I pride myself on being patient when teaching driver education, something I have done for 30 years. I have encountered many, many students, who didn’t seem to be able to hit the floor with their hat. But one incident was just too much.
I had a sweet young thing behind the wheel for the first lesson of the semester. She had volunteered to go first and seemed ready to show the other two kids how well she could drive. We left the rural school and started toward town.
As we approached the first stop sign, the young lady gave no sign that she saw it. We got closer, but she still did not slow down. Finally, I used the “teacher’s brake” pedal, on my side of the car, to get us stopped.
When I asked her why she didn’t slow down to stop for the stop sign, she replied, “but, Mr. Smith, the speed limit is 35 ALL the way to the stop sign!”
Bright meteor over Australia on July 10 was a rocket reentry
That bright meteor over Australia – seen by many – was likely the reentry of the upper state of a Soyuz rocket, launched two days earlier. over
UPDATE JULY 10 AT 1815 UTC (1:15 P.M. CDT). Experts are now reporting that today’s bright meteor – widely reported over southeastern Australia today (July 10, 2014) – was not a piece of natural space debris, but instead was the reentry of the upper state of a Soyuz rocket, launched on July 8. It seems the meteor was part of the vehicle used to launch Russia’s second Meteor-M weather satellite. Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589), an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tweeted that the Australian meteor was:
… Object 40077, 3rd stage from Meteor-M launch, reentered over Australia at about 1145 UTC Jul 10
Daniel Fischer (@cosmos4u) pointed out that time and location of the Australian meteor event appear to match the last TIP (Tracking and Impact Prediction) message for the reentry. And, as Fischer pointed out on Twitter just now:
He’s talking about the video below, caught by in Australia via mobile phone. You can see that the meteor does take awhile to streak across the sky, and, indeed, in verbal reports of the meteor from earlier today, people were commenting on how slow it was.
Thursday night in Australia, reports of a very bright and slow-moving shooting star flooded into the Brisbane Times, which covers the widely populated states of Victoria and New South Wales in southeastern Australia. People in the city of Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, also reported a bright object streaking through the sky. The Sun Herald in Melbourne reported:
Social media lit up when the unusual spectacle was seen at around 10pm.
The object – described by witnesses as like a flame – was reported to be flying rapidly.
Charmaine Harris from Thornbury said it lasted more than a minute.
The Australia Bureau of Meteorology, which received reports of the July 10 meteor around 10 p.m., at first said it could be natural debris from space or artificial space junk. Now, it appears it was space junk.
Aviation Week reported on the launch of a Russian Soyuz-2.1b rocket with a Fregat upper stage – carrying a Russian weather satellite and six small spacecraft to orbit on July 8. According to Aviation Week, liftoff took place at 9:58 p.m. local time from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
They said this satellite – Russia’s second Meteor-M weather satellite – is designed to monitor global hydrometeorological data for weather forecasting and to gather data on the ozone and radiation environment in near-Earth space. It will also measure sea-surface temperature, monitoring icy conditions at the poles for navigation. The satellite itself, presumably still safely in orbit, has a design life of five years.
Bottom line: A bright meteor was seen by many in Australia around 10 p.m. local time on July 10, 2014. Experts are now reporting that the meteor was not a piece of natural space debris, but instead was the reentry of the upper state of a Soyuz rocket, launched on july8.
‘Auto Anna’ Annadurai has upped the ante this football season. By streaming the FIFA World Cup live in his auto, he has managed to douse many Chennaiites’ angst against auto-drivers! Photos: Vikas Vasu
Annadurai, a share auto driver on the Thiruvanmiyur-Sholinganallur route, live streams the FIFA World Cup for his customers.
With the FIFA fever catching up with him as well, the innovative auto driver from Thanjavur district says, “I support Argentina and I love Messi!”
Apart from the FIFA live streaming, Annadurai also live streamed the Lok Sabha Election results and all IPL matches (he has subscribed to Sony Six).
The posters on his auto are too catchy to miss. His ‘Amazing Auto’ offers live streaming of the FIFA World Cup and also asks customers to ‘like’ him in his facebook page.
