poo powder puppy

Here's an odd one. We have 4 cats, one of which loves to throw cat litter everywhere. But when I heard the kicking and went to clean up the mess, there was a freaky little sculpture on the floor. It looked like a puppy (with a broken back leg). Enjoy.

Freaky fungus

Nov. 2008 - Imagine our surprise when raking leaves in the backyard, to find what looked like a tiny dirty skull. Sure, it turned out to be a fat fungus that poofed out spores if we poked it with a stick. It's still pretty creepy.



There's something you (luckily) don't see every day.

Foot Wabbit Fail

We do a lot of our thinking by analogy. So, sometimes this recognition thing works in reverse, and backfires. Here's an odd "mom" thing. A new mom made some little footprints of a two-year-old boy. That would have been quite cute enough. But then someone drew some ears, added googly eyes and cotton balls and called them rabbits. (I'm not kidding. I don't make this stuff up.)



But no. My internal set of rabbit icons said it takes more than that to make something look like a wabbit. So, this is a foot wabbit FAIL.

Now for the Rorschach moment, which happens a lot when things don't look quite right. Let's zoom in.



I see a really angry sock puppet with bulging veins. But that's just me. ;-)

Garden surprise

We have a lot of plants & critters in our garden. The first step outdoors on a given day has a high chance of showing something odd or different. Today it was this poor little dead lizard:



Luckily, it was just a bunch of little twigs and mulch:

Pareidolia - that's the word

There's a technical term for the kind of mistaken identity story we're covering here. I can never remember what it is, but I can always google "jesus toast" and there it is again: Pareidolia. Think of it as the paranormal, but with idols. We're wired to find certain patterns, especially faces and animal shapes, in the choatic world around us. So we'll see faces on toast and silhouettes on shower curtains, when they aren't really there -- it all seems so normal. We're familiar with slips of the tongue. These are "slips of our idols/icons."

Our take is to stay on the light side, and document our own cases where our eyes have triggered a spurious recognition response. Those moments have an odd little jolt to them. A "look at that!" feeling. Still very natural. Pareidolia is the basis of the famous Rorschach test; given a series of blobs, people are epected to see something. Yet it does have a vaguely mystical feel when it happens.

Here's a funny case from the Bad Astronomy website, talking about a naked girl "seen" in Dick Cheney's sunglasses while out fishing. The comments are very illuminating, showing how quickly people will attack each other's beliefs, and how meanly they will defend them. All starting from a case of something that was never there!

This started as a simple blog post. It spun off a long, serious article about the topic, which I hope to find a home for. I'll be sure to link it up if it ever sees print. Meanwhile, enjoy the imaginary naked lady.

Dragonfly twig

Carmen & I went out for a walk, and she stopped short at one point. "Look at that huge dragonfly." But it was just this silly twig. Funny, it even has a segmented abdomen!

Shadow chief

Carmen & I were just relaxing one night with some candles burning, when I looked at the wall and there was a huge shadow of an Indian head. It was a cross between a cigar shop Indian and a Mayan glyph. It was a bit creepy, pulsing as the candle flickered. I had to go look and see what was casting this weird shadow. It turned out it was a stack of CDs which were a bit out of line. The candle below it caught them at just the right angle. With the slightest tinkering, the big spooky head went away. There wasn't enough light for a good photo, but I hope you'll get the picture...

Cloud poodle

Funny how our eyes can see a swarm of shapes and make just one part stand out. There's even a weird "jolt" to it sometimes. Here I just stepped out of the house & my brain said, "Look at that silly poodle!" Emphatically. When I looked at the photo months later, it wasn't nearly as obvious. Lost in the noise, or was it all about living in the moment?

This Figures.

SCV told me last night that he's taken a couple of photos he'd like to start posting again. So, uh, yeah.

It looks like we will be returning you to your previously scheduled blog. I will create a new location for my character biographies and story snippets.

Ad astra per technica,
FF

Green Man

Found this guy in a photo, long after I took it. I thought the shot was interesting at the time, then later didn't think so, then saw it flash by on the screen saver and spotted the little fellow peaking out behind a leaf in the center of the photo. May be that is what made me snap the photo originally.

Timed, Moonlit Shapes

Shapes everywhere, long exposure gave the palm time to jump in the way.

Cotton Tail in the Weeds

This seemed more obvious when looking at it in person. Keep trying, he's there, looking out into the weeds.

Fox Racing to Catch a Train?

If he'd been a rabbit he'd have had a watch and would have know what time it was. Still, I'd give him good odds, especially being able to jump that stand of trees with such clearance.

Rhino Beetle, Timed Exposure

This process produces a bit of noise with this camera, but it came out better than I expected. Now that I look at it again, it looks a bit more like a scorpion.

hungry hungry human

I forgot to each breakfast - the emails kept stacking up, things to do. Then it was 3pm, and I forgot lunch, too. I went outside to check the mail, and there was this huge hungry cloud monster hovering over the house, eating other clouds ...

Escondido, CA 1/19/2006

Sickle of Doom.

It was the first day back to work of the year. In addition to the angle blowing on his trumpet, there was this interesting distortion of a contrail. An auspicious start to a new work year.

Hovering over My Work

Angel or Headless Hymenoptera.

EZ thing

Here's a fun little time series. These things are so fleeting.

It was a little group of clouds, away from all the rest. I walked outside, looked up, and it said "E2C". A while later it looked like "EZ2" or "EZC". By 15:48 it was not EZ2C at all!

Escondido, CA 1/5/2006

AH!

It was a perfect sky for contrails today. About every half hour, a plane comes into Palomar Airport (about 12 miles west of here), and the trails just stacked up.

Later on, they came unraveled in a very interesting, turbulent way:





When I zoomed in on the boxed area, I saw some sign of relief. It says, "AH".





I thought about posting the mirror image, so it would say "HA", but we're both opposed to tampering with the images. Then it becomes too easy.

- Escondido CA, 1/5/2006

Funny. I was just looking at this again, and now I see the date "1954" at the middle of the right edge. - SCV: May 1, 2009

xmas sunset oddity

I was in Phoenix for Xmas. We went for a walk around sunset, and there was a prominent sun dog. Looked like a double sun for a while, a binary star. Cool. When I looked at these photos, I saw something odd ... sleigh tracks running through the sun!

Bigger version viewable here.

Chandler, AZ, 12/25/2005

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In case you couldn't tell, we're having fun here. This is not a serious scientific discussion.