With Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation, 116 cardinals from various regions have to come a consensus on who will be next. Amanda Cox and Graham Roberts for The New York Times wondered what a composite of all the cardinals might look like, which looks exactly how you might expect the average to look.
Like a youthful Dick Cheney?
Any clue how to make a composite like that? Is it all Photoshop grunt work or is there a way to automate it?
Well, as a neurscientist, I co-register images of brains of different shapes and sizes all the time. The math isn’t that hard, but I don’t know of any software package built to do that with 2d images. If you are comfortable with some coding of your own I bet you could gain all the info you need from here:
http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cis/cista/746/papers/mutual_info_survey.pdf
Reminds me of this: Jason Salavon’s piece “Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (normalized) 2002” seen here http://salavon.com/work/EveryPlayboyCenterfoldDecades/ (don’t be scared by title, the link is completely SFW).
Has anyone found the cardinal closest to this composite yet?