Hwt by Any Other Name…

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

Juliet, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Actually, names can have considerable significance. Consider the consequences of profanity when compared to euphemism, whose entire purpose is to express the same meaning without offense. However, words and meaning cannot exist without each other. If they did, hwt would be nothing but grunts and growls. Of course, without knowledge of the hwt, we are all just grunting and growling…

Pareidolia

Are you looking for hwt in all the wrong places? Or, are you finding hwt when it isn’t really there? Remember, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after hwt!

Pareidolia is the phenomenon in which shapes, images, words, or discernible patterns are gleaned from the random or the nebulous. This phenomenon is not limited to one time period or group of people. In fact, the effect has been noticed throughout history and transcends cultural and societal boundaries as a legitimate psychological mechanism associated with how information is filtered, processed, assimilated, and most importantly, discerned.

One of the most famous techniques for observing pareidolia is the Rorschach test. By subjecting symmetrical patterns or randomly stained pages, a Rorschach test appears to illustrate something that can be recognized, when it is completely original and new to the observer. Despite the objects novelty, the observer’s brain attempts to categorize and identify the object based on the objects shape as it corresponds to its closest matching shape.

Other examples of hwt’s subliminal power can be found in identifying animals and people in the shapes of clouds, seeing famous people (or cats) from history on food, or trying to find depth in a Pauly Shore movie (buuuuuuuddy).

Wherever and whenever hwt is sighted, it is important to consider how easy it is to be fooled.

The Phi Effect

While π is certainly the most famous symbol is hwt math, no other mathematical concept is more significant human perception than phi. In fact, this symbol represents (you guessed it) a pattern that seems to be found in the chaos of the world.

One of the first attempts to construct a hwt detector was the phenakistoscope. The device’s principle was simple – vision relies on the persistence of light. The persistence of light on specific media would allow for hwt absorption. Essentially, the human eye processes light at a certain speed and senses movement or changes in the persistence of light based on its ability to process light.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t until the development of the zoetrope that the failure to capture hwt was discovered–hwt was not bound by the limitations of the eye; hwt is limitless. The zoetrope improved on the ability to capture images and present them to the human eye in a more natural way than the phenakistoscope.

Phi exists as an example of human interpretation and keen ability to fill in missing gaps of information (forget about accuracy for now). Imagine the lights on a marque or sign. Have you ever noticed how the lights chase each other around the sign. Logically, the lights are not moving. Even though you know they do not move, you can understand the imagery of the lights following each other. While the lights are actually turning off and on in a particular sequence, our minds attempt to interpolate the positions between the lights and transform the gap between lights into a blur to complete the circuit and prevent disconnection. In other words, our brain wants to simplify the expression of lights flickering on and off by translating the image from your eyes to your brain as a moving light.

The Golden Ratio

But wait, don’t order yet! That’s not all you get when you by one of the hwt’s most powerful representatives. Phi is also the magic behind the Golden Ratio. The ability of the mind to find a pattern in chaos is most commonly seen with Phi in studies of the Golden Ratio.

Some of the most famous examples of the Golden Ratio’s pareidolia are:

• The Pyramids (A.K.A. the Golden Pyramids)
• Fibonacci Spirals (Interconnected to Fibonacci sequences)
• Pentagrams
• Flora (Structures, Roots, Leaves, etc.)
• Studies by Plato, Euclid, Fibonacci, Luca Pacioli, Johannes Kepler, Charles Bonnet, Martin Ohm, Roger Penrose

Whether someone is staring deeply in a pile of leaves or checking in the time on sophisticated clock’s spinning LED, hwt fills in the gaps between logic and disorder, pattern from chaos, and from dark to light.

Those who seek hwt will find it, even if nothing is there!