That doesn't seem right to me. Sodium (and mercury) vapor lamps are the color they are due to physics, and were chosen because they're very efficient (and long lasting). Low-pressure sodium is the best and worst of these; essentially monochromatic but fantastic efficiency. Their only advantage, color-wise, is that the light can be filtered out easily (they used to be widely used in San Jose because Lick Observatory could filter out the 589 nm light).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_tower
[1] https://sigostreetlight.com/blogs/common-quality-problems-in...
These are still available today, although the chromate version seems less popular for general use due to toxicity, especially (I assume) in the case of a fire.
I have painted quite a few bits of sheet metal with a sea-foam-ish blue-green/gray paint back in the day (30 years or so ago). I don't recall the manufacturer, but it was a zinc conversion coating in nearly exactly that seafoam color, which has probably stolen at least a few years of my life expectancy. The same company sold other paints in a sickly mustard yellow, and close to fire-engine red, all with slightly different chemistries, I assume for different base metals.
After she moved out, I put up greens, yellows, brown, and blue all over the house. It's not quite as "public pool" feeling as that original aquamarine, but it's certainly more lively than grey/white. Funny enough though, when I had a designer come in to take measurements and do a mockup for a kitchen reno... everything was back to white because that's step one in making it look "modern" even though part of the pitch is custom cabinetry that won't just look like that same white IKEA stuff that everyone installs now.
Most of the rooms in my house are painted in colors and I mostly like it but it can sometimeds feel fatiguing. I've thought about repainting in a neutral gray or green.
[0] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/16434/why-are-r...
The research on why certain colors feel calm points to the same perceptual substrate as why certain sounds feel calm. Low-chroma, mid-value colors (seafoam, sage, dusty blue) register as low-arousal across multiple measures, and that low-arousal quality maps predictably to other sensory modalities. The Bouba/Kiki effect is the famous example: rounded shapes feel like bouba, angular ones feel like kiki, cross-linguistically. But it extends to color -- rounded phonemes (/m/, /n/, /l/) tend to be rated more compatible with low-chroma colors than stop consonants.
So the seafoam choice might be overdetermined: it works physiologically (low stimulation for long monitoring sessions) AND cognitively (low-arousal color category activates low-arousal associations across the board, keeping operators from overcorrecting on ambiguous signals).
The independent Russian cockpit convergence is interesting evidence for this. If it were purely cultural you would expect more divergence.
Meanwhile the Yanks stayed with mil-spec gray on a similar ship, the F-15: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:F-15_Eagle_Cockpit.jpg
He talked about how the wiring schematics were a maze, made worse by using only non-labeled gray and black wires with connections and mounts that were the same color made of the same material.
The exterior being gray makes sense - harder to see with human eyes. But internals? They should be massively contrasting colors for every single series of pieces to be removed so you can just follow along by color.
Sometime before that, he got a lot of flak for having neglected one of the standing rules, to label everything as you take it apart and put it back "the way you found it". He decided to break it down and put it back the way the technical documentation said it should actually go. This seems to be part of the reason his radar performed better than the others after teardown maintenance.
My two guesses are that it was colored like that get the pilots feel like they were in a particular environment - a familar but not exactly private or comfortable one. It's a cultural thing like if you paint a bus yellow, Americans will think of a school bus, but most other people won't.
My other guess is that they only made certain kinds of dye, and its very well possible the same factory made it that made it for bathroom tiles. In capitalism, if you don't have orange paint, for example, some company will just start making it if there's a demand.
In communism, if nobody makes it, then it's not available, until and if some comittee decides that it should be made.
Either because of unconscious choice, or because some designer theorized that people would be biologically primed to prefer it.
I'm not sure if it started with the teal from Windows 95's default color (hex codes vary based on Google searches), or if it was a purple-ish color from a classic Mac from school.
To this day, my work Mac is teal and my personal is purple.
#81D8D0 club, represent!
After a little over a decade of service, no other color infuriates me more
As a semi professional eagle enjoyer, if the day before was trash day, then she might have been telling the truth. I’m not joking, they have bald eagle proofed dumpsters in Alaska.
They’re basically smart seagulls with talons.
It was eagles fighting over a salmon. They genuinely do sound and act exactly like seagulls.
And? Did it?
I’d never even heard of this guy.
Sure. But this is not one those things.
Basically the same nonsensical belief as in regard the dark mode nowadays.
I don't even believe it's true. Green is just an army colour, that's pretty much it. Army uses army colours. Mystery solved.
Maybe it even works better with the color of a clear blue sky above it.
Anyway, it's intuitive and not rocket science.
With anything, an academic can thread together a theory that neatly joins the dots to sound feasible, but my bet is that 99% of all engineers are stronger at physics than color theory.