Slashdot Mirror

Already done.

As a bonus it would appear attractive to most people.

Australia also has a gifted, oh wait, it is only for sports douche's. Want to know the real reason why this is so, because they sell advertising, and the companies that sell shit get lobbyists to get the government to pay and promote sports, basically subsidising advertising to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Face it, reality is science and engineering types don't not make good advertising tools. Often they are not pretty enough (or average enough looking according to this http://www.faceresearch.org/de...) or they are unwilling to lie about the quality of products (it's not lying it's acting being the normal bullshit coming out of athletes mouths). So it not just about sports worship, which in reality is advertising driven, it is about the advertising itself and the government subsidising it at public expense (in return of course, it's not lying it's acting, what great politicians they are, according to those self serving athletes).

Um, no you can't. Human thought and emotion, by definition, is outside the realm of scientific inquiry.

Human thought and emotion evolved as a result of environmental pressures, like everything else. It's a very active field of scientific inquiry. For example, did you know that if you take an average of faces from people you find less attractive, you will arrive at an attractive face? Which makes perfect sense, as things we perceive as blemishes tend to disappear.

Face research from a while back did decent job studying facial attractiveness. While it might not be as satisfying as a study of the entire body, it does give you the option of creating the most beautiful face ever.
http://www.faceresearch.org/

Normalise the sizes. Pick points on the images which mark particular features (corner of eye for instance) and then average them to reduce the errors.

e.g.
http://www.faceresearch.org/demos/average
 

personally, i find the faceresearch.org demo posted on Slashdot a while back the most interesting. unlike this algorithm, it actually presents some interesting findings about the psychology of aesthetic beauty.

rather than manipulating a single photo to make that person more "pretty." it allows you to average different people's head shots. and the result of this research seems to show that our perception of beauty is based on the mean range of facial geometries we're exposed to. we naturally find faces that are the most "average" attractive. but different populations have different averages, so there are still cultural differences.

another way to look at it is that instead of looking for features that define beauty, we really just have an aversion to faces that deviate too much from the cultural norm as defined by the average range of facial configurations. now, everyone has unique features that distinguish them from others, and everyone deviates from the population average in some respect, but some show a greater deviation than others, which may indicate their genetic fitness. and so our psychological attraction to average faces is an evolutionarily learned trait to help us pick the most genetically healthy individuals to mate with.

but what's interesting is that if you mix several very different faces that don't meet conventional standards of beauty, you will actually get a very attractive face as a result (try this in the demo by picking the ugliest faces out of the gallery to mix). this is probably because even though "ugly" people deviate largely from the cultural average, they all deviate in different ways, so it doesn't take two beautiful individuals to produce an attractive average.

a corollary to this effect is that a couple with drastically different looks will give birth to very attractive children. which actually works out perfectly with another evolutionary trait--that of opposites attracting. human beings (and perhaps other mammals as well) are attracted to individuals with a very different histocompatibility index to themselves. that is to say, we are attracted to individuals which are very genetically different from ourselves. we can detect people's histocompatibility with our own based on their body scent. and double blind studies have found that men and women find the body odors of individuals whose Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) was the most different from their own. this is to ensure that their offspring will receive a diverse set of genes, which leads to a more robust immune system and prevents inbreeding.

now, my personal theory is, men and women don't just find partners with complementary MHCs to them based on scent alone. facial features can also be an indication of genetic differences. so this may also lead to individuals being attracted to people who have very different facial features from themselves. and since the average of two drastically different faces produces a more average face, this also leads to better looking children.

You can test it for yourself at http://www.faceresearch.org/demos/average.