Pareidolia – Seeing Things That Aren’t There

Show a fellow human being a picture of two dots and a curved line, and he’s going to interpret it as a human face.
– Summer Beretsky, PsychCentral –

If you imagine you can see faces or characters in clouds, the moon, a tree, a flower or rock formations – you are experiencing a psychological phenomenon called Pareidolia. Seeing patterns in random data can also include hearing things (such as the urban legend of a message when the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever” is played backwards). I hear a word being repeated over and over in the ticking of a loud clock on my wall…

Pareidolia may also explain UFO, Loch Ness Monster or Elvis sightings. The Rorschach inkblot test uses the phenomenon to gain insight into a person’s mental state.

I document my Pareidolia when I take pictures:

A derelict house – I see a sad face under the curve of the roof on the right side of the photo.

At Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico. This pair of rocks looked human like to me.

A home in Bourton-on-Water, England. Precisely trimmed hair frames a pair of close set eyes. The ‘X’s are a twirled mustache. The upper half of the door is a toothy mouth.

No need to explain this pansy face!

I remember drawing houses like this when I was a child:

Grand childs drawing of the Red House. She emphasized the ‘faceness’ by drawing eyebrows on the roof.

One place where this (pareidolia) commonly happens is with cars: the headlights become eyes, the grille becomes a mouth (possibly nostrils or a mustache if split), the logo becomes a nose, etc.
– Tyler Duffy, Gear Patrol, 2020 –

“The original PT Cruiser made some interesting design choices. One of them was the grille below the bumper, which resembles a grin that says, “I just raided the Monopoly bank while you were using the restroom.”
– Tyler Duffy, Gear Patrol, 2020 –

The logical (to me) next step is to add faces where there are none!

I  photoshopped these taco chips for my post Best Puns Ever – Let’s Taco ’bout Them

One Last Story

The Car Guy was in a motorcycle accident in 2012. He had a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). There were certainly some interesting and even amusing moments during his recovery. For the first few months, he was unable to retain memories, but more spectacularly – sometimes he saw people that the rest of us couldn’t see!

One afternoon he woke up after a nap in the Guest Room at the Cabin and announced there were puppy faces on the ceiling over the bed. This was a new hallucination. He insisted I come and look. I stretched out on the bed and looked up at the wood paneled ceiling.

“See – there.” He pointed at the wood grain knots and swirls. “Two eyes and a nose. And over there. Two eyes, a nose and ears. And another one over there!”

Relief – yes, I could see puppy faces in the knots and swirls too! Then – I thought about all the people who had slept in that bed, but had never mentioned seeing puppy faces! It takes a certain freedom of thought, I guess, to see things like that.

Do you experience Pareidolia?

More about this phenomenon: Why People See Faces When There Are None: Pareidolia

Picture Perfect Flowers – Anticipation

Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.
– A. A. Milne –

In a month or two, my flower beds should look like this…

One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides.
– W. E. Johns –

Before that, though, there will be lots of non-gardening weather…

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
– John Ruskin –

which gives me sufficient time to put the photo through my filter factory.

A Digital Marble

Topaz Studio Fantasy Filter

Topaz Studio Impasto Filter

Topaz Studio Quad Tone filter

A Spanish magician prepares the audience for his final trick…
He yells “UNO!”
The crowd falls silent in anticipation.
“DOS!”
Everyone’s eyes are wide, laser focused on the performer.
Then, the magician vanishes… without a tres.
– Author Unknown –

What are you looking forward to in the next few months?

Digital Marble – Desert Chicory

I was going to do a blog post called ‘Circle Quotations’‘ but funny or interesting quotes about a mathematical concept are few and far between. Then I found this one-

Why is a polar bear never lost in the Arctic Circle?
Because it uses Polar Coordinates.

I think you have to be a math person to appreciate the wit, and that isn’t normally me, except I know that the ‘Digital Marbles’ I make in my photo program use a polar coordinate filter to turn square photos into circles.

I don’t know how the polar coordinate  filter works, but I like the result. The circles remind me of the marbles I played with as a child.

Are you old enough to remember when marbles and jacks were popular games? How about skipping and hop scotch; tag, hide and seek, leap frog, and yo-yos? Hula hoops! In the winter, fox and hounds, red rover (skating version), crack the whip, snowball fights and tobogganing!

I made the following two ‘marbles’ from photos of Desert Chicory.

