Is it a tiger? Or not? Better play safe...

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From Scientific American
Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news? [...] UFOlogists see a face on Mars. Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. Paranormalists hear dead people speaking to them through a radio receiver. Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. Is there a deeper ultimate cause for why people believe such weird things?
It turns out, there is. Its a neurological feature called Patternicity, where random events end up forming patterns - at least, patterns as far as we puny humans are concerned.  Humans, as it turns out, are really, really good at detecting patterns in white noise.
This actually makes a tremendous amount of sense - in a world where survival was predicated upon differentiating - successfully - between stripy shadows and tiger stripes, it was waay more effective to mistakenly assume that the stripy shadows were a tiger, than to end up as Yummy Lunch for said tiger.

The problem, however, is when people actually believe in the stripes, and spend vast sums of money on "proving" the 9/11 conspiracy, or go to psychics every other day, etc.

The bottom line - don't be a sucker.  Check it out on Snopes first...

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