Face in the clouds
Our friends at Fortean Times have posted a bunch of new reader-submitted "simulacra photos." In Fortean terms, simulacra photos depict "spontaneous or natural figures or images. These can occur in nature as well as in the chance conjunction of artefacts." This cloudy face was snapped last winter with a phonecam in Sittingbourne, Kent, England. Link


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There's a face in that?
Someone took too much.
The human brain is an incredible pattern recognition machine - and had been honed by evolution to recognise faces. But sometimes it's a little too eager and produces false positives (hence the man/men in the moon, for example). I can see at least three distinct, humanlike faces in this cloud formation. (One in profile, looking to the right, one chubby childlike face with small eyes looking down and to the left, and another mournful face looking down/right). This is just an artefact of over-powerful pattern recognition algorithms running on insufficient data...and not really newsworthy
- Andrew
The human brain is wired to recognize faces everywhere. There's nothing spookier about this than the face that will spontaneously appear below:
:)
relatedly, here is picture i took of a (fallen) angel of harlem:
http://tinyurl.com/273fkv
I must agree with Andrew and Lars, for I would call this a case of Apophenia, not simulacra.
aloha
psilo
Pareidolia.
Re: Cloud Face
I did a short videoclip called "Faces"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev0y7DMe0ug
Keep trying. This is nonsense.
one word: pareidolia
check these out for more info:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/lenin.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
http://www.answers.com/topic/pareidolia
it's interesting that different groups refer to this phenomenon differently: many in the ghosthunting realm refer to it as "matrixing."
I don't even see a face. Are the holes supposed to be the eyes?
Oh my god, it's Jesus!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Whoa! These links are a trip. I love that BB now has comments. Thank you.
clearly that cloud was intelligently designed.
Kind of looks like Andrei Sakharov...
If someone could bottle that cloud, goldenpalace would be all over that auction.