How many degrees does a circle have?
Depends on how long it’s been in school.
-Author Unknown –

These is the original photo. Desert Chicory is a wild flower growing in Arizona.

 

Here are some of the other ‘marbles’ I’ve made:

Red Lily Beetle Invades Alberta

Red Lily Beetle

I normally do not use pesticides at my place. I’m fairly tolerant of anything Mother Nature invites into my back yard. So, in 2011, when some pretty, bright red, unspotted beetles showed up on my lilies, I welcomed them. There was no question that their intent was to eat the lily leaves, but I had lots of lilies, so I was content to let them graze. I was confident Mother Nature would send in some troops to keep the beetles in check. That was the first year.

The second year, the beetle numbers had multiplied. Their offspring were disgusting, gooey things. By the time my lilies started to bloom, there was not much left of them to bloom. I searched the internet, and discovered unsettling information about this red lily beetle. It is very hardy, isn’t bothered much by chemical warfare, and has no natural enemies in my part of the world.

Many gardeners have apparently torn out their lily beds, rather than try to control the beetle. I decided to embark on a process of elimination, armed with a bucket of soapy water, a pair of forceps, and a stiff sheet of white paper. I started as soon as my lilies poked their heads out of the ground. Every morning I would inspect the leaves carefully. When I found a beetle, I would capture it and throw it in the bucket of soapy water. I’d read that the beetle is a very strong flier, but can’t swim. I have confirmed the swimming part of this information. Not a single one of the beetles survived.

Orange Lily

You are probably wondering what I used the forceps and the paper for. The forceps were very handy for plucking the beetle out of hard to reach places. The paper was to foil one of the beetles other skills – invisibility. When the beetle senses danger, it drops off  the plant onto the ground. It lands on its back, where it lies quite still. The underside of its body is dirt color… so I would position the sheet of paper under the plant so that the beetle would drop on the paper instead of the dirt. The beetle was no longer invisible!

During the height of the beetle season, before they started to lay eggs, I increased my lily inspection to two or three times a day. Eventually I ran out of bugs to catch, and I did not see a single one of the disgusting larvae. I was cautiously optimistic that there were no more red lily beetles in my yard – for that year, anyway. I had every reason to expect a glorious display of lily blooms that year. And I would have if the hail hadn’t got them…

The Lily Beetles returned. In the spring of 2015 I gave up the fight. I started to remove all my lilies except one – the White Trumpet Lily.

White Trumpet Lily

Removing some types of lilies is as difficult a task as removing the Lily Beetle. The orange lilies produce lots of little bulblets that are easy to overlook when the parent bulbs are removed. In other words, the lilies keep coming back, no matter how often I remove them. I’ve given up trying. If the lilies and the lily beetle can reach some sort of détente, who am I to interfere?

Detente – isn’t that what a farmer has with his turkey – until Thanksgiving?
– Ronald Reagan –

Chaos in the Garden

This is one of my flower beds. It has been over 20 years in the making. In that time, a small tree grew – casting more and more deep shade. The plants that liked sun weren’t so happy about this. Some died – I thought. So I planted others, only to have the dead sometimes reappear (yes, tulips, I’m talking about you and your splashes of red in a bed that once was yellow, blue and purple!)

This year I gave up on order and accepted plant Chaos. Even chaos will take time, though. There are bare spots where some things, like my bleeding hearts, all died this past winter. As George W. Bush said:

Topaz Studio filter “Ghost Town”

What George Bush actually said was “…And, you know, it’ll take time to restore chaos and order – order out of chaos. But we will.” Some media outlets shortened the quote to “It will take time to restore chaos” which triggered the usual crowd to make fun of him – but I think the shortened quote perfectly describes my new gardening mantra.

Topaz Studio filter “HDR”

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
– Henry Adams –

Topaz Studio filter “Rock”

Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.
– Terence McKenna –

Topaz Studio filter “3D Sketch”

Chaos is not the lack of order, it is merely the absence of order, that the observer is used to.
– Mamur Mustapha –

Topaz Studio filter “Abstract”

All of these photos were altered with Topaz Studio filters.

What say you – which photo is most chaotic?

Red Poppies – Filters

How does the colour red make you feel?
Do you wear red clothes?
Do you decorate with red?
Do you drive a red car?
Do birds poop more on red cars than other colour cars?
Do you have red hair? (Apparently only about 2% of people are redheaded).
How many red flowers are in your garden? (I don’t have that many at the Red House. Tulips and poppies, mostly. At the Bland Beige House, I have Valentine’s bushes, bottlebrushes and fairy dusters.)

