Apophenia (redux)

A commentator (Merkin) on my previous post asks...

Am I really ill?
That graphic of the exclusion zones showed a prick and ball in the middle.




The answer is, I think, no

I don't think that Apophenia, the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data, can be considered an illness as such. After all, who's to say that the data, certainly without further investigation, really is random or meaningless?

Take the work of twisted, and unfortunately psychotic, genius Luke Halder for example. He really was trying to paint a smiley face across America with pipe bombs...




...and if you had been an FBI agent clever enough to spot what Luke was up to you would have won a prize and not been considered mental at all

(PS you can track Lucas' whereabouts with the useful, if slightly disturbing, Federal Bureau of Prisons - 'Find an Inmate' service)

And returning to the example of DEFRA FMV Protection Zones, I too must confess that I was reminded of a picture of Michelin Man that adorned the common room in my old geology department which had been 'enhanced' by a bored Earth Sciences student armed with a bottle of Tippex...




Phallophenia?

.