Pigment Palaver: YInMn Blue

Way back in the first post in this series, I mentioned I was inspired to start it by the discovery of YInMn Blue, or Oregon Blue. It actually wasn't commercially available yet back in 2019, but it's finally been cleared for consumer use and went on sale just recently. This site is selling it as part of the Matisse line of acrylics by Australian company Derivan, which incidentally is the brand I've gotten most of my paint from. (Though Derivan's own website, oddly, isn't listing it yet.) YInMn Blue is notable as the first new inorganic blue pigment discovered in quite some time (I've seen conflicting reports on what the most recent previous inorganic blue pigment—Prussian Blue or Manganese Blue—is, but it seems like it's been at least a hundred years since the last one was discovered.)

You might notice, if you followed the link, that this is a very expensive paint. It's currently going for $179.40 for a 40 ml tube, or $4.49/ml. Given that the company is located in Maine, I'm assuming that's in US dollars, so at the time of writing that'd be $5.87/ml AUD. Normally the Matisse Structure Formula line comes in 75 ml tubes in seven tiers of pricing ranging from $10.75 to $38.95, so that's $0.14 to $0.52 per milliliter. Yes, this paint is more than ten times more expensive than standard paint pricing.

To understand why, we have to turn to the name. The name YInMn Blue comes from the chemical formula of the pigment in this paint: yttrium-indium-manganese oxide. (It's also called Oregon Blue, since it was discovered at Oregon State University in 2009.) From what I've read, indium is the main factor in the cost, being a rather rare element (comparable to silver), though the production of the pigment might also be a factor, as it requires heating the oxides of the three elements together at about 1,200 °C (2,200 °F). (Manganese is quite common, and while yttrium is of perhaps middling rarity it's still more common than indium.)

While the prohibitive cost of YInMn Blue means I regrettably won't be able to get my hands on any to try it out any time soon, it's interesting to reflect on the historic costs of painting. While even the costs I noted above will add up over time, we're currently living in the best time ever for pigment costs. Modern chemistry has rendered pigment-making easier and cheaper than ever before in history. As an example, the pigment ultramarine used to be made of crushed-up lapis-lazuli, mined in Afghanistan and imported to Europe. Because of the labor involved, it literally cost more than its weight in gold in the Middle Ages. (Which is why it gets used so sparingly in famous Renaissance paintings!) The gold price listed for today in AUD is $77.77 per gram; multiply by gold's density of 19.3 g/ml to get a cost of $1,500.96/ml. By that metric, YInMn Blue paint is still 256 times less expensive than gold by volume. Unfortunately I don't know the density of YInMn Blue pigment so I can't compare them by weight (which would make the most sense), so comparing by volume, which is how paint is sold, will have to do.

Oh, and the ultramarine that used to be so expensive? We can now produce the relevant molecule synthetically, and Derivan has it listed as a Series 2 (i.e., second-cheapest) paint at $12.95 a tube, or $0.17/ml. That's almost 8830 times cheaper than gold, showing just how much we artists have to be thankful about in this day and age. (I quite like ultramarine and have used it in several paintings, so I'll probably do a post on it at some point.) Anyway, that's enough for now, and maybe in a few years the price for YInMn Blue will come down too (due to improvements in the manufacturing process or economies of scale) and I'll be able to actually try some. Who knows? A hui hou!

Supertasters

I recently came across the page on supertasters on Wikipedia while browsing…and I think I might be one.

A supertaster, per the article, is “a person who experiences the sense of taste with far greater intensity than average.” This refers to both pleasant and unpleasant tastes, and it was while reading the list of foods that supertasters generally dislike that I went from reading with mild interest to sitting up and taking notice. The evidence is, admittedly, circumstantial, but let's go down the list:

