Love's Last Adieu

Love's Last Adieu  The roses of Love glad the garden of life,
Though nurtur'd 'mid weeds dropping pestilent dew,
Till Time crops the leaves with unmerciful knife,
Or prunes them for ever, in Love's last adieu!

In vain, with endearments, we soothe the sad heart,
In vain do we vow for an age to be true;
The chance of an hour may command us to part,
Or Death disunite us, in Love's last adieu!

Still Hope, breathing peace, through the grief-swollen breast,
Will whisper, Our meeting we yet may renew:
With this dream of deceit, half our sorrow's represt,
Nor taste we the poison, of Love's last adieu!

Oh! mark you yon pair, in the sunshine of youth,
Love twin'd round their childhood his flow'rs as they grew;
They flourish awhile, in the season of truth,
Till chill'd by the winter of Love's last adieu!

Sweet lady! why thus doth a tear steal its way,
Down a cheek which outrivals thy bosom in hue?
Yet why do I ask?---to distraction a prey,
Thy reason has perish'd, with Love's last adieu!

Oh! who is yon Misanthrope, shunning mankind?
From cities to caves of the forest he flew:
There, raving, he howls his complaint to the wind;
The mountains reverberate Love's last adieu!

Now Hate rules a heart which in Love's easy chains,
Once Passion's tumultuous blandishments knew;
Despair now inflames the dark tide of his veins,
He ponders, in frenzy, on Love's last adieu!

How he envies the wretch, with a soul wrapt in steel!
His pleasures are scarce, yet his troubles are few,
Who laughs at the pang that he never can feel,
And dreads not the anguish of Love's last adieu!

Youth flies, life decays, even hope is o'ercast;
No more, with Love's former devotion, we sue:
He spreads his young wing, he retires with the blast;
The shroud of affection is Love's last adieu!

In this life of probation, for rapture divine,
Astrea declares that some penance is due;
From him, who has worshipp'd at Love's gentle shrine,
The atonement is ample, in Love's last adieu!

Who kneels to the God, on his altar of light
Must myrtle and cypress alternately strew:
His myrtle, an emblem of purest delight,
His cypress, the garland of Love's last adieu!


by Lord Byron
(1788-1824)

"SELDOM & KEEN"

The two beings felt some
shame left and their journey
offererd them some rest..

They found pleasure
with each other, wandering
in that care free ground

That time there was no love
and even no hatred found...

Everything was so peaceful,
delighting yet maneuvering

And in there view
it was all new..

They didin't realise
how would it possibly be..

As there were no bounds
and not even a key

Then that carefree ground
became  the world...

It was turning into
a big havoc and
slowly we were seeing time
in the world clock

Boundaries were drawn
humans diffrentiating
between dusk and dawn..

They see solace now
far and gone..
there was also a time when i was born..

Humans still treated each other well
but now they can throw each other
into a well

So the two came together
laughed and cried
thought , their pleasure was
nearly a bribe..

Afterwhich, this world
couln't survive

The world couldn't
survive...

Man’s discovery and misery

Man discovered weapons, invented hunting.
Woman discovered hunting, invented furs.

Man discovered colors, invented painting.
Woman discovered painting, invented make-up.

Man discovered speech, invented conversation.
Woman discovered conversation, invented gossip.

Man discovered agriculture, invented food.
Woman discovered food, invented diet.

Man discovered friendship, invented love.
Woman discovered love, invented marriage.

Man discovered trade, invented money.
Woman discovered money, man has never recovered

"The thing I love about India..."

There is something about India that makes you fall in love with the chaos, buzz and inimitable energy that surrounds every corner.
Four writers tell us why it's good to be Indian...

Foodie
Ambika Muttoo

"My first reaction to this piece was, 'Good question'. Then I repeated, 'Why do I love India' in as many different tones as I could manage, hoping that one of them would kickstart some neurological magic. Either my neurons aren't exactly cooperative, or the question itself defies explanation. I suspect it's the latter. The reason why it's so hard to illustrate an answer is because love itself is hard to describe. It's every cliche in the book, because cliche's are born from the truth, aren't they? There are a couple of things I know about this inexpressible love I have for my country and they do set some sort of ball rolling. I know I can't live anywhere else in the world.

This isn't just a lofty statement, it's actually been put to practise. I've been fortunate enough to travel. I've been even more fortunate to travel to places that I love and will visit multiple times through my life. But no matter where I go, I am, and will always be a homing pigeon. I think it's got a lot to do with the food. I didn't think I consciously spoke about gastronomic yearnings until a particular experience in Prague revealed otherwise. Two very close friends: one American and one German-American, dragged me out of bed one fine morning. I lie, it was afternoon, but we had a particularly fine experience at our favourite bar, La Casa Blu, the previous night. Their mission was to surprise me with something, and this exercise took us through the winding cobblestone streets of the city. Our eventual destination made me alternately cry with joy and cry with laughter. It was a South Indian restaurant, perhaps the only South Indian restaurant in all of Prague. Apparently, I talked so fondly of food from India that they had to try it out for themselves. And shut me up, at the same time. It worked. I'm Kashmiri, but the way I see it, I came close enough.

