disalarming

“Our family is like cavemen and the camera is fire.”

So said my wise brother during a two-day family excursion to Guangzhou. The amount of time spent in front of minor sights with various combinations of people and different cameras used (since, in today’s digital age, it made more sense to use every camera in possession to take photos, rather than stick to one camera and share the photos with everyone at the end of the trip) was headache-inducing. There is a reason for the Asian tourist stereotype of taking photos for every little damn thing encountered.

I’m seriously thinking of investing in a green screen and presenting it to my family. It’s not like they are concerned about the sights; the photos are all about the people and have little to no focus on the background. A green screen would take care of everything.

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Every girl wants to be seen as beautiful, no matter how small this desire may be. Perhaps it has been hardwired into a girl’s brain, or it has been drilled into a girl’s mind by society and the media. There are images of “beautiful” girls everywhere that are tall, thin, clear-skinned, and are so beautiful and so perfect that it seems as though they are too beautiful and too perfect to be true. And most of the time, they are, for the images the media projects to us of beautiful girls aren’t entirely real.

The beauty company Dove launched a campaign for real beauty to emphasize the fact that today’s standards of beauty set by media and society are not realistic standards at all. These standards are based off of images that are airbrushed and Photoshopped to the point where the final image bears few or no similarities to the model in the photo. The accompanying video for Dove’s campaign makes a powerful statement, and it really shows you how the image of beauty has been distorted by society today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

In June 2007, I did an exchange trip to France. Part of my stay was with a host family in Strasbourg, and one of the many events the host school in Strasbourg organized for us American exchange students was a tour of Colmar, a neighboring town in the Alsace region of France. Colmar was very picturesque, particularly Little Venice, as well as the old town section that was full of quaint little stores¹.

It was on our visit to Colmar that we saw this statue of Gustave-Adolphe Hirn, a famous French scientist, sculpted by Frédéric Bartholdi, who was the same man that did the Statue of Liberty in New York City. Obviously this statue of Hirn was meant to pay tribute to Hirn’s significant contributions in his chosen field of science, yet if you look at the Wikipedia image of Hirn, you’ll see that in my photo, someone decided to supply Hirn with a bottle of vodka. It seems as though even the most brilliant of scientists² enjoy partaking in drinking hard liquor from time to time!

1. One of my friends found a store that sold tea and jam, and proceeded to buy nearly twenty euros worth of tea and jam. I’m not sure what she was planning to do with all that tea and jam. [↩]
2. According to Wikipedia, Hirn was a “physicist, astronomer. mathematician and engineer who made important measurements of the mechanical equivalent of heat and contributions to the early development of thermodynamics. He further applied his science in the practical development of steam engines.” If that’s not a description of someone who’s brilliant at science, I don’t know what is. [↩]

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.