Physiognomy

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?!

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