My finest hour
On Usenet was when the resident kook on sci.archaeology accused me of not being a proper scientist. I was able to tell him he could find my name in that week's issue of Nature. A piece of excellent timing.
I also remember the other kook on there who saw numbers in rocks convinced they had been made and coded by aliens. He posted a picture of a Scottish standing stone and started seeing numbers. One of them required the yellow patch, 'yellow' I thought, 'on Scottish granite?' Then it hit me he was reading the algae, lichens and mosses. No rock left to the elements in Scotland show the native rock surface. Life gets in there. Why geologists carry hammers, to crack the rocks open to get an unsullied look at them. Under most quartz grains on an exposed surface will be a little colony of algae.
Paraedolia was strong in that kook, very, very strong.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
