Vox Sentences: The optics and metaphysics of the dress

1. It's black and blue you maniacs

• Okay. So there's a thing going on with a dress.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• It all began when Scottish singer Caitlin McNeill uploaded this picture with the question, "guys please help me - is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can’t agree and we are freaking the fuck out."

  [Caitlin McNeill]

Caitlin McNeill

• BuzzFeed then posted it, prompting a mass hysteria on Facebook and Twitter and generally interrupting the progress of human civilization for an evening (the BuzzFeed post has 28 million views since being posted at 6pm last night).

  [BuzzFeed / Cates Holderness]

• As of this writing, 70 percent of BuzzFeed quiz respondents (1.9 million votes) said it was white and gold, while 30 percent (829,800) said it was blue and black.

• Facebook analyzed reader posts, and estimate that, of posts only mentioning one or the other color scheme, 58 percent mentioned white and gold and 42 percent mentioned blue and black. The younger the user, the likelier they were to be in the blue and black camp; men were also more likely to mention blue and black.

  [Facebook / Mike Develin and Adrien Friggeri]

• In real life, the dress is blue and black.

  [Roman]

• So what's going on here? For one thing, as this illustration shows, our perceptions of colors depend a lot on the colors around them. Note how the dress on the left looks blue and black, while the one on the right looks white and gold.

  [xkcd / Randall Munroe]

xkcd / Randall Munroe

• But they're the same colors:

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

Vox / Joe Posner

• That still leaves one gaping question: why do people perceive the same exact photo so differently?

• The answer is we don't really know: maybe we just randomly latch on to one color perception immediately and stick with it, or maybe there are subtle differences in the way our brains look at this.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• Even scientists who study color perception are baffled; neuroscientist Jay Neitz said, "I’ve studied individual differences in color vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I’ve ever seen."

  [Wired / Adam Rogers]

• The ultimate explanation is probably biological, but the dress is still a good window into the fascinating philosophical problem of "qualia inversion."

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• For those keeping track at home: Kim Kardashian, Jimmy Fallon, and Julianne Moore are team white and gold; while Kanye West, Taylor Swift, Mindy Kaling, and Justin Bieber are team blue and black. Kanye and Taylor are together on this one.

  [BuzzFeed / Krystie Lee Yandoli]

• McNeill is understandably amazed by the response: "I thought my followers on Tumblr would maybe have a good reaction, but I never would have considered that Taylor Swift and Mindy Kaling would be tweeting about it."

  [Business Insider / Hunter Walker]

2. Lived long and prospered

Dot Records

• Leonard Nimoy, best known as Spock in the original Star Trek film and TV series, has died at 83.

  [Vox / Alex Abad-Santos]

• He died from smoking-related chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), tweeting last month, "Don't smoke. I did. Wish I never had. LLAP [Live Long and Prosper]."

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Star Trek superfan Matt Yglesias has a wonderful appreciation of Spock, one of the greatest characters in TV history: "Spock is someone who some of us can eminently identify with, but also someone who others find so alien that they are compelled to castigate him."

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• President Obama also paid his respects: "Cool, logical, big-eared and level-headed, the center of Star Trek's optimistic, inclusive vision of humanity's future. I loved Spock."

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Nimoy also had a successful directing career, helming both Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home but also the 1987 smash comedy hit Three Men and a Baby.

  [Vox / Kelsey McKinney]

• He made multiple appearances on The Simpsons, including a cameo in the classic, Conan O'Brien-penned "Marge Vs. the Monorail."

  [NY Mag / Abraham Riesman]

• Personally, my favorite Nimoy performance was the music video for his song "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins," which remains a better adaptation of The Hobbit than this Peter Jackson nonsense.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• While he became famous for playing opposite William Shatner in Star Trek, the two first acted together in an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; the clip's on YouTube.

  [YouTube]

• Nimoy invented the iconic Vulcan hand symbol himself, borrowing it from a practice in Orthodox Judaism.

  [Quartz / Matt Phillips]

3. The world's tiniest shutdown approaches

Hello darkness, my old friend. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

• The House rejected a plan to fund the Department of Homeland Security for three weeks.

  [Politico / Seung Min Kim and Jake Sherman]

• The Senate had passed a bill to fund DHS through September — without any provisions rolling back President Obama's immigration executive actions.

  [NYT / Ashley Parker]

• But the House didn't take it up in turn, instead opting for the three week extension; it was also a "clean" bill but would have let Republican leadership fight longer for provisions rolling back Obama's actions.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• There's still time to prevent a shutdown, but avoiding one is looking a lot harder. Here's what a shutdown means.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• This is taking up valuable time in session that the Republican majority could be using for other priorities, like passing an on-time budget for the first time in years.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

4. Misc.

• 25 years ago, three Rembrandts, a Vermeer, a Manet, and eight other works of art were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. We still have no idea who did it.

  [NYT / Tom Mashberg]

• Retailers are starting to give shoplifters a choice: either the police get a call, or the thief agrees to pay $320 for an online class to teach them not to steal anymore.

  [Slate / Leon Neyfakh]

• Apparently spoons made out of gold make sorbet taste better.

  [The Guardian / Oliver Wainwright]

• Road signs that make driving feel more dangerous could cut down on accidents.

  [The Atlantic / Cari Romm]

• According to the General Social Survey, 47 percent of Americans lead lives of quiet desperation.

  [WSJ / Jonathan Clements]

5. Verbatim

• "I didn't wake up one morning and declare, 'I want to be the Boss of Bras!'"

  [Vox / Alecia Li Morgan]

• "Film-making thus presents itself as no more (and no less) than a specific way in which one human being can acknowledge or fail to acknowledge the humanity of others a challenge which faces us all in every moment of our lives."

  [Film and Philosophy / Stephen Mulhall]

• "Their studies have shown that for the first time, human egg and sperm cells can be created from the skin cells of two adults of the same gender."

  [New Republic / Eric Sasson]

• "I argue that progressive income taxation in the twentieth century is a product of the exigency of war and not of democracy."

  [Juliana Londoño Vélez via Marginal Revolution / Tyler Cowen]

• "I want a Uranus orbiter. I want go back to Jupiter. I want to fly to the plumes of Enceladus. I want a boat on Titan. Those are what I want."

  [Emily Lakdawalla to Vox / David W. Brown]

• "It’s a movie that Gamergate participants will unabashedly love, in that there is only one woman in it, she is insanely beautiful, all she does in the film is wear minimal clothing and ask men to impart all their manly wisdom, and all the men do in her presence is talk about 'hitting that' and distract her with sparkly pink flower necklaces and imagine her having sex with other women and complain that she’s having 'the world’s longest period.'"

  [The Atlantic / Sophie Gilbert]

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