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One interesting thing I've read is that eyebrows may be more important for face recognition (by humans) than the appearance of the eyes themselves. (I suspect this has more to do with the shape of the brow bone than the eyebrow hair.)

See this example: http://i.imgur.com/ADXtF.png

The research was done by Pawan Sinha at MIT.

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Interesting, because shaving you eyebrows is easy and is not as conspicuous as painting your face.

Sure, or wearing a headband over the eyebrows. But computers probably detect faces differently, so I don't know if this would fool a computer.

The one system I read about in passing, which was surprisingly accurate, just looked for off-color blots to the bottom, left and right of a supposed face. If you're not blonde, eyebrows probably contribute more to the blot than the pupils.

"The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows." - Frank Zappa

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." -- Pablo Picasso

I wonder where all those artists get their knowledge about computers from. Whoever thinks that computer can only give you answers, and only do what they are told to---has never debugged.

I would guess Zappa was being obtuse on purpose.

He later composed his album 'Jazz from Hell' just for the Synclavier, no human musicians. Presumably he could potter about a bit.

I was just responding to the 'computer' and 'eyebrow' theme above, in a way that I don't now understand myself.

Indeed.

I checked the biography of Zappa (OK, really just the Wikipedia page about him) before I wrote. It mentioned electronic stuff.

That's why I had to resort to a Picasso quote as a strawmen to make sure there's at least some validity to my complained.

Well, have you debugged? I've done so thousands of times, and invariably the cause was that the computer was doing exactly what I told it to do, but not what I thought I was telling it to do.

Indeed. Apart from hardware flaws and strange concurrency issues, that's the thing.

I did not express myself clear enough.

Perhaps I should have said that some people think, because computers only do what you tell them, that they can not surprise you.

Debugging and fractals are only two counterexamples.

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