Haunted mountain

Three more days before Solstice; then the days start getting longer again. I'll be glad to see daylight on our way home before supper time. Still, the low-lying sun does produce some interesting views.

Here's Mount Baker, usually so smooth and white in the distance, now, just before 4 PM, draped in long shadows and ringed with spiky, jagged rocks, tinted pink.

And poor old Mount Baker; he's haunted! I was looking for a heart for Clytie, and instead, I found a dozen faces peering at me out of the snow. How many do you see?

A Skywatch post.

What do you see here?

From time to time, we find unexpected faces peering at us from clouds, from puddles and leaf patterns, from rocks and lichen.

(I have blogged before about some of these: see the Jesus rock, an alien spaceship, and quite a few more.)

A couple of weeks ago, I almost stepped on this figure on the beach. I see a pilgrim; hooded, bearded, in a long traveler's robe, leaning on a sturdy walking stick.


A sign? A talisman for the long road ahead? A visitation? A wandering monk? A Saint of some stripe? A wizard strayed from the LOTR? A figure for a Nativity scene? Good old Joseph himself? Or a Buddhist arhat?

Should I put him on a high shelf and light candles to him, bring him fruit and flowers, or just rub his hood for luck?

Ah, me! For those actions to bring any benefit, one must believe. And I don't. I think it's a piece of driftwood, molded by waves and rocks, turned into a pattern by my meddling brain. Pareidolia, they call it. I'm out of luck.

So I'm happy to have met him, and he can sit on my table for a while and later go to join the oddities on my shelves. But I won't light candles for him.

Here's another face I found. This one, I couldn't bring home. It was a water stain on the ceiling tiles of a coffee shop washroom. Luckily, my camera rides comfortably in my purse.


A girls face in pink and brown. Lots of hair floating in the breeze. Just the thing for a ladies' washroom!

Pareidolia, continued

Part II of 4: Part I, Part III, Part IV .

A few weeks ago, the Mungers at Cognitive Daily explored the question, "Why is it that people seem to see faces so many places that there aren't actually faces?" They discussed the work of Pawan Sinha on developing computer models for face recognition.

It seems that we need very few clues to identify a face. (I would even extend that to a body part; a foot extending beyond a parked car in the lot, for example. Often, on the basis of that alone, we deduce age bracket, sex, direction, and decide whether or not to brake.) Dr. Sinha was experimenting with photos of 12 by 15 pixels only; Cognitive Daily went on to do an online survey with photos down to 6 by 7 pixels.

Go look them over and test yourself on their photos, here, here and here: you will be amazed!

Hint: many of these photos are nothing but a blur from close up. But walk across the room, and look. Even though they are much tinier at that distance, they usually resolve perfectly into clear images.

Does this have a bearing on why we see faces in random patterns?

And here are another couple of photos where we see faces. A puddle on the roadway and a rotting stump in Watershed Park.

(Laurie sees different faces than the ones I see. What do you see? Walk across the room; do the faces appear or change?)

More tomorrow.