The World Wide Weird
The Great Simple Tricks Pizza Challenge!
Wednesday, July 19th, 2006Well, this is interesting…
Jason Bennion, who blogs at Simple Tricks and Nonsense, has a friend who makes the rather ridiculous claim that a pizza place in Salt Lake City, Utah (Este) makes a pizza that “rivals or excels over the best New York has to offer.” I, of course, suggested that this claim is likely based on the assumption that none of his customers will ever travel to New York and compare. Little does this pizza store owner know about the power of the internet’s long tail…
Long story short, Jason’s friend has agreed to reach out to the pizza store owner (Dave) and have him send me a pizza. He even plans to create a short film about it. My role is to eat said pizza, and blog about the relative similarities/differences to a genuine New York pie.
As Jasons says on his blog:
I, of course, am planning to blog the whole process and am simply thrilled that my little corner of cyberspace has finally given rise to one of those ridiculous stunts that the Internet seems to have been invented for…
As am I, Jason. As am I.
Gentlemen, start your ovens…
UPDATE: More info here.
Categories: Blogging about Blogs, The World Wide Weird | 1 Comment »
Some More Face Recognition Fun
Tuesday, July 18th, 2006I decided to test the Celebrity Face Recognition program that I blogged about yesterday, so here’s what I did: I went to the Forbes.com Celebrity 100 list and pulled off a bunch of celebrities from the top of the list. Then I went and found a good picture (full frontal face shot) on Google Images and fed it to the Face Recognition software. Ideally, it would match the celebrity with him/herself given that it’s, well you know, the same person and all.
So here are the results. These are in the format of:
Picture I Uploaded – Highest Percentage Match (Percentage) (if not a match, whether the match occurred in any of the suggested celebrities – and if so the percentage of the actual match).
I sampled 25 celebrities. First, the matches:
David Letterman – David Letterman (100%)
Paul McCartney – Paul McCartney (100%)
Tom Hanks – Tom Hanks (100%)
Steven Spielberg – Steven Spielberg (99%)
Oprah Winfrey – Oprah Winfrey (90%)
50 Cent – 50 Cent (76%)
Brad Pitt – Brad Pitt (76%)
Johnny Depp – Johnny Depp (76%)
Donald Trump – Donald Trump (76%)
Celine Dion – Celine Dion (75%)
George Lucas – George Lucas (74%)
Jerry Seinfeld – Jerry Seinfeld (75%)
Tiger Woods – Tiger Woods (67%)
Peter Jackson – Peter Jackson (64%)
14 out of 25, or 56%. Not too shabby, although only three were perfect, 100% matches (with Spielberg at a very close 99%). Then there were two that mismatched, but eventually got it right at lower percentages:
Tom Cruise – Dean R. Koontz (73%) (Y – 64%)
Jay Leno – Wesley Clark (64%) (Y – 51%)
And the remaining nine, with some rather entertaining wrong guesses:
Muhammad Ali – Billy Zane (61%) (N)
Bruce Springsteen – Emma Watson (64%) (N)
Dr. Phil – Daniel Day Lewis (70%) (N)
Elton John – Bill Gates (71%) (N)
Howard Stern – Brian May (58%) (N)
Kobe Bryant – Andriy Shevchenko (66%) (N)
Michael Jordan – John Coltrane (72%) (N)
Phil Mickelson – Rudolf Steiner (64%) (N)
Simon Cowell – Mel Gibson (70%) (N)
I particularly like Bill Gates for Elton John, Mel Gibson for Simon Cowell, and Emma Watson (?) for Bruce Springsteen.
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Celebrity Look-Alike
Sunday, July 16th, 2006This is the coolest site I’ve seen in a long time. You upload a photo of yourself (or anyone else), it runs some basic face recognition software, and then compares it against a celebrity database, and tells you what celebrities it think you look like.
This is the image I submitted for myself, and here are the celebrities it came up with:
My reactions:
Claude Lelouch (61%): French Film Director. According to the algorithm, the closest match they have. Sorry – I just don’t see it.
Benito Mussolini (61%): Fascist Italian Dictator. Thanks a lot, folks. I never really knew what Mussolini looked like. Now that I get a look, I guess I can see a slight resemblence, but it’s a really big stretch…
Jake Gyllenhaal (57%): The Brokeback Mountain guy. As far as I’m concerned, we’re 0 for 3. I don’t see the slightest resemblence…
Emmy Rossum (54%): The Phantom of the Opera movie, Poseiden, various others. All I can say here is, “Huh?”
Helen Clark (51%): The Prime Minister of New Zealand. Makes the Emmy Rossum comparison a downright perfect match…
David Hasselhoff (51%): Baywatch, German rock star, etc., etc. Now we’re talking, huh? I still think they’re crazy, but at least this time, it’s a compliment of sorts…
Jim Carrey (50%): Pet Detective, Cable Guy, all around funny guy. Just to be clear, here: I don’t think I look like Jim Carrey. That said, I can see how this picture of Jim Carrey looks a little like that picture of me. Especially the forehead, the nose, and the chin. Other pictures of Jim Carrey don’t even come close, though, so it’s probably more about the vagaries of this one picture…
Kareem Abdul-Jabaar (50%): Basketball star. We’re back to crazy, random algorithm here. Unless you want to say we have similar foreheads (like with Carrey), but this is taking it to the extreme, no?
