[zachster]

You know, I was actually thinking of this. What SxSW really needs is just a tiny bit of NLP to do a tag cloud for the panels. I think that could be used to perform the kind of experiment you describe.

And I wouldn't bias such a thing by predicting the outcome, but can we agree that the panelists on topics we're interested in will be appealing to us in some way? Maybe not physically all the time, but they will be attractive to us.

I guess all I'm saying is that the inverse is true. Someone's nature, and interests do come through in their appearance (book cover judging rules!), especially in a set of people already pre-selected for common interests like the sxsw crowd.