The strange animal called perception

Yesterday this obscure website had earned its first comment, from none other than my friend Angela. By obscure I meant only a few people I personally know would care to click on it. But despite this the website console registered 631 malicious attempt to hijack this website. Why would you want to hack a website this obscure? Just why?

But I digress.

In the comment she said, “Hahaha possibly brilliantly hued pee from overdoese of vit C?”

From the comment you might have surmised that she is one disgusting specimen of human being. However in this instance you would not be far off the mark. Her favourite joke that she likes to retell is “how many times you can wear an underwear without changing it”. The answer is 6 if I recall correctly.

But to be fair, I started that. However if you can see past the tinge of her bodily fluid themed humour she brought up an interesting point, the colour orange is associated with vitamin C.

Being a nerd I am compelled to mention that vitamin C (ascorbic acid)  is actually white in solid form, and colourless in solution. But for various reasons, we are accustomed that vitamin C products are supposed to be orange or yellow. There are vitamin C products these days that are not orange or yellow but the masses would wonder if there are much vitamin C in them. To buff up their street cred manufacturers have to include the obligatory citrus flavour and colouring.

Correction: She was right, vitamin C causes yellow pee. I have to make retraction this early in this blog, signs are not promising.

But such is life, people have learned to erroneously associate unrelated variables in order to make sense of a world that is difficult to comprehend. Sometimes it is the mundane like the colour of your drink, other times it is a lot of more serious like the colour of your skin.

If you are perceptive, you would have anticipated that I am bringing this irreverent discourse to a more sombre note. On this,  I could perhaps write a book with what I have to say. But I believe I’ve already made my point. So I am throwing you yet another curve ball, I’m going back to Angela’s favourite theme.

As we grow older, our taste grows more sophisticated. No longer I am content to cleaning the toilet bowl once every 2 weeks and have a reasonably clean toilet. Now I aspire to clean the toilet just once a month and hope to have an even cleaner toilet. Thus I started experimenting with this thing that you dump in the cistern that slowly dissolves in water, so that the flush water kills germ. This allows toilet bowl to remain clean longer.

Where am I going with this? To indicate this thing isn’t used up, this thing has a dye that turns the flush water coloured. What I find interesting is the choice of dye colour, which is blue. Now why do we want the puddle of water inside the toilet bowl blue? For obvious reason, the choice of dye cannot be the various hues of yellow, or brown. It’s all about perception here. Even black or gray has the reputation of being unclean. Shades of red? Still very confusing. These are unacceptable even though they really have nothing to do with cleanliness.

That doesn’t leave a whole lot of other options, specifically blue and green. Both colour aren’t particularly being associated with anything unclean. Between the two, blue is the superior choice. Remember the science or art lessons from your school days? Blue + yellow = green. So it still looks clean, even though it is not. Compared to green, blue can take a lot more yellow before it turns yellow. Yellow is the enemy here.

Nowadays, every time I go to the bathroom I get the warm and fuzzy feeling knowing that all those years and money spent in overseas education are not in vain. I could not otherwise understood the phenomenon as thoroughly as I am now. It is the transmittance and adsorption of electromagnetic waves. A whole branch of analytical techniques called spectroscopy are developed with this phenomenon and are widely used in laboratory as a means of qualitative and quantitative analysis. Yes I am starting to bore you now, I was just trying to correct the perception of what you might have on my educational background.

But to answer the question of my sole commentator, because of this thing that I used, I have no idea to the answer to the question.

This blog just started, two out of three posts so far has to do with bodily fluids, this will definitely give the wrong perception of this blog and me. Or perhaps not.