And The Crowd Goes Wild

Interesting article, but could have benefited from some basic trigonometry.

1) The shoe is not "almost perpendicular", if you view the larger image, you can draw a selection box of roughly 50px in width by 150px in height (his shoe is tilted more than 18 degrees), so his shoe length is closer to around 158px. That puts his shoe "size" around 10.3".

2) His toe extends several pixels beyond where the "sole" ends, I don't know how that factors into shoe measurements.

3) The author always refers to shoe size in inches, then comments that, "Since shoes don't come in quarter fractions, this is likely a 9.5" shoe". I assume he is referring to US Men's Shoe Sizes, but a size 9 1/2 shoe is not 9.5", it's 10.5" (inches), and a size 10 shoe is 10.69", a 0.19 inch difference. (http://shoes.about.com/od/fitcomfort/a/men_inches.htm)

Since the original problem was "an associate of mine who asked if I could identify a person's shoe size from a photo", assuming the other math is right, 158 pixels would be make the correct answer closer to a size 8 1/2 or 9 (in US Men's Shoe sizes).

Of course, I could be completely off base here, since I only spent about 3 or 4 minutes thinking about this and didn't write an entire blog entry.