LINK · via Hacker News · Mar 23, 2026 Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green Somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, one psychologist named Faber Birren wrote a sufficiently convincing report for the US Navy and essentially color-coded the entire infrastructure of modern civilization without most people noticing. The shade was Functional Green, a muted grey-tinged seafoam that you would not pick for your kitchen, and it ended up on the walls of nuclear plant control rooms, air traffic control towers, military operations centers, and hospital operating suites because Birren made a solid case that it reduced eye strain under fluorescent light, kept people alert without tipping them into anxiety, and made it easier to spot blood and other biological materials you'd prefer to identify quickly. The recommendation worked its way into government procurement manuals and became standard spec language that apparently nobody felt the need to revisit, which means the rooms where humanity was managing its most consequential and occasionally catastrophic decisions — nuclear launches, surgical emergencies, the routing of aircraft over populated areas — were all, more or less, the same color, because one man wrote the right memo at the right time and then the bureaucracy just kept photocopying it.