He would see something familiar in a cloud, the habit of a tree, or a splatter of mud and use it as inspiration for one of his stories. Lloyd loved stories. Growing up, his would make up new stories to tell each other twice a month and, as an adult, he continued the tradition with his own family and the neighborhood kids. I was one one of those kids.
One night both of our families were camped near Two Medicine Lake on a spectacularly clear and dark June night. The mountains cut pitch black outlines into the starry sky with new stars bursting into view as the Earth rotated. So many stars were visible it was difficult to find some of the constellations so Lloyd made up some of his own and started into his storytelling. But two constellations survived - the Big and Little Dippers. They were so well known to everyone that it was difficult seeing something else. My contribution to the evening was pointing out some dark patches in the Milky Way. Like the mountains that seemed to be eating the sky and one looked like a galloping horse - enough to launch Lloyd on one of his ten minute excursions into fantasy.
Pareidolia is something familiar in otherwise unrelated objects. It's seeing the face on the Moon or a bunny rabbit in a cloud. It's a type of apophenia - our tendency to look for patterns in information. Sometimes the patterns are there, often they're not. The trick is to take a critical empirical look at the underlying information. Exactly what is it? How was it measured and what steps were used to interpret it? (this is where machine learning can fail .. it's not just bad data sets).
Let's go back to the constellations - Ursa Major, the Big Dipper, in particular. Early on we learn that, with the help of culture, we're just finding familiar patterns as we connect the dots. Stars are usually at different distances and brightnesses. We're giving up the third dimension. Nothing to see here .. or is there?
For years I considered the constellations to be nothing more than useful human constructions for finding one's way around the sky. Ursa Major turns out to be special when you dig a bit deeper. If you ignore Alkaid, the end of the handle, and Dubhe, the furthest point on the bucket, the remaining stars are all just a bit more than 80 light-years from Earth. They also have the same proper motion - they're moving in the same direction at about the same speed. Use a telescope and look at the distance and proper motion of dimmer stars you find over fifty that make up a physical cluster. Spectroscopically they're very similar. It looks like they were formed from the same dense cloud of gas about a half billion years ago - just after the Cambrian explosion on Earth. With the exception of Alkaid and Dubhe they've moved in a slowly expanding formation and will continue along their way for some time
And for years I thought the grouping must be nothing more than a human construct. A more critical look exposes a richer story.
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