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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The under age kid

History has a tendency to repeat itself, over and over and over again. I guess that is one reason why it is still taught to people, so they would learn from the past and move towards a better future.

This is also counteracted by the ability of human beings to forget things quickly and get on with life.. the same life that people got on with a few decades ago and by extrapolation a few centuries ago..

It is true that todays Cyclotrons are a lot more complicated that the proverbial "wheel" invented a long time ago, but have we really come that far in learning from history?

People still kill each other, go take things forcefully from others if they lack a certain resource (it used to be gum arabic, silk, spices, gold, diamonds, now it is oil!) and continue to ignore the past.

All that, was the cynic in me talking. This post is more about something happening in our life right now. Jr. who is a November child, just like her daddy, is having attention issues in school. She is an extremely smart and intelligent kid and is easily distracted, just like her daddy and she does tend to walk into the occasional wall, just like her grandma!

We had a meeting with her teacher who gave us a detailed report card for the Kindergardener and said "she has trouble following my instruction. She keeps looking at what the other kids are doing and cannot focus". She went on to explain how she is the youngest in her class and how it is going to pose problems for her because some of her classmates are 14 months older.

San promptly cut in and said "hubby here was in 2nd grade at Jr.'s age". Being the sincere daddy, I went on to explain to the teacher that I had the same problems. I never went to kindergarten and was directly thrown into first grade at age 4 and finished school at 16 and college at 20 and was in gradschool before I could legally drink in the US. I also told her that my social life wasnt exactly stellar because "having no moustache when graduating high school" was an issue, but I never had any problems with academics.

At this point, the teacher must have seen very clearly why Jr. is distracted (talking to her daddy for 5 minutes would explain that) and asked me "so do you have any suggestions to improve Jr.'s focus?".

Daddy said "Eureka! I know exactly what they did when I was in first and second grade". They moved me to the first row so all I saw was the teacher and the blackboard. Nothing to distract me.

The teacher said, well.. in the US, we used to do that only to kids who were troublemakers. In any case we do not have rows in the classroom till 3rd or 4th grade. We have them sit around circular desks in groups of 4 or 5 so they can learn the value of teamwork!

Where do you sit then, and where is the blackboard ? I asked.

Apparently there is no thing like a blackboard and the teacher moves around the classroom as she gives instructions to kids.

Hmm.. let's see here. You are trying to focus on a certain voice trying to give you an instruction and you have to execute on it. This might also involve looking at a piece of paper or an object that is in the teachers hand and you have to do something on your desk based on that. What would be easier. A fixed location for the teacher directly in front of the student or a moving teacher who could sometimes be talking from your right, left, or even behind you..

Bah!!!! I said and walked out.

Really love the teachers, their enthusiasm and their passion.. but I know myself and based on history and some genetic extrapolation, my kid, and there are no surprises on why she cannot focus. First we need to learn focus on stationary targets before we can focus on the moving targets!

Bah!!! Bah!!! Bah!!!

Now I am going to train Jr. Jason Bourne style on how to follow instructions from a moving daddy..

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