Do I look European to you?

A couple of years ago when I was still thin some of my friends would comment that I do not look 'chinese'. Eh? "You look mixed!" "You look Eurosian." etc. My friends from mainland China were even more sceptical. "You are not chinese. You can't even speak chinese." I never said I was from China! Living in Malaysia, everyone knew my pedigree is chinese.

So a new fad on the Interweb called Face Analyzer came to my attention one day and I jumped the chance to mess around with it, uploading many different photographs of me with different facial emotions.

Most of which churn out my job description as 'white collar' which is in fact true but I suspect it got that from my profile, compiling the data from where I lived, age, drunkness and other shits. Average social life, average risk, average honour, average politeness. Yes I am just an average guy.

With every different picture I submitted I got a different celebmatch. If this face analyzer is true, my ancestors are people from Middle East, England, Germany, Russia etc. It challenged my family's genealogy tree. Not that I have a tree. I only know so far as my grandparents - that's it! Genealogy never interest me one bit, but now I might just do a little more research. No matter, please read on.

In this picture Face Analzer reckons they are looking at a 1% Middle Eastern, 56% Southern European, 30% South East Asian and 13% Chinese man. Oh they said I look like Ben Affleck too. Gak. When I resubmitted it got Leon Lai and at one time Jackie Chan. What the bloody fuck!

At one time this picture (this was taken two days after the London bombs when I wanted to look 'tough' for my 'Not Afraid' banner. Failed eh?) above yielded the result of 40% Anglo-Saxon and 56% Middle Eastern. WTF! You see any 'Englishness' in the face above?! *Caughs* When I resubmitted they thought it was Robert DeNiro. I am seriously flattered. And now I look like Christian Slater.

The point is Face Analyzer uses and I quote from them here: "state of the art facial recognition technology and the most recent developments in the field of evolutionary psychology we are able to provide you with a patented process that correlates facial characteristics to personality traits. Our Biometric software allows us to automatically find and measure certain key facial features. We use these measurements with our algorithms to determine your inherent personality profile."

This very technology is currently in trials around Britain and will be used in combating crime and terrorism based on facial recognition technology embedded with CCTV systems. And right from the moment my results came in it is obvious that the technology is flawed.

It is crazy. Computers and humans can't even tell the difference between a person's race. Great example was last Friday's killing of a Brazilian man. There was a witness who kept describing him as 'Asian' looking. In Britain Asian means Indian/Pakistani looking.

You can have a go here.

Update: removed