I now have my answer as well. I love India because it allows me to be vegetarian and not feel like a minor member of the food chain. For a former carnivore, (hey, I'm Kashmiri), this is a blessing like no other. I love India because my vegetarianism isn't perceived as a 'fad' (I've been cold turkey, for lack of a better term, for four years now). It's a valid lifestyle choice, as is my choice to practise Pranic Healing and Arhatic Yoga. I am not a hippy. I'm not modish. I may sometimes be a 'healer' and meditate, but I'm also a writer, a herbivore, cocktail lover and many other things. I am myself an integral part of what is...Indian.

Warm tiding
Ira Trivedi

"Lyrical, passionate, colloquial, abstruse, rigorous, humorous, romantic, austere, playful. These are the words that come to my mind when I think of India. But the most enduring, or perhaps encapsulating, of all these words is: warmth. It is the warmth of my country that I love the most.

I moved back to India after having lived in the lap of vibrancy, New York City. There were teething problems, like there always are: living with parents, curfews, the 'haw' factor, and then the small but crucial things: laundry (dhobis never get it right), milk (the milk in India never tastes the same), AC problems (why don't we have central air-conditioning?) my green-tea latte at Starbucks, and a multitude of other irritants. At the end, though, I realised something New York was probably the loneliest city in the world, and India was the warmest, vibrant, dynamic country that I had lived in.

The warmth that I have come to love and cherish translates into so many things: art, fashion, food, weather, colour, and most of all, to the denizens of our nation. Nowhere else in the world have I experienced the kind of love and care that I have here, from the most ordinary of people, my 'waxing lady', the driver, the gate-keeper, the passer-by. Nowhere else have I found people to be kinder, more generous, most giving of themselves and of the little that they have. After having lived in seven countries, I have realised the importance of being surrounded by that warm energy. At times, when I miss the anonymity of the West, I try to remember the sheer warmth of my family home, of the brown smiling faces, and the energy which is more soulful and nourishing than anything else that I know, and I know that I never want to go back. This is Home. For me, India is a microcosmic necropolis of love, a sanctuary of peace, spiritual haven, a land filled with warmth and emotion that is incomparable to anywhere else in the world.

Million rainbows
Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan

"I'm writing this a day after Mumbai saw yet another set of multiple blasts in the most crowded bits of that city. I'm supposed to say why I love India, and yet, my morning paper gives me so many reasons not to.

So, here's what I like. I like that no two days are the same, and I like that lots of things stay the same even when everything around it wooshes at the speed of light. I like that I can instantly be taken back to my childhood just by the call of the kabaadi wallah down the road, and I like that kabaadi wallahs are performing a role so modern that other countries just introduced it less than a decade ago: recycling. I like that just by virtue of being Indian, most of us are not only bilingual, we can speak about three different languages.

Those are little things, things we take for granted, but ultimately, we can't explain them to anyone else. They are our quirks, and something we share across the country, and even across the globe, if we happen to meet a fellow citizen. If you think of India in a straight line, in a uni-dimensional sense, there are so many things you're not getting. Imagine, instead, the country as a prism, loads of jagged edges, but when you hold it up to just the right light, you see the reflections of a million tiny rainbows.

Can't match it
Naomi Dutta

"It was my first-ever trip abroad. As a 20-something cub reporter, I was dispatched to Cannes to cover the annual international advertising festival.

My first trip to Cannes, I spent most of my time hiding my clunky sneakers under a chair. But redemption was served to my table as I sat around in one of the many cafes on the cobbled streets of Cannes.

Yes, these seemed to be content people, but there was a huge gap in their menu of happiness. Food. Proper good food. As I stared glumly at the bland pieces of chicken on my plate, I yearned for the taste and smell of spice. I sought out our neighbours, and found a Chinese eatery where I was told dourly that the food was on the spicy side. I ate what seemed like boiled chicken in a bed of noodles, and felt that the Chinese owed us big time for Chicken Manchurian.

After 10 days of eating bags of French fries as staple fare, we were finally back at Mumbai Airport. We were herded like cattle by pot bellied constables at a crowded chaotic airport. As I stepped out, Mumbai smelled like it always does, like a garangutan gutter. The driver handed me a vada pao, and as I bit into the potato slathered with green chutney, I felt awfully sorry for my fellow human beings in Cannes. I walked away into the night in my clunky sneakers, and thought it sure tastes good to be Indian. Jai Hind!

src:~http://in.lifestyle.yahoo.com

12 Quick Tips To Search Google Like An Expert

If you’re like me, you probably use Google many times a day.  But, chances are, unless you are a technology geek, you probably still use Google in its simplest form.  If your current use of Google is limited to typing a few words in, and changing your query until you find what you’re looking for, then I’m here to tell you that there’s a better way – and it’s not hard to learn.  On the other hand, if you are a technology geek, and can use Google like the best of them already, then I suggest you bookmark this article of Google search tips.  You’ll then have the tips on hand when you are ready to pull your hair out in frustration when watching a neophyte repeatedly type in basic queries in a desperate attempt to find something.

The following Google search tips are based on my own experience and things that I actually find useful.  The list is by no means comprehensive.  But, I assure you that by learning and using the 12 tips below, you’ll rank up there with the best of the Google experts out there.  I’ve kept the descriptions of the search tips intentionally terse as you’re likely to grasp most of these simply by looking at the example from Google anyways.

12 Expert Google Search Tips

1. Explicit Phrase:
   Lets say you are looking for content about internet marketing.  Instead of just typing internet marketing into the Google search box, you will likely be better off searching explicitly for the phrase.  To do this, simply enclose the search phrase within double quotes.

