cow tools and Pattern recognition
so. I like old newspaper cartoons such as Calvin and Hobbes, or, for today’s rant, The Far Side. But aside from reading them, I also enjoy reading ABOUT them.
now, many already know of the Cow Tools comic, but if you don’t, here it is
Now, this comic, for those who don’t know, once caused mass confusion and panic due to one little detail. One of the Cow Tools happened to resemble a handsaw. This led to thousands of people across the US during the comic’s original printing to decide that this means all the other objects were supposed to be other human tools[ as built by cows].
now, unfortunately, this is not the case. The joke was that if cows made tools, this is what they’d look like.
but the fact so many came to this conclusion and spent months [yes, MONTHS] trying to piece together what the cow tools were “supposed” to be says a lot about the human mind’s pattern recognition and stubbornness. Once we decide a conclusion is the “correct” one, we stubbornly try to prove it with any evidence we can piece together, usually utilizing pattern recognition alone if that’s the only evidence we can find.
now there’s two things this reminds me of, and one is FNAF lore, so I’m not touching that with a forty-three and 7/8ths foot pole.
the other, of course, is pseudoscience and pseudoarchaeology. How many of these theories rely on pattern recognition, like terrace farms actually being staircases for giants, or mountains being pyramids or treestumps?
Cow Tools provides a great microcosm of this phenomenon. The only difference is that Earth doesn’t have a cartoonist in charge who can explain that the joke isn’t that deep.
in conclusion, sometimes a cow tool is just a cow tool, no matter what your eyes are telling you.
