Pretty interesting blog post, reminds me of how much we take for truth simply as it's presented to us. As with the studies in our poor ability to judge scale and ratio of two similar objects or determine the angle of a pie chart slice this was a fantastic dive into the seemingly simplistic decisions of color choice. I thought the hue shift at the 82 degree change for hurricanes map was the best part of the whole post. As with a lot of the nuances that were detailed, what at first appeared to be a hindrance on work as we know it opened up a new avenue for expressing the underlying data.
It did feel a shame his ultimate color palette tool has yet to materialize 4 years later, amazing how little innovation I've actually seen in the color palette/picking space outside of Adobe Kuler (Color CC now I think) and that too was a couple years ago. I do wonder as display gamut is reaching further and HDR begins to become the norm if a sweep of new color tools will follow.
The intuitive colors section was also incredibly aesthetically pleasing. Having grown up reading Science and Nature, I recognized the lazy gatekeeping of obfuscating the intention of a graphic. Unlike some in the class I wholeheartedly agreed with his take on the "white hot" issue of the surface temperature reading, I wish he had redone the entire earth image with the new color palette to compare.