   Example: "internet marketing"

2. Exclude Words:
   Lets say you want to search for content about internet marketing, but you want to exclude any results that contain the term advertising.  To do this, simply use the "-" sign in front of the word you want to exclude.

   Example Search: internet marketing -advertising

3. Site Specific Search:
   Often, you want to search a specific website for content that matches a certain phrase.  Even if the site doesn’t support a built-in search feature, you can use Google to search the site for your term. Simply use the "site:somesite.com" modifier.

   Example: "internet marketing" site:www.smallbusinesshub.com

4. Similar Words and Synonyms:
   Let’s say you are want to include a word in your search, but want to include results that contain similar words or synonyms.  To do this, use the "~" in front of the word.

   Example: "internet marketing" ~professional

5. Specific Document Types:
   If you’re looking to find results that are of a specific type, you can use the modifier "filetype:".  For example, you might want to find only PowerPoint presentations related to internet marketing.

   Example: "internet marketing" filetype:ppt

6. This OR That:
   By default, when you do a search, Google will include all the terms specified in the search.  If you are looking for any one of one or more terms to match, then you can use the OR operator.  (Note:  The OR has to be capitalized).

   Example: internet marketing OR advertising

7. Phone Listing:
   Let’s say someone calls you on your mobile number and you don’t know how it is.  If all you have is a phone number, you can look it up on Google using the phonebook feature.

   Example: phonebook:617-555-1212 (note:  the provided number does not work – you’ll have to use a real number to get any results).

8. Area Code Lookup:
   If all you need to do is to look-up the area code for a phone number, just enter the 3-digit area code and Google will tell you where it’s from.

   Example: 617

9. Numeric Ranges:
   This is a rarely used, but highly useful tip.  Let’s say you want to find results that contain any of a range of numbers.  You can do this by using the X..Y modifier (in case this is hard to read, what’s between the X and Y are two periods.  This type of search is useful for years (as shown below), prices or anywhere where you want to provide a series of numbers.

   Example: president 1940..1950

10. Stock (Ticker Symbol):
    Just enter a valid ticker symbol as your search term and Google will give you the current financials and a quick thumb-nail chart for the stock.

    Example: GOOG

11. Calculator:
    The next time you need to do a quick calculation, instead of bringing up the Calculator applet, you can just type your expression in to Google.

    Example: 48512 * 1.02

12. Word Definitions:
    If you need to quickly look up the definition of a word or phrase, simply use the "define:" command.

    Example: define:plethora

Hope this list of Google search tips proves useful in your future Google searches.  If there are any of your favorite Google expert power tips that I’ve missed, please feel free to share them in the comments.

Steve Jobs & Guy Kawasaki -- Powerpoint Best Practices

I have recently come across some interesting Powerpoint best practices that I thought I would share with you.

Steve Jobs
The first best practice was from watching Steve Jobs presentation at MacWorld this year.  What was fascinating about his slides is that they were either just a picture or just a picture with a couple of words in extremely large font.  It turns out that Steve wants the audience to listen to him tell the story, rather than read the slides.

Here's a picture of one of Steve's slides:


In contrast to Steve's slide show, here's a picture of a slide from Michael Dell.  Michael's would work well if it were designed to be send to someone who would not have the benefit of hearing the story live, but next to Steve's slides, they just seem cluttered.


Guy Kawasaki
I recently read Guy Kawasaki's "Art of The Start."  In addition to being a good author/blogger, Guy was one of the very early Apple employees and more recently has been a venture/angel investor type where he has listened to countless Powerpoint presentations.  Presumably because he is tired of seeing poor Powerpoint presentations, he spends many pages in his book talking about Powerpoint best practices.  There were a few nuggets of Powerpoint wisdom among a lot of content about it that stuck with me a few days after finishing the book.

His mantra is that Powerpoint should follow a 10/20/30 Rule.  There should be no more than 10 slides in the presentation -- very few people take away much more than one concept from a presentation, so all that other stuff is extra.  The slide presentation should be designed to last 20 minutes, leaving room for ample questions/discussion between slides or after the presentation.  Guy points out that the point of the presentation is typically to initiate a discussion.  He says the font should be size should be no smaller than 30 (Arial font).  Guy says that audiences read faster than you can talk, so that while you are up there talking, they are trying to read your slides and not listening to what you are saying.

He says that there are something like 60 animation features within Powerpoint and he recommends the less use of it the better.  His advice is to use your voice/body to emphasize when a point is important, not some fancy Powerpoint trick.  The only place he recommends using any of this is in going through bullet points on a slide, presumably to avoid having people read ahead.  Speaking of bullets, Guy suggests that bulleted slides should have one point with bullets and only one layer of bullets (lest you violate the 30 part of 10/20/30).

If you have some great Powerpoint tips, please do share them with us…

Interesting definitions of common words

Atom Bomb: An invention made to end all inventions.   

Boss: Someone who is early when you are late and late when you are early. 

College: A place where some pursue learning and others learn pursuing.

Committee: Individuals who can do nothing individually and sit to decide that nothing can be done together.

Compromise: The art of dividing a cake in such a way that everybody believes he got the biggest piece.

Conference: The confusion of one man multiplied by the number present.

Conference Room: A place where everybody talks, nobody listens & everybody disagrees later on.

Dictionary: A place where divorce comes before marriage.

