I got home about 9:00 last night, having missed dinner and had an unexpectedly exciting ending to the evening. I warmed up leftovers, ate, and decided to fool around a bit online while waiting for #1 daughter to show up so I could tell her my interesting experience.
brewster

So I decided to go play with the Celebrity Lookalike thing that #2 daughter has on her blog.

This thing is not infallible. They said I looked like Paget Brewster. I do not.

gar I tried another brand. This one said I looked like Ava Gardner. I would totally be okay with  looking like Ava Gardner, but it just isn’t true. Sigh. venus

They also said that I looked like Venus Williams.  Another attractive woman, but  I don’t think there is much similarity between us. I mean, the chances that Venus, when she is out with friends, has people saying, “Hey, aren’t you the lady from the teacher store?” seem slim.

jansen And Famke Janssen. I’d enjoy looking like Famke, too, but her name is just flat too hard to spell.

Now the thing that you might have noticed — I did — is that these people bear very little resemblance to one another. Do these applications just pick out a few people at random and hope we’ll imagine a resemblance, like astrology?

Or does this merely tell us something about how computers see us? For example, I notice that all these women have similar chins. Their chins are even somewhat similar to mine. Maybe to a computer, the chin is the thing that really tells you all about people.

Possibly computers think that we all look alike. After all, you have to tell these games your gender. They can’t tell. Maybe the computer is saying, “Well, these all seem to have two eyebrows. They look quite a lot alike.”

Yet another reason to think that Gary Marcus is wrong on the old human vs. computer brain question.

You were wondering about the excitement?

Well, I had the music meeting, and suffered soldiered through bells, and was well into choir.

And you remember how I have been working on getting volunteers for special music for the early service every week and have the calendar filled up to Easter? And working with the choirlet, as well? Well, our choir director asked if the choirlet would sing this Sunday in the second service. I asked them, they agreed, I emailed the pastor to let him know, they worked hard on the song, all was going swimmingly.

We were about to sing a lovely new piece by L.L. Fleming, when someone in the choir asked about the anthem on Sunday. I confidently expected the announcement that the early service ensemble would be singing it. Nope. We’re doing — it doesn’t matter what piece, because I was sitting there in consternation. I believe I said something.

The choir director said there had been a change of plans and it wasn’t his decision.

I assume that I sang the Fleming piece more or less as it was written. I was thinking about the eight people who had been asked to do special music for the 11:00 service. About the fact that some had been excited and flattered to be asked and some possibly nervous about it, but all had rearranged their schedules to do it and worked hard to prepare. And about how the change had not even been conveyed to them — I mean, two of us were in choir practice that night, and two more in bells, and no one had told the four of us, so I was pretty sure that the plan was just to blow us off at the time. And about how I didn’t even have contact information for all these women. And about the effect this will have on my ability to find volunteers in future, after all these eight people have talked to everyone they meet about being uninvited to our little party.

I stayed after to find out who had made this decision, and I sent a carefully-phrased email. Carefully phrased meaning that it didn’t say “You blankety blank! What do you mean blanking up my work like this?! Don’t blank with me!” Not that I use that sort of language. But I think it would have expressed how I felt.

Sometime in my work day today, I will have to get in contact with all the people involved.

We have snow and ice and stuff, as a fitting background to such a task.

The recipient of my email got right back to me and we have fixed it all up. I am now thinking of ways to avoid having this sort of thing happen again in future.