"Improved " Changes

A good website on Hindustani Classical Music.....

http://hindustanivocalconcerts.blogspot.com/

Without Comment.....

"A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"
Irina Dunn

"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for--in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it."

Ellen DeGeneres

A dog typing away at a computer tells his canine buddy, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog ".

New Yorker cartoon

You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.
-What mood is that?
-Last-minute panic.

-Calvin and Hobbes

Fun Puzzle

Try putting the pieces together ......

Click here: Unusual Puzzle

RSK

Pet Rules--Memo to the Family Dog and Cat

1. When I say move, it means go someplace else. It does not mean switch positions with each other so there are still two of you in the way.

2. The dishes on the floor are yours and contain your food. All other dishes are mine and contain my food. (Please note: placing a paw or nose-print in the middle of my dinner does not stake your claim on it, nor do I find it aesthetically pleasing in any way.)

3. The stairway was not designed by NASCAR and is not a racetrack. Beating me to the bottom is not the object. Tripping me doesn't help because I fall faster than you can run.

4. I cannot buy anything bigger than a king size bed. Locate your inner beast and remember that sleeping animals can actually curl up in a ball, so it is not necessary to sleep perpendicular to each other, stretched out to the fullest extent possible.

5. My compact discs are not miniature Frisbees.

6. For the last time, humans like to use the bathroom alone. If by some miracle I beat you there and manage to get the door shut, it won't help to claw, whine, meow, bite the knob, or get your paw under the edge and try to pull the door open. (Trust me, I have been using the bathroom for years...canine or feline attendance is not mandatory.)

7. When you see me asleep on the couch, it is not funny to make a sudden leap onto my stomach and drop a chew toy, bone or jingle ball on my crotch, no matter how much that makes other family members laugh.

8. Dog: Don't think for a minute that making a sad face and whimpering pathetically will get you out of trouble when I find a puddle of pee on the carpet. The face and the whimpering only validate that you knew it was wrong when you did it.

9. Cat: My sitting down to bite into a juicy sandwich is not a signal for you to begin gagging loudly and then hocking up the most disgusting hairball in history.

10. Dog and Cat: The proper order is kiss me, then go lick yourself. I cannot stress this enough.

To pacify you I have posted the following message on our front door:

Rules for Non-Pet Owners Who Visit and Complain About Our Pets:

1. They live here; you don't.

2. If you don't want their hair on your clothes, stay off the furniture.

3. I like my pet(s) better than I like most people.

4. To you it's an animal. To me, it's an adopted child who is short, hairy, walks on all fours and is speech-challenged.

5. Dogs and cats are better than kids. They eat less, are easier to train, usually come when called, don't ask for money, never drive your car, don't hang out with losers, don't drink or smoke, and don't worry about the latest fashions.

Sixth Sense

Gujju -English notwithstanding, this MIT student has mind-boggling ideas ! Is it real? I hope so.....

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tv/TED-India-Pranav-Mistry/videoshow_ted/5231080.cms

RSK

7-Years Old Wonder.......

Pondy Girl Can Name Medicines For 1,000 Ailments

Bosco Dominique | TNN

Puducherry: While other children her age pore over comics, sevenyear-old Bakkiashri Baskar reads tomes on anatomy, pharmacology and ophthalmology.
Ask this Std III student about managing haemorrhage while performing open heart surgery, and she can tell you the correct medication in a trice. Bakkiashri, who has an impeccable memory and knows the right medicine for over 1,000 ailments right from a headache to dreaded diseases aspires to become the world’s youngest doctor. A host of doctors in Puducherry, who tested her skills, were spellbound and some have given written testimony to her talent.
“It was little difficult to read the books in the beginning, but it turned out to be fun. I really love to read medical books and magazines,” says Bakkiashri, who has never been to a cinema theatre. She doesn’t watch television either. Her father M Baskar, a graduate in zoology, plans to approach medical institutions that are willing to relax the age limit for Bakkiashri to sit for examinations to obtain a degree in medicine. It all began last year, when Baskar realised that his daughter has a good memory and started questioning her about what she wanted to be when she grew up. “She said she wanted to become a doctor and find a permanent cure for cancer. She requested me to buy books so that she could begin her studies,” says Baskar, who spent almost Rs 40,000 on books and within a year, the child prodigy started memorising ailments and their medication.

CHILD PRODIGY: Std III student Bakkiashri with father M Baskar in Puducherry. Bakkiashri has an impeccable memory and aspires to become the world’s youngest doctor.

