" The new images of the Face at Cydonia Mensa confirm eyes, nose, mouth, helmet structure with additional detail of nostrils and helmet ornaments being clearly seen in new images with details at approximately 1/10 scale of the face. New imagery confirms the pyramid structure seen in Viking images of the The D&M pyramid and new high resolution images show evidence of collapsed brickwork. New images of a face found at Galaxias Chaos (the Utopia site) confirms facial structure with eyes, nose, mouth and helmet. High resolution imagery shows symmetric brickwork around the nose region. The civilization appears to have been primitive and indigenous to Mars. Taken together, the evidence suggests that Mars was the locale of a planetary nuclear massacre."

John E.Brandenburg

https://www.tsijournals.com/abstract/evidence-of-massive-the...

That's some industrial grade apophenia, pareidolia, and good old fashioned cognitive dissonance. The MSSS imagery makes it very plane that the Cydonian face is just a hill. But no, they put some white arrows pointing to nothing and claim it's evidence of a made up thing.

> That's some industrial grade apophenia

In this case, that's some industrial grade bullshit !

Then let's make some industrial grade apophenia machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xOGeZt71sg

https://youtu.be/0Y8v3X6Oft4

I'd be really interested in generating on the fly numerical apophenia like those. In fact I dabbled into doing exactly that using GPT to code a python script. I ran L-BFGS-B on a unit pyramid to optimize its basic dimensions (height, base-length, set to 1 initially) so that it matches the pyramid equations [1]. As a result I get the pyramid's actual dimensions. My synthetic pyramid is slightly better than the actual pyramid when it comes to matching the "pyramid equations". I know this is tautological, yet when I observe the actual pyramid dimensions and where it fits on the gradient magnitude graph my script[2] provides, it falls right when the gradient becomes almost flat. That made me want to explore further, and I attempted to come up with my own crackpot equations using symbolic regression/genetic programming[3]. The ultimate goal: a VR app, let's call it the "conspiracy lens".

[1]https://tobeornottobe.org/the-great-pyramid-intro/math-const...

[2]https://pastebin.com/TsUtcWAa

[3]https://pastebin.com/9CEU76K6

There's a field studying this kind of stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_theory

And look what I found: https://journals.openedition.org/tipa/3068 – Louis de Saussure & Tim Wharton, 2019

Seems like the de Saussure family still has a very robust scientific tradition. The most famous of the de Saussure, Ferdinand, founder of synchronic linguistics, got trapped into an apophenia trap with his theory of "hypograms" underlying saturnian verses. More at https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016-0158...