Posts Tagged ‘pareidolia’
When is a leaf not a leaf?
An old riddle, which should be spoken rather than read, asks: when is a door not a door? The answer: when it’s ajar. I don’t have anything as verbally clever as that for you today, but I hope you’ll agree that the natural rock formation above that I found in Springfield Neighborhood Park on April 2nd does look like a dry leaf. I leave it to your imagination if it wants to make something of the natural formation below, which lay a few steps away from the first one.
Also close by, rock layers curved more broadly.
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… The enthusiasm of leftist professors and students for the Islamic Resistance Movement in Gaza is unprecedented in the history of modern leftism. Scepticism and even outright rejection of what Marx called “the opiate of the people” has been a salient theme of leftist sensibilities since the French Revolution. Yet Hamas’s punishing fundamentalism has not deterred the secular American Left from embracing what I have called “fascism with a religious face.” Over the past decade, I have drawn attention to the emergence of the pro-Hamas Left, and to the bizarre fact that secular intellectuals and students are now supporting an organisation that grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood and Nazi collaborators. Today, the Islamisation of the Left has become unignorable on college campuses.
As its foundational Covenant made clear in 1988, Hamas’s reactionary nature lies in a selective reading of Islam’s ancient texts that defines the religion as inherently antisemitic. This interpretation of Islam legitimises Hamas’s religious war to destroy the state of Israel, its rejection of liberal democracy, its use of terror as a political weapon, and its social conservatism that demands the subordination of women and lethal hostility to homosexuality. All of which ought to make Hamas anathema to social progressives on the academic Left. But the enthusiasm with which secular anti-Zionists have rallied to the cause of Hamas’s religious warriors—or at least protected them from criticism—suggests that solidarity in their shared hatred of a common enemy, Israel, supersedes all other political differences.
You can read Jeffrey Herf’s full May 2nd article “Springtime for Sinwar,” whose subtitle is “Notes on the pro-Hamas Left and its antecedents.”
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Cosmic ice
From Bull Creek District Park on January 17th comes this portrait of ice
on the ground that could pass for a view of a nebula with a myriad of stars.
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Sometimes we go to a branch of the Austin Public Library and browse through the DVDs to take out a few that look interesting to each of us, based on what their covers say. So it was three weeks ago, and after we came home I found that Eve had picked a 1954 fictional Japanese movie directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, “Sansho the Bailiff.”
Just the previous day I’d published a commentary lamenting the fact that a seemingly large number of American schoolchildren these days are given the false impression that slavery was a uniquely American institution, whereas the truth is that slavery has been practiced around the world since ancient times and still exists in disconcertingly many places today.
To my surprise, I found out that “Sansho the Bailiff” deals with slavery in medieval Japan. In the film, a mother and her son and daughter get kidnapped by bandits and sold into slavery, with the two children ending up in a slave camp run by the Sansho in the movie’s title. The Independent Movie Database gives the film a viewer rating of 8.4/10, which is about as high as any I’ve ever seen on that website. After watching the movie, I have to say the rating is warranted. If you have the ability to check it out of your library or watch it through a streaming service, or if you’re willing to buy a DVD of it online, it will be well worth your time (even if some scenes are understandably disturbing).
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Icicles, slender branches, and a blob
You’ve already seen how Bull Creek District Park hosted some great icicles on January 17th, the second day in a row when temperatures dipped down into the mid-teens overnight (around -10°C) and stayed below freezing all day. The top picture shows that in one place—just off to the left of the vista you saw last week—some of the icicles intermingled with a dense cluster of slender bare branches hanging downward. On the cliff side of that cluster a long ice blob had developed along the lowest portion of one branch, and the blob’s weight brought it down almost to the ice that covered the rocky ground beneath it. Whether your pareidolia will send you down to a CCC (certain cetaceous creature) remains to be seen.
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Toward the end of each year when I was a teenager I would buy the new edition of the Information Please Almanac and the World Almanac so I could learn lots of interesting facts about the world. The important word in that sentence is facts. You’ve probably heard it said that people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts, the idea being that an objective reality exists. Someone may not like the fact that in arithmetic 3 and 5 add up to 8 rather than to 35 or some other number, but in fact 3 and 5 stubbornly keep adding up to 8 every time, and no amount of complaining or wishful thinking will make that fact any less a fact.