Topaz Studio Impasto Filter

Topaz Studio Pen Ink Filter

Red Poppies original photo

Springtime Blooms – Arizona and Alberta

My Place in the World is in the Garden, with my camera, then at my computer – turning photographs into digital art.

Olneya tesota – Ironwood tree – Impasto filter

Carnegiea gigantea – Saguaro Cactus – Cartoon filter

Opuntia – Prickly Pear Cactus – Pointilism filter

Trichocereus candicans – Argentine Giant – ‘Fine Wine’ filter

Puschkinia libanotica – Striped Squill – Color Grunge filter

Scilla siberica – Siberian Squill – Radiance filter

Forsythia Northern Gold – Texture Impression filter

All photo filters were applied in the program Topaz Studio.

 

Red Roses in a White Vase

This simple bouquet of two roses and some baby’s breath will last forever (or until it gets so dusty the roses don’t look red any longer) because I dried the roses by hanging them upside down in a cool spot for several months.

After I took the photo, I tried a few filters in the Topaz Studio program which is a free download.

Roses are angiosperms,
Violets are, too.
Sugar is C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁
We know this from peer review.
– Author Unknown –

Impasto filter

Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
Some poems rhyme,
Some don’t.
– Author Unknown –

Pointillism filter

Roses are red and violets are purple
Sugar is sweet and so is maple surple.
– Roger Miller –

Textured impressionist filter

Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Please flush the toilet
after you’re through.
– Author Unknown –

‘Fine Wine’ filter

Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Please don’t kiss me,
‘cuz I have the flu.
– Author Unknown –

Original photo

Springtime Blooms – Arizona and Alberta

My Place in the World is in the Garden with my camera!

The best part about living part time in Arizona is that I get to experience spring twice! In April, when Alberta might still be experiencing snow storms, our Arizona home is at the height of spring blooming!

Olneya tesota – Ironwood tree

We have a large old Ironwood tree on our property. It is estimated that these trees can live for hundreds and hundreds of years. It sheds its leaves annually just before it blooms. The flowers are pea like (because it is a member of that family) and the entire tree becomes a dusky pink colour during full bloom.

Carnegiea gigantea – Saguaro Cactus

The Ironwood often serves as a backdrop to the giant Saguaro cactus. The Saguaro can live for 150 to 200 years and it can grow 40 to 60 ft tall (12 to 18 meters). It is very slow growing and can be decades old before it sprouts arms or blooms.

Opuntia – Prickly Pear Cactus

The Prickly Pear cactus is the ‘rat’ of the neighbourhood for the simple reason that the resident rodents live in holes under the prickly shelter of this plant. We have a large specimen that isn’t actually on our property, but it thinks it should be. We have to carefully ‘prune’ it off our property every few years.

Trichocereus candicans – Argentine Giant

My favourite cactus is the Argentine Giant. It is a common enough looking cactus with multiple stems up to 24 inches (60 cm) tall. The wow factor is when it blooms. The white flowers can be 6 to 8 inches across (15 to 20 cm). The flowers come out at night, and only last about 24 hours.

A week after my Argentine Giant bloomed, I was back in Alberta where an extremely long and cold winter had finally ended. The last of the snow had just melted, and the earth quickly exploded with greenery.

Puschkinia libanotica – Striped Squill

The first flower to bloom was the Striped Squill, a starry pale blue and white flower that is only about 4 inches (10 cm) tall.

Scilla siberica – Siberian Squill

Another squill, the Siberian Squill, mingles with the Striped ones. Neither Squill seem anxious to expand their territory much, but they might simply be unable to compete with the other residents in that location – the prolific Grape hyacinths (Muscari).

Forsythia Northern Gold

The only other flower blooming right now is a bush – the Forsythia Northern Gold. I’m expecting great things from this fast growing bush. In addition to spectacular early blooms, it should help a lot with the task of masking the silvery wall of The Car Guy’s new quonset metal garage.

What blooms in your part of the world each spring?

Digital Marble – The Hay Field Flowers

Original photo

I decided to try an HDR technique to add more “dynamic range” (the ratio of light to dark) to the photo. I used a program called Topaz Studio and applied one of their filters to add the increased depth I was looking for. (Have you test driven Topaz Studio yet?)

Then I tried another filter – the field rendered as a drawing!

Back in GIMP (my standard editing program) I cropped the photo into a square, and applied the Darla Amazing Circle filter.