Face recognition, weed whacking, Sunday comics

Three things:

Interesting demonstration of "face mining" from video. I watched a Star Trek episode ("Where no man has gone before") last night on television and today found that it is one used for the face mining demo. They get Scotty wrong, but pretty impressive anyway.
• Also a Sunday cartoon caught my eye. The cartoonist must not like Charlie Sheen's sitcom much :)
• Finally, is there actual evidence that increasing vegetation clearance around mountain structures from 30 to 100 feet is cost effective? This is a real pain (I was mowing today) since area goes up by the length of the side squared: from 900 ft^2 to 10000 ft^2, eleven times as much to clear! Grrr. Where is evidence-based fire fighting when you need it :) I guess we should be grateful, some insurance companies were requiring more than 100 feet. The law now addresses that in section 51182 item 3 :)