It’s 5 or so in the morning right now, and Alex has gotten me up with the sound of soft clattering in the living room. He’s digging through a box of plastic animals. Sometimes he wants to set them all up in rows, but often he just wants to dump them out on the floor to know they’re there. It works out good for me, too, as nothing wakes you up like driving the snout of a hard plastic big into the bottom of your foot at 5 in the morning.

Three lions ranging in length from two inches to six; …read more

Patternicity.
It’s a term that refers to “the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise,” as noted by Michael Shermer in the November Scientific American:
Traditionally, scientists have treated patternicity as an error in cognition. A type I error, or a false positive, is believing something is real when it is not (finding a nonexistent pattern). A type II error, or a false negative, is not believing something is real when it is (not recognizing a real pattern—call it “apatternicity”).
However, as Shermer notes, we don’t have a “Baloney Detection Network in the brain to distinguish between true and false patterns”—-patternicity does …read more