Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I don’t know what’s worse: people who really think they are seeing skulls on Mars, or people in the media who think this is honestly worth reporting.

C’mon, The Telegraph: srsly? This is news?

I wonder if it’s any better than MSNBC posting a picture of two Mexican wrestlers staring at a griddle they think has the Virgin Mary on it.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Skeptics. Our work will never be done.

And, of course:

Tip o’ the Rorschach blotter to BABloggees Spencer Cunningham and Vernon Balbert.

A woman in South Carolina says she sees Jesus in a piece of toast.

Not wood bark, or an oil stain, or an insect’s carapace, but an actual honest-to-FSM piece of toast. Just like old times.

How refreshing.

So, it looks nothing at all like Jesus to me, certainly less than the Kit Kat of yore. I see Doug Henning. Or maybe Karen Carpenter.

But the thing is… the woman who found Jesus in her toast is, I think, a little optimistic. Because if she flips it over, it ain’t Jesus. Could it be…

SATAN?

Or at the very least, it’s the collective Martian insect soul from the end of "Quatermass and the Pit".

Tip o’ the chef’s hat to BABloggee Seth Hensley. Picture credit: MIKE BONNER/mike.bonner@shj.com

Question for you: which of these two images shows dots that are placed at random, and which does not?

The problem with questions like this is that you already know it’s the one on the left that’s random, and the one on the right isn’t, since you know I’m trying to trick you. But what’s going on?

Our brains love to find patterns in random noise. Look at the clumping of the dots on the left; surely that’s not random? But it is. The distance between dots will average out to some number, but statistically you expect there to be some deviation from that average, so that some dots will be closer together (making clumps) and some farther apart (making voids). That’s what’s happening on the left.

On the right, the random pattern that was generated was modified so that the dots would not be too close together. If a dot’s position was found to be too close to another, its position was redone until it was a minimum distance from all other dots. What’s left is a pattern that we think looks more random, but is in fact highly non-random.

A more detailed explanation of these images is at the blog In The Dark, and he uses it to talk about galaxy distributions. However, it also tells us a lot about our brains. We are instinctively lousy at statistics.

Another great example is this one: imagine you flip a coin ten times, and you keep track. Which of these sequences is more likely?

The answer is they are both exactly as likely. You have a 50/50 shot at a heads or tails on each throw, so any 10-throw sequence is just as likely as any other! But we look at the second sequence and see no information in it. We assume it’s just random, and therefore more likely than a sequence where we perceive there is information, like five heads in a row followed by five tails. But each is just as likely.

We view the entire Universe through our senses, and the data are processed by our brains. This gloppy computer is highly sophisticated, but also highly unreliable to give us unbiased information. We see patterns where they don’t exist, we see cause where they may be none, and we see intent where there may be randomness.

That’s why pareidolia — seeing faces or other familiar objects in random patterns like oil stains, wood grain, and the odd piece of bark of pastry item — cracks me up. The brain of a human will interpret that pattern into something familiar, and if that person is religious, they see a religious icon. But they don’t seem to hang the same connotation on seeing Abe Vigoda in a nebula and Lenin in a shower curtain, or Ben Grimm in a supernova, or any of a hundred examples I can find easily.

You can be fooled. Remember that, always. It pertains to a lot in life, and a lot in the life of an active skeptic. Fooling people is easy. Getting them to see? That’s what’s hard.

Remember that part of the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus said "Blessed are the sweetmakers, for they shall be called the bonbons of God?"

No? Then explain this:

Made. Of. Win.

Or made of sugar, wheat flour, cocoa butter, non-fat milk, chocolate, refined palm kernel oil, lactose, milk fat, soy lecithin, PGPR (emulsifier), yeast, artificial flavor, salt, and sodium bicarbonate.

Either way, that’s awesome. If you don’t see it right away, look closely at the bite mark, or go to the original article and click the picture for a closeup.

So many jokes to make… the Shroud of Chewin’… As a bird that wandereth from her Nestlé, so is a man that wandereth from his place…

Or, maybe, just "Gimme a break!"

Tip o’ the chocolate-smudged wrapper to BABloggee Jimmy Erickson.

I have two faces for you today:

The one on the left is clearly Andre the Giant (which is funny, as the email about it came the day after watching "The Princess Bride". Inconceivable!), and on the right is Mother Teresa, who apparently had work done when this portrait was made. Unless it’s Alfred E. Newman. Hard to say.

Both appear to me to be, as usual, random patterns that look like faces and, also as usual, once you see the face you can’t not see it. Our brains are funny.

Tip o’ the oil stain to Sam Lehman and Elwood Herring, respectively, for sending those to me!

The Pravda — the Russian newspaper whose name translates as "stuff we just make up" — has an article today about a meteorite found in Russia almost a century ago that has an image of Jesus in it.

As you can see, it’s actually not that bad a case of pareidolia. The image on the left is the so-called Shroud of Turin, the long-debunked cloth that people erroneously think has the face of Jesus in it. Right away that gives you a sense of the level of accuracy of the Pravda article (of course, the article in the sidebar with a picture of Viveca Fox in a bikini labeled "The chocolate side of Hollywood" gives you even a better sense of their journalistic integrity).

Anyway, the meteorite is real enough. It fell in eastern Russia in 1916, and is called — and you just simply have to love this — Boguslavka. The total mass that hit was 256 kilos, which is a substantial fall.

It’s a nickle-iron meteorite (and very very pretty!) with what looks to me to be a very tight metallic crystal pattern called the Widmanstätten pattern; some have large structures in them and some very thin ones. You can find this by slicing the meteorite and getting a flat surface which is then washed with a weak solution of nitric acid; the crystal pattern then pops right out. It can also leave other patterns in the surface, which I strongly suspect is what we’re seeing here, as opposed to an image of, say, Jesus.

I have several meteorites myself, and since they tend to have slightly randomized shapes, of course you can see faces and other things in them. One of my favorites is the one shown here, a Sikhote-Alin fragment that also fell in Russia, in 1947. They’re well-known for having a blue-black color on the outside, called the fusion crust, from the heat of blasting through the Earth’s atmosphere. Mine’s about the size of the tip of my thumb, and has a rounded top because it spun as it came in, forming a nosecone or bullet shape. And while it doesn’t look like Jesus, it does bear a strong resemblance to a skull.

And from another angle, well, it looks just like Darth Vader. Some people see their religious icons in random patterns, and some see movie icons. I guess it just depends on how you were raised.

One of my favorite web comics is The Pain– When Will It End? I love the drawing style — it’s sort of a throwback to the 30s, but really it’s because it’s so cynical and beaten down it makes my outlook seem positively optimistic.

Anyway, this week he takes on pareidolia, and it’s pretty funny, though very much NSFW. But here at BA HQ we feel the need to spread the love of all things seeing-faces-in-random-patterns-wise. I’ll need to email him and tell him about my own shower encounter… at least the face he saw was his own. I don’t need dead communists staring at me any more. One is enough.