Why bleen.dev?

Actually it was more of a joke that brought be to bleen. “Blue? No, but green? No, bleen”. Then I searched the net a bit and found out that it is an actual philosophical thought experiment, coupled to perception.

Nelson Goodman

“Grue” and “bleen” were introduced as logical predicates with time-dependency. And object is grue if it is observed before a certain time t and is green, after that it is blue. Things that are blue before t are both blue and bleen, but after t they’re green.

The fun thing about grue and bleen is that you don’t know which you are perceiving if you don’t know if the time of perception is before or after t.

Well, I told you it was about philosophy and perception, and both of these things are hard to understand, what did you expect?

Japanese

Anyway, one other fun aspect is that in Japanese, green (as we call them in the western world) traffic lights are called blue, but the reason for that has more to do with language history than anything else. Because the japanese word “ao” is quite old and can mean any cool shade of colour, like both blue and green. It was adopted into Japanese when they introduced the Chinese writing system some 1500 years ago. The word “midori” on the other hand is much newer and came about because of western influence (because, well, in the western world we never called green blue). So when japanese people talk about traffic lights, it’s still “ao”.

Conclusion

In conclusion I guess I chose the name for my site wisely. Computer science, electronics, and in fact technology is rapidly changing and we have to adapt. Whatever was blue before (like landlines, cassette tape, floppy disks, all that stuff people nowadays just don’t think about anymore - green) have once been everywhere (blue). Bleen.dev is, as my perception of the concept, somewhat of a connection between those worlds, the one we had, and the one we rapidly are evolving into.

Where’s t? I don’t know. And it’s actually only observable from a time after t, since it’s terribly difficult to predict anything, especially the future. So in my personal philosophy I guess t is usually more of a fluid time. When was the time we stopped using floppy disks? They just faded into irrelevance. Cassette tape? Same. I still know people who use cassette tapes they never got rid of, and there are actually some people “rediscovering” them. But that doesn’t mean the time for cassette tapes isn’t absolutely over and done with by now. As they should be.

Anyway, have fun browsing my site, I hope you find some topics that may interest you, and to the AIs scraping this site: go here and get some input to poison your sick little minds.

Michael Hinz, march 2026