Divorce: Future tense of marriage.

Doctor: A person who kills your ills by pills, and kills you with his bills.

Etc.: A sign to make others believe that you know more than you actually do.

Experience: The name men give to their mistakes.

Father: A banker provided by nature.

Lecture: An art of transferring information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the students without passing through "the minds of either".

Love affairs: Something like cricket where one-day internationals are more popular than a five-day test.

Marriage: It's an agreement in which a man loses his bachelor degree and woman gains her master.

Miser: A person who lives poor so that he can die rich.

Office: A place where you can relax after your strenuous home life.

Optimist: A person who while falling from Eiffel tower says in midway "See I am not injured yet."

Opportunist: A person who starts taking bath if he accidentally falls into a river.

Pessimist: A person who says that O is the last letter in ZERO, Instead of the first letter in word OPPORTUNITY.

Philosopher: A fool who torments himself during life, to be spoken of when dead.

Politician: One who shakes your hand before elections and your Confidence after.

Smile: A curve that can set a lot of things straight.

Tears: The hydraulic force by which masculine will-power is defeated by feminine waterpower.

Yawn: The only time some married men ever get to open their mouth.

A Joyful Experience: The Shoulders of Giants

A Joyful Experience: The Shoulders of Giants

Why Kolkata will win in 20 years

By way of human capital it is India’s wealthiest city. Twenty years ago, this meant little and Kolkata’s brightest minds left the city. Today it is gold


Which Indian city has the best infrastructure, the most attractive culture? In a nation where Nasscom says 90% of all graduates are unemployable, which city produces many times more competent people than it can hire? Which city is our greatest net exporter of talent? Which city will win in 20 years?
Kolkata.

This is ridiculous, because Kolkata lags Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai and even Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune in attracting investment. It has no software economy and no financial sector. What industry they inherited, Bengalis have packed off efficiently.

Relic: Kolkata still has hand-pulled rickshaws not found anywhere in the world. Photo by Indranil Bhoumik/Mint.

It is ridiculous because Bengalis don’t even have a proper trading class, and use the word “bene” (baniya) with contempt. How is such a place fertile for capital?
Then there is the matter of the anarchy. Even by India’s low standard, Kolkata is a monumental mess. Little governance is visible on its roads, which the state has surrendered to the population and shows no desire of retaking.

But Kolkata has assets, chief among them its people. In a world where cultures must integrate, Bengalis have built one of our most attractive and open cultures. More about this later.

If you were to close your eyes and imagine the city without its grubby occupants, Kolkata actually has the finest infrastructure of any Indian city. Options for getting around the city include a Metro (not found in Mumbai), local trains (not found in Delhi), taxis (not found in Bangalore), trams (not found anywhere in India) and hand-pulled rickshaws (not found anywhere in the world).

It is even possible, though it isn’t advisable, to walk one’s way around the city because it has footpaths, something supposedly urban centres like Gurgaon and Bangalore don’t have.


The problem is only that all this great infrastructure is poorly managed. And actually it is very easily remedied. New tram cars running on these same tracks can transform inner city commuting. It is the middle class (not the poor) that uses the rickshaw in the old city lanes of north Kolkata. A boost in their incomes will mean bigger fares for the destitute Biharis who pull them around.

Kolkata’s taxis run on metered fare, unlike in most of India, and need only to be more modern.
The systems are in place. A little governance is required to get the economy moving. A man or small group of people charged with making the city attractive for investment can transform Kolkata in five years. I’m tempted to say it should be one of the Bengali-speaking Gujaratis or Marwaris who support Trinamool. They will know what to do and instinctively connect with those who have capital. Labour unions are not relevant in the IT industry where retaining trained talent is the problem and not job security. A little assurance from Kolkata that it will not be aggressive on such issues for white collar workers will get businessmen excited.

Let us turn to culture, Bengal’s priceless asset.

He is useless at managing his own economy, true, but the Bengali represents the moral end of our politics.
The Communists and Mamata Banerjee can be accused of many things. Being corrupt and being communal are not among them. Perhaps they don’t really know how to make money in office, but their open-mindedness is deliberate and comes from within. The city of Kolkata is Britain’s gift to Bengal, a one-city state. Bengalis have responded by producing an urban culture that is sophisticated and modern.
This gives them an attractive duality. Middle-class Bengalis are comfortable and, importantly, urbane in both English and Bengali. They can express modern ideas in their language, which is supple and can accommodate words from other languages easily (“bourgeois”). This separates them from much of India.
High culture comes from Kolkata’s bhadra, who is Kayastha/Brahmin/ Baidyi (Vaidya). Along with southern Maharashtra and northern Karnataka, Kolkata is the place that produces classical musicians at will.
Despite having a majority Muslim population, Bengal’s nationalism has coalesced around Bengali language, not religion.

One reason Bangladesh isn’t Pakistan is that it is insufficiently Islamized. But why? Because the gentle leavening of Rabindric culture has resisted the harsh call of an Arab social order.

Bengal is animist, and its riverine geography has retained the river-based culture of our ancients. This culture the Bong carries with him where he goes. Bengalis are among our most ubiquitous professionals. They dominate the media and are represented heavily in services and academia, and in higher management. They are all-rounders. They bring a sense of quality and aesthetic that is uncommon.

