Cracked talks about that damned dress

The dress looks blue and black to me, and I can make myself see it as white and gold, but none of that really matters because our senses are filthy liars that barely manage to keep our fragile but waaaaaaaay-too powerful brains alive from day to day. At least that's what I got out of this podcast.

And I'm inclined to believe it. The dress is an optical illusion of sorts, and humans are TERRIBLE at coping with things that fuck with their senses. We're sight-dominant animals and we really don't like it when we see things that aren't there, or when we're told that we're seeing something different than those around us (because we're also social conformists, which has probably served us better as a species than our vision has).

In the podcast Jack O'Brien, David Wong, and Michael Swaim discuss the kinds of cognitive kill-switches that throw people for loops the way the damn dress does, most of which comes down to the fact that our brains are too busy thinking about stuff to give two shits if we actually saw the dress as one color or another, or if there was actually a car driving down the street or if it was the same old boring street, or if there's classical music that you might actually enjoy or if it all sounds the same and isn't worth your time.

The speakers discuss interesting factoids that are pertinent to the discussion, among them are the facts that: cultures with more words for a color perceive more versions of that color; phantom limb pain has been treated by using mirrors and just believing enough that you are not missing a limb that the pain goes away; and that magicians are way cleverer than they're given credit for because they figured out that whole slight-of-hand thing about a thousand years ago and have been using it to separate people from their money ever since, which is awesome (said the granddaughter of a stage magician).

But I do feel like I need to answer the stupid dress question. I'm a person who works with images and has been known to photoshop now and then so here's what I did:

I opened a photo of the dress in photo shop and selected the left hand side and using the curves tool I set the brightest bit of the dress that wasn't glare as the white point. Then I selected the right hand side of the dress and using the curves tool I set the darkest part of the dress that wasn't shadow as the black point.

The center column of this photo is as I originally found it, with what seems to be the original colors that caused so much controversy.Using the eyedroppers in curves is a pretty basic, not at all fancy, no trickery involved with color sliders way, to correct oddly exposed photos. I already thought the dress was black and blue but the amount of color noise in the white and gold side leads me to believe that my initial assessment was correct and also doesn't matter a single tiny bit. See whatever color you want to see. It's just a dress.

Cracked Podcasts - Why the Black-Blue/White-Gold dress is reality's Sorting Hat

Your TV is the worst kind of liar

Last month David Wong, pretty much my favorite Cracked author (and the author of some completely amazing and bizarre books), wrote an article about the odd perception of wealth and poverty on TV. This week he's joined by Jack O'Brien and Kristi Harrison to talk about exactly how fucked up the presentation of money is on TV.

This is one of those great moments where you go through your memories and say "holy shit, they're right!" Think about the poorest non-addict, non-homeless character you've seen on TV. Or even someone who WAS homeless - I'm going to use Phoebe from Friends as an example here because she's PERFECT. Phoebe is a part-time masseuse who plays terrible music as a side gig. Once in a while she's got some other kind of wacky part-time job supporting her. How the fuck does Phoebe afford to live in New York? Using current numbers a NY masseuse will make about $2500 a month (about $25 an hour at 25 hours a week with really rough estimates on tips and taxes); Phoebe gets coffee at Central Perk at least two times a day every day of the week - using current NY Starbucks pricing for a coffee and a cookie each time (which is similar to Phoebe's typical order and also their cheapest offerings on the menu) that's about $225 a month. Let's assume that OTHER than the coffee shop Phoebe is usually frugal with food and spends only $100 a week on her vegetarian diet. She lives in New York and doesn't drive her cab often so she must have a metro card, and I'm going to assume she uses the $30 a week option instead of the $112 a month because it's unlikely that she'd be able to save up that much cash in a month but $30 a week isn't as big a hit even if it costs more overall. That leave her $1755 a month for rent, and hey, that means she can afford a whole 400 square foot apartment in Chinatown. And nothing else. No dinners out, no strings for her guitar, no insurance or registration for her cab, no toothpaste, new clothes, or health insurance. But Phoebe is at least at a net positive of $5 a month (especially since she's got a roommate at least part of the time. Joey, on the other hand, owed Chandler at least $100,000.00 at one point.

And you see the same thing all over the place in movies and TV - In Big Bang Theory Penny, a waitress and sometimes actress, can afford a similar apartment to two PhDs living down the hall from her (plus she spends a lot more money on clothes and hair and makeup stuff than Leonard and Sheldon do); hell even in Twin Peaks Big Ed keeps a nice house on the income from his small service station and the Log Lady has a great cabin and a nice tea set and money to eat at the diner in spite of having no visible means of income. Unless a show is mostly about poverty the writers totally erase poverty.

Anway, Harrison, O'Brien, and Wong make a lot of great points about the same sorts of things and it's well worth a listen.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Cracked Podcasts: Money Myths in Pop Culture
Cracked Articles: 5 Insane things you believe about money (Thanks to the movies)