Also a fact is that many people have mistaken notions about certain objective facts. What’s worse than being wrong per se is that those people may adopt worldviews and try to promulgate policies based on incorrect “facts.” Let’s take a case in point, namely a survey that Skeptic carried out in 2020 as part of the Civil Unrest and Presidential Election Study (CUPES). The participants were 980 adults in the United States from the CUPES dataset that reported a consistent political orientation. One question was: “If you had to guess, how many unarmed* Black men were killed by police in 2019?” It was a multiple choice question, with the following choices: A) About 10 B) About 100 C) About 1,000 D) About 10,000 E) More than 10,000. Respondents were asked to pick the choice they felt was closest to the actual number.
Before I give you the results of the survey, take a moment and pick what you think is the most accurate answer. Then follow the arrows down, down, down to find out which answer is correct and what percent of the respondents got it right.
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The Skeptic poll concluded that “The available data on police shootings of unarmed Black men is incomplete; however, existing data indicate that somewhere between 13-27 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. Adjusted for the number of law enforcement agencies that have yet to provide data, this number may be higher, perhaps between 60-100. Yet, over half (53.5%) of those reporting ‘very liberal’ political views estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed Black men were killed, a likely error of at least an order of magnitude.”
An order of magnitude means a factor of 10, so “at least an order of magnitude” means that some “very liberal” respondents overestimated by more than a factor of 10. In fact about 22% of the people who described themselves as very liberal exaggerated by at least a factor of 100. So also did smaller percents of people in all four of the other political groups. In everyday life, exaggerating by a factor of 100 would mean believing that a loaf of bread costs $300, a cat weighs about 900 lbs., and the average human being lives to be 8000 years old.
With so many Americans being wrong—and sometimes wrong by a factor 100!—about the actual number of unarmed black men killed by police each year, how can there be a realistic discussion about policing? The correct answer is that there can’t be. Facts must come first, and policies must follow the facts.
* Just because someone isn’t holding a gun or knife or club doesn’t mean the person isn’t a threat. A large, strong man without a weapon who charges at you could still overwhelm you and either injure or kill you, especially if you’re smaller and weaker, as are most women compared to most men. If a nearby person suddenly charges at you, you have only a few seconds to decide what to do before that person reaches you.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Inland sea oats in a new light
As common a sight as the native grass called inland sea oats (Chasmanthum latifolium) is in the woods of my northwest part of Austin, never had I seen any encased in ice and lit up by a shaft of sunlight the way I did on January 17th in Bull Creek District Park.
Interestingly, several people who looked at this photograph elsewhere said they saw a manger scene. One person described it as “Just… no words!! Yes, Mary kneeling beside Christ’s manger with Joseph looking on. Wow….” Those reactions prompted me to add the “pareidolia” tag to this post.
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Commit yourself irredeemably to the pursuit of personal excellence. Be the very best that you can be. If you do that. . . our color becomes more relevant, because we demonstrate “black is beautiful” not as some slogan, but black is beautiful because of its commitment to personal excellence, which has no color.
Those thoughts are from someone I’d never heard of, Clarence Jones. At age 93, he’s apparently the last living member of the “inner circle” of people who worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Jones even co-wrote some of King’s speeches, including the “I have a dream” speech, though not those famous words.
I found out about the Jones-King collaboration in Francesca Block’s January 14th article “MLK’s Former Speechwriter: ‘We Are Trying to Save the Soul of America,’” whose subtitle is “‘I Have a Dream’ coauthor Clarence Jones on color blindness, Ibram X. Kendi, black-Jewish relations, and why MLK ‘wouldn’t permit what’s going on.’” Here’s another passage from the article:
“Regrettably, some very important parts of his message are not being remembered,” Jones said, referring to King’s belief in “radical nonviolence” and his eagerness to build allies across ethnic lines.
“Put in a more negative way,” he added, King’s messages “have been forgotten.”
And in light of the antisemitism that became blatant after Hamas’s October 7th massacre, there’s this:
Jones is the first to admit King and his circle didn’t change the country on their own.
“As powerful as he was at moving the country, I tell everybody, there’s no way in hell that he or we would have achieved what we achieved without the coalition support of the American Jewish community.”
Jones especially gives credit to Stanley Levinson, who also advised King and helped write his speeches, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched alongside King in Selma, Alabama. He remembers being on the picket lines and talking to Jewish protesters who told him about their own families’ experiences in the Holocaust.
“There would have been no Civil Rights Act of 1964, no Voting Rights Act of 1965, had it not been for the coalition of blacks and Jews that made it happen,” Jones says.