Dan Rather (49%): Disgraced former news anchor. Again, no real resemblance, but I can see how this picture looks a little like my picture.
Kareena Kapoor (48%): Major film actress in Bollywood, the Hindi language film industry in Mumbai, India. As with most Indian people, she and I have similar skin coloring. And if I really stretch it, I can see similarities in some facial features (cheekbones, smile). But again, I’m stretching it…
So all in all, the idea is intriguing, but the selections are, shall we say, fascinating.
My wife’s was a little better. Here’s the picture of Sherry I submitted, and the results it produced:
They all have Sherry’s smile (which is, IMHO, one of her best features), except for Salma Hayek. Beautiful woman, terrible picture. Don’t know what they were thinking there. Interestingly, I can even see how they picked LL Cool J (after the smile, though, it’s another sign of randomness).
The best matches here are Madonna, Mischa Barton and Katherine Hepburn. In all three cases, I think it’s a “this picture only” thing, especially in Madonna’s case of course. But that’s three pretty close matches, as opposed to one for me. So we’re improving, right?
Anyway, I don’t exactly have the readership to start a real blog meme, but for what it’s worth: Go to the site, submit your picture, and report back in the comments (or in your own blog) who it picked, OK? Should be an interesting exercise.
Categories: The World Wide Weird | 3 Comments »
“Google” earns official verb status
Thursday, July 6th, 2006The latest edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines the word “google” as a verb. It also contains other words and phrases I figured were already in there, such as “drama queen,” “biodiesel” and “bling.” And then there are those I wouldn’t have guessed, like “mouse potato,” “soul patch” and “himbo.”
I understand the need to keep the language current, so that future generations can look up the words they use regularly. The real question, though, is this: who uses a dictionary anymore? If you need to know how to spell a word these days, you’d just..er…what’s the word? Oh yeah, you’d just google it!
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Breaking the Judicial Code
Thursday, April 27th, 2006All right, this is really, really cool.
Quick summary: The British judge that recently ruled that Dan Brown did not plagiarize “The Da Vinci Code” from another book, italicized seemingly random characters throughout his ruling. A lawyer made an off-hand comment to The London Times that it would be ironic if the italicized letters were some sort of secret, embedded message. At which point, he got an e-mail from the judge telling him to check out the first few paragraphs.
Turns out the italicized letters in the first few paragraphs spell “smithcode” (the judge’s name is Peter Smith), suggesting that was exactly his intent. Here is the complete message:
smithcodeJaeiextostpsacgreamqwfkadpmqz
Anyone have a solution?
UPDATE: It’s been solved by the laywer who found it. Something to do with the Fibonacci sequence…
Categories: The World Wide Weird | 1 Comment »
What the Hell?
Monday, April 10th, 2006A man was arrested today for jumping the White House fence. Check out this quote:
Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren said agents took any breach seriously but that the suspect, who had climbed the White House fence three times before, made ‘no spoken threats’ against the president.
Zahren identified the man as Brian Lee Patterson, 40, and said he would be charged with unlawful entry and contempt of court, for violating a court order to stay away from the White House after he last intruded in February.
Who had climbed the WHite House fence three times before?!?!? Your third offense for that is a court order to stay away from the White House? What will they give him this time, a jay-walking ticket?
Obviously, the guy isn’t exactly learning his lesson…
Categories: The World Wide Weird | 3 Comments »
A Moral Dilemma…
Tuesday, March 28th, 2006I’m on the commuter train heading home. The man sitting next to me has fallen asleep. His right elbow is leaning against the window while his right hand props up his head. His left hand is holding his open cell phone, which is currently running some kind of Texas Hold’Em game.
His left thumb is resting (rather firmly) on the “3” key. I’m not sure what the “3” key does in this game, but he appears to be losing hand after hand. I have no idea if this is for real money or not, but if it is, this is quickly going to become a very expensive train ride for this guy.
Question: Do I wake him up?
Categories: New York, New York, The World Wide Weird | 1 Comment »
And he Wasn’t Even a Suspected Terorrist…
Sunday, February 12th, 2006Dick Cheney just shot a guy.
Seriously.
That’s got to be a violation of his civil rights, no?
Categories: Political Rantings, The World Wide Weird | 3 Comments »
Rubik^3 . . . again
Thursday, January 19th, 2006OK, not only are they still holding Rubik’s Cube competitions, but Leyan Lo just set the world record by solving one in 11.33 seconds. Leyan is twenty years old, making him five years younger than the cube itself.
I guess if you’re going to waste time, it’s good to be able to waste as little of it as possible…
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A Warning and a Test
Friday, January 13th, 2006Just in case there are a lot of squirrels reading this blog, here’s what happens if one of you gets caught at Mike’s house:
(More honestly, this is basically an experiment to see if Google’s “Put on site” link works in a blog.)
UPDATE: It works! Cool!
Categories: The World Wide Weird | 2 Comments »