Bringing fantasy to life with the aid of his own images and photo editing software Photoshop, Switzerland-based Wilhelm inherited his love for photography from his father, an experienced hobby-photographer who set up at least two local photography associations.Picture: John Wilhelm/WENN.com
John Wilhelm may be an IT professional by day but by night he is John Wilhelm, photo manipulation extraordinaire
source:::::The Telegraph UK
NATARAJAN
A psychologist says he has discovered the answer.
Ten years ago, I set out to examine luck. I wanted to know why some people are always in the right place at the right time, while others consistently experience ill fortune. I placed advertisements in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me.
Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research and over the years, I have interviewed them, monitored their lives and had them take part in experiments.
The results reveal that although these people have almost no insight into the causes of their luck, their thoughts and behavior are responsible for much of their good and bad fortune. Take the case of seemingly chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not.
I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities. I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. I had secretly placed a large message halfway through the newspaper saying: “Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $50.”
This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.
Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky people, and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected.
As a result, they miss opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties’ intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and miss other types of jobs.
Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for. My research eventually revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
Towards the end of the work, I wondered whether these principles could be used to create good luck. I asked a group of volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person.
Dramatic results! These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck. One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80% of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier.
Finally, I had found the elusive “luck factor”.
Here are Professor Wise man’s four top tips for becoming lucky:
1) Listen to your gut instincts – they are normally right
2) Be open to new experiences and breaking your normal routine
3) Spend a few moments each day remembering things that went well
4) Visualize yourself being lucky before an important meeting or telephone call.
Have a Lucky day and work for it.
The happiest people in the world are not those who have no problems,
Fast internet is fast. Google Fiber’s gigabit connections? That’s like driving a sports car compared to the go-cart-speed connection that’s probably in your house. But new technology from IBM opens the door for connections that are beyond fast. Comparatively, it’s like flying a fighter jet.
IBM researchers in Switzerland just unveiled the prototype for an energy efficient analog-to-digital converter (ADC) that enables connections as fast as 400 gigabits per second. That’s 400 times faster than Google Fiber and about 5,000 times faster than the average U.S. connection. That’s fast enough to download a two-hour-long, 4K ultra high definition movie in mere seconds. In short, that’s incomprehensibly fast.
The ADC chip itself was actually built for loftier purposes than downloading episodes of Planet Earth, though. It’s actually bound for the Square Kilometer Array in Australia and South Africa to help us peer hundreds of millions of light years into space, hopefully to give us a better idea of what the universe was like around the time of the Big Bang. This massive radio telescope will devour data, too. It’s expected to gather over an exabyte every day when it’s finished in 2024. That’s over 100 billion gigabytes.
Believe it or not, 400 gigabit isn’t even the fastest connection the world has seen. For that you’ll have to go to the United Kingdom where researchers recently developed 1.4 terabit internet using commercial-grade hardware. That’s warp speed. [ZDNet]
Image via IBM
source:::: gizmodo.com
natarajan
FAN OF CLOUDS OVER KATHMANDU …NEPAL
|Photo via EarthSky Facebook friend Sangam Panta Músico
SOURCE::::earth sky news site
natarajan
What a ship—the Emma Maersk!
The Emma Maersk
The giant Emma Maersk and several other ships like it have been commissioned by Wal-Mart to bring their goods from China – and fast! Ninety-eight percent of Wal-Mart’s products come from China.
This monster ship travels at the high speed of 31 knots to transport goods across the Pacific in only five days, which is four days quicker than a normal container ship. That’s fast enough to bring perishable goods to the U.S. from China.
The Emma Maersk is only one of three huge $145,000,000 ships presently in service, with another two ships commissioned to be launched …
The Emma Maersk holds an incredible 15,000 cartons and has a 207 foot deck beam. At 1,302 feet in length, the Emma Maersk is longer than a U.S. Aircraft Carrier and has a crew of only 13 as compared to 5,000 on an aircraft carrier.
Emma Maersk Command Bridge
The command bridge is higher than a 10-story building.
Being 207 feet across, the Emma Maersk is strictly trans-pacific as it is too big to fit through the Panama or Suez Canals
The Emma Maersk has eleven cargo crane rigs which operate simultaneously to unload the entire ship in less than two hours—and then it’s back to China.
On its return trip to China, the Emma Maersk and its sister ships carry only empty containers. The U.S. sends nothing back to China on these ships.
That is—nothing but American jobs, which Wal-Mart is exporting to China !!!
source::::johnharding.com
natarajan
OM SRI GURUPYO NAMAHA:,RESPECTFUL PRANAMS TO SRI KANCHI MAHA PERIVA.
My name is Madhu and my grand mother’s Athai’s daughter is Pollachi Paatti.
Once Pollachi Paati told Him that I am suffering and fighting for life due to the disease called Hemangioma which is an abnormal buildup of blood vessels in the skin or internal organs. The symptoms of which are a red to reddish-purple, raised sore (lesion) on the skin. The doctor had also given up and said I cannot survive.
Then Mahaswamigal told my Paati, “Naan irrukken.. Naan andha kuzhandhaiyai paathukkaren… I am there, I will take care of that child!”From the moment That Sarveshwaran laid His eyes on on me all my physical problems slowly started disappearing and I became alright gradually.
