A recently released video of Candidate Obama in 2007, speaking to a group of black ministers. Along with some pretty blatant racism on his part and some lavish praise of the extremely racist Rev. Wright, what I found most interesting is his speaking style. His *accent* seems to be quite different from what he usually employs.
I’m still plugging away on the panoramas from my recent trip to Yellowstone/Grand Tetons.
In my poking around in photography, I’ve come across various levels of photoshoppery. I try to keep it fairly light with my photos… not nonexistent, though. Stitching photos together into a panorama is by definition tinkering with the reality of the photo. Additionally, I fix flaws such as hot/dead pixels, or paint out the occasional missing bit resulting from misaligned separate photos in a panorama, or tinker with contrast, brightness, fade corrections, etc. However, I don’t do stuff like adding airplanes or birds to photos that don’t have ’em. Other do, and that’s fine; I just choose to have my photos be as representative of the actual reality of the scene as possible.
While glancing at Fark.com, I saw a discussion thread making fun of the official headshots of the Miss Arkansas contestants. It is clear that in many cases these women, or at least their managers, are fully in favor of photoshopping the bejeebers out of the women, with some results that are less than entirely realistic.
Somewhere in that thread someone posted a link to a website that takes a wholly different point of view from me on the merits of heavily photoshopping images:
*Note* These enhancements below are used for High Glitz Beauty Pageants,
which are meant to have an “over the top” retouching style.
Note: “over the top” doesn’t *begin* to describe what’s been done to the photos of child and toddler “models” (a disturbing concept even before the photo retouching).
Short form:
1) The “sequestration” issue, due to kick in January 2, means that the military budget will be cut
2) Budget cuts means that contractors will be forced to do layoffs.
3) Federal law means that companies with more than 100 employees need to provide employees 90 day warnings of layoffs, or suffer the wrath of lawsuits
4) The timing of the sequestration means that the 90-day notices will need to go out a few days prior to the elections.
Since the military cuts/layoffs would be laid right at the feet of the President who has done little to nothing to prevent them, this would be bad news. But wait! There’s good news! Lockheed has signed an agreement with the White House so that they *won’t* issue 90-day warnings for layoffs. And how can this be legal? Well, it ain’t. Thus Lockheed can expect lawsuits. So why would they agree to this? Because the White House is going to reimburse Lockheed for the cost of any lawsuits. And where will this money for Lockheed violating federal law come from? Why… you chumps, the taxpayers!
Awesome, yes?
Yellowstone National Parks most impressive waterfall:
Some guy decides to step up to the President of the Czech Republic at a public event and shoot him with a plastic airsoft pistol, hitting him many times. Czech President to his bodyguards:
You can amplify light by bouncing it between the horizons of a black hole and a white hole. Now physicists have worked out how to build such a device in the lab
In short, the “black hole laser” can be replicated by making a waveguide out of diamond and letting a pulse of light bounce back and forth… duplicating the effects of bouncing back and forth between a black hole and a white hole event horizon, gathering steam on each bounce due to Hawking radiation.
Yeah, I don’t get it either.
The actual preprint of the relevant paper can be downloaded here:
Same “ban blasphemy,” different religion:
“The state will use the force of law in its entirety to defend our citizens’ religious feelings and our national and spiritual values from blasphemy and insult,” [Kremlin chief of staff Sergey] Ivanov said in Moscow on Monday
The ATK “rocket garden” near promontory, Utah, has a Trident C-4 sea launched ballistic missile on display. Projecting from the blunt nose of the missile is an “aerospike.” This is not an aerospike rocket engine (such as the X-33 was supposed to have), but instead a telescoping rod with a smallish flat plate. Stored within the nosecone, it would project forward shortly after launch. The plate – made of wood, of all things – would take the aerothermal heating load of hypersonic flight at relatively low altitude, and would set up a shockwave well ahead of the nosecone, reducing drag. The Trident has a blunt nose for packing purposes… a pointy nose simply wouldn’t fit within the limited missile tube length of a submarine. The aerospike lets it have more or less the aerodynamics of a pointy nose while being shorter.
