Pattern recognition.

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Apparently they had a saying in the Vietnam war.
'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.'

An incredible amount of things in life, as I see it, pattern related.

Music for example is patterns and the way that the different patterns interact with each other. Even in electronica, computer generated sounds are generated and altered according to a pattern. The alterations form a pattern. The loops are repeated over bars, and over longer periods throughout the song, but the song is given direction only by the disruption to the pattern. Patternless music is noise.

The thing that got me thinking like this is that I seem to be running into people that are copies of each other. All I noticed at first was that Jim looked similar to Gez. Then I started noticing that they had a very similar manner of speech. Similar facial expressions. The *exact* same half-smile. I looked around the place I was working and found that over half the people there had *very* strong resemblances to other people I have known. One guy who reminded me a lot of my ex's ex even had the same bloody name. Plus the same facial features.

Some girls I know also seem uncannily similar. Their core personalities seem to be almost identical. Maybe this manifests itself in outward appearance as a result of the media. The same personality will affect a lot of the same things that they see. Affectations, I mean, not effecting.

I want to see the way in which these same people generate different loops when interacting with different generic personalities on a regular basis.

I have a talent for pattern recognition. A few times (maybe ten) I have been listening to five CDs in random play. In a non-brain active moment (just blank) a song will finish and I start singing the next song (apparently chosen at random by the player) before it begins playing. About two seconds before a note sounds, or the track is selected. This only ever happens when the player is one I have heard on random a LOT and the CDs are ones that I've heard a LOT. This is why I think it's pattern recognition. The player has not selected the track purely at random, but due to a complex mathematical function. Maybe my brain learns to anticipate this function in the same way that it learns to intercept the complex mathematical rules involving a ball being thrown and caught.

It gives me the heebie-jeebies when it happens, though.

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