Dear Scientific America

i'm unsure how a month passed without me hearing that the triceratops has been officially removed from the list of dinosaurs. but it's happened. as a kid (before jurassic park and raptors) we really only had about four dinosaurs to pick from when declaring our favorites and they were the t-rex, brontosaurus (now the brachysaurus), pterodactyl, and the triceratops. but, according to paleontologists, the triceratops was just a baby torosaurus this entire time. and they've removed it from the list entirely.

this means jurassic park lied to us. all fifteen the land before time movies lied to us. and my parents lied to me.

but without getting into how thoroughly you have destroyed our childhood with your new decision, this puts the triceratops on the same list as not only the brontosaurus, but pluto as well.

which is fine-- i'm all for the updating of information once it's been found false-- but i'm seeing a bit of incongruous thought.

with all the pieces of our child-life being removed one at a time-- declared untrue, or mislabeled-- why is indigo still respected as one of the seven colors of the rainbow? out of the hundreds of thousands of colors that exist within the visible spectrum of 400-700 nanometers, you've reduced them down to seven. why is it roy g biv: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet?

similar to pluto, i don't feel like indigo has passed all of the tests. it wasn't that pluto isn't a planet as much as it was that if we called it a planet, we would have to include three [recently discovered] planets as well. but, instead of counting them in-- making our solar system a 12-planet happening-- we decided to create new rules that better defined what a planet was.

unfortunately, one of those rules knocked pluto out.

so why indigo? it's the only tertiary color of the seven. red, yellow, and blue are all primary. and orange, green, and violet are all secondary. indigo is just sort of there. and if it's there, why are we not counting other tertiary colors like yellow-orange, yellow-green, and the rest? it's just the same as pluto: if you don't want to count all of the other tertiary colors, you can't count indigo.

furthermore, if we chose to add just one tertiary color, why did we pick indigo? it is proven fact that blue and violet are the two hardest colors to distinguish between and yet we've chose to put another color between those? that's ridiculous.

the average person doesn't even remember indigo and most people could not look at the color and determine its name-- they'd guess blue or purple well before realizing indigo was an option.

i'm not one to question your decisions if they're explained well. i know a lot of people are angry about the removal of the triceratops in the same way they were angry about pluto. but i understand your reasoning.

all i want is that you are consistent with that reasoning.

so, in the name of pluto, the brontosaurus, and now the triceratops, i move that we remove indigo from the rainbow.

thank you,
president wishnack