Elliott C. Back » Qualitative

Lightning & Thunderstorm Video

Elliott Back — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 00:54:18 +0000

There was some decent looking lightning in a storm we had here in Phoenix a few days ago, so I made a little video clip of it:

Thunderstorm in Phoenix –

Celebrity Face Recognition

Elliott Back — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 04:36:22 +0000

If you want to see which celebrity you look like, try My Heritage’s facial match demo. For a free signup, it will let you upload a large frontal picture of yourself that it uses to compare you to its stored database of celebrities, returning a handful of interesting “best matches.” I put that in quotes because my best match was only 67%, but I suppose that’s better than nothing.

My first match was luckily male. Mr. David Beckham at 67% shares more than just his handsome face with me–our last names are eerily similar. I just have less “ham” in me.

Oh yes, we are brother seperated at birth. Twins, even!

So, for your own celeb mashup, give this web 2.0 app a little whirl!

The “Cute” Factor

Elliott Back — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 20:54:02 +0000

The New York Times is running an article called The Cute Factor which basically concludes the humans have an incredibly low threshold for cuteness–basically anything resembling infants of our species in any way is considered cute. Which must be why red is the color of Valentine’s day and love.

Scientists have decided that “bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait” are cute traits, and that “extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need” are behavior cues for cuteness. This sounds exactly like the combination for anime:

Then again, there’s too much cute in the world these days. Everything is cute. Sometimes you just want to rage against the cute, but “the human cuteness detector is set at such a low barthat it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby.” Our own biology fights against us realists. Let me mention that much that is cute in nature is ” accidental cuteness…”