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It's Okay to Outgrow
Swirling Visions
Eigengrau
ˈaɪɡənɡɹaʊ
*Noun*
• The dark gray color seen by the eyes in perfect darkness as a result of signals from the optic nerves.
**Example Sentences**
“Before my eyes adjusted to the dark, all I could see was eigengrau.”
“Henry awoke in the eigengrau of total darkness, so he quickly turned on his lamp.”
“The darkness of the sub-basement seemed eigengrau to my eyes.”
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**Word Origin**
German, mid-20th century
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**Why this word?**
“Eigengrau” is a German loanword used to describe the specific color of total darkness as perceived by human eyes.
Rather than black, the color that human optic nerves discern in pure darkness is a dark gray, which is why eigengrau is sometimes called “brain gray.”
Eigengrau is close to what might be called “charcoal gray,” but the word’s German roots specify that this is a gray created inside the viewer’s brain.
In German, “eigengrau” translates to “own gray,” or “intrinsic gray,” suggesting the shade might shift, depending on the viewer’s perception.
it’s important to realize that **ChatGPT and LaMDA aren’t trained to be correct**.
You can train models that are optimized to be correct—but
that’s a different kind of model.
Models like that are being built now;
they tend to be smaller and trained on specialized data sets
(O’Reilly Media has a search engine that has been trained on the 70,000+ items in our learning platform).
And you could integrate those models with GPT-style language models, so that
one group of models supplies the *facts* and
the other supplies the *language*.
Sydney and the Bard
Mike Loukides
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