Good Lord! Is that Jesus?
QUESTION Is there a term to describe the phenomenon of ‘seeing’ faces in ordinary items, such as coffee foam?
Pareidolia is the brain’s tendency to try to identify patterns in random objects and convert them into something meaningful, very often a human face.
There are many reports involving people seeing the face of Jesus or the Virgin Mary in slices of toast, pools of liquid or stains on surfaces.
The brain will try to make sense out of something as random as the bubbles on the top of a cup of coffee.
as far back as the ancient Babylonians, egyptians and Greeks, people studied the stars and joined the dots to create the constellations.
another early version is seeing the Man in the Moon — interpreting the patterns of light and shadow on the surface of the Moon as a human face. This is recorded as far back as ancient rome in the legend of the sheep thief banished to the Moon.
leonardo da Vinci claimed that some of his work was inspired by interpreting the faces of characters he saw in the patterns on stone walls.
Why the human face and not some other object? Probably because the face is one of the first things that a baby learns to recognise.
it may be a genetically programmed response triggered for survival that a child should recognise the face of a parent, but not recognise the face of a stranger or a predator and start crying.
From then on the brain is constantly searching for this safety feature, to the point where apparently random patterns are interpreted as faces.
You only have to draw a circle and put two dots in it for it to be instantly recognisable as a face. add a line or an arc and you can even tell if this ‘face’ is happy, sad or indifferent. There is a whole series of emojis based on this simple, face-like shape.
Facial recognition is highly advanced in humans. Studies have revealed we can pick out the faces of friends and relatives in crowds of thousands of people at a considerable distance.
Given that from afar most faces are indistinguishable in any meaningful sense, this is remarkable. Those sorts of studies have resulted in this skill being mimicked in facial recognition software by working out how the brain interprets facial shapes and writing computer programs to emulate that.
Bob Dillon, Edinburgh.
QUESTION Is it true that the volume of all the oil ever extracted and all the coal ever mined would not fill Loch Ness?
The answer is an emphatic no. The volume of loch Ness is around 1.8 cubic miles. Globally we extract more coal than that each year.
in 2018, we extracted 7,000 million tons of coal compared with 4,000 million tons in 2004, a rise explained by a dramatic increase in consumption in China.
roughly speaking, one ton of coal equates to 40 cubic feet in volume. Therefore, in 2018 we extracted 280 billion cubic feet of coal, or 1.9 cubic miles, which is greater than the volume of loch Ness.
We extract 4,000 million tons of crude oil each year. This equates to 1.1 cubic miles annually, enough to fill loch Ness in less than two years.
Simon Goddard, Southampton.
QUESTION At the Battle of Rorke’s Drift in 1879, the Zulus suffered 351 dead and 500 wounded. How were the dead and wounded dealt with?
oN JaNUarY 22, 1879, at rorke’s drift on the Natal border with Zululand, in South africa, a British garrison of 150 men fought for 12 hours to repel repeated attacks by up to 4,000 Zulu warriors.
This heroic defence was rewarded with a record 11 Victoria Crosses and was immortalised in the 1964 film Zulu, directed by Cy endfield and starring Michael Caine. This feat overshadowed the Battle of isandlwana, one of the British army’s most notorious defeats, which had taken place earlier that day.
an army of 20,000 Zulus bearing assegai (native spears) overwhelmed a British column armed with modern rifles, killing more than 1,300 troops.
The Zulu army suffered fatalities of between 1,000 and 2,500, but still won a decisive victory.
The defenders of rorke’s drift had received news of the isandlwana debacle and the knowledge of the brutal way in which Zulus had treated their compatriots probably led to reprisals.
The number of Zulu dead and wounded at rorke’s drift was taken from the private journal of lt Col John North Crealock. it was part of the evidence gathered by ron lock and Peter Quantrill, former British army officers, for their 2002 book Zulu Victory: The epic of isandlwana and The Cover-up.
Using sources ranging from the royal Windsor archives to oral history passed down by the Zulus, the authors unearthed evidence to suggest far more than 351 warriors were killed that day.
‘altogether we buried 375 dead Zulus, and some wounded were thrown in the grave,’ wrote William James Clark of the Natal Mounted Police.
‘ Seeing the manner in which our wounded had been mutilated after being dragged from the hospital we were very bitter and did not spare wounded Zulus.’
The Zulus were known to disembowel their enemies because of their belief in releasing the spirit.
a warrior later admitted ‘some of our bad men cut away the lower jaws of those white men who had beards and decorated their heads with them’.
lt horace Smith-dorrien, who later became a general, wrote that a frame to dry ox hides became an improvised gallows ‘for hanging Zulus who were supposed to have behaved treacherously’ during the battle.
Private Samuel Pitts told a newspaper in 1914 that the death toll was much higher than the official version. ‘We reckon we had accounted for 875, but the books will tell you 400 or 500.’
it seems probable that most of the Zulu wounded were put to death.
P. E. Farlowe, Letchworth Garden City, Herts. IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London, W8 5TT. You can also email them to charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection will be published, but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.