My favorite thing these days:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

It’s vital to the human creation of art, yes?

The fact of randomness (and I may as well posit it as a fact, because I don’t know how to know differently) is the miracle from which we all spring, and the foundation upholding everything we feel, think, do, create. We needn’t even learn–we are born to know how–to take advantage of random events (“coincidences,” with all that word’s various connotations), insofar as we’re able (and willing?) to. Just seconds after our birth, among the otherwise “meaningless” distortions of a suddenly visual, almost certainly terrifying world, our eyes are somehow and irresistibly drawn to the life-saving pattern of our mother’s face. We feel better; with muscles we’ve never used before, we strain to reach her. I think it’s like this: She’s our first “Jesus-in-a-piece-of-toast.” She’s our first “Face on Mars.” (In my own private parlance, she’s the “pirate in the bathroom tile”) Two eyes, one nose, one mouth (and, in the pirate’s case [but probably not the mother’s], an eye-patch and a droopy mustache). That simple visual pattern becomes our first lullabye, our first fable, our primal surrender to the comfort of the arbitrary.