• “Certain alcoholic beverages (gins, tequilas, and hoppy beers)”
• Well, I've never actually had one to confirm, because I dislike the smell of most alcoholic beverages—especially beer.
• “Brassica oleracea cultivars (become very sulfurous, especially if overcooked): Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kale”
• I'm definitely not fond of either Brussels sprouts or kale. Cabbage I like raw, in a salad, but reading this reminded me that I don't like sauerkraut despite generally loving sour tastes. So, kind of?
• “Coffee”
• Can't stand it. When I first started my PhD, back when we had a coffee machine in the lunch room, I decided to finally give it a go and see if I could figure out what people saw in it. I stuck it out for a few months, before finally giving up because I just could not enjoy the vile taste (and that's despite dousing it with sugar).
• “Grapefruit juice”
• This one I can't really remember trying, but going off my memory of the scent of grapefruit I don't think I'd like it.
• “Cilantro or Coriander”
• No. I have the gene OR6A2 which makes cilantro taste incredibly repulsive. Like, if you don't have the gene, I'm not sure it's possible for me to convey just how awful it tastes. To me it tastes like the smell stinkbugs make. Take a bite out of a cake of soap if you want an inkling of what it's like.
• “Green tea”
• I don't really drink green tea, I realized. I drink black tea sometimes, but even then I don't really drink it for the taste, as I only have it with enough sugar to make it sweet. I guess I dislike unsweetened tea in general.
• “Watercress, mustard greens, horseradish, dandelion greens, rutabaga and turnip”
• I…am trying to think of the last time I had any of these, if ever. None of them are things I'm particularly motivated to seek out, at least, so it's possible I tried them once and didn't like them.
• “Soy products”
• Not entirely sure what this one means. I do like soy sauce, and I'll eat soybeans…though they can definitely be a bit bitter sometimes, now that I think about it.
• “Carbonated water”
• Never could stand the stuff. I like it if it's sweetened as soda pop, but not by itself—it just burns my tongue.
• “Mushrooms”
• I definitely dislike mushrooms, though part of that is their texture. Not sure how much of it is their taste—I haven't had one in long enough to have forgotten what they taste like.
• “Anise and licorice”
• Don't like either.
• “Lower-sodium foods”
• Not really sure what this is referring to. The article does say “Supertasters consume more salt in comparison to those with average taste.” It's true I do love my salt-and-vinegar potato chips (that perfect combination of salty and sour, perhaps why I love dill pickles as well), but I don't think I particularly dislike lower-sodium foods.
• “Hot-spicy foods”
• Yup, definitely do not like spicy foods. I can stand the occasional “mild” salsa or taco mix, but that's about it.
• “Other foods may also show altered patterns of preference and consumption, but only indirect evidence exists:
• Tonic water – quinine is more bitter to supertasters”
• No idea, don't think I've ever had tasted quinine (though if it's bitter, I probably wouldn't like it).
• “Olives – for a given concentration, salt is more intense in supertasters”
• For whatever reason, I've always been ashamed of my dislike of olives (unlike any of my other dislikes). I'll order them on pizza, or Subway sandwiches from time to time, and over the past year I've actually been buying them from the grocery store to try to build up a tolerance of them, but no. They remain disagreeable.

So that's at least eight things on that list I definitively dislike, and several more that I'm pretty sure I'd dislike based on my nose (which by the way, Mom and Dad, was basically 100% accurate when, as a kid, I told you I wasn't going to like something before actually tasting it)¹. Keeping in mind that is only general trends and not a strict diagnosis (which requires exposure to very specific compounds to see what they taste like, apparently), it's still pretty striking just how well this lines up with my overall taste preferences.

I suppose the flip side to all this is that if I am a supertaster, at least I'm experiencing the good tastes more intensely too? I don't have any way of telling that, of course, though I have learned to tone down my natural reactions to biting into a perfect hamburger or other culinary masterpiece to stop people teasing me about it. Not that it really matters either way, I just thought this was an interesting phenomenon to learn about. A hui hou!

¹I can think of a few foods (sauerkraut, coffee) where I like the smell but dislike the taste, but no foods where I dislike the smell and like the taste.

Birds of Melbourne: Crimson Rosella

Now that I've got a GoPro I'm constantly on the lookout for new and different things to film, and recently had the idea of trying to catch some of the neat birds that are present this far out in the suburbs of Melbourne. I was surprised at just how many species of parrots are found in Australia when I first moved here—I can think of at least four widely different ones I see around here on timescales from every few days to every few weeks. Anyway, I started putting out some birdseed, and last week I got lucky when a crimson rosella showed up to eat just a few minutes after I set up my camera. Crimson rosellas are native to the southern and eastern parts of Australia, and have a striking red-and-blue-and-black coloration. You can see (and hear) a few of them in action in the video below:

I think in future videos I'll try to stick to a more consistent field of view and resolution; I was experimenting changing between different ones, which made the final video a bit disjointed. I'm definitely still learning as I go, but it's great to be able to capture such high-quality video so easily. I've been a bit doubtful of the usefulness of shooting in 4k resolution when I only have a 1080p monitor and it chews up so much memory space, but I tried shooting some of the central segments of the video in 4k and even when downscaled to 1080p resolution it retains so much more detail. I'll definitely be experimenting more with it in future, maybe even start releasing videos in 4k? We'll see! I can't exactly promise more videos like this because it depends on the birds and luck, but I'd really like to do more, showing off more of the cool bird species around here. A hui hou!

Edit (1/26/21): There's a bird which I identified as a “myna” which flies by in the video, and I have recently discovered to my chagrin that I have misidentified it: it's actually a noisy miner. There are common mynas in Australia (an introduced pest), and they look fairly similar at first glance, but I've seen enough noisy miners around where I live to tell them apart now.

Celebrating Ten…Er, Eleven Years of Daniel's Musings!

