The possibilities of Photoshop are only limited by one’s imagination. I don’t know who originally had the idea to swap facial features in pictures of more than one person, but the results can be freaky! Sometimes the whole face is swapped; sometimes it’s hard to tell where each part came from in this selection of images from the Something Awful forums posted at Unreality magazine. Link

Have you ever wondered what Brad and Angelina would look like if they switched faces with each other? Or what Abraham Lincoln would look like if he was actually played by Nic Cage? Well, thanks to the magic of Photoshop, now you can -and the results are hilarious. WebUrbanist has a great collection of Photoshop face swaps along with links to blogs that specialize in that sort of thing. Enjoy.

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Andy Alcala, a student at the University of Iowa, took the term “face value” quite literally when he decided to reinterpret some of the most famous paintings in the world as face paintings. They’re quite entertaining and visually stunning.

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As the President of The United States Barack Obama is one of the most photographed people in the world. Every day photographers take snapshots of the POTUS in a variety of serious and funny moments. If your a fan or not, you may enjoy this gallery which has some of the best presidential faces from each day.  I wonder what weird faces I would get caught making if someone took my picture constantly?

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Herman Chernoff

A smiley-face is very expressive, statistically. By tweaking the eyes, mouth and other bits, you can literally put a meaningful face on any jumble of numbers. Herman Chernoff pointed this out in 1973 in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, in a monograph called “The Use of Faces to Represent Points in K-Dimensional Space Graphically.”

Subsequently, folks took to calling these things Chernoff faces. Chernoff faces can make statistical analysis into a recognizably human activity.

Most people, when shown some statistics, sigh and get boggled. But Herman Chernoff realized that almost everyone is good at reading faces. So he devised recipes to convert any set of statistics into an equivalent bunch of smiley-face drawings.

Each data point, he wrote, “is represented by a cartoon of a face whose features, such as length of nose and curvature of mouth, correspond to components of the point. Thus every multivariate observation is visualized as a computer-drawn face. This presentation makes it easy for the human mind to grasp many of the essential regularities and irregularities present in the data.”

“The Use of Faces to Represent Points in K-Dimensional Space Graphically” is one of the few statistics papers that is visually goofy, rather than arid.

One page is filled with 87 cartoon faces, each slightly different. Some faces have little beady eyes, others have big, startled-wideawake peepers. There are wide mouths, little dried-up “I’m not here, don’t notice me” mouths, and middling mouths. Another page shows off some of the cartoony variety that’s possible: roundish simpleton heads, jowly alien-visitor heads, and a smattering of noggins that look froggy. Elsewhere, the study perhaps inevitably includes conventional statistics machinery — charts of numbers, differential and intergral calculus equations, and plenty of technical lingo.

Chernoff discovered, by experiment, that people could comfortably interpret a face that expresses quite large amounts of data. “At this point,” he wrote, “one can treat up to 18 variables, but it would be relatively easy to increase that number by adding other features such as ears, hair, [and] facial lines.”

Chernoff faces made from data gathered by measuring rocks, and presented in Chernoff’s original paper in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. The paper explains that “Eight measurements were made on each of 88 nummulited specimens from the Eocene Yellow Limestone Formation of northwestern Jamaica.”

The world has gone on to employ Chernoff faces a little, but not yet a lot. A 1981 report in the Journal of Marketing, for example, used them to display corporate financial data, with this explanation: “From Year 5 to Year 1, the nose narrows as well as increases in length, and the eccentricity of the eyes increases. Respectively, these facial features represent a decrease in total assets, an increase in the ratio of retained earnings to total assets, and an  increase in cash flow.”

A note at the very end of Chernoff’s 1973 paper hints at a practical reason why his idea would not catch on immediately: “At this time the cost of drawing these faces is about 20 to 25 cents per face on the IBM 360-67 at Stanford University using the Calcomp Plotter. Most of this cost is in the computing, and I believe that it should be possible to reduce it considerably.”

Chernoff faces representing data about a series of Swiss bank notes, some real, some forged, from Bernhard Flury and Hans Riedwyl,’s 1981 study in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. The main variables are:
Xl length of the bank note
X2 width of the bank note, measured on the left side
X3 width of the bank note, measured on the right side
X4 width of the lower margin
X5 width of the upper margin
X6 length of the print diagonal from the lower left to the upper right corner

References
“The Use of Faces to Represent Points in K-Dimensional Space Graphically,” Herman Chernoff, Journal of the American Statistical Association, vol. 68, no. 342, 1973, pp. 361–8.

“Facial Representation of Multivariate Data,” David L. Huff, Vijay Mahajan and William C. Black, Journal of Marketing, vol. 45, no. 4, Autumn 1981, pp. 53-9.

“Use of Chernoff Faces to Follow Trends in Laboratory Data,” John A. Lott and Timothy C. Durbridge, Journal of Clinical Laboratory Analysis, 1990, pp. 459-63. The authors are at Ohio State University in the USA and the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Sciences in Adelaide, Australia.

“Graphical Representation of Multivariate Data by Means of Asymmetrical Faces,” Bernhard Flury and Hans Riedwyl, Journal of the American Statistical Association, vol. 76, no. 376, December 1981, pp. 757-65. The authors are at the University of Berne, Switzerland.

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This article is republished with permission from the July-August 2010 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

I don’t know about you guys, but I get a kick out of these goofy pictures of unintentional faces found in objects. Dark Roasted Blend has a great collection of these guys. If you like them, be sure to check out the whole list on the link.

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Sam “No Nickname” Saxton makes vertical ambigrams with illustrations that read the same whether you hold them right side up or upside down. He’s given the treatment to presidents, pop culture figures, and even Star Wars characters! Link

James Dacey of Physicsworld.com Blog spotted two such phenomena:

Michael Jackson: This Is It (It Being Polymer Droplet)

Physicist David Fairhurst of Nottingham Trent University was working on a physics experiment involving droplet of polymer solution (those wacky scientists!) when he saw the face of Michael Jackson!

The ugly-looking globular mound is a droplet of polymer solution, the kind of substance you might find in the ink cartridges of your printer. As the solution began to dry, Fairhurst noticed a number of small “spherulites” begin to crystallise on the droplet surface revealing what appears to be a tiny human face. [...]

The physicist and his group of PhD students reckon the face looks like a small girl, or possibly even the King of Pop, Michael Jackson.

I ran the image through an online face-recognition programme and the names that came out included: Rachel Carson, the American environmentalist; Marlene Dietrich the German-born actress; and (tenuously) Iggy Pop.

Link – via Geekosystem, thanks Glenn!

The Beatles in Bouncing Water Droplet

It was whilst writing a story this afternoon about water-repellency in lotus leaves that I noticed something very strange. Bizarrely, everybody’s favourite mop-topped Liverpudlian seems to reveal himself in the high-speed photo images of water-droplets being ejected from the leaf surface.

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Daito Manabe is a Japanese artist and programer who has figured out a way to make his face involuntarily dance to music: by using electricity. Each beat hits a different part of his face with a quick shock. The result is disturbing, yet highly entertaining.

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