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from the the-very-concept-of-beauty-is-part-of-the-entrenched-patriarchy dept.
For over a year, I worked as a beauty editor, writing and researching about the products, trends, and people that make us want to look a certain way. And as research for many of the stories I wrote, I consulted with dermatologists, plastic surgeons, makeup artists, aestheticians, and more trying to answer a simple question—how can I make myself more conventionally attractive?
"Beauty is confidence," they'd always say, prefacing the real answer. Inevitably, these experts would eventually tell me that you feel more confident, and thus more beautiful, when you look blemish- and wrinkle-free. (Pending on the product they were promoting, this could also incorporate being tanner, or more contoured, or thinner, or paler, or less made up, or curvier, etc.) Regardless of respondents' different aesthetic tastes, everyone seemed to agree—younger is more beautiful. Beauty was about anti-aging.
Naturally, the problem here is the premise. What is beauty beyond someone else defining it? For as long as humanity's obsession with the term has existed, we've equally known about its subjective nature. After all, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is merely a cliché that posits that exact subjectivity of attractiveness.
But what if the beholder can eliminate subjectivity—what if the beholder wasn't a person, but an algorithm? Using machine learning to define beauty could, theoretically, make beauty pageants and rankings like People's annual Most Beautiful in the World list more objective and less prone to human error. Of course, teaching an algorithm to do anything may involve some bias from whoever does the programming, but that hasn't stopped this automated approach from defining equally subjective things like listening preferences or news value (we see you, Facebook et al).
(Score: 3, Funny) by Thexalon on Tuesday March 21 2017, @12:08PM (2 children)
Any D&D veteran knows that beauty is definitely *not* in the eye of a Beholder.
What will be interesting, though, is if they manage to quantify beauty more closely than the current "helen" units: 1 helen = the amount of beauty required to send 1000 ships worth of people towards you. Typically, that's a bit too much for practical use, so millihelens and microhelens are in common use. Negative values, of course, repulse with equal force: -1 helen chases 1000 ships worth of people away.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Tuesday March 21 2017, @01:17PM
millihelens
That would be an interesting replacement for the Beaufort scale and rating ship hulls if you express weather or survivability as a percentage of 1 in millihelens.
That squall line isn't much, its barely white capping the waves, glad the storm died down from the forecast 250 millihelens to a mere 10 millihelens sea state danger level.
Yeah my 29 foot sailboat is built to atlantic crossing specs and its rated to 800 millihelens of weather but the ride is pretty brutal above 500 millihelens and the galley is pretty much out of commission in sea states above 600 millihelens, so on paper its a north atlantic crosser but in practice its more fun in the Caribbean.
They changed the coast guard regs such that ship and platform lifeboats need to be engineered to survive higher than 990 milihelens of weather but much like a puppeteer hull, the steel hull surviving intact and afloat does not imply the passengers are any better than red goo pooled in the bilge after a couple hours in a 900 millihelen hurricane.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday March 21 2017, @02:18PM
I'd be more interested/worried if we started to use Hel [wikipedia.org] as a unit.
One Hel is enough to make you build an android replacement that moonlights as the destroyer of civilisation.