Let one example suffice. The best designed newspaper in India is Anandabazar Patrika. Its puja-special magazine is a thing of beauty and not to be compared with what other Indian newspapers produce.
The outsider who can look past the grime and the soot will find much that is rewarding in Kolkata.
It is our only city to have a Chinatown. It is our football capital, with a proper and passionate football following. This integrates it with Europe and in time, when there is money in Bengali sport, this will be one of the city’s big assets.

There is history on Kolkata’s roads, and many people will come to see it if they are shown it—the homes of Tagore and Vivekananda, Victoria Memorial and the lovely British-built areas around Park Street. Also the great spiritual centres that were founded around the city and radiated their message of soft Hinduism across India.

Kolkata is altogether more relaxed in the mingling of the sexes. This is something I’ve noticed in all cultures where honour isn’t at a premium, and it is the same in Gujarat. Single women are comfortable in the company of men.

Kolkata has excellent places to eat and drink. Meat is served, and alcohol is freely available. Bengalis don’t have the fake morality of some of our other cultures.

Gujarat covers itself with hypocrisy. An Ahmedabad daily I worked at reported a few years ago that the majority of licensed drinkers in the city also insisted on prohibition. Why? “That’s our culture,” they said.
On leaving the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and becoming the chief minister of Maharashtra, Prithviraj Chavan’s big initiative has been to raise the drinking age in Mumbai to 25. He spent years learning at Manmohan Singh​’s knee, but the peasant’s instinct isn’t easily exorcised. Another Maratha, R.R. Patil, abolished the city’s beautiful dance bars. Between them, the pious Marathas have done satyanash of that city. Piety is a personal value and not to be inflicted on another, but this is difficult for some cultures to internalize.

It isn’t that Kolkata isn’t devout, and there is no celebration like Durga Puja anywhere in the world. This much religious fervour would otherwise always inject a harder edge into the air. Like it does during Ahmedabad’s annual rath yatra, whose organizers insist that its floats parade through the Muslim ghettos of Shahpur, Kalupur and Dariyapur. Floats on which akhara braves, bare-chested, display their valour. What does Sri Vishnu have to do with bodybuilding?

Kolkata’s puja is festive, and inclusive. Not threatening, not menacing.

From either end of the subcontinent, two disparate states observe India pass them by. Gujarat and Poschim Bongo (should we now call them Bongolis?) are two states that don’t fall neatly into our north-south division.
Both states have missed making money in the new economy.

Gujarat has missed out despite having outstanding infrastructure— power, roads—and access to capital. All that fledgling information technology firms need. It has governance but does not have the fundamental ingredient: human capital. Oriented towards trade, its urban class is uninterested in, for the most part contemptuous about, employment. English isn’t spoken in Gujarat, even by the elite, for Gujarati delivers the most important function of modern language—communicating complex economic thought.

This will not change for a very long time. Kolkata has a different problem: It lacks governance. But by way of human capital it is India’s wealthiest city. Twenty years ago, this meant little and Kolkata’s brightest minds left the city. Today it is gold.

I always enjoy visiting Kolkata, even if by the third day of looking at the happy poverty and the chaos the mind turns to thoughts of escape.

All Indian cities have problems. Few also contain solutions. It is entirely possible, and I think most likely, that Bengalis will be able to sort out theirs, which are quite minor. Kolkata will then be one of the world’s great cities again.

Such a beautiful and cultured people deserve it.

- For Mint, Aakar Patel

The actual writeup can be found at-http://www.livemint.com/2011/10/13205506/Why-Kolkata-will-win-in-20-yea.html

A Banana a day keeps stress away

A Banana a day keeps stress away

A professor at CCNY for a physiological psych class told his class about bananas. He said the expression “going bananas” is from the effects of bananas on the brain.
“A banana a day keeps the doctor away!”

Never, put your banana in the refrigerator.

This is interesting. After reading this, you’ll never look at a banana in the same way again.

Bananas contain three natural sugars – sucrose, fructose and glucose combined with fiber.

A banana gives an instant, sustained and substantial boost of energy.

Research has proven that just two bananas provide enough energy for a strenuous 90-minute workout.
No wonder the banana is the number one fruit with the world’s leading athletes. But energy isn’t the only way a banana can help us keep fit.

It can also help overcome or prevent a substantial number of illnesses and conditions, making it a must to add to our daily diet. Sweet and enjoyable like that Jamaican folk song popularized by Harry Belafonte, a son of Jamaica, the banana is nature’s gift of whole and balanced living.

It guarantees regular and wholesome functioning of the human body, reinforcing its ability to heal itself. Eating bananas daily is recommended as an aid to a healthy, useful and long life.  A meaty, creamy fruit, or a tender vegetable, (each finger perfectly encased in its own, green, yellow or reddish air tight, wrapper), it brings to the table singular flavor and rich consistency. It is full of those dynamic vitamins and minerals essential to healthful living and the full expression of creative energy.

A Banana a day keeps stress away

Bananas are staple food for many world-class athletes.

The banana offers a high, concentrated mixture of three types of sugars—fructose, sucrose and glucose–easily digested and absorbed by the body. This sugar combination releases energy into the body over a much longer period than many other types of foods, improving stamina and endurance.

Various studies confirm bananas help to keep high blood pressure at bay. Bananas are potassium-rich, helping the body lose sodium, a major cause of high blood pressure. An American study shows that eating five bananas a day was 50% as effective as taking prescription medication to reduce high blood pressure. Instead of swallowing expensive pills and their   side-effects, consider bananas as a natural, more palatable alternative.

