Project Galileo: A Weird Coincidence on Friday

On Friday I posted links to 3 Project Galileo videos - two new, one old.

	Selection Part 1	Selection_Part 1.mov (10 MB)
	Selection Part 2	Selection_part2.mov (8 MB)
	Selection Part 3	Selection_part3.mov (11 MB)

When Technical Marketing Manager, Lynda Sharkey, gave me the two new videos to accompany the existing one, I saw that the topic of selection in Project Galileo had 3 videos. This made me think of the Star Wars trilogy. Since IMHO a blog post should be a little offbeat, otherwise it might as well be a press release, I decided to have fun with the Star Wars angle. Since my blog posts always include a picture, otherwise it might as well be a discussion forum post, I needed something related to Star Wars. I looked for Star Wars images and found many pictures of Princess Leia. Since fair use guidelines make special provisions for parody, I knew I would not want to use any of the images directly, so I would have to do something with whatever one I chose. Shaan Hurley came to mind, and the resulting image was:

Princess Shaan

So never judge a book by its cover
Or who you gonna love by your lover
Love put me wise to her love in disguise
She had the body of Venus
Lord imagine my surprise
Dude looks like a lady
   Aerosmith, "Dude Looks Like A Lady," Permanent Vacation, 1987.

Later that morning, by total coincidence, I saw this story on TechRadar:

Weird Tech: Thought control, robot deer and dude detectors

In the "Dude looks like a lady" section of that article, there's an iPhone app that looks at a picture and tells you if it is a man or a woman. So I downloaded the application to my iPhone and gave it a try. Of course I tried a picture of myself.

I also tried a picture of Shaan Hurley.

Rest assured, Shaan Hurley is indeed a dude. The app scored him higher than me! Maybe this is a feature we should add to Project Photofly? Or alternatively, coupled with solutions like Autodesk Showroom and a built-in computer webcam, this could provide a more customized shopping experience. I believe there are vending machines in Japan that already do this.

To verify that the app does not simply map everyone as a dude, I tried it on Melanie Perry of Mistress of the Dorkness fame:

Indeed Melanie is not a dude.

Laughing out loud is alive in the lab.