I am the Dalai Lama's evil twin

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Did you read about the weird «evil twin» scenario that is being bandied about to explain the bizarre case of Claude Allen, former top advisor to President Bush, who was arrested a few days ago and booked on shoplifting and fraud charges? The poor man is innocent, his evil twin did it, see? [http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/007891.php]

It made me think how convenient it would be to have an evil twin that can be used as scapegoat every time you're caught doing something you shouldn't be doing. While googling for my evil twin, I found out about the face recognition programme at the MyHeritage Site (Free registration required) [http://tinyurl.com/z3ptd]. The idea is: you upload your photo and the computer analyzes your facial features and compares your face to that of various celebrities.

MyHeritage Face Recognition program runs in 3 steps:

1. The digital photo (or scanned photo print) that you provide is loaded.
2. Specialized technology is applied to automatically detect human faces in your photo.
3. Additional technology is applied to recognize the faces detected in the previous step.

Recognizing faces is done by algorythms that compare the faces in your photo with all faces previously known to the face recognition program, through photos and meta-data contributed by yourself and other users. So the more photos are added to the system, the more powerful it becomes. If people in your photos are not recognized well, it is likely that the program has never encountered them before. If more people add their photos to MyHeritage.com database and annotate them manually, the program will «learn» these faces and will be able to recognize them in future photos, even in different ages of the same person's life.

My results? Believe it or not, I look like: Naomi Watts, Paris Hilton, Kate Hudson, George Soros, Julia Roberts, HH The Dalai Lama, Zhang Ziyi and Madonna. Yes!

I realize of course that a one-time trial cannot yield conclusive results and I probably should upload more pictures to get a decent comparison. Still, there doesn't even seem to be any similarities in the list of faces I was associated with (Julia Roberts and Paris Hilton??!!WTF??!), unless you consider «human» to be a valid common characteristic.

Heck, they might as well say I look like these people:

In the meantime, Your Holiness, if you ever need an evil twin to blame some shit on, you can count on me.