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There is no use arguing and quarrelling amongst you. Examine, experience and then you will know the truth. Be silent when you are still undecided or engaged in evaluating. Do not proclaim before you are convinced. Of course, you must discard all evil in you before you can attempt to evaluate the mystery. When faith dawns, it is very important to fence it with discipline and self-control. Just as the tender sapling is guarded with a fence to protect against the goats and cattle; you too should stay away from the motley crowd of cynics and unbelievers. When your faith grows into a big tree, those very cattle which wanted to eat the young plant now lay and rest in the shade of the tree which has spread with lots of branches and leaves. |
environment
Message For The Day….Water Booths For This Summer !!!!
![[image]](https://i0.wp.com/i1066.photobucket.com/albums/u405/Sumi1971/Periva%20Posters/Template---178_zpscee4795c.jpg)
Message For The Day….Dont Ignore Traffic Signals In Life !!!!
The system of education, which promotes an attitude of contempt towards learning that does not yield monetary benefits, is largely responsible for the neglect of great scriptures and saints. Another cause is the general decline in the moral standards of living. When all are sliding down the easy path of flippancy, those who advise against it and warn about the inevitable disaster are ignored and laughed at. Sunk in the search of pleasures and cheap recreation, people become deaf to the counsels of the ancient and calls of the sublime. Scriptures are like traffic signals in a busy junction. If the signals are removed, the journey is rendered slow and difficult, filled with accidents and chaos. We cannot afford to destroy them. We have to restore them for the well-being of humanity.
There is no nobler quality in the world than love. It is wisdom. It is righteousness. It is wealth. 
It is Truth. – Baba
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Why Melbourne, Australia Is The World’s Best Place To Live !!!!!
In a recent ranking of the world’s “most livable” cities, Melbourne, Australia took the number one spot.
The Economist Intelligence Unit gave the city perfect marks for education, healthcare, and infrastructure.
Melbourne’s total score was 97.5 out of 100, only losing a few spare points for climate, petty crime, and culture.
Australia had five other cities in the top 10, but Melbourne with its Gothic Laneways, music culture, and gorgeous Yarra River was proclaimed the very best.
Why it is Very Best ?…..
Melbourne sits on the gorgeous Yarra River, making it a prime spot for water sports, boating, and scenic views.
It has the largest gambling center in the southern hemisphere, Crown Casino, with a license for 500 table games and an hourly fire show.
The city also hosts Big Day Out, one of the biggest nationwide music festivals where plenty of local and famous international bands come to play.
Melbourne’s residents are surrounded by cutting-edge architecture, like the Digital Harbour Port 1010, the Arts Centre Melbourne spire, and the Melbourne Recital Centre
The city is filled with parks and gardens, including the famous Royal Park which covers 420 acres and is open to the public.
Melbourne is considered a UNESCO City of Literature because of its literary festivals, book stores, publishers, and history of famous, award-winning authors.
Behind Melbourne’s grid-like streets are quirky little Gothic Laneways which house restaurants, book stores, and unique shops.
Melbourne also has a lot of nightlife options including underground bars, jazz cafés, and dance clubs hidden along the Laneways.
Melbourne hosts the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix in March, which becomes a huge city-wide event.
It also hosts the Australian Open, which takes place at the Margaret Court Arena, can hold 6,000 fans, and is one of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments in the worldMelbourne is never too hot or too cold. In the summer, the city sees temps of high 70s to low 80s, while the winter drops down to only 60 degrees.
Melbourne is a multicultural city with a large Indigenous community known as the Kulin Nation. There are many galleries and museums with an Aboriginal-focus.
It is home to the Best Chef in Australia, Ben Shewry, serving his seafood-centric tasting menu at Melbourne’s Attica restaurant.
Getting around the city is super easy thanks to Melbourne’s tram network, which covers over 150 miles and is one of the best in the world
And it has one of Australia’s best and largest open air shopping markets — The Queen Victoria Market from 1878 — where people flock on the weekends.
source::::businessinsider.com
Natarajan
Indian startup aims for the moon – and $30 million Prize Money!!!!
GOOGLE LUNAR X PRIZE | MOON | SPACE | TEAM INDUS
Rahul Narayan, who describes himself as a serial entrepreneur, is the founder of Team Indus. It is the only Indian team in a race to the moon by privately funded groups competing for the largest international incentive prize of all time – the Google Lunar X Prize.
Google is offering $30 million in prizes to the first privately funded teams to safely land a robot on the Moon, including a grand prize and other bonus prizes.
With a purse of $30 million, the competition will reward the first privately funded team to softland on the moon, travel 500 metres and transmit back to earth, at a distance of nearly 4 lakh km.!!!!!!
