Monday, April 7, 2008

Dresses of The Week

Did you really have to guess this? Just made the commitment to do a Dress of The Week Column, Shoe and maybe Bag of The Week Column since talking about dresses and shoes is what I do anyway. You definitely saw that coming, right? LOL Anyway, I remember seeing these beautiful long maxi dresses on the catwalk everywhere for the summer season and I wondered where I'd find them and what would be the most popular interpretation of them? I'm thinking long, flowy (Is flowy a word?), lots of material.....it's gonna be hot! I want a dress that's made with the weather in mind. It's got to float a little, you know? Dianne Von Furstenberg's "Washed Silk Strapless Maxi Dress." Beautifully colored in Emerald Green. I would also have liked to seen a red and a Emerald Blue but Ms. Furstenberg decided to stick with green. The next dress, this striped gypsy top dress is DKNY's contribution to the trend. They call it their "Long Stripe Off The Shoulder Habotai Dress." Comes in grey and white. The belt comes with it. I wouldn't wear a belt with it though, and if I did it would be solid black, grey or white. Both the Diane von Furstenberg and the DKNY are available at Bloomingdale's. This green dress with too many colors to name in it comes from Nordstrom. It called their "Single Dress Long Knot Front Dress." It has a beautiful mosaic print on it and it has "V" Neck. It's different. I venture to guess a little bit cooler on those oh-so-hot days to come.

"Its never too late to be what you might have been" ---George Elliot

Lovin Life, truthis

Beauty Recognition Software

More than 2,000 years ago the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras observed the connection between math, geometry and beauty. He reasoned that features of physical objects corresponding to the “golden ratio” were considered most attractive. Though the saying goes “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, this time the beholder is a computer. Scientists at Tel Aviv University have developed computer software that can successfully “interpret attractiveness in women.” Recognizing “beauty” in men might be the next step, but it is more difficult. Psychological research has shown that there is less agreement as to what defines “male beauty” among human subjects. The software developer Amit Kagian said, “Until now, computers have been taught how to identify basic facial characteristics, such as the difference between a woman and a man, and even to detect facial expressions. But our software lets a computer make an aesthetic judgment. Linked to sentiments and abstract thought processes, humans can make a judgment, but they usually don’t understand how they arrived at their conclusions.” In the first step of the study, 30 men and women were presented with 100 different faces of Caucasian women, roughly of the same age, and were asked to judge the beauty of each face. The subjects rated the images on a scale of 1 through 7 and did not explain why they chose certain scores. Kagian and his colleagues then went to the computer and processed and mapped the geometric shape of facial features mathematically. Additional features such as face symmetry, smoothness of the skin and hair color were fed into the analysis as well. Based on human preferences, the machine "learned" the relation between facial features and attractiveness scores and was then put to the test on a fresh set of faces. (physorg)

"Look To This Day For it is Life, the very Life of Life. In It's brief course lie all the Verities and Realities of your existence; The Bliss of Growth; The Glory of Action; The Splendor of Beauty; For Yesterday is but a Dream, And tomorrow is only a Vision: But Today well lived makes every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness, and very Tomorrow a Vision of Hope. Look well, therefore, to this day!"---Indian Sanskrit

Lovin Life, truthis