Add Homonym Attacks! #37
Ad Hominem: Appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason.
Ad Hominem Attack: An argument that focuses on a personal attack as opposed to the subject in question.
Add Homonym Attacks!: The process by which one inserts a homophone and it bites you.
(It also serves as the title to Inside Pulse Beyond the Threshold’s representative column in the world of Critical Thinking, Science and Skepticism.)
It’s a face!
I recently watched the Penn and Teller Bullshit! about signs from God. If you haven’t seen the episode, in it a woman sees the knots on her wooden door as “God’s eyes” watchin over her. People go over to her house, and pray towards her door.
The same episode also visits the woman who grilled a cheese sandwich that held a passing resemblance to the Virgin Mary.
You remember that right?
Is that really Mary though? I kinda see Annie Lennox, myself.
Let’s use MyHeritage.com.
After uploading the photo, MyHeritage.com didn’t recognize any faces in the photo. After manually telling them where the face was, I got … No matches. Repeatedly. It wouldn’t read the grill cheese as a face.
Mind you, this is a system that says I bear a passing resemblance to Fiona Apple.
Well that was frustrating. What about the old face in Mars?
You know?
Of course, we’ve since taken better pictures, and the New Face looks more like:
(Shamelessly stolen from Skepdic.com. Check out that site, and maybe they won’t yell at me.)
Looks more like a pop tab, doesn’t it? Well, let’s use the old face. Maybe the facial recognition software will see somebody there.
Nope no dice.
So maybe it’s just people. Really, no machine can match a human being in the ability to recognize a human face. Almost from birth, the average person reads other human faces daily. Couple that with millions of years of evolution honing the skill, and it’s quite a formidable talent.
But as we say almost weekly here, in evolution we get rewarded for the right answers, but not always punished for wrong answers.
In fact, human being can see faces just about everywhere. Here is an experiment, that I first saw in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.
Step 1: Have somebody draw any random closed shape. Say-
Now, we can turn this, or any other such random closed shape into something that resembles a face.
How?
Well, all we have to do is add an eye.
Go ahead.
Draw your shape, and add an eye.
I’ll wait.
Here’s mine. I rotated it for dramatic effect.
Hello! Lalala.
Now, is this thing merely a trick of the brain, or some sort of sign from a higher power. Bear in mind that in my example the higher power looks to be Jay Leno.