In a conversation with Reuters, Narayan talks about Team Indus’ prospects, timing, his struggle to be taken seriously by investors and why he would not be too disappointed if someone else wins.
Q: What is the biggest challenge in this mission?
A: Everything is a challenge – money, finding advisers, being taken seriously, reaching out to people.
Almost all of it is uncharted territory. Nobody’s done a (privately funded) mission before, definitely not from India.
Q: How was Team Indus formed?
A: I had gotten in touch with them (organizers) saying, if there was an Indian team, please let me know, I’d like to work with them. They got back to me saying there was no Indian team, and if you want to set up a team, we can give you a bit of expert help. That’s when I got out of whatever startups I was doing.
Q: How did you recruit people for this project?
A: Almost our entire team right now is people who came to our website and said they wanted to work.
Q: When is your planned launch date?
A: We plan to launch sometime in 2015.
Q: How much have you spent so far? What is the projected total cost?
A: We’ve spent about one crore rupees (10 million rupees, or about $185,200), including for registration, a little bit of prototype being done, operational expenses and salaries. It’s a design effort and we are not doing any hardware yet. Total spend, we expect it to be $15 million.
Q: Where do you see yourself among the 23 active teams?
A: We believe we are in the top five. We believe the moment we sign up with ISRO, we will be in the top two. Signing up with ISRO is the one big event that changes a lot of things for us. It has not happened yet, but we’ve started talking to them. (The Indian Space Research Organisation, or ISRO, is the primary space agency of the Indian government. Team Indus plans to use ISRO’s PSLV satellite launch vehicle for its moon mission)
Q: The competition rules state that the project must be 90 percent privately funded. So how are you managing?
A: Right now it is founder-funded. We’ve divided the cost into three different parts. One is cost of design, second is the cost of building it and the third is the cost of launching it. We have separate strategies for each one of them. For designing, we will be looking for investments. Building it is where we are looking at partnerships (aerospace companies, IITs or government agencies). We are looking at these people to partner with us and potentially contribute, if not money, then equipment. The last part, we are going to do crowdfunding.
Q: Why would investors be interested?
A: I started by saying we are an aerospace company. So we see this as a company which is doing a project, and it will continue doing other aerospace projects or derived technologies or IPR, or licensing rights from what we’re going to do here (moon mission).
We are a for-profit company. It’s not just this mission, we will continue building beyond it.
Q: What if somebody else beats you to the prizes?
A: We’re definitely aiming for the first prize. We’ve got one bonus prize built into it. But, if all the prizes go away in 2014 and I’ve booked my launch with ISRO, that doesn’t mean I stop. I have to go because I’ve already done my engineering, I’ve already spent the money and probably just a residual amount is left. So you’d see that differently as then maybe it converts from a Google Lunar X Prize mission to simply a India’s mission. It’s a people mission, people have contributed to it, people have worked in it, and people have a part in it.
Q: What would losing mean for your team?
A: Even if we lose, we’ll still accomplish a fantastic engineering feat. Prize money is just one component of it, so I’m talking about a company which is going to continue after the prize money….
source:::: David Lalmalsawma in Reuters US
Natarajan
You can follow the David on Twitter @confusedat30
Message For The Day….Meditation is Like Learning a Bicycle Ride !!!
When you learn to ride a bicycle, you do not get the skill of balancing immediately. You push the cycle along to a safe and open ground, hop and skip, leaning now and then on one side and another, and make many an attempt to get the balance. Once you get the skill, you never even think or worry about balancing. You automatically make the necessary adjustments. You can now ride through narrow streets and lanes, and even through crowded alleys – you no longer need the large, safe, open ground! So too, practice alone will equip you with deep concentration, that will sustain you even in your most difficult situation. Hence, do not get discouraged that you are not able to concentrate on prayer or meditation for long. It is just the start!
Swami Sathya Sai in one of HIS discourses..
Natarajan
Highest and Largest Infinity Pool in the World …at Singapore !!!
The Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore opened its doors in 2010, to the tune of a whopping $5.7 billion.That amount paid for the massive 2,561-room hotel, a museum, casino, restaurants, bars, a swanky shopping mall, and the pièce de résistance: the SkyPark, an insane rooftop pleasure dome with a 150-meter (492 ft.) infinity pool.Click here to see photos >
Located on the 57th floor, this pool offers stunning views of Singapore’s financial district, Marina Bay, and beyond. It’s the largest and highest infinity pool in the world, according to the hotel, and if you swim up to the pool’s edge, it feels like you’re about to fall off the top of the world !!!!!
source::::: businessinsider.com
Natarajan
Here’s what Marina Bay Sands looks like from the outside. The SkyPark, which connects the hotel’s three towers, looks a bit like a cruise ship perched in the air.
The pool is just as stunning as you might think.
