I couldn’t help but notice this headline on the Drudge Report today:
Here is the actual satellite image of Hurricane #Matthew, as Tweeted by The Weather Channel’s Stu Ostro:
This is a classic case of the human propensity to see faces in things where there aren’t any. For example, the famous “face on Mars”
Above: A 1976 Viking 1 photograph of the Face on Mars. Click here for a 2001 photo from Mars Global Surveyor that reveals the true appearance of the Face.
It has long since been explained as little more than light and shadow: http://science1.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast24may_1/
It is called Pareidolia
Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a stimulus (an image or a sound) wherein the mind perceives a familiar pattern of something where none actually exists. Common examples are perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations, the man in the moon, the moon rabbit, and hidden messages within recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds. – Wikipedia
This is akin to the need for humans to find patterns in data to support beliefs where there aren’t any, it is called Apophenia
Apophenia is the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data. -Wikipedia
This is something we see often in the climate debate. For example, while a nearly 4000 day long major hurricane drought is in progress, eco-activist newspapers are already trying to blame Hurricane Matthew on global warming/climate change.
Color me about as impressed as I am about the face on Mars.
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stressed, burnout.
Some hopes.
Didn’t even pick up a Cuban cigar?
I miss our Old Man of the Mountain
http://wermenh.com/images/oldman.jpeg
Of course sometimes there IS a huge face carved in the rock…
check this out…
http://archaeologyinbulgaria.com/2016/03/27/5000-year-old-prehistoric-rock-shrine-with-huge-human-faces-hewn-in-discovered-in-bulgarias-rhodope-mountains/
The mind sees what it is looking for.
That NASA satellite image of hurricane Matthew looks like Naomi Oreskes
The sad thing is that some people might actually believe this is a sign of the end times. (Yeah, I know, too much Youseless Tubes but some of them are fun to watch and there are, sometimes, actually tidbits of real science behind the outrageous claims. 😉
I predict a Donald Trump meme will shortly appear using this picture, very shortly.
This human tendency to see patterns even where there isn’t any almost certainly has an evolutionary explanation. The evolutionary cost of seeing a lion/leopard/snake etc in the underbrush where there isn’t one is very low, while the cost of not seeing it when it is actually there can be very high. So our pattern-recognition software tends to be somewhat over-enthusiastic.
As a matter of fact the human eye is extremely good at discerning patterns in noisy data, usually much better than computers. This is the basis for using captchas to separate humans from computers.