Friday, January 13, 2006

Self-assessment exercise, 2


Following a brilliantly tempting link from profgrrrl, MyHeritage face recognition has examined a photo of me and concluded that the celebrity I look most like is ... ::drumroll:: ... Willow!

This is the highlight of my week.

Of course, now that I have been sucked in by this hyper-bourgeois scrap of bait, I've no doubt the CIA has now got a detailed biometric analysis of my face on file for future comparison with world CCTV footage.

No, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. Why do you ask?

Edit: Further research has revealed that my current fantasy nemesis Nick Bostrom looks most like Mussolini. I may have to revise my highlight of the week.

5 comments:

Pluvialis said...

I tried this heritage thing too, but they couldn't recognise 'a face' in any picture of my face I uploaded. after six attempts, with different pictures, i got rather freaked out. Not only does my face fail to resemble that of any celebrity, but also it's not even recognisable as a face.

Scrivener said...

Pluvialis: When it does that there's a way to manually direct the software to find your face. I don't remember how it words the thing, but you just have to drag a box over your face and let it run again. It confused me the first time I tried it too.

Even though I've got a big bushy beard these days, that thing returned nothing but female faces to match with mine. Wonder what that's about.

Xtin said...

I always knew you were very in touch with your anima, Scrivener. Who knew it was in the biometrics?

Pluvialis said...

Thanks, Scrivener. I did the manual direction too, with the draggy box, but no joy. Maybe the CIA has sufficient pictures of me already. Who knows :)

Except from Virtual Light by William Gibson:

Separated at Birth was a police program you used in missing persons cases. You scanned a photo of the person you wanted, got back the names of half a dozen celebrities who looked vaguely like the subject, then went around asking people if they'd seen anybody lately who reminded them of A, B, C ... The weird thing was, it worked better than just showing them a picture of the subject. The instructor at the Academy in Knoxville had told Rydell's class that that was because it tapped into the part of the brain that kept track of celebrities. Rydell had imagined that as some kind of movie-star lobe. (p.94)

Heidi the Hick said...

Very interesting...so far I have been compared to: Julia Roberts, Hilary Swank, Sandra Bullock, Angelina Jolie and Shania Twain, although I look like none of them except we all have lots of teeth and long brown hair. (Until I dyed mine pink, haha!) Now the funny thing here at this little party is, Scrivener there is the only one of us who actually shows his face!! Xtin, I think that lovely creature you showed in your posting is very adorable.