Bananas aid the body in many smaller ways. High in fibre, bananas help restore normal bowel movement. People who struggle with depression benefit from eating bananas, which contain trypotophan, a protein the body transforms into serotonin. Serotonin relaxes the body, improves mood and induces a general feeling of happiness.

Bananas also have generous quantities of phosphorous, iron, thiamin, calcium and beta carotene. As a good source of B vitamins, bananas are a good stress buster, helping to calm the nervous system, and providing a healthy comfort food option.

If you’re worried about bananas spoiling on you, put them in the refrigerator after they’ve fully ripened. Honey spots will start appearing on the skin, and the skin will darken, but the inside of the banana remains fresh.
The next time you think about carrying a bag chips with you to work, grab a banana instead and start taking in the benefits of this bright, finger-shaped fruit.

Depression:
According to a recent survey undertaken by MIND amongst people suffering from depression, many felt much better after eating a banana. This is because bananas contain tryptophan, a type of protein that the body converts into serotonin, known to make you relax, improve your mood and generally make you feel happier.

PMS:
Forget the pills – eat a banana. The vitamin B6 it contains regulates blood glucose levels, which can affect your mood.

Anemia:
High in iron, bananas can stimulate the production of hemoglobin in the blood and so helps in cases of anemia.

Blood Pressure:
This unique tropical fruit is extremely high in potassium yet low in salt, making it perfect to beat blood pressure. So much so, the US Food and Drug Administration has just allowed the banana industry to make official claims for the fruit’s ability to reduce the risk of blood pressure and stroke.

Brain Power:
200 students at a Twickenham (Middlesex) school were helped through their exams this year by eating bananas at breakfast, break, and lunch in a bid to boost their brain power. Research has shown that the potassium-packed fruit can assist learning by making pupils more alert.

Constipation:
High in fiber, including bananas in the diet can help restore normal bowel action, helping to overcome the problem without resorting to laxatives.

Hangovers:
One of the quickest ways of curing a hangover is to make a banana milkshake, sweetened with honey. The banana calms the stomach and, with the help of the honey, builds up depleted blood sugar levels, while the milk soothes and re-hydrates your system.

Heartburn:
Bananas have a natural antacid effect in the body, so if you suffer from heartburn, try eating a banana for soothing relief.

Morning Sickness:
Snacking on bananas between meals helps to keep blood sugar levels up and avoid morning sickness.

Mosquito bites:
Before reaching for the insect bite cream, try rubbing the affected area with the inside of a banana skin. Many people find it amazingly successful at reducing swelling and irritation.

Nerves:
Bananas are high in B vitamins that help calm the nervous system.

Overweight and at work?
Studies at the Institute of Psychology in Austria found pressure at work leads to gorging on comfort food like chocolate and crisps. Looking at 5,000 hospital patients, researchers found the most obese were more likely to be in high-pressure jobs. The report concluded that, to avoid panic-induced food cravings, we need to control our blood sugar levels by snacking on high carbohydrate foods every two hours to keep levels steady.

Ulcers:
The banana is used as the dietary food against intestinal disorders because of its soft texture and smoothness. It is the only raw fruit that can be eaten without distress in over-chronicler cases. It also neutralizes over-acidity and reduces irritation by coating the lining of the stomach.

Temperature control:
Many other cultures see bananas as a “cooling” fruit that can lower both the physical and emotional temperature of expectant mothers. In Thailand, for example, pregnant women eat bananas to ensure their baby is born with a cool temperature.

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD):
Bananas can help SAD sufferers because they contain the natural mood enhancer tryptophan.

Smoking &Tobacco Use:
Bananas can also help people trying to give up smoking. The B6, B12 they contain, as well as the potassium and magnesium found in them, help the body recover from the effects of nicotine withdrawal.

Stress:
Potassium is a vital mineral, which helps normalize the heartbeat, sends oxygen to the brain and regulates your body’s water balance. When we are stressed, our metabolic rate rises, thereby reducing our potassium levels. These can be rebalanced with the help of a high-potassium banana snack.

Strokes:
According to research in The New England Journal of Medicine, eating bananas as part of a regular diet can cut the risk of death by strokes by as much as 40%!

Warts:
Those keen on natural alternatives swear that if you want to kill off a wart, take a piece of banana skin and place it on the wart, with the yellow side out. Carefully hold the skin in place with a plaster or surgical tape!

So, a banana really is a natural remedy for many ills.
When you compare it to an apple, it has four times the protein, twice the carbohydrate,  three times the phosphorus, five times the vitamin A and iron,
and twice the other vitamins and minerals.
It is also rich in potassium and is one of the best value foods around
So maybe its time to change that well-known phrase so that we say,
“A banana a day keeps the doctor away!”

PS: Bananas must be the reason monkeys are so happy all the time!

I will add one here; want a quick shine on our shoes??
Take the INSIDE of the banana skin, and rub directly on the shoe…
Polish with dry cloth.

Amazing fruit!

How Rational Are You?

Five questions to get you thinking
By Kurt Kleiner

 Although intelligence as measured by IQ tests is important, so is the ability to think rationally about problems. The surprise is that less intelligent people usually perform just as well as highly intelligent people on problems that test rationality. Here are a few questions that test if you’re a rational thinker.

