It isn't just looking at hex ... until it is. I used to work on a medium-model kernel back in the 8086 days. When somebody brought me a crash-dump to look at,

It isn't just looking at hex ... until it is. I used to work on a medium-model kernel back in the 8086 days. When somebody brought me a crash-dump to look at, one process I'd use is to just page through the kernel data segment, watching the hex go by and relaxing my mind. As often as not I'd see the corrupt data go by. A string copied where no strings should be. A zero in a dense table that should not have any zeroes. A block duplicated. Whatever it was, your brain can pattern match way more than we imagine it can.