Passing spacecraft snaps Earth pics

Pl click the above link and read the story as appeared in http://www.earthsky.org

Natarajan

Source: http://media.radiosai.org/

The command of the Vedas, “Matru devo bhava; Pitru devo bhava (May the mother be your God; may the father be your God)”, is repeated ad nauseum today, but, there is no sign of reverence towards the parents anywhere. A generation that does not respect and foster its parents is bound to end in disaster. Parents suffer great hardships and deny various comforts for themselves in order to put their children through school and college, but the children are ungrateful; they taunt and tease, they cause mental pain and physical hunger to their parents by ridiculing their habits and attitudes, and dismissing their advice with neglect. When the creators of your physical equipment and mental make-up are thus treated with sacrilege, how can one expect you to adore the Creator of the Universe, the God who provides for all? Honour your parents, so that your children learn to honour you. 

–

 

Of the many things the Romans were famous for, roads rank pretty high in the list by importance, along with bridges, viaducts and canals. Together they formed an outstanding transportation network that played a crucial role in tightening Rome’s grasp on the Mediterranean Basin. It was roads that held the Roman Empire together.

One of the first and the most important long roads built by the Romans was the Appian Way. The road was begun by Appius Claudius Caecus, the Roman censor, in 312 BC, and originally ran for about 212 km from Rome to the ancient city of Capua, but by 244 BC, it was extended by another 370 km to reach the port of Brundisium (now Brindisi) by the Adriatic Sea. The Appian Way was chiefly a military road built to transport troops to smaller regions outside of greater Rome.

The Appian Way averaged 20 feet in width and was slightly convex in the middle to allow water to runoff and collect in the ditches that ran on either side of the road. The road’s foundation was of heavy stone blocks cemented together with lime mortar. Over these were laid tight fitting, interlocking stones to provide a flat surface. These stones fitted so closely that the historian Procopius said that the stones appeared to have grown together rather than to have been fitted together.

Flanking the road are several striking monuments, tombs and milestones. The most impressive is the well-preserved tomb of Cecilia Metella, the wife of one of Julius Caesar’s generals. Other notable tombs include the tomb of Marcus Servilius, the Tomb of Cecilia Metella, and the tomb of the Roman emperor Gallienus. Other monuments that line the Via Appia are the Temple of Hercules, the church Quo Vadis, Villa dei Quintili, with its ancient baths and beautiful friezes, and the Circus of Maxentius.

Many important events took place along the Appian Way. After the Roman General Marcus Crassus crushed the slave rebellion against the Roman Empire in 71 BC, more than 6,000 captured slaves were crucified along the 200-kilometer Via Appia from Rome to Capua.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the road fell out of use. Some 1,300 years later, in the late 18th century, a new Appian Way was built in parallel with the old one as far as the Alban Hills region. The new road is called the New Appian Way, as opposed to the old section, known as the Old Appian Way. The Old Appian Way is now a tourist attraction. The first 5 kilometers is still heavily used by cars, buses and coaches but from then on traffic is very light and the ruins can be explored on foot in relative safety.

Source….Kaushik in http://www.amusingplanet.com   Photo credit: Stijn Nieuwendijk/Flickr

Natarajan

Crop circles seen from space

Pl click the above link and read the story as appeared in http://www.earthsky.org

Natarajan

Source…. http://www.eartrhsky.org

 

Source: http://media.radiosai.org

When the mirror of the mind is soiled, it cannot perceive anything in its true state. This is the reason why man is unable to recognise his own true nature. Hence it is necessary to cleanse the mirror of impurities on it. How is this to be done? By regulating one’s food and recreational habits. It is important to ensure that the food that is eaten is obtained by righteous means. Many of the ills which people suffer today are due to the fact that the things they consume have been got by unrighteous means. So to purify your mind the first prerequisite is pure food. But it may not always be possible to ensure purity in every meal, in every respect and at all times. To overcome this difficulty, make an offering of your meal to God and accept it as a gift from God. Before eating, when food is offered to God, it becomes Prasada(gift from God). All impurities in the food are thereby removed. This helps the process of cleansing the mind. This practice must be kept up continuously.

 

The 1930s were some of the driest years in American history. Eight long years of drought, preceded by inappropriate cultivation technique, and the financial crises of the Great Depression forced many farmers off the land abandoning their fields throughout the Great Plains that run across the heart of mainland United States. When the high winds came, it lifted the topsoil from barren lands and carried them in large choking clouds of dust for thousands of miles. Many dust storms started around the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and touched adjacent sections of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. But eventually the entire country was affected forcing tens of thousands of families to abandon their farms and migrate in search for work and better living conditions.