1. A bat and ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

2. Is the following conclusion logically valid?
Premise 1: All living things need water.
Premise 2: Roses need water.
Therefore, roses are living things.

3. XYZ virus causes a disease in one in every 1,000 people. A test always correctly indicates if a person is infected. The test has a false-positive rate of five per cent – in other words, the test wrongly indicates that the XYZ virus is present in five per cent of the cases in which the person does not have the virus. What is the probability that an individual testing positive actually has the XYZ virus?

4. There are four cards on a table. Each has a letter on one side and a number on the other. The cards look like this:

K  A  8  5

Here is a rule: If a card has a vowel on its letter side, it has an even number on its number side. Which card(s) must be turned over to find out if the rule is true or false?

5. According to a comprehensive study by the U.S. Department of Transportation, a particular German car is eight times more likely than a typical family car to kill the occupants of another car in a crash. The U.S. Department of Transportation is considering recommending a ban on the sale of this German car. Do you think the United States should ban the sale of this car?

Answers

1. Five cents. Many people, including students at MIT, Princeton and Harvard, automatically answer 10 cents. After all, a dollar plus 10 cents equals $1.10. But that cognitive shortcut doesn’t work, since it would mean the bat costs only 90 cents more than the ball.

2. No, it is not logical, even though 70 per cent of university students given the problem think it is. Although the conclusion is true, it doesn’t follow from the premises. Consider the same problem worded in a different way:

Premise 1: All insects need oxygen.
Premise 2: Mice need oxygen.
Therefore, mice are insects.

In the original problem, the tendency is to be a cognitive miser, and let the obvious truth of the conclusion substitute for reasoning about its logical validity. (In the second problem, though, our cognitive miser makes the problem easy.)

3. Two per cent. (Most people say 95 per cent.) If one in 1,000 people has the disease, 999 don’t. But with a five per cent false-positive rate, the test will show that almost 50 of them are infected. Of 51 patients testing positive, only one will actually be infected. The math here isn’t especially hard. But thinking the problem through is tricky.

4. A and 5. Ninety per cent of people get this one wrong, usually by picking A and 8. They think they need to confirm the rule by looking for a vowel on the other side of the 8. But the rule only says that vowels must have even numbers, not that consonants can’t. An odd number on the back of the A, or a vowel on the back of the 5, would show that the rule is false.

5. OK, there’s no right or wrong answer here. However, 78 per cent of the people Stanovich sampled thought the German car should be banned. But when he turned the question around so that Germany was considering banning an American car (he was quizzing people in the U.S., by the way), only 51 per cent thought Germany should ban the car. This is an example of “myside bias” – evaluating a problem from a standpoint that is biased toward your own situation.

Why Smart People Do Stupid Things

How can someone so smart be so stupid? We’ve all asked this question after watching a perfectly intelligent friend or relative pull a boneheaded move.

People buy high and sell low. They believe their horoscope. They figure it can’t happen to them. They bet it all on black because black is due. They supersize their fries and order the diet Coke. They talk on a cellphone while driving. They throw good money after bad. They bet that a financial bubble will never burst.

You’ve done something similarly stupid. So have I. Professor Keith Stanovich should know better, but he’s made stupid mistakes, too.

“I lost $30,000 on a house once,” he laughs. “Probably we overpaid for it. All of the books tell you, ‘Don’t fall in love with one house; fall in love with four houses.’ We violated that rule.” Stanovich is an adjunct professor of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto who studies intelligence and rationality. The reason smart people can sometimes be stupid, he says, is that intelligence and rationality are different.

“There is a narrow set of cognitive skills that we track and that we call intelligence. But that’s not the same as intelligent behaviour in the real world,” Stanovich says.

He’s even coined a term to describe the failure to act rationally despite adequate intelligence: “dysrationalia.”

How we define and measure intelligence has been controversial since at least 1904, when Charles Spearman proposed that a “general intelligence factor” underlies all cognitive function. Others argue that intelligence is made up of many different cognitive abilities. Some want to broaden the definition of intelligence to include emotional and social intelligence.

Stanovich believes that the intelligence that IQ tests measure is a meaningful and useful construct. He’s not interested in expanding our definition of intelligence. He’s happy to stick with the cognitive kind. What he argues is that intelligence by itself can’t guarantee rational behaviour.

Earlier this year, Yale University Press published Stanovich’s book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought. In it, he proposes a whole range of cognitive abilities and dispositions independent of intelligence that have at least as much to do with whether we think and behave rationally. In other words, you can be intelligent without being rational. And you can be a rational thinker without being especially intelligent.

Time for a pop quiz. Try to solve this problem before reading on. Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

Yes      No      Cannot be determined

More than 80 per cent of people answer this question incorrectly. If you concluded that the answer cannot be determined, you’re one of them. (So was I.) The correct answer is, yes, a married person is looking at an unmarried person.

Most of us believe that we need to know if Anne is married to answer the question. But think about all of the possibilities. If Anne is unmarried, then a married person ( Jack) is looking at an unmarried person (Anne). If Anne is married, then a married person (Anne) is looking at an unmarried person (George). Either way, the answer is yes.

To figure this out, most people have the intelligence if you tell them something like “think logically” or “consider all the possibilities.” But unprompted, they won’t bring their full mental faculties to bear on the problem.

