Somebody suggested to me that I was behaving dangerously blogging about numerology. That one person might suddenly wake up and realize that they have been wasting their life and go crazy and murder their beloved pet turtle while it slept or something.
I have said this before. I don't make judgment on mental health issues. I'm not qualified for one thing. I have opinions, but those exist outside this blog. Second, I've seen critics make that suggestion. It doesn't work. Bearing in mind my not making mental health judgments comment, I will suggest that it seems likely if somebody has a mental health issue they aren't open to the idea that they are not stable.
More to the point, is my caveman character Durp. Durp is a satirical representation of total stupidity in regards to pattern recognition. Durp doesn't understand that 83 does not equal 38.
Apophenia is a condition that relates to things like seeing Attu the Magical Turtle's image in a slice of toast. And this came up in conversation about Outback restaurants. The apophenia, not the turtle thing.
It seems that Outback suffered a Twitter storm recently because groups of five restaurants can be connected by mapping them and connecting the lines drawn in the shape of a pentagram.
People. Critical thinking please. I'd like to think that a healthy percentage know what's going on and were amused and joking along. To begin with, you don't put two of the sane restaurant right next to each other unless you are in the Demolition Man universe and all restaurants are taco bells. And you don't have to draw a pentagram. That's one of the prettier shapes. Another nice shape is to connect the outline in the shape of a pentagon. And five equidistant points can have five lines drawn that don't look as pretty. This is apophenia when you see the pentagram once and can't help but only see a pentagram any time you hear about five Outbacks in the same geographic location.
Now confirmation bias (or bias confirmation so I get my ABCD initialism) is related. There's lots of that going on in numerology. Here you have a screen of 16 different elisions(ciphers), 15 don't give you a number you like. Discard those and use the one you do like. Throw out the entire screen and PhraseShop until you get a number you like.
Somewhere in the middle is a condition I will call Apufeemia. Looking for confirmation in the most unlikely (stupid) sources. Like numerology in the Simpsons. A show made purely for entertainment. Your pattern recognition skills, unless you are Durp, should recognize Apu the Kwiki Mart owner and the similarity to apophenia. And for reasons I trust are obvious has numerology of 166.
When everything gets sliced down into confirmation bias of multiple searches yielding two or three digit numbers you can have apufeemia in any source material and thus prove whatever you want. Durping 83 into equaling 38 is starting to go beyond reasonable. If your pet, Attu, is supposed to be fed exactly 38 pellets of Purina Wonder Turtle Chow a day you don't feed it 83.
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