Painbow Award
Painbow Award
[A figure of a graph is shown, the figure has a number as if used in a paper. The graph has two labeled axis but without any units given. The Y-Axis has 15 ticks of equal length, the X-axis has 21 ticks, with every fifth double the height of the other. The graph displays a messy shape with color gradients, with a bright spot to the right of the shape around the middle right part of the graph. This bright spot is surrounded by mainly green and red, with darker colors at the edge, and the rest of the graph white. On the right side of the graph there is a labeled bar with the color scale. To the right of this are numbers indicating what the color represents. The color scale begins at the bottom with white, then goes to gray/blue, to black, back to blue, to gray, to green, to dark red, to red which fades via brown in to green, from where it fades slowly from darker green to lighter green ending up as yellow before going back to white again at the top.] Label: Figure 2 Y-Axis: λ X-Axis: θ (phase) Scale label: Peak Energy 120 100 80 60 40 20 0
[Caption under the panel:] Every year, disgruntled scientists compete for the Painbow Award for worst color scale.

This comic makes fun of the badly selected color scales used in the figures for scientific papers by suggesting that the scientists picking them are in competition to use the most problematic scale. The title of the comic is a portmanteau of "pain" and "rainbow" suggesting a humorous name for terrible color scales.
The color scale here showcases a collection of unintuitive and unhelpful decisions. Starting from the top, white fades down into green, which then fades into red (passing through brown in the middle instead of yellow, indicating subtractive color mixing instead of additive color mixing, for no obvious reason). The red then turns back into green as the intensity decreases further. Red and green in close proximity make the energy levels hard or impossible to distinguish for those with protanopic color vision deficiency . This confusion is repeated at lower energy levels, where blue transitions to black and then back into white via a gray with a tiny tinge of blue. The highest and lowest recorded energy levels have the same color value, which is less than ideal. That Randall is aware of color blindness and the problems this causes has been revealed in other comics like this one 1213: Combination Vision Test .
Although it's possible (for someone with full color vision) to interpret data from this graph from context clues - the white that fades to green is high-energy white, while the white that fades to blue is low-energy white - there's no benefit to doing things this way, and a lot of downsides. Additionally, there are regions in the color scale where the color changes very rapidly, which creates the false appearance of an edge in what is likely a smooth function.
Because the color scale includes black, representing just over 20 unlabeled units, it is possible that the graph axes, labels, and perhaps even the comic's caption represent measured values. Because they don't blend continuously with the negative space around them, this appears unlikely.
Real-world analogues to the Painbow Award include radar meteorology charts, where different types of precipitation have different color schemes that can overlap and blend in confusing transition zones. In the field of data visualization, the CIELAB color space , perceptually uniform color spaces , or even more specialised scales have been developed to replace simple algebraic interpolation of red, green, and blue values.
The title text takes the concept of bad color combinations further, suggesting the use of navy blue , dark blue , and midnight blue for first, second, and third respectively. These are the names of three similar XKCD colors , and, as sighted readers will be able to see, there is very little difference between them [ citation needed ] . However, the choice of blue(s) may be a direct play upon the association of the Blue Riband (a.k.a. "Blue Ribbon") and/or Cordon Bleu (likewise, but this time direct from the French) awards, extended in common use for excellence across a much wider range of competitive fields.
For rosette-rewarded competitions (e.g. livestock parades, dog-shows, etc) the first prize ones are commonly blue (red for 2 nd and either yellow or white for 3 rd ), though it may not be logically obvious to someone unfamiliar with this, perhaps more used to yellow depicting the 'gold standard, first place' indicator or red as the most alerting hue in some other ranking situations. Where a depicted award schema is directly gold/silver/bronze-influenced, however, the gold and bronze 'metallic off-yellows' can sometimes be more confused with each other than with the mid-level desaturated 'silver'
[A figure of a graph is shown, the figure has a number as if used in a paper. The graph has two labeled axis but without any units given. The Y-Axis has 15 ticks of equal length, the X-axis has 21 ticks, with every fifth double the height of the other. The graph displays a messy shape with color gradients, with a bright spot to the right of the shape around the middle right part of the graph. This bright spot is surrounded by mainly green and red, with darker colors at the edge, and the rest of the graph white. On the right side of the graph there is a labeled bar with the color scale. To the right of this are numbers indicating what the color represents. The color scale begins at the bottom with white, then goes to gray/blue, to black, back to blue, to gray, to green, to dark red, to red which fades via brown in to green, from where it fades slowly from darker green to lighter green ending up as yellow before going back to white again at the top.] Label: Figure 2 Y-Axis: λ X-Axis: θ (phase) Scale label: Peak Energy 120 100 80 60 40 20 0
[Caption under the panel:] Every year, disgruntled scientists compete for the Painbow Award for worst color scale.
