Super Model, Super Perfection

We live in the age of Photoshop, where companies will pay photographers to take the best, most flattering photo of their product or celebrity, and then go the next step and "Improve" on reality.

Most of the time Photoshop is used to "Fix" the same types of issues that film photographers have dealt with for decades. They can range from removing glare or a reflection of the photo lights on the subject, simplifying a background so as to make the subject stand out. But with the invention of Photoshop, we see companies and celebrities alike demanding that "A bit of work be done" in an attempt for perfection.

Please understand, I would love to have a professional "Work on" any image of me; since I can use all the help I can get. That said, it is a little disconcerting  when Super Models find they are not ready for publication without hours of a trained person being spent "Fixing the image. But I am NO SUPER MODEL ! I need all the help I can get.

But the Idea that some one would take a look at her, and say "No I think she needs a bit of work seems a bit hard to believe.

 If Kate Upton is not hot enough to appear on the cover of a magazine without Photoshop magic, what chance would the rest of us have?

It becomes easy to understand why so many young woman have eating disorders, and feel bad about the way they look, if even those one out of a thousand winners in the genetics lottery still fall short of the perfection magazines lead us to believe are common place.
So much for perfection, I like the before image better.

U.S. Forces Rescue Two Hostages From Somali Pirates

Reading today about how the U.S. Forces pulled of a  Rescue of Two Hostages From Somali Pirates, I could not help but feel a small sense of pride.  The Seal team travled some 8.000 miles, then under the cover of darkness parachuted down to carry out their mission,  It required dozens of members of the Navy Seals, and orders from the president, to rescue an American and Danish aid worker held by pirates in Somali for over 3 months.  All of this was unfolding at the same time that President Obama was set to deliver the State of the Union address.
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Good work US Seals!
The military has clearly been serving our interests at home and around the world with a series of successful missions, each worthy of a film script.


It's a mistake to give all of the credit to President Obama, but as Commander in Chief, clearly he deserves some praise. In part because I have no doubt that those dedicated to making him a one-term-president, would blame him for any military mishaps. If memory serves me correctly, those on the "Right" placed the responsibility for the helicopter crash, during the attempted hostage rescue, squarely on the back of President Carter.

Bin Laden, Kadafi, now this daring rescue; all go to show the world the US Military is the best in the world, and we have a President with the judgment and skill to know how to best use their talents.

Bain Capital Private Equity

Six months ago, who would have thought that Mitt Romney would have his time at

Bain Capital viewed as a negative in the Republican Primaries .

Yes, we recognized that the Democrats would raise questions about his track-record of taking over companies, dismantling them, selling off the assets while pocketing tens of millions for him self. But to see the charge raised by his fellow Conservatives, is a bit surprising.

As an interesting side note, in a few months, the biggest movie of the year will show up at over 6,000 screens. That film the Dark Knight Rises, is the third of the 3 Batman films down by Nolan. It is also a film that features the super villain "Bane".

This can give a whole new meaning to "I work for Bane."

I'm not sure, but I find it difficult to believe that my son was the only person to connect the two.

Latest trends in electric cars.

With the social unrest in the Middle-East, and speculators driving the price of oil to record highs; it is easy to see why so many consumers are searching for more fuel efficient autos.
"Greener" cars have had a select group of followers, but in the past two years we have seen a far greater, and more diverce group of buyers show an interest. Electric autos are not just for the " Flower-Children," no today we see people being driven by a far more practical set of concerns.

This short film reveals some of the latest innovation, most are, or will shortly be available in showrooms across America.

Is Romney the "Anti-Romney" candidate

This is one interesting election cycle.


President Obama is faced with an under performing economy, that has most Americans believing that we are on the "Wrong-Track." Yes, most people recognize that the bad economy was a "Gift" left to him by the prior administration, but after 3 years there is a feeling that the Obama administration has fallen short of expectations. There is a saying in politics, "People vote their pocketbooks," well with the middle class buying power falling, the European debt disaster at a tipping point; there is a great deal of fear and desperation. Those sentiments don't typically work well for an incumbent. On the plus-side, the people seem to like him personally, and do give him some points for catching Bin Laden, and Muammar el-Qaddafi



That said, the Republicans should be in a very strong position, and would be if they had amassed a more main-stream group of candidates.

For nearly a year, Mitt Romney has been seen as the front-runner for the nomination. During that time various candidates have risen up to take the spot as "The Anti-Romney Candidate" but each have fallen nearly as quickly as they rose. The newest flavor of the month is Newt Gingrich. All candidates have some past; there are points of pride but often also flaws. The bright-lights focused upon a candidate tend to uncover even carefully hidden mistakes, and questionable choices. the media focus has set it's sights on the new front-runner- Let's see what Skeletons Newt has in his closet. The fact that he was forced to resign the House, pay over $300,000 in fines in the face of ethics charges, had cheated on TWO wife's (one while under going cancer treatment), got paid $1,600,000.00 by Freddy-Mac, then called out anyone that supported them; strikes me as some real problems. But if not Newt, than who will be the Anti-Romney candidate?

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Cain: For weeks he was at the top of the polls; but beyond the closet, Cain's Skeletons, Are all over the house, in his trunk, in various hotels. It is difficult to see his campaign lasting a few more days, let alone becoming the nominee.



