helmetiblog

James got me thinking about his blog, then about my blog, which helped me notice that my images were broken, which led me to look at my world and state coverage maps. I haven't travelled to many new places in the last couple of years, though I've repeated visits to Mexico, Canada, Argentina and Chile. I can claim Utah on my state map, so there's a small gain.

I was thinking about goals recently, riding the bus home. I wrote travel goals for parts of both Australia and Africa to complete in the next two years. Hopefully I'll need to update these maps more often.

Hi all,

So, it's been a long time. I've been really busy, gone through all sorts of change and intend to post some updates about all that going forward, but I want to re-start my blogging today so I can say happy birthday to Kristen, on whose birthday I'm not fishing this year, and in response to James' efforts to spur me out of silence.

Happy birthday Kristen!

Thanks James. That's awesome and I appreciate it.

Since I've been missing for so long, I think it's fitting to share with you my favorite recent missed connections (courtesy of my friend Lindsey):

• #1 - haggen


• #2 - homeless


• #3 - costco

Until soon.

So you know when you've been sick, and specifically out sick from the office, and then come back, feeling better at home but realizing once you get in that it won't be a normal day, as you don't have full use of your mind, but you don't really know where it is, unless it stayed home again to sleep or watch another Star Trek rerun? Yeah, hi.

from the back cover: "God created the integers. All the rest is the work of Man." -Leopold Kronecker

Pretty random title recommended to me today in the Amazon book store. This looks to be the most recent of Hawking's books. I'm not sure whether I want to begin by calling to question the arrogance of the above quote or the prominent depiction of π and smaller of ∞ on the cover, neither integers but respectively transcendental and hyperreal numbers. But that said, the recommendation was apt and I rather would like to check it out.

I wanted to wait a couple of days to see whether national coverage of the questionable officiating would materialize.

As conspiracy theories and their squattier cousins abound, the focus in Seattle should be around updating the public perception of our football franchise, so that Sunday's debacle can't happen again. A few thoughts for your consideration:

What the Seahawks need is to import a Japanese football star. That will help with our visibility problem, much like it helped the Mariners become Japan's team.

... Actually, perhaps using the Mariners (63-99 in 2004, 69-93 in 2005) as a model for success isn't the best idea right now.

What we need is a catchy product that can be distributed and marketed to casual and non-fans.

We could rename the team to the Seattle Starbucks and our terrible towels could be extra-hot lattes. Crowds would dig it. Can you imagine 67,000+ fans whipping their lattes through the air to unnerve an opposing offense?

Maybe rally birds? The rubber-chicken answer to Anaheim LA #2 and the monkey? I'd like to see Leavy return from under the hood to validate a questionable call to a crowd wielding rally birds.

Or maybe the team should jump on the state beer commission bandwagon as the Seattle Redhooks. It's geared at attracting attention with exactly the right demographic. Stranger things could happen.

There was one more site that I should add to my sick-day list: Kristen and her commenters got me to try the MyHeritage Face Recognition site, which matches your face in a picture you upload against celebrity faces. It then yields your best matches and its certainty scores.

I go through something of a three-step process when I hear about a service like this: denial, testing, and vindication. How well could it actually work? Truth be told, my process is often arrested after the first step. In this case, I don't doubt that good facial recognition software exists, but I do doubt it exposed on the web as a novelty. The workflow for innovative input has stops at military, law enforcement, expensive and commercial before it gets to trivial.

So I was sick, didn't feel like reading and decided to try the second of my three-step process: testing. I ran a photo of myself taken a couple of years ago in ceremonial Beninese garb through the system. It came from my photo site at http://photos.helmetica.com. I was square to the camera with my face unobstructed as per the instructions. And I was impressed with the site -- it has a pleasing, dynamic and responsive interface and cleanly delineated my face in the photo. The one drawback was the mandatory registration (see the aside below).

And for the results:

Look-alikes: Sigourney Weaver 54% Orlando Bloom 53%

Hmm, interesting. I've listed the top two matches and their corresponding certainty scores. I wasn't sure what to expect, though, so I can't speak to its correctness. That'll require a few more tests:

	Elvis Costello 61% Steven Soderbergh 60%
	Vivien Leigh 65% Kingsley Amis 65%
	Paul Simon 58% Walther Nernst 53% ?!?!

Conclusion:

The highest certainty score achieved against one of my pictures was 65%, and of the total of 40 celebrities I look like (4 tests x 10 celebrities each) there were no repeats between tests. This wasn't exhaustive, and each of the photos I uploaded had unique elements to them: glasses, facial hair, proximity and focus, etc. But they were all taken within six months of each other, and the results were quite varied. The glasses were important, as eight of the ten resultant photos also showed glasses. But facial hair seemed to carry little weight, with no bearded or mustached figures returned in the third test and only four in the fourth (the fourth also including Penelope Cruz and Greta Garbo). So much for my yes-or-no, Guess Who hypothesis.

Overall, I'm not sure what to make of the face recognition service. My photos all turned up different look-alikes, and I couldn't see the similarities. That said, I have no evidence to the contrary, and no celebrities I feel strongly to resemble. And most important, I guess, is that it was fun to use.

**
An aside about data quality: in order to use the face recognition novelty service, MyHeritage requires you to provide your email address, your name and other personal information. This is likely tied to their larger mission on the web: genealogy. Now as someone who is only interested in the novelty, and only once at that, I'm not likely to provide my actual data, but rather to fill in the blanks with whatever occurs to me. I'm obviously interested in something MyHeritage has to offer, but haven't been sold on the value of signing up in earnest. If you want someone's information, convince him or her that it's necessary in order to provide something of value; if not, your customers will be less satisfied and your data will be junked-up with a bunch of John Does or Asdf Jkl;s.

I wasn't feeling well yesterday and stayed home from work. I got in some rest and chicken soup and was able to catch up on a few emails in the afternoon, a couple of which pointed me to some fun online tests. I don't normally take the time for these, but heavier reading felt like too much for my brain at the time. I hereby share the frivolity with you.

Intelligence test part one and part two

Nerd, Geek or Dork test (with slightly-surprising results for me)

Star Trek Geek test (95% -- what??? I swear I got all these right)

and last, and maybe least, my kittenwar submission. They were undefeated for quite a while, and even with the recent slump have still won twice for every defeat (limited sample size). Only on a sick day ...