Yanny or Laurel?
Yanny vs. Laurel triggers ear-splitting debate
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The country awoke, Wednesday, May 16th to a rollicking argument over two simple words - Yanny or Laurel? A short audio clip of a computer-generated voice was posted on Reddit. It says the word "Yanny." Or is it "Laurel?" That depends on your ears. Some people hear one, some the other, some hear both. It's the audio version of the great gold/blue dress controversy of 2015. Like Obamacare, millions of people looked at the same thing but saw it differently. Twitter and other social media platforms were battlefields between the forces of Yanny and armies of Laurel.
Talk show host Ellen DeGeneres discussed this issue on her show. "Literally everything at my show just stopped to see if people hear Laurel or Yanny. I hear Laurel," said Ellen.
There's really a non-simple explanation for the phenomenon. It has to do with the frequency, and the amount of bass that's produced by the device you're listening to. It also depends on your ears' particular mechanics and what you're expecting to hear. If you're into things like spectrograms and waveforms, Popular Science offers far more detail on the technical aspects of the controversy.
Wired magazine solved part of the mystery Wednesday when it revealed the origins of the audio recording in question. Katie Hetzel, a freshman at Flowery Branch High School in Georgia, had a question about one of her vocabulary words, "laurel." "She looked it up on Vocabulary.com, and played the audio. Instead of the word in front of her, she heard 'Yanny," Wired reports.
"I asked my friends in my class and we all heard mixed thing," Hetzel told Wired. She posted the audio clip to her Instagram story, another student re-published it as a poll, and then a friend put it on Reddit, thus sparking the nationwide debate.
by: S. Martinez
The Black and Blue, White and Gold Dress
Since early 2015 this dress has been surfing the internet and creating chaos among households. This dress is the magical color changing dress. For some they see white and gold, for others they see black and blue, and the rare bunch that can see both.
What we see has to do with our eyes and how we can see in the dark. If you see black and blue your retina's cones are higher functioning which results in your eyes doing 'subtractive mixing." If you see white and gold your eyes don't work very well in dim light so the retina rods see white maiking them less light sensitive which causes "addictive mixing" of green and red which make gold.