Or, at least, contribute to my getting my doctoral research done.
Here’s the game:
Come up with sequences of colors that are easy to remember and hard to screw up. You have all the colors of the rainbow in jewel tones and pastels, along with: light brown, dark brown, black, and white. Oh, and you also have metallic silver, gold, and bronze.
Examples of good sequences:
-
Red, yellow, and green = the colors of traffic lights.
-
Gold, silver, and bronze = the medals in the Olympics
-
Black and tan, like the drink (it’s never called a “tan and black.”)
-
Pale peach and deep forest green = Peaches and Herb.
-
The colors of the rainbow, plus gold = the gold at the end of the rainbow.
Extra points for sequences of four or five colors. So far, the only four-color sequence I can think of is CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black), from color printers.
You get the idea. I know that Dopers are a creative bunch. Show me what you’ve got!
For those of you who are sticklers–yes, I know that black and white aren’t colors. I’m ignoring that for now. Feel free to ignore them, or not, as you’d like.
For those of you who haven’t hit the tl;dr point and want to know where this game comes from:
I do a lot of work with DNA in strip tubes–little sets of 8 tiny vials arranged in a row. The caps are also in a row and snap onto the vials. Both the strip tubes and the strip tube caps are symmetric, and all strip tubes and caps look alike.
For what I do, it’s really important to make sure that the right cap always goes on the right tube and that the cap always goes on in the right orientation. Most people just write letters or numbers on strip tubes and/or caps to keep that stuff straight, but that doesn’t work well for me. At some point, I always end up spacing out and screwing it up. However, I’ve found that coloring one end of a strip tube and its corresponding place on the cap works well. Even at my most tired and scatterbrained, I can always see in an instant that, say, the red end of the cap goes on the red end of the strip tube.
Using colors has the added advantage (for me, anyway) of keeping sets of strip tubes in their correct order, which is also pretty important. I use sets of colors that go in sequence for that.
I have a few sets of two colors, three colors, six colors, and seven colors. I can also do eight colors OK. It would be very helpful to have more ordered sets of colors, especially sets of four or five.
Explanation for my fellow bio geeks: I’m reconstructing the phylogeny of a genus, using multilocus data from traditional PCR and Sanger sequencing. Products of successful reactions are cleaned and sent off for sequencing. Contaminating samples pre- or post-PCR can be disastrous, since I can get incorrect data–and therefore an erroneous phylogeny–and never know it.
) but the seven colors I ended up with are