You’re welcome to read the full article.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Still more ice
After spending a total of several hours in the cold and wind at one cliff and then another cliff on the morning of January 16th, I eventually ended up back home for lunch. The meal and being indoors warmed me up, so, duly fortified, in the afternoon I ventured back out into the cold, this time heading for a high embankment along Rain Creek in my Great Hills neighborhood where I’d gotten good icicle pictures in 2022. Impressive icicles had indeed formed again, one example of which you see above.
In addition, the ground offered up its share of little figurines presumably formed
by dripping meltwater that refroze. Birds and a racehorse, anyone?
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Since early December, the end of my 20-year career teaching at Harvard has been the subject of articles, op-eds, tweets from a billionaire, and even a congressional hearing. I have become a poster child for how the growing campus DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—bureaucracies strangle free speech. My ordeal has been used to illustrate the hypocrisy of the assertions by Harvard’s leaders that they honor the robust exchange of challenging ideas.
What happened to me, and others, strongly suggests that these assertions aren’t true—at least, if those ideas oppose campus orthodoxy.
To be a central example of what has gone wrong in higher education feels surreal. If there is any silver lining to losing the career that I found so fulfilling, perhaps it’s that my story will help explain the fear that stalks campuses, a fear that spreads every time someone is punished for their speech.
That’s the beginning of a January 16th article in The Free Press, “Carole Hooven: Why I Left Harvard.” The blurb for it is:”After I stated banal facts about human biology, I found myself caught in a DEI web, without the support to do the job I loved. The only way out was to leave…”
You’re welcome to read the rest of this cautionary tale.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Skyhorse
It occurs to me that this dried-out goldenrod leaf (Solidago sp.) from the Blackland Prairie in Pflugerville on December 17th looks like a seahorse. Blue being a favored color of the sky as well as the sea, I’m calling this seahorse-like leaf a skyhorse.
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© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Decaying prickly pear pad as sculpture
On November 14th I carefully picked up a broken portion of a decaying prickly pear cactus pad (Opuntia engelmannii) and held it up to better see its sculpturality. The “eye” and “beak” give you a head start in unleashing your inner pareidolia, which may of course see things differently.
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“I was talking to a hostage negotiator this morning,” asks [Sky News] host Kay Burley. “He made the comparison between the 50 hostages that Hamas has promised to release, as opposed to the 150 prisoners that are Palestinians that Israel has released. And he made the comparison between the numbers and the fact that ‘Does Israel not think that Palestinian lives are not valued as highly as Israeli lives?’”
At the end of the question, government spokesperson Eylon Levy raises his eyebrows in shock and remains silent for a moment.
“That is an astonishing accusation. If we could release one prisoner for every one hostage, we would obviously do that,” he replies. “We’re operating in horrific circumstances. We’re not choosing to release these prisoners who have blood on their hands. We are talking about people who have been convicted of stabbing and shooting attacks.”
“Notice the question of proportionality doesn’t interest Palestinian supporters when they’re able to get more of their prisoners out. But really, it is outrageous to suggest that the fact that we are willing to release prisoners who are convicted of terrorism offenses, more of them than we are getting our own innocent children back, somehow suggests that we don’t care about Palestinian lives? Really, that’s a disgusting accusation.”
You can read the full Times of Israel article and watch an embedded video of that interchange.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
Longhorn Cavern, part 4
On January 26th we visited Longhorn Cavern State Park, which is about an hour’s drive west of home.
All the pictures here came from my iPhone 14 in raw mode at 48.8 megapixels per image.
Our tour guide surprised me by bringing up the word pareidolia and asking if any of us knew what it meant. It’s been a mainstay in my posts for several years, so naturally I piped up with a definition. The guide said I was only the third person he’d encountered in a tour group who knew it (and of course many of you would have known it, too). The reason he brought up pareidolia is that visitors tend to imagine they see something in several of the Longhorn Cavern formations.
The mass of rock above—found elsewhere in the cavern and moved to this pedestal—strikes many onlookers as a mammal of some sort. I leave the formation below to your imagination. Speak up if you’re so inclined.
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Here are still more quotations from Andrew Doyle‘s 2022 book The New Puritans.
(I’ve retained his British spelling and punctuation.)
This tendency to persist with false convictions even when evidence is produced to contradict them is known as ‘belief perseverance’, and is a recurring trait among ideologues. This applies as much to the student activist who has convinced himself that his university is a hothouse of white supremacy as it does to the soldier in the gulag committing acts of torture on those innocent prisoners who refused to recite the approved creed.
The greatest trick of authoritarians is to convince their subjects to rejoice in their own subjugation.
Claiming to be an ‘anti-fascist’ is rather like wearing a badge saying ‘I am not a paedophile’; it makes others wonder what you’re hiding.
