Remember the face on Mars? Turns out that from other angles it doesn't really look like a face....

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A strong myth developed, holding that the Face was an artificial structure built by some ancient civilization. Surrounding pyramids—also just interesting-looking massifs—fueled the myth. Last year, a study helped explain why: People see faces that aren't there—on Mars or in clouds—because we have "over-learned" to recognize the human face.

Do you think he would feel erquired to pay himself for this service?

There's a good chance he's owed that--I'm betting he already fixes his own computer issues.

Humans? Over-recognising the human face? Now there's a shocker.

It was either Bevis or Butthead who said, "If I had boobs like that, I'd never leave the house."

(Or it's possible I'm conflating the quote with something else.)

It's possible, as I DEFINITELY remember them making a comment like that wrt a (Marilyn Manson?) vidoe where they showed a stop-motion arm going up and down at high-speed, and how "If I could do that, I'd never leave the house." However, I wouldn't put it past Mike Judge to re-use a joke that good though.

Yeah. Maybe the boobs quote was "...I'd spend the whole day in front of the mirror."

Sometimes I wish I could borrow ita's ability for cool reason sans my rage. I realized I can't make a rational argument about gender differences/scientific abilities/math/Larry Summers without going to a rage place. It's no good for debate.

I'm becoming convinced that I never should have quit my soul-sucking job to move to Chicago, because apparently, no one wants to hire me here.

There was a comedian years ago, and I can't remember his name, but I saw him live, who made a comment about oral sex, and if men could do it, they'd never leave the house.

It's the sort of joke that finds its way into a lot of different venues, though. Last season on Veronica Mars, * Logan Echolls sent Dick Casablancas to buy some drugs from the PCHers (a local gang) as part of his plan to figure out who might be framing him. When Dick returned to Logan, he made a quip about a PCHer suggesting he perform intercourse on his own person, and Logan's reply was a riff on the same joke. "Doesn't he understand? If you could do that, you'd never come to school." Logan's not really a Beavis or Butthead type, but Dick could be their bastard child who lucked into a lot of money. *

shrift, you have a soul now. Unsucked. The rest will happen.

Ack shrift, I'm sorry the job situation is not going well. I wish I knew somebody in Chicago who could help.

I'd like to vote no on making Chavez an honorary Buffistas. He is too authoritarian, has accomplished little against poverty in Venezuela depite his rhetoric, and had a questionable election. Also, I'm not a Bush fan, but I don't like Chavez's over the top accusations and general anti-American stance.

Humans? Over-recognising the human face? Now there's a shocker.

Speaking of which....

Often times skeptics talk about people who have paranormal beliefs as seeing patterns that aren't necessarily there. We even have a word for it, pareidolia (which I invariably have to look up the spelling for). This seems to make sense because our neocortex is an incredibly powerful pattern matching engine. So if some people see patterns more easily in vague or obscure stimuli then that implies there is something different going on in their brains.

This 2002 article from New Scientist magazine reports on research conducted by Dr. Peter Brugger at University Hospital in Zurich. Using a group of 20 self-described "believers" (I wonder exactly what they believed in) and 20 self-described skeptics he asked each group to distinguish between scrambled images of faces and images of actual faces flashed upon a screen. A second trial asked the two groups to tell real words from nonsense words. As you might expect, the believers were much more likely to see a face or a word where there wasn't one.

Both groups were then given L-DOPA to increase the levels of dopamine in their brains (L-DOPA is a synthetic precursor to dopamine and is able to cross the blood-brain barrier). This led to both groups making more errors, but it also led to the skeptics being more likely to see the scrambled faces and words as real. Interestingly, the increased levels of dopamine in the believer's brains did not seem to increase the likelihood of their interpreting the spurious data as real which might mean there is a threshold above which more dopamine does not make a difference.

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