caddyman | I love humans. They always see patterns in things that aren't there.

Every now and again, some plum turns up in the news because they have found a piece of pizza with an image of Jesus in it, or a tomato personally signed by "He who shall not be named lest I get a Fatwa called down on my infidel head", or Princess Diana in a dog poo.

Invariably, they don't just bin this item, they let the word spread and soon the gullible are loping round in the hope of a miracle cure and someone somewhere gets very rich and the gullible get just a little poorer.

I was watching a series of programmes on either BBC 3 or BBC 4 over the weekend, commemorating the approaching 40th anniversary of the first moon landing and on several occasions they used the now iconic photograph, Earthrise taken from Apollo 8 as it re-emerged from the far side of the moon in 1968. Now I have seen that picture any number of times over the years. But if you look at it closely at different magnifications, you can see different things:

Here, with the picture somewhat reduced, I can see the three quarter profile of a grey haired elderly black gentleman looking off to the left of the picture¹:

That's interesting enough, but if you double the magnification, you see that it isn't the profile of an elderly black gentleman at all. Instead, there's a Chinese dragon emerging from the head of one of the Seven Dwarfs; what had appeared to be the black man's ear is, in fact, the dwarf's face and he looks rather surprised to have the dragon looping up out of his head in a question mark shape across the upper curve of the globe...

Amazing.

Er, what are the butterfly nets for, guys? Er, guys?

¹You may have to click on the pictures and examine them on the gallery pages, I have never worked out how to make them display at the precise size I want.