I'm pretty sure this only affects protan(omaly/opia). The green and red cones along with the rods all play a roll in determining the brightness of any colour. When the red cone is shifted towards green, then all wavelengths to the right of that will be darkened. I thought tritanopia would experience this too since the blue cone is also an edge-of-the-rainbow cone, but apparently the blue cone plays a very small roll in detecting brightness. Therefore, a bright blue colour would appear to to someone with tritanopia as yellowish white, since it is nearly equally detected by the green & red cones.
I really enjoyed Ursula Le Guin's scifi for those reasons. The technology in Le Guin's stories basically doesn't matter; her stories revolve around relationships and culture. As an example, a story that focuses on a 2 planet system that has a slavery based society. On one planet, the slaves rebel. But even after their successful rebellion, the freed slaves fail to acknowledge that their women are essentially still slaves since they lack all basic human rights. Another story is about a planet/moon system where a few hundred years prior an anarchist culture secedes from the planets staunchly capitalistic culture, and then moves to the moon. The story follows a physicist/mathematicians life in an anarchist society. Another story deals with the toll that war has on people with telepathy. They have empathy for their enemies, but none the less they are in a situation in which they must kill those they have a telepathic connection with.
All the plot lines I talk about are in the collection of books belonging to the "Hainish cycle" series. Every book in the series is very good.
I think a civilization could make a pretty good go at things without fossil fuels. The 2 big use cases for fossil fuel are the temperature of the heat itself (for things like smelting), but also how simple it is to make a steam engine with energy dense fuels (cars/trains/planes/electricity). Temperature wise, a lot of metals can be smelted with clever oven design using wood/charcoal (though another planet wont have exactly wood, obviously). Energy wise, wind mills and water wheels have been in use for thousands of years, and after the discovery of electricity, its reasonably simple to turn that mechanical energy into electricity (using wood-smelted metals).
Its a quick intro to computability theory. There is a progression of more and more complicated 'machines' on the way from Finite Automata towards Turing Machines. This article goes over what types of things each machine can and can't solve. Its more of a theoretical topic than a practical one (and why you'll occasionally see silly things like someone implementing a turing machine in powerpoint to show that powerpoint could compute anything)
Doesn't apply to bureau, but I'm 100% there with you for the word beautiful. I simply can't hear the word in my heard without hearing Jim Carrey spell it out.
From what I understand, a tetrachromat has (and expresses) the normal green cone, normal red cone, normal blue cone, as well as the cone associated with either protanomaly or deuteranomaly. With that in mind, it seems reasonable that there could exist a pentachromat that expresses all of these cones.
