With respect to the Golden Ratio, check out Andrew Miller's week 11 page and my response thereto.
With respect to color coding, I must admit that I generally think of red as being higher than blue, partially due to the temperature identification--you turn red when you are overheaded and blue when you are chilled (even though a blue-hot poker is hotter than a red-hot one). In any case, beige or ecru tends to be a very neutral color and it generally represents zero for me.
I have also seen CAD-CAM refer to computer-aided-design-computer-aided-manufacture, and I'm not sure whether or not th ere is a canonical unraveling of the acronym. Perhaps we should link to the OED at this point? No, that doesn't help--you only get a rotter on a catapult merchant ship. Any suggestions?
In any case, yes, it would be nicer to have a real three-dim ensional representation to explore, rather than these frozen views of complex functions, even the spread-out versions like the necklace and the tetraview in my current show at the Providence Art Club. We're getting there. One of my colleagues in the Hyp ergraphics Group always provided visitors to the gallery with red-blue glasses for viewing his rotating four-dimensional sculptures, and there are similar glasses in the back of Tony Robbin's book Fourfield, which see. Someday we'll have Java hol ograms?