totally off topic: unrelated to reading this on HN, 5 mins ago I was googling "why are some clouds darker than others" (it's a cloudy day and I was looking out of my window at work, waiting for some data query to run) which led me to an article about the way light scatters off of water droplets in the clouds. This article mentioned Fata Morgana as another example of atmospheric phenomena related to light scattering. Not having heard about Fata Morgana before, I dutifully proceeded to read the wikipedia article about it. When I finished, my query still hadn't finished running, so what do you do, check HN front page of course. And I open this post and there it is...
>"strategy game "Kremlin," which had been developed by the small Swiss publisher Fata Morgana Games"
Sorry, the procgen algorithm for names has a tendency to repeat freshly generated ones with higher frequency for a while. We caught it in early tests but didn't have the time to correct it properly, so we attempt to hide it by trying to ensure it only reappears in unrelated contexts. In the end this may have just made it more obvious, but what can you do. There are several million higher priority issues on the docket so I wouldn't expect a fix any time soon.
I don't think they're describing Baader-Meinhof illusion, instead it sound like the phenomenon I know as "Feynman's grandmother" whereby we credit a coincidence with a degree of magic because we fail to notice the frequency compared to non-coincidences.
The phenomenon plays out something like this: If you recall all the times you read something, and the subsequent article has no unexpected relationship in key concepts then you'll see it's just a normal statistical occurrence rather than something spooky and notable.
I think he's actually describing a much deeper phenomenon called a "coincidence" in which two things occur which are related in some way other than by causality. This strange phenomena is usually attributed to a concept known by the phrase "chance" which is deeply rooted in probability theory, but top scienticians and psychological probability computationists are still studying this mysterious phenomenon.
>"strategy game "Kremlin," which had been developed by the small Swiss publisher Fata Morgana Games"
talk about coincidences...