Dynamic face recognition may be one of the last frontiers for quantifying why some of our simplest brain functions have difficulty being matched by computers.

As a kid, when computers were more basic, it was easy to see the differences between my brain and the power of a computer. When I played baseball I knew the instant the ball was hit whether I had to run back or forward. This was a spectacular amount of mathematics done in an instant with the only programming being my amount of practice. A computer has to be able to define a parabola before it can tell me which way to run - by the time it could tell me where to run, the ball will have landed. The only reason I bothered to show up for trigonometry was to figure out a methodology that could help me write a computer program to catch a baseball without having the computer know where the ball was going to be hit in advance.

Facial recognition today faces similar obstacles. If you look at your favorite scientist’s irritated face while his supermodel storms out because he did not tell her she was beautiful for the requisite hundredth time that day, it looks a certain way. If he then looks happy because he finally got some peace and quiet, it looks another way. To you, it is easily the same person but a computer has a very difficult time with that operation.

A three-year old child can look at a real chicken and then a cartoon chicken and say, “That’s a chicken.” A computer has a very difficult time with that also. And good luck getting a computer to tell you who is more attractive, that girl from “Veronica Mars” or the live action model of Lara Craft, Tomb Raider:
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I was puttering around the attic of the Cashominium, trying to sort through some old boxes, and I came across something you all might find interesting. Before any of this makes sense, I need to give you a little family background.

Like many, the Cash family has been here a long time (a long time for America, anyway - here a hundred years is a long time and in Europe a hundred miles is a long distance, so it’s all perspective) but we are not blueblooded fancy-pants Mayflower descendants or anything like that. We arrived just over 160 years ago. The mid-1800s were a popular time to leave Europe, what with land and opportunity here and there being the place where guys like Napoleon were still fashionable and ‘reform’ meant killing a lot of people, but we weren’t the working poor that left because of lousy potato crops or anything so dire.

More predictably, legend has it that old Jebediah left Britain under some questionable circumstances - namely a scandal involving a woman.

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It’s political primary season and you know what that means, right? Right, it’s time to rent movies and think about something else.

But you wouldn’t be here if you could watch just any movies, you’d be a Huffington Post reader or Glenn Beck listener or whatever it is those people do that gets so much more attention than actual quality writing, like this site. You have more sense than that so you like movies with scientists; and especially scientists who could be hottie supermodels, mostly because they don’t know anything about science.

In compiling a list like this, I am torn and maybe you will be also. Great science movies and attractive women don’t always go together. Number of hot women in Pi for example? Well, okay, Lauren Fox, but she wasn’t a scientist.

You get my point. We have to make a choice in a lot of cases; great women or great science. Sometimes we get both but that’s rare. Actually, female scientists, great or not, in movies apparently aren’t all that common. Eva Flicker of the University of Vienna wrote in Between Brains and Breasts—Women Scientists in Fiction Film: On the Marginalization and Sexualization of Scientific Competence that only 18% of movies containing scientists had the female kind. That means there must have been almost no female scientists in the early days of film because it is easy to find modern films with female scientists - a lot more than the 25% of the science work force in the real world. Scientists are in and female scientists even more so. If you’re going to have a female scientist you might as well make her a hot one.

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When President George Bush announced in 2004 that he wanted to reinvigorate space exploration, he presented a number of arguments for increasing funding but they were all rather tepid. Space exploration technology, for example, led to CAT scans and MRIs. Oh, and we got better weather forecasting.

Honestly, those are pretty weak arguments to justify an organization that gets almost $15 billion per year. Why not mention Tang and a pen that writes upside down? At least Tang is something most of us have had. I have never had an MRI.

Since then we have had some interesting projects take off; the Dawn misson to Ceres, for example, but nothing that really captured the attention of the common man. The space shuttle is, let’s face it, boring.

I remember one episode of Farscape where our lead character, who piloted a ship through a wormhole and discovered all kinds of interesting things, speaks with reverence about his astronaut father who was … a space shuttle pilot. I started laughing even though it wasn’t supposed to be funny. That’s how far the space program had fallen - the only recent thing that young people could idolize was the equivalent of a high-altitude delivery truck.

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We spent Part I discussing Bionic Women on TV and speculating as to why they spent $55 Million on Jaime Sommers in the show but couldn’t fix actress Michelle Ryan’s chin. Now we’re going to get into actual science - not perceptual science, like how Michelle can take photos like this …

… yet still most often looks like this …

… but actual science, like how we would build a Bionic Woman today if we didn’t give a crap about television ratings. It’s a good thing I am writing this now because television ratings are important and this show could be cancelled any day, making it a lot less culturally relevant. How will I get you to buy a book on science if it doesn’t have relevant pop culture and cute girls?

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