Poornima means the effulgent fullmoon. Guru is One who removes darkness and delusion from the heart and illumines it with the higher wisdom. The moon and the mind are interrelated, as object and image. On this day, the moon is full, fair and cool, its light pleasant and peaceful; the light of the mind too has to be pleasing and pure. In the firmament of your heart, the moon is the mind. Sensual desires and worldly activities are the clouds, thick and heavy which mar your joy at the light of the moon. Let the strong breeze of love scatter the clouds away and confer on you the cool glory of moonlight. When devotion shines full, the sky in the heart becomes a bowl of beauty and life is transformed into a charming avenue of Ananda (bliss). That beauty of heart, that bliss in life can be won through the mind, if the lesson of this day is remembered and realised.
July 12 full moon first of 3 full-moon supermoons in 2014…
Courtesy U.S. Naval Observatory
Image at top shows a micro-moon (smallest full moon) superimposed on supermoon (largest full moon). This image – an Astronomy Picture of the Day from earlier this year – is fromStefano Sciarpetti.
The moon has reached the crest of its full phase. The full moon crested this morning (July 12, 2014) at 6:25 a.m. CDT. (11:25 UTC). Saturday night’s moon will still look full, however, and it’ll be closest to Earth for this month. The moon’s perigee or closest point comes at at 3:37 a.m. CDT (8:27 UTC) Sunday morning, July 13. For all of us, around the world, the moon on both Friday and Saturday night rise around the time of sunset and set at dawn.
Thus on July 12 we have the first full moon after the June 21 solstice. Around this time of year, in North America, buck deer start growing antlers, thunder storms rage and farmers struggle to pile up hay in their barns. Thus, according to folklore, we call this full moon the Buck Moon, Thunder Moon or Hay Moon. The July 2014 full moon is also the first of three full-moon supermoons in 2014. Previously, we had two supermoons in January – on January 1 and 30 – but they were new-moon supermoons. The full moons on July 12, August 10 and September 9 all enjoy the supermoon designation because the centers of these full moons and the center of Earth are less than 361,863 kilometers (224,851 miles) apart. The closest supermoon of the year comes with the August 10 full moon, presenting a moon that’s only 356,896 kilometers (221,765 miles) from Earth.
Because it’s a supermoon, and relatively close to Earth, expect higher-than-usual tides in the days ahead.
By Deborah Byrd in EARTH | SCIENCE WIRE | JUL 07, 2014
This isn’t the Arctic. It isn’t Greenland. It’s Pakistan. At 63 kilometers (39 miles) in length, Baltoro Glacier in Pakistan is one of the longest glaciers outside the polar regions.
For success in any aspect of life, three things are essential – knowledge, skill and balance. If you combine knowledge with skill, you get balance which is very important. It means maintaining equipoise in the face of praise and criticism. To stay balanced, skill is necessary. If you lose balance, suffering will soon follow. When you are given some work, you should put your heart and soul into it, and do it with utmost sincerity and dedication, to the limit of your capacity. Take for example, a person who is entrusted with planting trees and developing a garden. If he does the work wholeheartedly without getting affected by praise or blame, the plants will come up well, and the garden will get transformed into a place of beauty. When the Guru comes to see that garden and feels happy with the growth of the plants, the joy of the Guru becomes the grace He bestows on that individual, and that grace will confer great happiness to that person.
Did you hear about the golfer trying to buy a new golf club? He looked at club after club after club. His friend asked him “Why are you taking so long?” He replied “I am looking for a hole in one!”
One day, a grandpa and his grandson go golfing. The young one is really good and the old one is just giving him tips. They are on hole 8 and there is a tree in the way and the grandpa says, “When I was your age, I would hit the ball right over that tree.” So, the grandson hits the ball and it bumps against the tree and lands not to far from where it started. “Of course,” added the grandpa, “when I was your age, the tree was only 3 feet tall.”
Q. What game encourages drinking and driving?
A. Golf
The scriptures declare that body is the temple and God is installed therein. Hence consider your body as a vessel for cooking food, given on loan for hosting the festival of life. Can we return it to God, the Owner, in a worse condition? Should we not scrub it clean and return it bright and free from rust and dust? When the festival of life began, we received a pure, fresh and bright body from Him, innocent of evil. We have now inflicted dents, leaks and other signs of damage, through lust, greed, hatred, anger and envy. Do not return His property in poor condition. You must return it to Him, as pure as He gave it, to be most worthy of His Grace. Remember the purpose of your birth; and leverage your full potential and capability to achieve it. Wear the garland of devotion around your neck and saturate your thought, word and deed with Divine Love.
Take off with Natarajan 