Brooklyn Bridge

Cris-cross mesh @ Brooklyn Bridge

My Snap- Oct 09, NY

Peter on Sachin.....

..............And yet, even this, the runs, the majesty, the thrills, does not capture his achievement. Reflect upon his circumstances and then marvel at his feat. Here is a man obliged to put on disguises so that he can move around the streets, a fellow able to drive his cars only in the dead of night for fear or creating a commotion, a father forced to take his family to Iceland on holiday, a person whose entire adult life has been lived in the eye of a storm. Throughout he has been public property, India's proudest possession, a young man and yet also a source of joy for millions, a sportsman and yet, too, an expression of a vast and ever-changing nation.....

Somehow he has managed to keep the world in its rightful place. Somehow he has raised children who relish his company and tease him about his batting. Whenever he loses his wicket in the 90s, a not uncommon occurrence, his boy asks why he does not "hit a sixer".

Somehow he has emerged with an almost untarnished reputation. Inevitably mistakes have been made. Something about a car, something else about a cricket ball, and suggestions that he had stretched the facts to assist his pal Harbhajan Singh. But then he is no secular saint. It's enough that he is expected to bat better than anyone else. It's hardly fair to ask him to match Mother Teresa as well.................

My snap of New York Harbour skyline
on a colourful Oct evening
RSK

Casual Dress @ Office !

The History Of Casual Day

Memo No. 1: Effective immediately, the company is adopting Fridays as Casual Day so that employees may express their diversity.

Memo No. 2: Spandex and leather micro-miniskirts are not appropriate attire for Casual Day. Neither are string ties, rodeo belt buckles or moccasins.

Memo No. 3: Casual Day refers to dress only, not attitude. When planning Friday's wardrobe, remember image is a key to our success.

Memo No. 4: A seminar on how to dress for Casual Day will be held at 4 p.m. Friday in the cafeteria. Fashion show to follow. Attendance is mandatory.

Memo No. 5: As an outgrowth of Friday's seminar, a 14-member Casual Day Task Force has been appointed to prepare guidelines for proper dress.

Memo No. 6: The Casual Day Task Force has completed a 30-page manual. A copy of "Relaxing Dress Without Relaxing Company Standards" has been mailed to each employee. Please review the chapter "You Are What You Wear" and consult the "home casual" versus "business casual" checklist before leaving for work each Friday. If you have doubts about the appropriateness of an item of clothing, contact your CDTF representative before 7 a.m. on Friday.

Memo No. 7: Because of lack of participation, Casual Day has been discontinued, effective immediately.

Bad TV

“Television induces mental disorders such as enhanced aggression, shortened attention span and reduced ability to communicate, and these disorders involve an even greater social cost than the obesity and lethargy that are TV’s normal physical side-effects.... As a threat to the nation’s health it stands far higher than alcohol, drugs or tobacco.”

- Roger Scruton, Journalist, London

The New Science of Temptation ?

What happens when Harvard scientists use a brain scanner to look for the devil inside?

By Piercarlo Valdesolo

The power to resist temptation has been extolled by philosophers, psychologists, teachers, coaches, and mothers. Anyone with advice on how you should live your life has surely spoken to you of its benefits. It is the path to the good life, professional and personal satisfaction, social adjustment and success, performance under pressure, and the best way for any child to avoid a penetrating stare and a cold dinner. Of course, this assumes that our natural urges are a thing to be resisted – that there is a devil inside, luring you to cheat, offend, err, and annoy. New research has begun to question this assumption.

A new brain imaging study by Josh Greene and Joe Paxton at Harvard University published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that what separates the well-behaved from the poorly-behaved might not be the ability to control your temptations but rather what kind of temptations you have. For example, foregoing the opportunity for short-term gain and satisfaction, whether it is a delicious slice of tiramisu or that wallet stuffed with cash you stumbled across in the empty parking lot, will depend more on the nature of your automatic urges than your ability to control them.

Greene and Paxton were interested in why people behave honestly when confronted with the opportunity to anonymously cheat for personal gain. They considered two possible explanations. First, there is the “Will” hypothesis: in order to behave honestly people must actively resist the temptation to cheat. In other words, returning the wallet depends on your ability to stifle your desire to take the cash and buy yourself something nice. Alternatively, there is the “Grace” hypothesis: honest behavior results from the absence of temptation. Returning the wallet requires no particular ability to control your treacherous urges – the urge simply isn’t there.