The early European explorers thought the Great Plains was unsuitable for agriculture. The land is semi-arid and is prone to extended drought, alternating with periods of unusual wetness. But the federal government was eager to see the land settled and cultivated. After the end of the Civil War in 1865, a series of federal land acts were passed granting settlers hundreds of acres of land. These acts led to a massive influx of new and inexperienced farmers across the Great Plains.

A stretch of unusually wet weather in the beginning of the 20th century confirmed the belief that the Plains could be tamed after all, leading to increased settlement and cultivation. Farmers ploughed through the land eliminating the native grasses that held the fine soil in place. When crops began to fail with the onset of drought in 1930, the bare soil became exposed to the wind, and it began to blow away in massive dust storms that blackened the sky.

These choking billows of dust, named “black blizzards”, traveled across the country, reaching as far as the East Coast and striking such cities as New York City and Washington, D.C.

“The impact is like a shovelful of fine sand flung against the face,” Avis D. Carlson wrote in a New Republic article. “People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk… We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions. It is becoming Real.”

The term “dust bowl” was coined by Edward Stanley, Kansas City news editor of the Associated Press. Originally it referred to the geographical area affected by the dust, but today the entire event is referred to as the Dust Bowl.

After the winds passed and the dust settled, President Franklin Roosevelt initiated a huge project to plant hundreds of millions of trees across the Great Plains to create a giant windbreak. Known as a shelterbelt, it consisted of 220 million trees stretching in a 100-mile wide zone from Canada to northern Texas, to protect the land from wind erosion. The shelterbelt wasn’t a continuous wall of trees, but rather short stretches protecting individual farmlands. By 1942, there was more than thirty thousand shelterbelts across the Plains. To this day it remains the largest and most-focused effort of the US government to address an environmental problem.

Now many of the shelterbelts are either gone or no longer provide the benefits that they used to. The trees that were once essential have now become a burden to the farmers whose focus is now to put more land into production. Some fear that the loss of these trees might lead to another crippling dust storm in the future.

A dust storm approaches Stratford, Texas, in 1935. Photo credit: George E. Marsh 

Source…Kaushik in http://www.amusingplanet.com

Natarajan

 

Pl click the link below to read the story as appeared in http://www.earthsky.org

Natarajan

Giant iceberg on the move

Source….www.earthsky.org

Source: http://media.radiosai.org

Embodiments of Love! There is nothing bad in Creation. If some things appear so, it is entirely due to faulty vision. The latent bad feelings within create the impression that certain things are bad. Hence it is important to develop pure and loving feelings. Always be immersed in the thought of God and constantly chant His Name. Be ever saturated with the divine feeling. If dutifully followed, spiritual practices are guaranteed to remove all the contamination within you. Never indulge in bad actions, never criticise others, blame others, or accuse others. Bad thoughts pollute the air and also infect others; this is how bad vibrations spread. Hence scrupulously avoid bad company and inappropriate behaviour. Always avoid bad thoughts, inappropriate looks, feelings and actions. Instead, be ever sacred and do only good. Make every possible effort to venerate and revere the elements in a suitable manner. Your every breath must resonate the chant of God’s Name. Always sing His Glory.

Source: http://media.radiosai.org

The supreme Shakti manifests herself in the form of Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati. Durga grants us energy – physical, mental and spiritual. Lakshmi bestows on us wealth of many kinds, not just money but intellectual wealth, the wealth of character, the wealth of health and so on. She grants untold riches to us. And Saraswati bestows on us intelligence, the capacity for intellectual enquiry and the power of discrimination. Your own mother is the combination of all these Divine beings. The life of a person who cannot respect and love one’s own venerable mother is utterly useless. Your mother provides you with energy, wealth and intelligence. She constantly desires our advancement in life. So she represents all the three goddesses that we worship during the Navaratri festival. Recognising your mother as the very embodiment of all divine forces, show reverence to her and treat her with love. This is the true message of Navaratri.

Source: http://media.radiosai.org/

Pray intensely and with faith. Then, Grace will be showered on you. When your heart is soaked in Love, it cannot be contaminated by egoism and its evil consequences. Just as you crave for physical health, which means health for the limbs of the body, you should strive for the health of humanity, which means peace and joy for all sections of society in all nations. If you dwell in that wider outlook, you will start feeling less and less for your own troubles and worrying more and more about the troubles of others. That is the initial offering of yourself in the great ‘yajna’ (ritual sacrifice) called ‘living.’ You should merge your welfare with the welfare of the world. How can you be happy when your neighbour is in misery? Therefore I call upon you to give up praying for your own advancement; pray for the peace, prosperity and happiness of all humanity, irrespective of clime or colour.