Crazy Things Happening in China Now !!!!!…..Part 2
One construction worker was killed when this 13-floor building collapsed almost intact. There are constant fears that safety comes second to speed.
Cities with no occupants pop up all over the country…China’s infrastructure-investment-driven growth has caused ghost cities and ghost malls to pop up all across the country.
26-mile bridges get built to nowhere.
The 8-lane Qingdao bridge is the world’s longest bridge and cost 14.8 billion yuan to build, but sees a fraction of the traffic that was expected, according to the Financial Times.
Cute kids get replaced by cuter kids.
China lied about the little girl who sang “Ode to the motherland” at the Beijing Olympics. Yang Peiyi, the real singer, wasn’t considered cute enough and Lin Miaoke was brought in to lip sync the song. The music director Chen Qigang told the AP: “The audience will understand that it’s in the national interes
Entire APPLE Stores Get Faked !!!
As Chinese cities develop across the country fake stores have become increasingly prevalent. Arguably the most famous fake store was the fake Apple store in Kunming,
Southern China.
Rivers TURN RED !!!!!
Environmental pollution and chemical spills have caused rivers in China to turn red.
source:::: businessinsider.com
Natarajan
Crazy Things Happening in China Now !!!! Part 1….
Immolations are a very popular form of protest. Before and during the leadership transition in 2012, Beijing positioned firefighters in Tiananmen Square to prevent self-immolations.
Chinese government officials reportedly spent thousands of dollars on gold and silver mooncakes. This raised concerns of corruption according to Xinhua.
The Chinese government announced a 20 percent tax on profits from home sales. But couples with more than one home have been getting divorced, taking one property each, and then selling one of the homes tax free, to take advantage of loopholes.
Rapid industrialization has caused pollution problems across China. Recently the smog got so bad NASA said it obscured the view from space.
source: businessinsider.com
Natarajan
Cooking Oil Powers TransAtlantic Flights !!!!!
Dutch airline KLM has begun powering some commercial flights on an eco-friendly fuel mix that includes 25% cooking oil and 75% jet fuel.
The same oil that fried up your lunch might be powering your next flight to Europe.
Dutch airline KLM has begun powering some commercial flights on an eco-friendly fuel mix that includes 25% cooking oil and 75% jet fuel. The cooking oil-fuelled Boeing 777 flights will be tested on 25 roundtrip transatlantic flights between New York’s JFK and Amsterdam’s Schiphol every Thursday for the next six months.
The leftover waste oil comes from restaurants in the southern US state of Louisiana, where it’s used to fry up cracklins, catfish and other Cajun treats before being refined at a plant near Baton Rouge and trucked to New York to fuel the flights.
Though some say the fuel smells like fast food, the cooking oil is safe for powering jumbo jets and provides exactly the same flying experience. Even better, it reduces carbon emissions by up to 80%.
It’s indistinguishable on a molecular level from regular kerosene jet fuel, Captain Rick Shouten, who piloted the maiden flight last week, told the New York Post. “For pilots, it’s totally transparent. It’s as if you’re flying a normal aircraft.”
KLM has been offering biofuel-powered flights for years, with its first demonstration flight fuelled by a mix of 50% biofuel made from camelina (an oily member of the mustard family) in November 2009. And while the Dutch airline started regularly using recycled cooking oil on some commercial flights between Amsterdam and Paris in June 2011, this latest usage represents the first time biofuels will be used on a regular weekly schedule on transatlantic flights.
What’s the future of cooking oil-fuelled flights?
In the near term, it’s more likely cooking oil will by frying up your French fries and falafels rather than fuelling your flight. That’s because biofuels made from recycled cooking oil are expensive – about $10 per gallon, or roughly three times the price of regular jet fuel – largely due to the costs of refining and preparing the oil for use on jumbo jets.
Most recycled cooking oil today is used to power diesel trucks or mixed with home heating fuel, a simpler conversion process. One innovative company,Grease Lightning, based in New York City, has been purchasing used cooking oil from local restaurants to convert into biodiesel fuel since 2011. And several Boston hotels, including the Saunders Hotel, Lenox Hotel, and Ramada Inn Boston, are using recycled vegetable oil to fuel their laundry trucks and hotel shuttle buses.
Although the sustainability of these alternative biofuels makes it an environmentally friendly option for progressive airlines, widespread adoption of recycled cooking oil requires that usage spreads, making the fuel more affordable for budget-strapped airlines.
The air travel community is hoping for financial support from the governments where major airlines are based in the form of subsidies, research grants and tax benefits.
“A lot still has to happen before biofuel will be available on a large scale and for it to be economically competitive in relation to fossil-fuel kerosene,” KLM said in a statement. “We cannot achieve this alone. We absolutely need the commitment and support of all the relevant parties: business, government and society.”
source:::::bbc.com.travel
Natarajan
