My pareidolia knows no bounds.

Fred pointed me to an interesting reference to pareidolia (all) at www.yoism.org/ . I found the following section on "Synchronicity and Littlewood's Law" to be most interesting. In essence, one might call this the "Mathematical Basis for Pareidolic Miracles":

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Synchronicity and Littlewood's Law

The phenomena of pareidolia and the pseudo-miracles it presents are closely paralleled by the seemingly significant events of synchronicity that suggest an acausal meaningful connection between events. For example, a phone rings while you are thinking of a friend whom you haven't spoken to in a year or more. You pick up the phone and it's your friend. In Carl Jung's synchronicity theory, this is a meaningful occurrence that operates outside of the causal structure of events and the improbability of such events provides evidence that, to a significant degree, the universe is organized by patterns of meaning and not physical causality.
Synchronicity theory, however, is dealt a fatal blow by Saint Johns Law, otherwise known as Littlewoods Law. Littlewood, a mathematician, defined a miracle as an exceptional event of special significance occurring at a frequency of one in a million. He then assumed that during the hours in which a human is awake and alert, a human will see or hear one "event" per second, which may be either exceptional or unexceptional. Additionally, Littlewood supposed that a human is alert for about eight hours per day.

Here we would have to add a caveat or a modification to the mathematical calculation underlying Littlewood's Law. Eight hours a day is in all likelihood a significant underestimate; people may not be functioning on all cylinders for more than eight hours per day, but that doesnt mean that they are only aware of events for that amount of time. Consider a cocktail party in which there is a cacophony of random noise that you are not paying attention to and are only minimally aware of as you engage in conversation with the person in front of you. Yet, if someone says your name on the other side of the room, it would not be surprising if you perked up and took notice. What that means is that even though apparently not paying attention, your awake brain for 14 to 18 hours/day is actually processing and discarding untold numbers of bits of sensory information and when something of significance occurs, it brings the information into full conscious awareness.

In any case, Littlewoods eight hour assumption just makes his argument stronger. According to Littlewoods calculations, in 35 days, a human will have experienced about one million events. Accepting his definition of a miracle, one can expect to observe one miraculous event for every 35 days' time, on average, and therefore, according to this reasoning, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace.

This is essentially the same analysis that one should apply to the uncanny "miracles" of pareidolia.</i><hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

rd

rd:
May I have you permission to pass the contents of your May 18 post, above, to a friend of mine? It is Mark Grant, author of A Tale of Two Synchronicities (see Amazon.com).

Jim Shand

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by shando</i>
<br />rd:
May I have you permission to pass the contents of your May 18 post, above, to a friend of mine? It is Mark Grant, author of A Tale of Two Synchronicities (see Amazon.com).

Jim Shand

<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Yes, by all means. Sorry it took me so long, I've been very busy.

rd

Here's a sample image of Madrid by DigitalGlobe. This was taken at 30cm/pixel, but the US Government made them resample to 40cm/p for now as a temporary security measure.

Note the fine detail of the city? Well the HiRise images at 25cm/pixel, meaning if the HiRise took this same scene <b>it would be even clearer.</b>

What does that mean? It means if there were anything worth seeing on Mars (artificial-like) we'd be seeing it quite easily, instead of spending hours squinting at the kind of stuff that's been posted for 8 years or so.

I rest my case. There are no artifacts on Mars, because if there were, we'd have thousands of images of them, analogous to this:



rd

Good point, Richard. Thanks.

Of course, a shovel or especially a paint brush or a screw driver or a needle would still escape our attempts to discover them.

So, there is still room for hope for those of us in the "look at what the Martians built" camp.

***

Boots (or tires) on the ground.

We cannot eradicate ISIS (ISIL, the Islamic State, the Islamic Caliphate, whatever), nor can we understand Mars, without sending people there.

Our machines are good. Really good. But not that good.

LB

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Larry Burford</i>
<br />Of course, a shovel or especially a paint brush or a screw driver or a needle would still escape our attempts to discover them.

So, there is still room for hope for those of us in the "look at what the Martians built" camp.

***
Our machines are good. Really good. But not that good.
LB
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Very true. There are things we won't see until we go there. As a matter of fact, if Professor Levasseur is right, even if there are artifacts all over the place, they will have been bombarded and etched away for countless millions of years, making a close up inspection next to useless. Sort of like looking at a da Vinci painting under a microscope.

Although, too many of these theories are just a bit too convenient for my tastes. But my main point is that there's no reason to squint. Either we see it, or we don't. And mostly we don't.

By the way Larry, did you see the new reports about "water everywhere" on Mars?

rd