The other day I stumbled across a website called myheritage.com. The site is a genealogical database designed to help people reconstruct their family history. That in and of itself is nothing new, but this one is different because it uses face recognition software to do so. The idea is for people to upload photos of themselves and their family members to the site which then connects you to other possible family members based upon their facial characteristics. In order to entice you to use the site they offer a free service called Find the Celebrity in you. After you upload a current photo of yourself the face recognition technology springs into action taking various measurements of your face and then comparing the results to a database of over 3000 celebrities. In the end it presents you with a list of celebrities you supposedly bear the strongest resemblance to.

So I looked through the pictures of myself and found one what I thought was a good representation of me, uploaded it to the site and waited for the results. Within a few seconds it came back with a list of celebrites that the computer believed I most looked liked.

At the top of the list Ben Stiller who was followed by Lance Armstrong, and after him Dan Rather. I thought ok, that’s not so bad, but then the list took a sudden bizarre turn when it came up with John Cleese, followed by Fidel Castro, followed by Kim Dae jung, the President of South Korea. It get’s worse because according to the website there is also a striking similiarity between me and Gwyneth Paltrow, Hillary Clinton, and the 80’s singing sensation Chaka Khan.

It would seem that Myheritage.com still has some bugs that it needs to work out.

I logged on to myheritage.com because I was curious to find an answer to the question…

Who do I look like?

As I sat there, disappointed with my results God began to teach me a lesson. The question came ot mind “Who do you want to look like?”

Well Lord, for starters not Chaka Khan.

Then he cut to the chase…

“Who are you trying to look like.”

That’s a good question…for all of us.