Illumination 2.0

I was talking to a friend this morning.  She speaks to the vastness of space and our insignificant position relative to the universe and everything.  I thought of the Sagan's "pale blue dot".   The tiny blue dot in the center of the bright band on the right is Earth. You ain't so cool. The picture was taken from the Voyager spacecraft as it left our solar system in 1990.  Scientists turned the camera back toward the sun and captured an image.  The image shows our planet, our home, the place where everyone that every human that has ever lived, modestly presented as a dim tiny fleck- a pale blue dot.  This single pixel shows our position we were all there in that photo, all of us captured on that single spot of light. It is humbling and maybe tragic, as it shows how minor we are in the true grand scale.

NOTE:  After knee surgery last week I've been subjected to a lot of television watching, fertile grounds for scams and claims that demand skeptical dissection.  There will be a few reports along this line over the coming weeks. Lipozene. The commercials claim rapid weight loss.  They appear highly clinical and are quite persuasive. Lipozene is packaged and pitched with an implicit claim of miracle weight loss drug status. The product and the clinical claims come from the Obesity Research Institute. The Obesity Research Institute LLC is a Los Angeles based company founded in 2003 that has sold several ill-fated products such as fiber-thin and Propylene.  A quick search of the scholarly literature shows no formal published research results from the Obesity Research Institute, so this appears to be a company and not a place actively engaged in scientific research. I was particularly drawn into the commercial when I read the blue italic print under the Lipozene name...