tales from the prosopagnosia tag

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

lennat:

Which one of you was it that came up with the idea of a face recognition app on google glasses?

I don’t think I got the idea from anyone else, but it’s such an obvious idea that I expect plenty of other prosos have come up with it independently.

I was just talking about this earlier today. (That post in turn links to the post before that, which links to the post before that, which I think was the first one.) I’m not sure if this is news to you: for all I know, you wandered by my Tumblr and that’s what prompted you to post this in the first place.

(I was discussing this with my family recently, and my parents think I should start a letter-writing campaign to pressure Google to allow facial recognition. It’s an interesting idea in theory, but I don’t think I’m the one to do it. Even assuming I figure out how to go about such a campaign, it’s a lose-lose situation: either it fails, in which case…you know, it fails, or it succeeds, in which case as its founder I’m the one who gets stuck dealing with the media and whatnot, and I don’t think I could cope with that.)

(I also learned recently of Lambda Labs, which was working on a black-market facial recognition Glass app. (They started working on it pre-ban, but said they would continue with it post-ban.) However, all of the news articles I found about it (such as this one) were slightly over a year old, and it seems that nobody has heard from the developer(s) in an official capacity for six months. I don’t have high hopes for it.)

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #tales from the prosopagnosia tag #reply via reblog #overenthusiastic parenthesis use #(although really that last one could apply to nearly every post I make) #(you see what I mean)

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

theforestcat:

I have prosopagnosia, which means “face blindness”. I have had it since birth, and I think it accounts for some of my neuroticism. When I was little, I was often scared that I’d accidentally go home with the wrong parents. Over my lifetime, I’ve learned to identify people in other ways, so it almost comes as naturally to me as someone without facial processing difficulties. I still make mistakes and people get frustrated with me quite often. I’ve also begun to recognize the body language of someone who recognizes me, although I’ve messed that up when someone has just been “checking me out”, which has lead those people to believe that the attraction was mutual… oops. Luckily the bus usually comes in time. xD

However, with movies, I often have difficulty following the plot because I cannot tell the difference between many actors, even if they are of different ages or ethnicities. (It helps a lot if they have different hairstyles.) This is why I prefer cartoons, although I have the same problem with a lot of anime where the characters look similar. I think I would enjoy anime a lot more if I did not have this mental deficit.

Although I haven’t seen this movie, the two men on the left would look identical to me, and I probably would not enjoy this movie due to that.

The first one from the left has brown hair (what’s left of it) and the second one has silver hair (ditto). God help you if they ever wear hoods, though. (And having to rely on a single trait like that would likely make it harder. You’re always having to do “Okay, so it was the brown one that did x and the silver one that did y…I think”.)

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #reply via reblog #tales from the prosopagnosia tag

Someone meme this, this shit is fucking priceless

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

lennat:

IF WE’RE NOT ASHAMED OF OUR NEUROLOGICAL DIFFERENCES THEN WE DON’T’ REALLY HAVE THEM, GASP!

WE DON’T HAVE A RIGHT TO REACH OUT TO OTHER PEOPLE WITH THE SAME DISABILITIES THAT JUST MEANS WE WANT ATTENTION, OH NO!

WE’RE FAKE IF WE TALK ABOUT IT SO WE CAN’T MENTION IT EVER!

WE SHOULD ALL JUST HIDE AWAY AND WALLOW IN SHAME BECAUSE THAT’S THE ONLY WAY WE’RE ACTUALLY REAL

IF YOU DON’T THEN WE WILL GET TALKED DOWN TO YOU USING DEMEANING AND SEXIST LANGUAGE LIKE ‘DARLING’

I shudder to think what would happen if I dared express an opinion on the explicit denial of technologically-assisted facial recognition to the general public (read: us) due to privacy concerns.

(It was bad enough when I thought they were just dancing around the edge, but no, now they’re dancing away from the edge. And where Google goes, the world follows.)

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #tales from the prosopagnosia tag #(I’d make an analogy here about hearing aids and eavesdropping) #(but I can never tell which analogies about this sort of thing you’re allowed to make and which will get you yelled at) #(and anyway turns out the people who make those hearing aid commercials that *advertise* the potential for eavesdropping) #(are commonly considered terrible people) #(so that’d probably backfire) #proud citizen of The Future #but only by birth #not by residency #next year in Waterloo