Hysteria is no sound basis for political analysis….
When you ask someone to declare pronouns, you are doing one of two things. You are either saying that you are having trouble identifying this person’s sex, or you are saying that you believe in the notion of gender identity and expect others to do the same. As a species we are very well attuned to recognising the sex of other people, so, for the most part, to ask for pronouns is an expression of fealty to a fashionable ideology, and to set a test for others to do likewise. This is akin to a religious conviction, and we would be rightly appalled if employers were to demand that their staff proclaim their faith in Christ the Saviour or Baal the Canaanite god of fertility before each meeting.
UPDATE: You can read an article about belief perseverance.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
Pareidolia in ice-encased yaupon twigs
On February 2nd, coincidentally our second day in the cold, I went out into the yard with my “real” camera, a macro lens, and a ring flash to see what I could do with the ice-encased yaupon trees, Ilex vomitoria. On the top image’s right side I see the reflections of the light on the ice as Hebrew writing. Perhaps you give a big thumbs up to that. Or maybe you see something in the picture below. Speak your imaginings if you wish.
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It’s a familiar predicament. We are living through a frenzy of conformity, in which the opinions of a minority of activists are falsely presented by the media, political and corporate classes as though they reflect an established consensus. The impact is being felt in all walks of life. For instance, after the seismic events of the summer of 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, an actor friend of mine was contacted by her agency because she had not posted anything on social media in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. She was told that she must do so immediately if she wanted casting directors to consider her for any future roles. I have heard many such anecdotes, but invariably they are communicated privately. There is a strong general feeling that to publicly object to the prevailing dogma is to jeopardise one’s career and social standing. I have lost count of the number of emails from academics, artists and media figures who have contacted me to express sympathy for my criticism of the new puritans, but who admit that they could never endorse my sentiments in public for fear of ‘cancellation’. It is a circular problem that can only possibly be resolved if sufficient numbers speak out.
This is the sad reality of most present-day working environments, where to utter a forbidden opinion, to misspeak, or even to fail to show due fealty to received wisdom can be an impediment to future job prospects. As a former teacher, I am still in contact with ex-colleagues who are troubled by the sudden revisions made to curricula and pastoral policies. Many are being forced to undergo ‘unconscious bias’ training, even though there is overwhelming evidence that such schemes are unreliable and ineffective. To raise a complaint is taken as proof of the kind of prejudice that the tests seek to expose. After all, only a witch would deny the existence of witchcraft.
Many teachers are concerned about how such modifications have been rushed through with little consultation with parents or staff. One teacher told me about a school assembly, conducted over the internet in the early days of the first coronavirus lockdown, in which pupils were berated for their ‘white privilege’. The Reverend Dr Bernard Randall, a school chaplain at Trent College in Derbyshire, told me about training sessions in which staff were instructed to chant ‘smash heteronormativity’, and when he delivered a sermon about the importance of respectfully challenging such ideological viewpoints he was reported to Prevent, the government’s anti-terrorism programme. Other private schools have pledged their fealty to Black Lives Matter, despite the fact that this explicitly anti-capitalist movement objects to their existence and would presumably be happy to see these institutions razed to the ground. In a noble effort to be seen to address injustice, these schools are implementing divisive and contentious theories as though they are irrefutable truths.
Amen to that, which is from Andrew Doyle’s 2022 book The New Puritans.
You’re welcome to read Noel Yaxley’s good review of it.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
Still more and different takes on icicles
Here’s a third installment of portraits that came from nearly four hours of
photographic playing with icicles on the morning of December 25th.
The location was a stretch of cliffs along the main creek in Great Hills Park.
In the odd-numbered pictures I used flash. In the even-numbered photographs natural light had its way with the ice. Each approach had an advantage. Flash allowed for more to stay in focus from front to back. Natural light let the icicles hold on to the colors they picked up from their surroundings.
(Pictures from Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas panhandle will resume next time.)
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Parents in the United States have a strong preference for charter schools, regardless of demographic factors including race, income, geographic region or political affiliation, according to a report released by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
An online survey of some 5,000 parents of schoolchildren revealed that 74 percent would consider sending their child to a charter school if one were available to them. Even among parents who might not choose a charter, 84 percent believe charter schools should be available to others.
Nearly 90 percent of families whose children have switched school types experienced a positive change as a result of the switch, with 57 percent saying their child was happier.
So begins a January 6th story in The Epoch Times. You can read the whole article. One thing I would want to know is how representative the online respondents were of the American population as a whole.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
Portraits of Wildflowers 