May Sai always be with us in all our lives to come..
source::::: H.Deepa in shirdi sai speaks site …debu7370.blogspot.com
natarajan
Interesting read
Why We Say ” o’ clock ” When We Tell Time !!!
The practice of saying “o’clock” is a remnant of simpler times when clocks weren’t very prevalent and people told time by a variety of means, depending on where they were and what references were available.
Generally, of course, the Sun was used as a reference point, with solar time being slightly different than clock time. Clocks divide the time evenly, whereas, by solar time, hour lengths vary somewhat based on a variety of factors, like what season it is.
Thus, to distinguish the fact that one was referencing a clock’s time, rather than something like a sundial, as early as the fourteenth century one would say something like, “It is six of the clock,” which later got slurred down to “six o’clock” sometime around the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. In those centuries, it was also somewhat common to just drop the “o’” altogether and say something like “six clock.”
Using the form of “o’clock” particularly increased in popularity around the eighteenth century when it became common to do a similar slurring in the names of many things such as “Will-o’-the wisp” from “Will of the wisp” (stemming from a legend of an evil blacksmith named Will Smith, with “wisp” meaning “torch”) and “Jack-o’-lantern” from “Jack of the lantern” (which originally just meant “man of the lantern” with “Jack,” at the time, being the generic “any man” name. Later, either this or the Irish legend of “Stingy Jack” got this name transferred to referring to carved pumpkins with lit candles inside).
While today, with clocks being ubiquitous and few telling direct time by the Sun, it isn’t necessary in most cases to specify we are referencing time from clocks, the practice of saying “o’clock” has stuck around anyway.
source:::: today i foundout .com
natarajan
Vast Freshwater Reserve Under Ocean ? !!!
Light in the ocean. Image credit: Shutterstock / kerenby
Scientists have discovered huge reserves of freshwater beneath oceans off of Australia, China, North America and South Africa.
An estimated half a million cubic kilometers of low-salinity water are buried beneath the seabed on continental shelves around the world, according to a new study, published December 5, 2013 in the journal Nature.
How much water is that?
Dr. Vincent Post of Australia’s National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training is lead author of the study. He said:
The volume of this water resource is a hundred times greater than the amount we’ve extracted from the Earth’s sub-surface in the past century since 1900 … This volume of water could sustain some regions for decades.
The freshwater reserves were formed over the past hundreds of thousands of years when on average the sea level was much lower than it is today, and when the coastline was further out, according to researchers.
Dr. Post said that these water reserves are non-renewable.
We should use them carefully. Once gone, they won’t be replenished until the sea level drops again, which is not likely to happen for a very long time.
Read more from Australia’s National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training
source:::::Earth sky news site
natarajan
Image of the Day….
Message For the Day…” What is True Love ?”…
Today there are many who are highly educated. But what help are they rendering to society? Practically nothing! They are acquiring degrees for the sake of earning money. Modern students are taking to the wrong path in the name of love. They do not understand what true love is. People often use the word saying, “I love you, I love you.” You should be prepared to sacrifice for others all that is dear to you. That is true love. Love is God, live in love. Only then will you be able to understand the true nature of love. Do not misinterpret love in a worldly sense. Love is the gift of God to every individual. It should be utilized for the service of society. You must share your love with others through constructive service. Only then you will have the right to be a part of society.
Optical Illusion Making Rounds in The Net !!!
This new illusion has been making the rounds of the Internet the last few days:
What’s the illusion? It’s that the two squares are actually the same colour, it’s just the edges that are different. The middle area, where these edges meet, causes the illusion. When covered up you can see the two upper and lower sections are the same colour:
It’s actually just a take on the well-knownCornsweet illusion, which takes advantage of a phenomenon that occurs in your brain called lateral inhibition.
To understand how it works, you first need to know a little about how we see things. Cells on the back walls of our eyes react to the energy in light that is funneled to them.
They get excited and send an electric impulse to special cells in the brain, which collate signals from many eye cells and send the average of those signals on.
These brain cells interpret the millions of signals coming from the millions of eye cells into a picture with brightness and different colours.
There are special ways that these brain cells influence each other. Lateral inhibition is one of those interactions — the more active brain cell tones down the sensitivity of the one next to it, making it less excited.
That amplifies the signal on one side of the black/white boundary and diminishes the signal on the other side of the boundary, creating more contrast between them than actually exists. It allows us to see more vividly, but also creates these optical illusions.
It is also active in our other senses, like hearing, touching, and smelling.
Here are some more examples:
The Grey Square or Checker Shadow Illusion. The squares A and B are the same colour:
And here’s a gif proving it:
There’s also the Grid Illusion, which produces grey dots at the intersections of these white bars:
A third is the Mach Band Illusion, which suggests a gradient within a one-colour grey bar. The areas near the lighter colour look darker and those near the darker colour look lighter (as the red dotted line represents in the image below — when it veers left we are experiencing progressively lighter colours and when it veers right the colours look darker.):
source::::::businessinsider.com au
natarajan
Airports With Catchy Interiors !!!
MASSIVE, beautiful, weird, wonderful, futuristic and fun.
Here are some of the world’s best – and the downright craziest – airport interiors, according to travel website Skyscanner.com.au .
1. Suvarnabhumi, Bangkok, Thailand
Ancient meets modern minimalism in the main concourse of Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, designed by Helmut Jahn. Suvarnabhumi – “the airport of smiles” – has the proud claim to fame of the world’s tallest freestanding control tower (123 metres if you were wondering).
