And now on this edition of “It is two days past the deadline and Grayson needs to write a column” comes a phenomena like no other. It is, as Aladdin says (have you seen his ABS!) “an indescribable feeling.” It is what colorblind people can’t see and what white people wish they couldn’t. That’s right, I’m talking about: Colors.

Colors are magical. They are the voice of our eyes and the whiff of our retina. I don’t think we actually spend enough time thinking about how wonderful colors are. 

One of the most joyous things about colors is just how many there are. According to howmanythereare.com, which, by the way, is the perfect website if you ever want to know how many there are, there are 10 million colors that humans can see with our eye. The way they find this number is by taking the 1000 levels of light and dark that we can see, multiplying it by the 100 levels of red and green we can see, and the 100 levels of yellow and blue we can see, and, VOILA! 10,000,000 colors.

The website also says that computers use 16.8 million colors to show us color images. I find this really weird because that means that computers can compute at least 6.8 million more colors than our brains. And our brains are incredible. How, you might ask? WE NEED A NEW PARAGRAPH!

I don’t understand the drive for us to create robots smarter than we are. We have a SUPER COMPUTER in our brains. A carbon-based, glucose-fueled supercomputer that can store 2.5 PETABYTES of memory. The largest internet database, run by Yahoo! (Fun fact: Yahoo! has the best company name), holds 2.0 petabytes of data and processes 24 billion events a day, whether searches, emails, or texts. That is 20% less powerful THAN ONE HUMAN BRAIN! You are the result of a massive carbon-intelligence that you have no control over that has NATURALLY FORMED over four billion years of existence, 13.8 billion years if you count the entire universe. Always be grateful that your brains are so incredible. 

Back to colors, do you know how many there are in the whole world? 18 decillion. That’s 18,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That is INSANE! Insane, ridiculous, out-of-this-world, unconventional. That last one just isn’t a synonym. According to estimates by space.com, there are only 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the ENTIRE universe. There are more colors than stars and that definitely puts colors in the big leagues. 

To ground this in our wonderful school, what are some of the colors of Parker? Well, when I think about Parker, I obviously think about blue and white, as those are the colors of our school, as shown on the Wikipedia page. I’m pretty sure we have these colors because of the colonel’s uniform, but maybe it’s based on the flag? I don’t know.

Grape Jam’s color is purple. At Lorado Taft, my color was pink, which explains a lot. But, for some reason, when I think about color at Parker, I mainly think of the tiles. The Parker tiles that each student gets to hang on the walls of the school. For those who don’t know, every kid at Parker, starting in 4th grade, and then all new kids after that, get to paint a tile that then gets plastered on the walls of the school. Kids get to paint whatever they wish and their expression through color and picture is shown for all to see, for all time. These tiles represent so much of what Parker stands for; the students literally get to build a piece of the house.

This endeavor into colors got me thinking: what is happening with the tiles now that COVID is going on? And I truly don’t know the answer. Because high school is virtual, are the new freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors getting to paint their tiles? If yes, great! No problems here. If no, WHY? That’s one of the best things and it is what makes Parker so colorful (luckily). SO! Everybody, if the tiles are being taken care of, then we are all set. But if the tiles are NOT being taken care of, SOMEBODY get on that! Right away. Maybe even right now. Deal?