Perry: We looked in Perry's closet and found few Skeletons, but found the whole closet EMPTY. In fact he could not remember where his 3 closets were.



Bachman, they searched, and search, but found the whole closet filled with nothing but crazy ideas.


Paul: Has an isolationist and anti drug-law platform, that scares many on the "Right" and social policy agenda that terrifies the "Left"


Romney: In has closet they found his battery-pack and owners manual. (Robot 135-R). Maybe Romney is the "Anti-Romney" candidate; after all, he seems to be against everything he was for last year. It is clear that the republican base, does not care for him, despite polling that shows he's the candidate most likely to beat Obama.



The President has a tough fight before him. The fact that the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate dropped to 8.6 percent in November, and that.the country added 120,000 jobs, is clearly some good news for Obama's ability to convince the public that we are on the right-track. At the same time, problems in Europe loom-large and there is a serious question where our economy will be in coming months. As of today, the president's strongest selling point is the weakness of his challengers.

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Go to Church or go to Jail.

In the news today is a story about  an Alabama town that has started an alternative sentencing program that would give non-violent offenders a new choice:
Go to jail, or go to church.


"Starting next week, the program will allow a city judge to sentence misdemeanor offenders to work off their sentences in jail and pay a fine, or go to church every Sunday for a year. Offenders who select church can pick the place of worship but must check in weekly with the pastor and the police department. If the one-year church attendance program is completed successfully, the offender's case will be dismissed.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/23/offenders-in-ala-town-can_n_977687.html

“This is a simply offensive idea, that both violated the "Separatio­n of Church and State", while denigratin­g Christiani­ty.

We need to begin with the basic truth that "America is a Secular nation, populated by predominan­tly by Christians­".

To force non-Christ­ians to go to church violates their right to freedom of religion. Remember America was founded in large part by Christians fleeing a Christian country, on the basis of religious persecutio­n NO AMERICAN SHOULD BE FORCED to attend church.

I am amazed that all Christians are not deeply offended by the idea of going to church being use as a "Punishmen­t" Going to services should be a JOY, not a form of discipline­. This is an insult to all of those attending services out of true belief.


Our founding fathers designed a form of government that kept the Church and the state separate, not to punish religion but to protect it from government­.”

Einstein continues to stand the test of time

In a week where there was a suggestion coming out of CERN that perhaps a Neutrino partial violated Einstein's E=MC2 equation by traveling faster than the speed of light; a new study of Galaxy Clusters Back Up Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
Every time someone tells me that Evolution is "Just a theory" I'm tempted to suggest that since gravity is also"Just a theory" maybe they would like to step off the top of a 40 story building. Funny, but I have yet to find any takers, it seems that gravity in something we can all agree on. Yet while we can all nod our heads in agreement over the fact that gravity exists, actually explaining how it works becomes a bit trickier. Albert Einstein’s Theory of general relativity describes how the mass of an object warps the space and time that surrounds it around it, the greater the mass, the greater the gravitational pull and the more intense the effect on Time/Space.


In 1905 when Einstien first published his Theory of general relativity, physicists marveled at the beautiful simplicity of the final E=MC2, the math made sense (to the few at the time that were able to comprehend it's ramifications) but testing the equations proved to be allusive. We had not yet invented a Super particle accelerators, no Cern, no Hubble, no real way to test the validity of his theory. Over the years we have been able to confirm that General relativity works on the scale of the solar system, but proving it held true on cosmic scales, while logical, had not been proven - but now a group of astrophysicists in Denmark have done just that.


One of the basic tenets of General Relativity is that light is influenced by gravity and will loose energy as it escapes a gravitational field. The stronger the gravitational field, the greater the amount of energy will be lost as the light escapes. The same way that a rocket will need more power to reach escape velocity Earth than from the Moon. As you increase the gravity, you increase the power needed to escape it's influence. The work led by Radek Wojtak of the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, was devised to test this central prediction of general relativity. Their method was to recognize that photons emitted from the center of a massive object containing thousands of galaxies, should reveal that they lost more energy than those photons that came from the edge of the galaxy cluster because gravity is strongest in the center.


So how do you test to see how much energy was lost by the proton's coming from various locations within a galaxy cluster, you measure the wavelength. The test is connected to the observations made by Hubble when he looked at the light spectrum of stars and recognized that their light was shifted towards the "Red" side of the spectrum. "Gravitational Redshifting demonstrates that light is moving away from the observer. It was this realization that lead to the knowledge that our universe is expanding. The team at the Niels Bohr Institute knew that the greater the energy loss, the greater the degree that the light waves should show a shift towards the red. What Radek Wojtak and his team found was a that the degree to which the light was redshifted was in direct proportion to the distance from the center of the cluster, just as the theory of general relativity predicted .


David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton University, compliments Wojtak and his colleagues on “cleverly combining” a large cluster data set to detect a “subtle effect.” Spergel says, “This is another victory for Einstein. … This cluster test suggests that we do live in a strange universe with dark matter and dark energy, but one in which Einstein’s theory of gravity is valid on large scales.”


Well if I have to venture a guess, I would say that Cern most-likely miscalculated and that Einstein's E=MC2 equation will continue to stand the test of time.



Based on information in an article By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, ScienceNOW