Suvarnabhumi, Bangkok
2. Beijing Capital International, China
Beijing’s Terminal 3, built in time to cope with the extra millions of passengers coming for the 2008 Olympic Games, is the second largest airport terminal in the world after Dubai International Airport’s Terminal 3 (more of that later).
Beijing Airport.
3. Chicago O’Hare, US
Moving walkways are cool, but colourful moving walkways, like this one in Chicago, are cooler. Along with going on the monorail back and forth between terminals, jumping off the end of “travelators”, as they’re sometimes called, is one of the most fun ways to spend your time at an airport.
Chicago O’Hare.
4. Singapore Changi
The departure lounge at Singapore’s Changi airport looks like it was modelled on an imaginary retro-futuristic fast food outlet. Or Universal Studios. Or maybe a flying saucer landed on the first floor food court? Check out the matching floor and ceiling too.
Changi Airport.
5. Dubai International, UAE
Terminal 3 at Dubai International Airport is, you guessed it, the single largest building in the world by floor space. It’s Dubai, what do you expect, small and subtle?
Dubai Airport.
6. Lyon St. Exupery, France
If you arrive at Lyon’s St. Exupéry Airport by TGV or the Rhône Express from the city centre, it’s a long walk to check-in, especially if you’re laden down with bags and you’re leaving from Terminal 3. But do look up to appreciate the architecture
7. Madrid – Barajas, Spain
If you can get over the sensation that you are under attack from a swarm of alien jellyfish, and that you have landed in Madrid in 1968, appreciate the wonder of the arrival hall at Barajas, which looks like an unused set from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
8. Munich, Germany
Horizontalators don’t come much more D.I.S.C.O. than this example at Munich Airport. They really should pump out Stayin’ Alive. You’ll catch Saturday night fever even if it’s Monday morning.
9. Charles de Gaulle, Paris
If, like the author, you missed your flight home from Paris because you were toasting your engagement with a bottle of champers on a bench outside Charles de Gaulle, then spent five hours drinking gin, slumped staring at the ceiling, this view will be familiar.
10. Shanghai Pudong, China
Asia boasts some of the world’s most architecturally-exciting airports, and Shanghai Pudong International is no exception. The exterior of Terminal 1 is shaped like waves, while arrival by escalator feels like an ascent into a sci-fi flick version of heaven
11. Ronald Reagan Washington National, US
There’s no mistaking which country you’re in, however jet-lagged you’re feeling. The Reagan’s classical style, redolent of tearful goodbyes in a 1920s railway station, eschewts the futurism of most major international airports.
Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
source::::news.com.au
natarajan
Spain’s Famous ” ghost ” Airport Goes Up for Sale !!!
Ciudad Real Airport.
A HUGE airport in central Spain that cost one billion euros ($1.5 billion) to build but has not received a commercial flight since 2011 has gone up for auction for just 100 million euros.
With a runway long enough to land an Airbus 380, the world’s largest airliner, and a capacity to handle 10 million passengers per year, the airport at Ciudad Real, some 200km south of Madrid, has become a symbol of Spain’s real estate bubble.
Spain’s first private international airport operated its first flight in December 2008 but passenger traffic never took off and CR Aeropuertos, the operator of the terminal, went into bankruptcy in June 2012 with debts of around 300 million euros.
It went up for auction on Monday for a starting price of 100 million euros to meet creditor demands and the bidding will close on December 27, a spokesman for a commercial court in Ciudad Real which is overseeing its sale said.
Ciudad Real, a city of around 75,000 residents located halfway between Madrid and Cordoba, attracts few visitors and the airport was designed to serve both the Spanish capital and the Andalusian coast which are both less than an hour away by high-speed rail. The airport, which reportedly cost around one billion euros to build, had its final commercial flight, from low-cost airline Vueling, at the end of 2011.
It remained open for another six months to receive a handful of private arrivals and in 2012 Oscar-winning Spanish director Pedro Almodovar used it for a week to film part of his latest film I’m So Excited! about a doomed passenger plane.
Since then the airport’s 4200-metre-long runway, Europe’s longest, has had to be continually painted with yellow crosses so pilots flying over the airport will know they cannot land there, according to Spanish media reports.
Spain, which is gingerly emerging from a double-dip recession sparked by the implosion in 2008 of a decade-long property bubble that fuelled overspending on massive infrastructure projects, has the most international commercial airports of any country in Europe.
Several of the country’s 47 public airports do not have any regular commercial flights and 15 move less than 100,000 passengers per year, or less than one flight per day.
Another private airport at Castellon on the Mediterranean coast has fared even worse than the one at Ciudad Real.
It opened in March 2011 but has not handled a single flight.
source::::news.com.au
natarajan
Message For the Day…” Realise Brotherhood Of Man & Fatherhood of God ” …
What is true humanness? You should treat your fellowmen as your own brothers and sisters. You deserve to be called a human being only when you cultivate the spirit of unity. Where there is no unity, there you find enmity and hatred. Consequently, the principle of love is lost altogether. Your foremost duty is to share your love with others. Only then can you realise the dictum: ‘Brotherhood of man and fatherhood of God’. You may or may not believe in the fatherhood of God, but you must have faith in the brotherhood of man; practise it and experience bliss therefrom. It is only when we share our love with our fellowmen, can we experience Divinity.
Image of The Day !!!
Snow geese in front of the moon ….
source:::::Earth sky news site
natarajan
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