Will Body Scans Make Online Shopping Easier?

An interesting story has just come out on the Wall Street Journal about a technology that takes the clothes you have and predicts which of their clothes you will fit. You only have to somehow add the size, make and model of your clothes. Since clothes might not fit perfectly, and makes and models of clothes are quickly obsolete, it's automatically a difficult system to obey, but it suggests many new growth opportunities for sales.

In the comments on that article, someone said that "full-body scans" will soon be available.  I don't know whether the possibility is true, but it made me think. Online body scans are an interesting idea. Wouldn't it be great if we could have these scanned models of ourselves in our computers (privacy issues aside), and drag an article of clothing from a website onto our own personal model, and see whether it fits, and what it looks like? Maybe one could add several clothes to make up an entire outfit. Seeing brand new shoes, trousers, jackets, shirts, jewelry online on an exact replica of your body could create an imaginary complete wardrobe overhaul. 

It sounds like fun to switch variables, as long as it's not the only way to shop. Little girls would love to have the chance to have this technology for a video game, at the very least, I would think, if the technology isn't already available. They have loved to dress up their Barbie dolls for many years.

Most shopping sites would have to model their clothes differently so that each size can be available online for viewing in different sizes and from different directions. That doesn't sound so onerous an imperative if it's done with clothes direct from the factory. It would just create a different goal for photographic models of clothes.

I'm sure many sites would have to follow, because who could have predicted the Amazon would have the plethora of information about new books that it currently provides, or that Google would publish so many of them.

I think having a personal model of oneself online, and being able to try clothes on it would be a huge benefit for many shoppers.

A Letter to Mrs. Assad

Dear Mrs. Assad ~

You are involved in the making of news in Syria, and you can influence your country's leader as few in the world can.

I'm only an observer of the news, I don't make it, and I don't like to hear the trouble in your country.

I saw Barbara Walters interview Bashar. I saw a rich, privileged kid grown up, probably privately educated. I've heard you call him 'beautiful'.

Yet there is nothing 'beautiful' about the regime he heads that he denies is killing people.

He has no future with the respectable Western majority, and your name is now out in public about your involvement in the genocide and mass murders. Your emails will be exposed.

Please give yourselves up. Do it for me, for all of us who are subjected to the unnecessary violence in Syria we see on television and on the internet, everywhere we get current news.

Your husband's a tyrannical, despotic, dictatorial leader of a military machine that is doomed to failure, and you've been shown to be part of it, too!

You can help stop the mass, indiscriminate destruction we all know is happening to your country.

Thanks,

Shelley

(Updated Mar 19/12)

On the Constitutionality of Certain State Laws

Why doesn't America learn to over-ride silly, unbaked State decisions that will just have to be overturned someday anyway, whether it's yesterday's decision in Utah to ignore certain delicate gender matters, or today's focus on the constitutionality of the actions of maniacal Governors. To have the former Mississippi Governor's pardons upheld as valid by the state Supreme Court, while challenged by the state's Attorney General, shows something is not right in the States.

Haley Barbour, former Governor of Mississippi from 2004 to 2012, a lawyer-lobbyist by trade, made friends with court-convicted murderers, and officially had the power to pardon them, and free them for life. Big fail.

The mother of a victim killed by one of the criminals said on CNN, she thinks  Gov. Barbour pardoned them "because he could, and because he wanted to." 

Did the state Supreme Court blindly go along with his wishes, because it had to, legally? Where was the place of the larger legal and moral question of right and wrong? Why wasn't majority rule obeying a larger, international sense of justice?

What absolutely twisted paternalism of power put this insane, fat, white, brawny idiot of a power-happy Governor in office and supported his failed leadership?

Why can't the Federal Supreme Court or the President, or even the Mississippi State Supreme Court over-ride a Governor whose powers clearly crossed a legal line? Legal, that is, in a moral and actual sense, if his pardons happened anywhere else in the civilized world? 

This former Governor has passed beyond anyone's idea of legal propriety. He pardoned more than 200 criminals, twenty-four of whom were convicted murderers. CBS-TV says he did not spare anyone on death row, and made "pardons" to save money in state prisons. A spoiled, little boy grown old, and a crazy, powerful lunatic all at once.

The criminals the former Governor pardoned in Mississippi have been given clean personal histories. They can travel internationally, vote, own guns, get hunting licenses, and so on, as if they had never been convicted.

The families of their victims, in stark contrast, live in perpetual danger, looking over their shoulders, as their  nightmare memories of  family members being stalked, hunted, and killed, return.

It's not fair, to say the least. The remainder of the entire civilized world sympathizes with them, as we watch this unbelievably tragic perversion of justice. How can this be happening in 2012?

Shame on Limbaugh

Limbaugh's goal on the radio show he hosts was to silence the good name of an innocent female victim. 

I resent that someone so despicable can TRADE on slurs against women.

His apology is a fake-out. What source of fear stops him from doing the same again?

Please STOP him?...I don't suppose LESS  will satisfy most of the women  around the world who heard this lunatic's wild ravings, and who compose about half the general population.

UPDATE: 4/2/12. One month has passed, and according to Media Matters, Mr. Limbaugh has apologized for only one of the 45, yes, forty-five (!) personal slurs he has made on this one individual female.

I've never listened anyway, not even once to this poor, sorry man, and hope I never do.