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"This category [science fiction] excludes rocket ships that make U-turns, serpent men of Neptune that lust after human maidens, and stories by authors who flunked their Boy Scout merit badge tests in descriptive astronomy."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Separated At Birth Database | ||
| Missing persons database uses similarity to famous people. |
What is the best way to ask people if they've seen a missing person?
| "Tommy Lee Jones," the black man said... "You look like him.."
"Who?" "Was an actor, man... You Rydell. Ran you on Separated at Birth." 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 th 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. |
| Technovelgy from Virtual Light,
by William Gibson. Published by Bantam in 1993 Additional resources -
|
As far as I know, there is no existing example of this idea in use by police agencies. However, there is a site called MyHeritage Face Recognition that will allow you to upload a face and find out which celebrity you might resemble.
I tried it with a picture of Tommy Lee Jones - and the site correctly recognized the actor. I then picked at random a picture of Jesse James, the famous 19th century American outlaw. MyHeritage thinks that he closely resembles Alan Turing, the 20th century mathematician.
Thanks to John for pointing this one out.
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'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
'Then he became aware of a gentle pressure pushing him away from the ship.'
'And now they wre busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on...'
'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down...'
'Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence...'
'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