I do remember Mahaswamigal enquring about me with kindness, “How are you?” ie “eppadi irukke?” He also used to give me orange prasadam. I do not remember what I spoke to Him. But my grandmother and others say that I used to converse with Him like a friend sharing all my feelings. Like, “I have pain here, and You have to save me! Some people are asking what is on my face and are making make fun of me etc..” He just listened to me and said, “Do not worry, My child!”.
Once when I was much younger, Mahaswamigal rolled Kalkandu from the window. I quickly grabbed and touched his hand by mistake. Everyone was shocked but He did not do Snanam and said, “No problems!”.
I was ten years old When He attained Siddhi. I felt like my heart had stopped for a second when I saw Him being placed in a chair after His Siddhi.
My son was born last year. I had prayed to offer Elakkai garland at His Adhistanam after his punyajanam ceremony. But since I was awake the whole night for my baby I could not do that. So I was a little upset that I could not make the garland. When we finished dharshan at His Adhistanam, we got the blessings of Bala Periyava also.
At that time He called us again and gave us an Elakkai Maalai. I was simply stunned and I just wept. How did Bala Periyava come to know about the Elakkai Maalai?… Sarveshwara.
Then I believed in true devotion to our Gurus Mahaswamigal and our Periyavas. They will never let us down. All we have to do is to hold on to Their Lotus Feet tightly, whether we are sad or happy.
My parents, husband, my child, my extended family and every person that I meet in my life I see them in the form of Mahaswamigal. And He is right there to protect me wherever I go.
source:::::www.periva.proboards.com
natarajan
Always help the poor and those suffering and in distress. Once upon a time, in Tamil Nadu, lived a poet saint who squatted on the small veranda of his hut and chanted beautiful songs to the Lord. One day, it was raining heavily. Another man came and asked him if he could also take shelter there. The devotee said, “There was place just enough for me to stretch out, but now that you are here we will both sit erect.” Later, another man stopped by and asked for shelter. The devotee again agreed saying, “There was place for the two of us to sit. Now that you also have joined, let us all stand.” He thus taught the principle of helping everyone and not sending anyone away who needed help, even when the means are limited. Cultivate this attitude of sharing with others any good thing you have. Thus you can practice daily, the great principle of finding God in every being.
YOU LIVE IN CALIFORNIA WHEN – –
1. You make over $250,000 and you still can’t afford to buy a house.
2. The high school quarterback calls a time-out to answer his cell phone.
3. The fastest part of your commute is going down your driveway.
4. You know how to eat an artichoke.
5. You drive to your neighborhood block party.
6. Someone asks you how far away something is, you tell them how long it will take to get there rather than how many miles away it is.
YOU LIVE IN NEW YORK WHEN – –
1. You say “the city” and expect everyone to know you mean Manhattan.
2. You have never been to the Statue of Liberty.
3. You can get into a 4-hour argument about how to get from Columbus Circle to Battery Park, but can’t find Wisconsin on a map.
4. You think Central Park is “nature.”
5. You believe that being able to swear at people in their own language makes you multilingual.
6. You’ve worn out a car horn.
7 You think eye contact is an act of aggression.
YOU LIVE IN ALASKA WHEN – –
1. You only have four spices: salt, pepper, ketchup and Tabasco.
2. Halloween costumes fit over parkas.
3. You have more than one recipe for moose.
4. Sexy lingerie is anything flannel with less than eight buttons.
5. The four seasons are: winter, still winter, almost winter, and construction.
YOU LIVE IN THE DEEP SOUTH WHEN – –
1. You get a movie and bait in the same store.
2. “Ya’ll” is singular and “all ya’ll” is plural.
3. After fifteen years you still hear, “You ain’t from ’round here, are ya?”
4. “He needed killin'” is a valid defense.
5. Everyone has 2 first names.
YOU LIVE IN COLORADO WHEN – –
1. You carry your $3,000 mountain bike atop your $500 car.
2. You tell your husband to pick up Granola on his way home, and he stops at the Day Care Center.
3. A pass does not involve a football or dating.
4. The top of your head is bald, but you still have a ponytail.
YOU LIVE IN THE MIDWEST WHEN – –
1. You’ve never met any celebrities, but the mayor knows your name.
2. Your idea of a traffic jam is ten cars waiting to pass a tractor.
3. You have had to switch from “heat” to “A/C” on the same day.
4. You end sentences with a preposition: “Where’s my coat at?”
5. When asked how your trip was to any exotic place, you say, “It was different! ”
YOU LIVE IN FLORIDA WHEN – –
1. You eat dinner at 3:15 in the afternoon.
2. All purchases include a coupon of some kind — even houses and cars.
3. Everyone can recommend an excellent dermatologist.
4. Road construction never ends anywhere in the state.
5. Cars in front of you are often driven by headless people
6. You don’t know how to vote
source::::joke a day.com
natarajan
God dwells in each and every one of us. Do not criticise anybody, you will accumulate sin. Do not hate anyone. Never deride anyone’s action or ridicule them on the grounds of caste, race, gender, religion or community. There is only one caste, the caste of humanity. There is only one religion, the religion of love. There is only one language, the language of the heart. All of you must understand and internalize this. Become an ideal person from today. Develop faith in the ‘Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God’. Do not worry about the past, forget it. This will lead you to real bliss. Thus I bless you!
