title: How can I convert numbers to a color scale in matplotlib?
body: <p>I'm making a bar plot and I want the colors of the bars to vary from red to blue according to a color gradient. I have a dimension of the data frame that tells me where on the red-blue scale each bar should be. My current method is to manually convert these values to RGB colors by linearly interpolating between the RGB red and blue colors but I want an automatic way of converting my numeric values to a color scale. I also need to be able to have a colorbar legend to help interpret it.</p>