriously impressed with that haha, that was awesome!
No way I just watched BBC Sherlock the other week, and the same thing popped into my head 😭
Every single HTML coding/photoshopping millennial did the same trick with colours at the end pretty quickly, but getting from "pun" to "bad bed" so quickly was the real Tom Scott miracle imho 😂
I said "light blue" the moment the question was asked, but for a completely different reason. I had a crappy mattress as a kid, from some no-name brand and *it was blue* 😅
Having now had it explained to me . . . this is a two watch Lateral . . . maybe three : )
I needed to see this video right now. Wow. Tom's mind palace.
I might have got there by entirely the wrong route, thinking of PU foam that's usually pastel yellow green or blue
Also just as a good "huh!" check, yes, all 3 other members of the Technical Difficulties also have named colors.
Bet someone in the team saw this question and thought “I’m sure that Tom can figure out the colour by the hex code”.
Also. Can we just appreciate how incredibly knowledgeable the Jet Lag Team are.
They're my favorite guests
It's so funny that people are amazed web developers (or probably more commonly, anybody working on UI) can translate hex or RGB to a color impression. It's not like we know all the values. It's literally that we know there's red, green, blue and then what the gradient looks like when you go from one color to the other.
Of course it's Tom Scott that wins the award of "thing that's not remotely cool seems very cool for a moment"
That's cool, till now I hd never bother finding out how the HEX code related to the colour, but this makes sense.
Toms strange talent is delightful! That was so cool.
As an artist, Tom's skill to not only remember where the letter/number combos land but then to mentally blend them together on a paint palette to get that color in his mind's eye is *ABSOLUTELY IMPRESSIVE AND COOL AF* and I have gone to look at that color & it absolutely is the color of the Serta children's special of the 1980s which came in a pale dusty blue and a pale dusty pink both in a damask print that was UGLY! I know... because I had one of each color for most of my childhood. (Daybed baby!)
das ist einfach genial :D