Disney Princesses to Princes!

Ever wonder how the most beloved Disney princesses would look like if they were princes? Well wonder no more! On April 22, 2014 Cosmopolitan released an article by Eliza Thompson featuring the works of Sakimi Chan.

Here are the works!

SakimiChan is officially my new favorite artist! Her skill and creativity is just, WOW ^_^ lols so please please please support her and her works via Tumblr through HERE!

Fireman and Hoses from Right This Minute

To see the original video, see this link.

Boston Marathon 2014

April 21, 2014. After the gruesome event that happened last April 15, 2013 at 2:49 PM where two bombs exploded at 12 seconds apart (LA Times), Boston is holding its 118th annual Boston Marathon today at 9:00 AM. Television coverage will be made available through CBS affiliate WBZ-TV and the Universal Sports Network, which will be the country's top source for Boston Marathon coverage. In addition, viewers with high speed internet service can watch a free live streaming online feed of the event at the official streaming site for the Boston Marathon. Radio coverage is available on iHeartRadio website and apps from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EST.(Examiner.com)

Hard Contact Lens

Hard / Rigid Contact Lenses

Hard contact lenses are the original form of contact lens. It was first introduced in 1948 by Kevin Tuohy (1919-1968). He began his experiments in the mid - 1940's at Obrig Laboratories in New York City and finished them at Solex Laboratories in Southern California.

Tuohy applied for patent in 1947 and was granted in June 1950. Despite the previous unsuccessful attempts by Tuohy's predecessors, much of the acceptance of Tuohy's contacts are due to Los Angeles actors who eagerly adopted whatever would give their careers a boost and the support of several respected physicians.

The first contact lenses created by Tuohy was made from polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) otherwise known as acrylic glass. 

IUPAC Name: Poly (methyl - 2 - methylpropenoate)

These types of lenses are difficult to adapt to as they are impermeable and lubrication is majorly dependent on the eye's ability to create tears. For people who currently wear contacts and have problems with dry eyes, hard contacts results the same only worse. On the positive side, the diameter of hard contacts are much smaller than the current soft contacts (see image below), which makes it manageable and the process of creating the PMMA is called annealing where in the material is exposed to successive heating and cooling sequence leaving the final product free of toxic chemicals. 

 

Size Comparison Between Soft and Hard Contact Lenses

Below is a list of 10 reasons why rigid contact lenses are obsolete according to OpticianOnline.Net on its Contact Lens Monthly published at July 01, 2011.

1. "Initial Discomfort with Rigid Lenses"
• They always have been, and will be uncomfortable. This is fundamentally due to the impermeable nature of the material
2. Uncontrollable Complications to Eye and Lid Pathology (See images below)
• Blepharoptosis: abnormal dropping of the upper eyelids
• 3 & 9 o’clock Staining / Peripheral Corneal Desiccation: corneal staining at regions at the edge of the rigid contact lenses. 
3. Surfacing of Better Alternatives:
• Development of soft contact lens with much fewer disadvantages.
4. Superior Soft Lens Fitting Logistics:
• Ease and ready availability of materials at an "almost complete range of parameters and powers"
• Rigid contact lens takes far longer time time to fit and must be ordered at a custom laboratory.
5. Lack of Training Facilities for Practitioners
•  Optometry schools usually mimic real world scenarios where patients are expected to be fitted soft contact lenses. Hard contact lens fitting is considered as a rarity, and thus students usually are taught to fit "by theory"
6. Role as a "Problem Solver" is No Longer Necessary:
• Hard contact lenses were often used as a secondary options in case soft contacts is not a good fit for a patient up until mid-1980.
• Due to continuous advancement in technology and manufacturing, much of the previous incompatibility have mostly been resolved or the effects greatly reduced making hard contacts, with all its time consuming process, more trouble than its worth. 
7. Improved Soft Toric and Bifocal / Varifocal Lenses
8. Limited Uptake of  Orthokeratology
9. Lack of Investment on Rigid Contact Lenses
• Makes sense, why invest on something that clearly is not working, waste money on development when there already exists an alternative whose pros greatly outweighs whatever development the wasted money could ever come up with.
10. Emergence of Aberration-Control Soft Lens
• Like all the rest of the reasons, better alternative outweighs the predecessor.   

