Physiognomy
Tuesday, August 19, 2008 at 11:03PM Physiognomy, a word which I was introduced to early in life, not through the "BARON's GRE guide" as one might expect, but rather from an Edgar Wallace novel (I think it was The Four Just Men) where one of the characters can "face read".
Why are we talking about "face reading" here?
We were watching the olympics on NBC yesterday and they have this crazy Romanian dude (yeah, yeah, we know he was a great coach at one point) in the studio repeatedly making an accusation that the Chinese gymnasts are under age! He says "Does that girl really look 16 to you?"
Here is something I have experienced first hand after moving to the United States. In this respect both me and Mr. Karolyi have the same advantage or disadvantage. We are both non-chinese and have not necessarily starred at enough Chinese people, in the face, till we reached a certain age (okay, okay, that second statement is conjecture, but hey, the guy was not born and raised in China.. he was in Hungary).
The first thing I learnt after showing up in the US of A, 15 years ago, was that the grad student office was 60% Chinese (or so I thought because all Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Thai, some Japanese) all looked alike to me. Within a month, I would be able to identify "asian" features by country and have a great success rate in at least placing them in a geographic region and within six months could do that for most people from different parts of the world. Grad school gives you such wonderful exposure to people of this world!
The second lesson learnt was in guessing the approximate age of Chinese people. I even had a simple program worked out which was something along the lines of
# include < iostream.h >
int main(void)
{
int guess_age=0;
cout << "Please look at Chinese persons face and guess age:";
cin >> guess_age;
cout << "The real age of the person is ">> guess_age + 12 >> "you dumb@$$." << endl;
return 0;
}
This program worked reasonably well for most of the grad students who shared my lab!
Based on the same program, it appears that the Chinese gymnast girls would be around 23-24 years old at least!
In contrast, Caucasian girls seem to appear older then they are! Especially the girls with Eastern european, Russian genes. If anything, the older looking girls are probably underage!
It is ridiculous to try and claim the Chinese gymnasts are underage simply because of how they look! It is high time Mr. Karolyi learnt some basic programming skills or improved his Physiognomy skills.
On a completely tangential note, do I really look 40?!
.
Chinese, gymnastics, olympics, physiognomy, under age
Reader Comments (12)
LOL! nice program. We have something called as the geek-award in our lab (a set of old hard drives wrapped in tape) which we give to people who do nerdy things during the daily course of the day.
we award that to you today!
btw, ppl are just being sore losers with china winning gold in gymnastics.
Fantastic!
I am so excited to receive a geek award!
:)
haven't actually compiled the program to see if it will run!
you know, I am a materials science guy.. programming was something that had to be learnt on the side.. I forget the name of the place.it was on the top floor in a building near the Sanskrit college bus stop.. quite an experience learning c programming during summer holidays in madras.
Are you talking about SSC institute in Jammi building next to the Raymond showroom?
RRmom
Geek! :-)
I was carded for a long time after it should have stopped and someone actually thought that I was a teenager. Go figure! This was when I was in my mid 20s. I used to work at this gym, and the other lady there said I got a call from my dad. That was something, as it had been almost 10 years since my dad passed away. Figured out my hubby had called. I can tell you he was not very happy to hear about this.
But either way I wouldn't be surprised re. the gymnasts. Some of them look so young, really. And in general, they do tend to look at least a decade younger than their real age.
BTW, I was a EW fan too! Can't find them here.
Nice program.:D !. but Karyoli really has a problem, when the US Gymnasts dont get the gold. His arguement that the judges are from countries, who are not from the top gymnastic nations due to olympic rules,and dont know what how to judge well.. If thats the case, that i wonder how nastia luikin got the overall gold
The mind works in strange ways when its over 40 ! ( I am talking of Karyoli) !!
Please do continue writing such programs, publish them ! And trust me, you will grow younger ! A year for each script !
Also, if you can program how they have those flat abs...will help.
I think you should be the prof. for Geek 101!
By the way, it does seem like the girls are underage...there have been numerous articles about it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-flumenbaum/scandal-of-the-ages-docum_b_118842.html
http://olympics.fanhouse.com/2008/07/27/is-china-using-underage-gymnasts-in-violation-of-olympic-rules/
The Olympics committee only accepts passport for age verification and since these gymnasts are Govt. backed...there is no way to contradict.
Not a day over thirty-five, young Sundar!
Hello Sundar, all your fans out here are waiting for your next post! Why the long silence? All well I hope!
hope everything is fine...no blog for 10 days?
Where you ? All Ok ? Been some time. Let us know.