On May 8, 1958, art imitated life in 2018. In an episode of a TV show called Trackdown, there was a conman named Trump, who tried to scare the bejeezus out of a town by preaching, "at midnight tonight, without my help and knowledge, every one of you will be dead.” The only way he could save them is by building a wall.

One sane man tries to talk some sense into the sheriff, with Trump in their presence. "How long are you going to put up with this?" he asks. But the brainwashed sheriff replies with a dumb, "What do you mean?"

How long are you going to let this conman walk around town?" the man persists.

Then Trump speaks his signature line: "Be careful son, I can sue you."

I Googled Trackdown and yes, this show was real. Also from Snopes, "A representative for MeTV, a Chicago network that airs reruns of Trackdown, confirmed that the episode was real." Hopefully the title of the episode, "The End of the World," isn't as prophetic.

Here is the full episode:

Via The Wrap Read the rest

Teghan Lucas, a comparative anatomy researcher at the University of Adelaide, was fascinated with the idea of doppelgängers, that every person has a look-alike out there in the world. So Teghan analyzed thousands of photos of people, for example measuring the distance between features, to determine the probability that two people would have matching faces. According to Teghan, there's only a one in a trillion chance that you share even eight measurements with someone else. Of course, people can still look very similar even if their eyes and ears aren't separated by precisely the same distance. From the BBC:

"It depends whether we mean ‘lookalike to a human’ or ‘lookalike to facial recognition software’,” says David Aldous, a statistician at U.C. Berkeley...

When you bump into a friend on the street, the brain immediately sets to work recognising their features – such as hairline and skin tone – individually, like recognising Italy by its shape alone. But what if they’ve just had a haircut? Or they’re wearing makeup?

To ensure they can be recognised in any context, the brain employs an area known as the fusiform gyrus to tie all the pieces together. If you compare it to finding a country on a map, this is like checking it has a border with France and a coast. This holistic ‘sum of the parts’ perception is thought to make recognising friends a lot more accurate than it would be if their features were assessed in isolation. Crucially, it also fudges the importance of some of the subtler details.

Sara from Sweden used the website Twin Strangers to find her doppelgänger, Shannon from Ireland. In this video, they meet for the fist time.

[via] Read the rest