Examples of Complications of Wearing Rigid Contact Lens: Left Blepharoptosis, Right Peripheral Corneal Desiccation

Importance of an Emergency Savings Fund

Lets face it, times are tough. Every little money saved can always go a long way.

Now imagine this happening:

1. Losing your job
2. Recession
3. An emergency happened (medical, fire, natural calamity)

Where will you get the money to pay for the bills?

Good willed people are always nice to have around undoubtedly, but you cannot always rely on that, and seriously if you did, have some shame on yourself. In times like these that an Emergency Savings Fund comes very useful. As the name suggests, it a fund for...yeap, emergencies. Regardless of your definition of what an emergency is, money saved for a rainy day is always a good idea.

Determining How Much ESF a Person/Family Needs

The process of identifying how much Emergency Savings Fund (ESF) a person or a family needs is fairly straight forward. Just add up the total expenses you or your family uses for a month then multiply that by the number of months you want to have an ESF supply for. For starters, people usually start with a three (3) to six (6) month worth of ESF. This timeline has been established since the usual reason for the use of an ESF is the loss of income and it roughly takes this amount of time to find another revenue source. All you need to do is to be able to clearly identify what expenses you need to take care of on a monthly basis and a good estimate to cover for those. 

Some of the expense categories to take into consideration (C):

• Housing Expenses: Rent/Mortgage, Utilities, Property Tax, Insurance, 
• Food Expenses
• Loans and Debt Repayment: Credit Cards
• Transportation: Car Loan, Fuel, Insurance, Maintainance, Emergency Repairs
• Personal Expenses: Haircut, Household supplies, Toiletries, Grocery, Clothes, Laundry
• Insurance and Health
• Other Taxes
• Cost to Find a New Job (in case the reason for the use of the ESF is due to job loss)

Now this list is not exclusive. Add as much or as little expense as you want depending on your needs just make sure that everything is covered.

Emergency Savings Fund Calculator

Just go to Google or Yahoo! and search Emergency Savings Fund Calculator and there you have it! Here is a link for one of them.

PNC Emergency Fund Calculator

Where to Stash Your Emergency Savings Fund

I personally think that the most important part of an ESF is its liquidity. A piggy bank might be a great idea for kids or early teens but keeping an ESF in cash is more probably than not, a bad idea (imagine a house break in, there goes your emergency fund to supposedly cover that emergency, along with everything else in the thief's pocket.) Here are some places suggested by Morningstar.

• Savings Account: Keep your ESF on a separate savings account to minimize the urge to spend it every time you check your usual account. Online bank transfers makes it accessible in the actual case of emergency.
• Money Market Fund: is a type of mutual fund that is required by law to invest in low-risk securities. These funds have relatively low risks compared to other mutual funds and pay dividends that generally reflect short-term interest rates. Unlike a “money market deposit account” at a bank, money market funds are not federally insured (SEC.GOV). The advantage of money market is that it "often pays as much as a percentage point more than banks' money-market accounts do." A person usually gets less than that if it was only saved on a savings or checking account.

Contact Lenses : Early Origins

1508

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci is often credited for being the first to ponder upon the remote idea of contact lenses (especially for his time.) Not surprisingly enough, Leonardo's notes found in one of the 12 small manuscripts on sciences assigned to the Institut de France did not include the possible use of "contact lenses" for optical correction. He however managed to illustrate an experiment (never performed) where in a man would immerse his head in a glass bowl of water and be able to see clearly. As depicted in the illustration above,

"...the human eye takes the place of the optic nerve in a glass model of the eyeball with its lens, the whole apparatus being made to fit onto the head of the observer."(A)