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It's not just me then!
Our '94 Pontiac Trans Sport is purple. At least, I think it is. The rest of the world tells me that it's blue. You can decide for yourself (though I will admit that in this photograph, it does look bluer to me than usual).

I have had a similar conversation with my high school calculus teacher, who was red-green color blind. He knew that there was a color, "green," and he could identify what he knew was called "green" - but he didn't see this lush color green, and it was hard for him to tell that it wasn't "red." (The wikipedia page for color blindness is actually really interesting, if this is your kind of thing.) I think a possible explanation for why we label different colors is not due to vocabulary but to a slight difference in the way that our brains interpret the signal, in this case wavelength of light, they receive. The "blue" box and the "purple" box are pretty similar, as are in the black and navy blue... in my opinion. I've already admitted that the world is against my judgment of the color of our van, so I may have a bias.

To briefly touch on a conversation happening at the other end of this week's forum, I do want to say that I'm definitely a lot more comfortable with the action potentials as batteries analogy after Thursday's class. Like many of my classmates have already said, once we clarified what we meant by "battery" from the literal battery (small, powers my flashlight, usually associated with an Energizer bunny) that we experience every day, things started to click.

Since what we're dealing with is so abstract, I become confused when I try to relate ideas from class with phenomena that I've experienced. Would an output without an input be something like a muscle twitch, or is it something else? Do we have any idea how often an input occurs without an output or vice versa? It'd be helpful for me if we were to start relating examples to concepts.