Tuesday 8/3

Recognition


So I took this picture a while ago . . . hold on, back up.

I used to work at Starbucks, for almost three years, actually.  (Sweet gig, by the way.  If you've ever thought, "I like Starbucks.  I wonder if it would be fun to work here", well it is.  You should definitely check it out.)  Anyway, I digress.

The recipe for hot chocolate at Starbucks calls for chocolate drizzle on top of the whipped cream.  Yum, right?  For fun, I used to use the pointed chocolate bottles to draw chocolate smiley faces on all of the ones I had time for (especially the kids ones.)  Someone ordered six hot chocolates once and we weren't busy, so I took a picture with my phone and sent it to facebook.

If you're at all familiar with facebook, it suggests all kinds of things to its users, like friends you should be friends with, groups you should join, movies and music you would like, etc.  It has another feature which lets you "tag" people in your photos.  That way, someone who is looking at your photos can run their mouse over someone in a photo and their name will pop up.  Just yesterday, facebook was thumbing through my photos and, in its infinite wisdom, decided to suggest I name the person in this picture (my hot chocolates from Starbucks from like three years ago):

At least the facebook-photo-search-so-you-can-tag-your-friends-engine got one thing right.  Hot chocolate is indeed my friend.  But then it asks, "Whose face is this?"  I didn't know what to say, so I put "Quasimoto."

I guess you could take one of two angles on this.  One, perhaps my prowess as a chocolate artiste is easily recognizable, even by the mechanical means of a computer program.  Or two, face recognition software is so pitiful that even my crude chocolate rendition of positive emotion was deciphered as human.

I think I'll go with the first one.

By: S. Cole Garrett