Blue is the new...

Hmm this isn't exactly "news" except in DailyTelegraph world
It's first-term philosophy stuff.

bah humbug. kids today etc
 
In THAT link I see blue and black. But the version I saw on TV this morning I saw as white and gold - the news anchors were arguing over the same image, some seeing it as black and blue, others as gold and white. I saw gold and white - this one I definitely see as blue and black.

And then there were those loose llamas running around in Arizona. Between the two of them, they pretty much broke the internet. Ironically, I didn't see either of them online, but on TV this morning...

-Ray
 
I read an article about the dress this morning, and an interesting thing happened.
At first I saw the photo, and I had a slight preference for blue and black (although some parts seemed gold), but I could definitely see how people might perceive it as a white dress hit by blue-ish light. Then I scrolled down, and saw a photo of the manufacturer, showing it as blue and black. When I scrolled up again, I couldn't for the life of me imagine how anyone would ever consider the possibility of the dress being white; it was so obviously blue, and I couldn't fool my brain into thinking it was white at all. Strange...
 
well I had never seen the "original" photo, but after seeing this...... The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This Dress I now understand that it is a white balance issue.....not people actually seeing things differently. Because the WB is off, it's actually halfway between the two and the viewer is left to interpret the photo. I had only seen the WB corrected shot all day long and was wondering who the loonies were that said it was gold and white.
 
Ah, internet. Sometimes you amaze me with the knowledge you contain, but mostly you just make me wonder about the trivial things that these strange creatures called humans (and their blogger overlords) get worked up about.

P.S. I must have been done that hole. It was awesome; I got so much work done this week.
 
Back in my college years I worked a year or so on spectral analysis of rare earth pigments. My colleague could determine peak wavelengths with his eyes down to +-1-2nm. One glance and voila. Freaking amazing. So that's what I automatically looked for first in that image, the peak wavelengths. Then I ran it through a image analyzer and again I guess my colleague would have been closer o_O
 
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Ah, internet. Sometimes you amaze me with the knowledge you contain, but mostly you just make me wonder about the trivial things that these strange creatures called humans (and their blogger overlords) get worked up about.
I agree with you on an awful lot of stuff Nic, but this one I find absolutely fascinating on so many levels. The science of how our eyes perceive the light is interesting, and provides a fully plausible explanation for the differing perceptions. According to Buzzfeed, about 70% of people (including me) saw the dress as white and gold. Which it's not, but that's almost beside the point. The thing that's even more interesting to me, though, is the psychology behind the reactions to it. Taylor Swift found it really frightening that people could see it so differently than her when it was so obvious to her that it was blue/black. People have really gone into camps of absolutism on this, which to me is the most interesting thing. I just find it rather confirming that we all see EVERYTHING so differently. It gives me some small amount of comfort regarding the completely polarized political climate in the US, if not everywhere. We're all so damn sure we're right and those on the other side are so clearly wrong. I'm actually comforted by the thought that perception is so variable and easily fooled - it allows me to look at those fellow humans who I'm so thoroughly alarmed by and angered by in a different light and realize they just literally SEE things differently than I do and I may be every bit as "wrong" as I perceive them to be...

Another wonderful example of the visual tricks we can play on ourselves is this checkerboard illustration, where squares A and B are exactly the same shade of gray, but fully appear to be opposites. I can't get past this one at ALL - it's absolutely inexplicable yet also so obviously true... Sometimes I like coming face to face with my own, and all of our, limitations...

Checker shadow illusion - Wikipedia

-Ray
 
If I understand it correctly, some of the people who saw it as white and gold in one photo or on TV later saw it as blue and black when shown a different photo. Can someone please embed an image where you feel it looks white and gold? Because I've only seen one "version", and the blue looks very blue in that version.
 
If I understand it correctly, some of the people who saw it as white and gold in one photo or on TV later saw it as blue and black when shown a different photo. Can someone please embed an image where you feel it looks white and gold? Because I've only seen one "version", and the blue looks very blue in that version.
This is from the Wired article Luke linked to above. The middle image is the one that sparked all of the controversy, surrounded by versions that are more clearly white/gold and blue/black. I saw and still see the middle one as white/gold, although a darker version of white/gold than the left one, and with a slightly bluish tint to the "white" part. The right one is the only one I see as blue and black...

View attachment 107656Untitled-12-660x334 by ramboorider1, on Flickr

-Ray
 
Here's an interesting article by the Flickr team. They argue that it's due to the different temperature light sources in the photo (natural daylight, and warm indoor lighting); different people assume different light sources to be the "normal" one, and therefore their brains correct for the other light source to make the dress look, what they assume to be, the way it really should look.

Whats going on with #TheDress? | Flickr Blog
 
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