These two hypotheses make competing predictions regarding the brain regions activated when acting honestly as well as the time it should take participants to decide to act honestly. If “Will” is correct then people who choose to act honestly should exhibit heightened activity in brain regions responsible for cognitive control (presumably resulting from the struggle to ignore immediate desires). But if “Grace” is right then no such increase should occur. Furthermore, people should take a longer time to decide to act honestly if doing so requires a conscious act of “Will,” but a relatively shorter time to act if all you need is a bit of “Grace.”

In order to test these possibilities the researchers measured neural activity in an fMRI machine while participants played a computerized game wherein they could gain money by predicting the outcome of coin flips. Correctly guess heads or tails, you get some cash. In one condition, participants recorded their predictions before seeing any of the flips, precluding the opportunity to cheat. In the other condition, participants were rewarded based on self-reported accuracy after the flips, and therefore could fudge their predictions in accordance with the outcome of the flip. I got 100 percent correct, Mr. Experimenter, must be my lucky day!

Consistent with the “Grace” hypothesis, those who acted honestly (who guessed wrong and self-reported as much) showed no increased activity in control-related areas relative to others who guessed wrong but did not have the opportunity to cheat. Honest reporting of scores, then, didn’t require will-power, these participants simply did not feel the urge to cheat. Reaction time data further supported “Grace” showing that participants who acted honestly took no longer to do so, on average, when they had the opportunity to cheat than when they did not. The authors suggest that these findings demonstrate the human capacity to, at least temporarily, achieve a state of “moral grace” – a state devoid of selfish temptation.

But what good does this state serve? Why would we be averse, or even indifferent, to cheating when we could benefit from it? Perhaps because our automatic responses have evolved in social environments where self-interested behavior in the short-term has not always lead to personal gains over the long-term. Gaining a reputation as a cheat would be a one-way ticket to ostracism. Having intuitions sensitive to equity and the needs of others would promote the formation and maintenance of cooperative relationships that would ultimately be of benefit to the individual.

Greene and Paxton’s findings fit nicely with this idea, as well as past research showing that many of our intuitions regarding equity/fairness actually promote prosocial behavior, and we overcome them at our peril. This is not only because of the positive social consequences they confer, but also because the cognitive processes we use to overcome them can besusceptible to bias, motivated reasoning, justification and rationalization.

This is not to say that self-control is an impediment to social life. Clearly certain desires and urges are better off ignored. The psychologist Dan Gilbert has found that participants, when given the choice between receiving $50 now or $60 a month from now, prefer the immediate reward. The strong desire for cash in hand trumps the thought that you’d be better off if you waited for the higher sum. In this case, if it weren’t for those pesky urges, life would be much easier – you could more effectively plan for the long-term. But what’s also clear is that many of our urges guide us towards decision and actions that, while contrary to short-term goals, are in our long-term interests. Given Greene and Paxton’s findings, it seems that at least in some situations the best way to consider the future is by not considering it at all.

Why should Saudis ban an anti-Israeli series??

Oct 22nd 2009
From The Economist print edition

Turkey is selling its televisual wares all over the region

AP

Israeli baddies on Turkish television

BAD vibrations between Turkey and Israel have been worsened by a series on one of Turkey’s state-run television channels showing Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinian babies in a place that looks like Gaza. Yet anti-Jewish propaganda has long been a staple of a popular series called “Valley of the Wolves”. In a recent episode two Turkish scientists on the verge of building weapons that Turkey usually buys from Israel get bumped off by Kurds on Israel’s payroll.

But it is unfettered romance rather than Jew-bashing that is catching the imagination of millions of Arab viewers. Particularly alluring is a soap opera called “Noor” that has been dubbed in Arabic and was broadcast last year by a pan-Arab, Saudi-owned satellite network, MBC. Starring an emancipated woman and a blue-eyed blonde former male model, “Noor” has been credited with a recent surge in Arab tourists to Turkey. Many head straight for a Bosporus villa (now rented by tour operators) where the drama was filmed.

Yet the marital bliss portrayed in “Noor” is said to have prompted a rash of divorces in the Arab world, as female viewers compare their own husbands to the hero, Muhannad, who washes up the dishes. In Jordan a man is said to have dumped his wife after he caught her with Muhannad’s picture on her mobile phone. In Syria another did the same when his wife apparently said, “I want to sleep with Muhannad for just one night and then die.”

All of this has prompted Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti to call for a boycott of the Turkish series, which he called “evil”. But MBC is unfazed. It has snapped up the rights to a score of other Turkish television dramas.

Mantra

"I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest -- sometimes not even the most diligent. But they are learning machines; they go to bed every night a little wiser than when they got up. And, boy, does that habit help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you."

- Charlie Munge