Black and Blue and White All Over?

 

 

 

Think you are seeing two llamas of differing heights?  Think again.  While we're not saying one llama is blue and one is white...or one is gold and one is black...like that dress...what we are saying is that both llamas are exactly the same size.

"It's an optical illusion" stated Dr. Rafe McPherson of Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  "It's like when our cones and rods can't distinguish what colour that godawful looking dress is which is making the rounds on the Internet.  Whatever colour it is, you can rest assured it's still an ugly dress.  The llamas, on the other hand, are quite the opthalmological enigma.  They look different in size because of the perspective of the camera.  They are, pretty much, give or take an inch or two, the exact same size."

Black or White or Gold or What?

(Llamas - exactly the same height.)

"Our eyes are trained, from an early age, to see things the way the brain wants to perceive them," Todd Renquist of Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, stated.  "Sometimes they are completely wonky and it takes a good whack on the head or a bit of Photoshopping to make one...well, see the light...perspectively speaking."

It is refreshing to know in a world quick to make something go viral that not all things are easily passed around.  The photo known to a select few as "Bob Inhales His Own Phlegm" has been such a secret on the Internet that a Google search doesn't even turn anything up. 

"'Bob Inhales His Own Phlegm' is one of the best kept secrets of both eye specialists and photography, I'm talking serious photography buffs, for about three decades now," Nathan Roberts of the Rotterdam Eye Hospital in the Netherlands, said.  "It's mesmerizing in its own way.  I have a gelfotograf of it in my office and my colleagues often bring by their newest interns to see it.  It's a marvel to behold.  I can't really say anything other than that about it - you really have to SEE it to believe it.  It defies explanation."

So, while the world ponders if it's black or blue or white or gold, keep in mind that phlegm has been every single colour of the rainbow, and then some.