Sunday July 9, 2006
By Miles Erwin

"Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell once famously claimed he and Helen Clark were "very, very, very good friends". Well, they could be more than that.

Digital face-matching technology suggests they could be siblings. www.myheritage.com has launched a new website service called Find the Celebrity in You, which, using advanced three-dimensional face-mapping technology, allows users to match faces with 3200 celebrity mugs from around the world.

Put Clark's picture into the database, and Powell comes back as her spitting image. But they're not the only lookalikes. According to the technology, Don Brash is nearly the mirror image of Bee Gee Robin Gibb and actor Charlton Heston, while Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters is a dead ringer for actor Jackie Chan. TV3 presenter John Campbell could be actor John Travolta's twin, while Maori activist Tame Iti - tattoos and all - matches up with veteran American comedian Mel Brooks.

Campbell was a little shocked at the finding, saying he never would have thought he had a celebrity lookalike. "I clearly don't behave in any way like him," he said. "Well, we have absolutely nothing in common, apart from the first name. No one has ever confused us in the past. There aren't that many celebrities out there with big ears and hair like a toilet brush."

And the nose could be a link to financial nous, with multi-millionaire property developer Sir Robert Jones bearing a striking resemblance to IBM founder Thomas Watson.

Otago University psychology professor Dr Janice Murray was intrigued by some of the results and the fact that the technology did not always differentiate between genders.

She said that while some of the results may surprise people, it needed to be pointed out that the technology matched faces using individual features, rather than the entire profile."

NB1: You have to register to the site (it's free though) - so use your free hotmail/yahoo addy that you only give out to people/websites you think might be a bit dodge.

NB2: Very, very, very close friends? Thats two "very's" too much :| *Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" plays*

Sorry I promised not to make weird threads :-$ ... but tell me the results if you do this!