Life in all its glory

Music alphabet tutorial

rmehandru — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 07:52:09 +0000

Any neophyte who wants to pick up music alphabet and words like staff, note, clef can see the videos at:

http://www.expertvillage.com/videos/read-sheet-music-alphabet.htm

TCP/IP Tutorial

rmehandru — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 07:43:34 +0000

If any body wants to know what is the all fuss about IP addresses, there is a good tutorial at:

http://www.vtc.com/products/TCP/IP-for-Windows-tutorials.htm

Fortune cookies – Japanese?

rmehandru — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 11:00:24 +0000

Some 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year, almost all in the United States. But the crisp cookies wrapped around enigmatic sayings have spread around the world. They are served in Chinese restaurants in Britain, Mexico, Italy, France and elsewhere. In India, they taste more like butter cookies. A surprisingly high number of winning tickets in Brazil’s national lottery in 2004 were traced to lucky numbers from fortune cookies distributed by a Chinese restaurant chain called Chinatown.

But there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.

Now a researcher in Japan believes she can explain the disconnect, which has long perplexed American tourists in China. Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/dining/16fort.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Human genome et al

rmehandru — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 10:19:08 +0000

Saw a speech by Craig Venter on BBC today. He spoke the human genome and his vision for the future. His prediction is that in the future synthetic chromosomes can be generated in the lab and they can also be used to create fuel cells in silos. This would help save the oil and coal dependency that is there and also reduce the huge carbon dioxide emissions that we have. This in turn would help us save our environment and create a ‘green’ world.

I am sure the oil industry won’t be happy about that. : (

More details are available at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Venter

Pregnant males!

rmehandru — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 07:31:08 +0000

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seahorse

Seahorses reproduce in an unusual way: the male becomes pregnant. “The female inserts her ovipositor into the male’s brood pouch, where she deposits her eggs, which the male fertilizes. The fertilized eggs then embed in the pouch wall and become enveloped with tissues.”^[5] New research indicates the male releases sperm into the surrounding sea water during fertilization, and not directly into the pouch as was previously thought.^[6] Most seahorse species’ pregnancies lasts approximately two to three weeks.

Quotes

rmehandru — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 07:18:12 +0000

Success

Nothing fails like success – Richard Carrion, owner of bank in Puerto Rico

Commitment

If a man is to be called a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michaelangelo painted, or as Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Risky living

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

- Albert Einstein

Think

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

- Peter Drucker

Source: Robin Sharma ‘The Greatness Guide’

Outsourcing and flat world

rmehandru — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 10:38:32 +0000

Princeton economist and
former Federal Reserve governor Alan S. Blinder believes that 40
million service jobs are in danger of being shifted abroad, including
those in professions like radiology, engineering and “maybe even
college teaching.” If so, that would cause dislocations. A 2005
best-seller on this topic by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman,
which Blinder has cited for inspiring his own projections, affirms the
disturbing sea-change with the metaphorical title, The World is Flat.

The world has definitely gotten smaller, as UCLA
economics professor Edward Leamer allows in a highly critical review of
Friedman’s book. But what Friedman describes as the flatness of the
“global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of
collaboration — the sharing of knowledge and work — in real time,
without regard to geography, distance, or in the near future, even
language” — does not reflect current reality.

Source: online.barrons.com