Lookalikes
A bunch of my Facebook friends are doing the thing where they temporarily replace their profile photo with an image of someone famous who they've been told they look like.
I can't remember who I've been told I look like, so the other day I tried the MyHeritage.com face recognition system.
Sadly, it failed to even find my face in any of my favorite photos of myself, all of which are from an angle. I suspect that a lot of face-detection systems have a hard time with beards.
I finally found three okay photos of myself facing directly into the camera, without my head tilted, and tried having it match those.
The first one (from the end of my brief blond period—don't think it's online anywhere) matched me with a bunch of people who I don't think look even remotely like me, such as Murray Gell-Mann, Greg Bear, and Sergio Aragones. (Those first two are the same photos they used. Their photo of Aragones had the mustache without the beard.)
The next photo (from the beginning of my blond period) matched me with Dave Navarro (a different photo of him, one with glasses). I guess I can kind of see that. Also Greg Bear again, and Brad Pitt, and John Major.
The third photo (with my usual brown hair) matched me with Gerry Adams. I think that's the closest match yet, but I don't really want to replace my photo with Gerry Adams.
(Other matches in that last set: Chevy Chase; Charles Dickens; Kevin Costner; Lawrence Lessig; Jean Reno; Adrien Brody; J. K. Rowling; Bill Gates. I'm not real impressed with their algorithm.)
So I think I'll be sitting this meme out, unless people have other suggestions.