Today marks the eleventh anniversary of this blog. I know, I too am amazed—that I didn't think to make this post a year ago at the ten-year anniversay. To tell the truth, I actually wrote most of this post thinking it was the tenth anniversary. (And they're letting me do a PhD in astrophysics…) Anyway, a decade just over a decade ago when I started this blog, I was one semester into getting a bachelor's degree at UH Hilo, and now, I'm (hopefully!) just a few months away from finishing a PhD at Swinburne.

I originally started this blog as a way to replace email for letting a few people back home know how I was doing. Over the years it's morphed into something like a public journal, where I can show off things I've made or done, or talk about things that interest me for later reference. Some facts about things since this blog was started:

1. I graduated with dual bachelor's degrees in physics (with a minor in mathematics) and astronomy.
2. I've worked five different jobs (while my job description and day-to-day work with the JCMT remained exactly the same during the handover between owners, it was still technically two different jobs with different employers), including ones at high altitude on the two tallest volcanoes in the world.
3. I started a PhD in astronomy, and am now just a few scant months away from completing it.
4. I learned Python, my first programming language, and have been using it for…let's say about seven or eight years in total, to various degrees. (And last year I started seriously trying to learn Rust, which I might have a post on sooner or later.)
5. I picked up a few hobbies:
• Astrophotrography
• Video editing/videography
• Knitting (and re-started crochet after learning it a few years prior to beginning this blog)
• Painting
• Digital music engraving
6. I created what is still, to date, the only video Let's Play of Dodge That Anvil!.
7. And I've written a total of 668 posts for this blog, for an average of one every 5.47 days (though this is obviously skewed by the earlier years, as we shall see).

In some ways I'm impressed that this blog is still going. My interests are often somewhat…mercurial, shall we say, and tend to shift on the scale of a few years. I can never tell if some intense new interest will turn out to be a passing fancy of a few months or years' duration, or an enduring passion still going strong a decade later. As other interests of mine have fallen by the wayside over the past eleven years, this blog is still going, even if my output waxes and wanes over time. Originally I tried to write at least once a week; a few years ago, under the time pressures of full-time employment, I settled on just trying to have at least two posts a month (and even then I've fallen short a month or two!). I do still hold to the rule I originally established of “no more than one post per day,” though that hasn't been too difficult as I can either merge things together into one post, or have material for multiple posts. I put that in place to remind myself that this isn't social media (though it's perhaps the closest thing I have to it), and that I want posts that are worth reading rather than throw-away thoughts. (I've put up a few short posts that might've been mostly filler over the years, but not too many.)

Anyway, back in 2016 I wrote a little Python script to make a plot of my posts-per-month over time. (Amusingly, I've just discovered that that post, written on the blog's sixth anniversary, was intended for the fifth anniversary, so I guess I've started a tradition now.) I still had it lying around on my hard drive, so I've modernized it a bit, applied a few things I've learned in the intervening years, and changed it to plot each year as its own color:

The numbers after each month are the total number of posts in that month across all eleven years.

Here we can clearly see me start off the first three years with a pretty consistently high output, where even the slowest months have only been rarely been equaled since. In 2010 and 2011 I was still a student, and though I did take some pretty brutal workloads I obviously still had plenty of time on my hands for writing. (I'm sure the novelty factor helped a bit, too.) For almost the entirety of 2012 I was working at the Visitor Information Station on Mauna Kea, where I had full days at work and then several days off during the week, so likewise still had plenty of time (though being un- or under-employed for much of 2016 didn't really bring it back up). Looking at the line for 2013, you can almost see where I enter full time employment at the JCMT in January: it starts off pretty high at seven posts, but steadily nose-dives for the rest of the year, establishing the pattern that will generally be followed afterwards.

After the first three years, it looks like February is consistently a slow month, while May can be somewhat variable (probably because I often try to make at least one post around my birthday). Both June and July I've slipped up and only had one post in, while September through November are remarkably uniform at between two and four posts for the past eight years. And finally, December can be either pretty quiet, or one of the busiest months of the year; usually when I'm visiting family for Christmas I don't have much opportunity to write (the two years with six posts, 2017 and 2020, were ones I spent in Australia), but it's not a hard and fast rule as I didn't write any more posts than normal in 2018 when I didn't go anywhere.

Anyway, that's pretty much it. The colors used in the plot were taken from an excellent Python package for scientific plots, CMasher, created just in the past few years by a fellow PhD student here at Swinburne. I took the opportunity while making this plot to learn how to scrape HTML with the Beautiful Soup library, so instead of manually entering post counts (which is so 2016) my script now automatically scrapes them from the blog itself, which should make doing the inevitable sixteenth anniversary plot a bit easier. That's all for now, though I've definitely got a few ideas for posts for the coming weeks (and months. I should try to bump February's count up this year…) A hui hou! (Which I was also gratified to discover I've been using since the very first post ten eleven years ago.)