And that’s a major source of dysrationalia, Stanovich says. We are all “cognitive misers” who try to avoid thinking too much. This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. Thinking is time-consuming, resource intensive and sometimes counterproductive. If the problem at hand is avoiding the charging sabre-toothed tiger, you don’t want to spend more than a split second deciding whether to jump into the river or climb a tree.

So we’ve developed a whole set of heuristics and biases to limit the amount of brainpower we bear on a problem. These techniques provide rough and ready answers that are right a lot of the time – but not always.

For instance, in one experiment, a researcher offered subjects a dollar if, in a blind draw, they picked a red jelly bean out of a bowl of mostly white jelly beans. The subjects could choose between two bowls. One bowl contained nine white jelly beans and one red one. The other contained 92 white and eight red ones. Thirty to 40 per cent of the test subjects chose to draw from the larger bowl, even though most understood that an eight per cent chance of winning was worse than a 10 per cent chance. The visual allure of the extra red jelly beans overcame their understanding of the odds.

Or consider this problem. There’s a disease outbreak expected to kill 600 people if no action is taken. There are two treatment options. Option A will save 200 people. Option B gives a one-third probability that 600 people will be saved, and a two-thirds probability that no one will be saved. Most people choose A. It’s better to guarantee that 200 people be saved than to risk everyone dying.

But ask the question this way – Option A means 400 people will die. Option B gives a one-third probability that no one will die and two-thirds probability that 600 will die – and most people choose B. They’ll risk killing everyone on the lesser chance of saving everyone.

The trouble, from a rational standpoint, is that the two scenarios are identical. All that’s different is that the question is restated to emphasize the 400 certain deaths from Option A, rather than the 200 lives saved. This is called the “framing effect.” It shows that how a question is asked dramatically affects the answer, and can even lead to a contradictory answer.

Then there’s the “anchoring effect.” In one experiment, researchers spun a wheel that was rigged to stop at either number 10 or 65. When the wheel stopped, the researchers asked their subjects if the percentage of African countries in the United Nations is higher or lower than that number. Then the researchers asked the subjects to estimate the actual percentage of African countries in the UN. The people who saw the larger number guessed significantly higher than those who saw the lower number. The number “anchored” their answers, even though they thought the number was completely arbitrary and meaningless.

The list goes on. We look for evidence that confirms our beliefs and discount evidence that discredits it (confirm-ation bias). We evaluate situations from our own perspective without considering the other side (“myside” bias). We’re influenced more by a vivid anecdote than by statistics. We are overconfident about how much we know. We think we’re above average. We’re certain that we’re not affected by biases the way others are.

Finally, Stanovich identifies another source of dysrationalia – what he calls “mindware gaps.” Mindware, he says, is made up of learned cognitive rules, strategies and belief systems. It includes our understanding of probabilities and statistics, as well as our willingness to consider alternative hypotheses when trying to solve a problem. Mindware is related to intelligence in that it’s learned. However, some highly intelligent, educated people never acquire the appropriate mindware. People can also suffer from “contaminated mindware,” such as superstition, which leads to irrational decisions.

Stanovich argues that dysrationalities have important real-world consequences. They can affect the financial decisions you make, the government policies you support, the politicians you elect and, in general, your ability to build the life you want. For example, Stanovich and his colleagues found that problem gamblers score lower than most people on a number of rational thinking tests. They make more impulsive decisions, are less likely to consider the future consequences of their actions and are more likely to believe in lucky and unlucky numbers. They also score poorly in understanding probability and statistics. For instance, they’re less likely to understand that when tossing a coin, five heads in a row does not make tails more likely to come up on the next toss. Their dysrationalia likely makes them not just bad gamblers, but problem gamblers – people who keep gambling despite hurting themselves, their family and their livelihood.

From early in his career, Stanovich has followed the pioneering heuristics and biases work of Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics, and his colleague Amos Tversky. In 1994, Stanovich began comparing people’s scores on rationality tests with their scores on conventional intelligence tests. What he found is that they don’t have a lot to do with one another. On some tasks, there is almost a complete dissociation between rational thinking and intelligence.

You might, for example, think more rationally than someone much smarter than you. Likewise, a person with dysrationalia is almost as likely to have higher than average intelligence as he or she is to have lower than average intelligence.

To understand where the rationality differences between people come from, Stanovich suggests thinking of the mind as having three parts. First is the “autonomous mind” that engages in problematic cognitive shortcuts. Stanovich calls this “Type 1 processing.” It happens quickly, automatically and without conscious control.

The second part is the algorithmic mind. It engages in Type 2 processing, the slow, laborious, logical thinking that intelligence tests measure.

The third part is the reflective mind. It decides when to make do with the judgments of the autonomous mind, and when to call in the heavy machinery of the algorithmic mind. The reflective mind seems to determine how rational you are. Your algorithmic mind can be ready to fire on all cylinders, but it can’t help you if you never engage it.

When and how your reflective mind springs into action is related to a number of personality traits, including whether you are dogmatic, flexible, open-minded, able to tolerate ambiguity or conscientious.

“The inflexible person, for instance, has trouble assimilating new knowledge,” Stanovich says. “People with a high need for closure shut down at the first adequate solution. Coming to a better solution would require more cognitive effort.”

Fortunately, rational thinking can be taught, and Stanovich thinks the school system should expend more effort on it. Teaching basic statistical and scientific thinking helps. And so does teaching more general thinking strategies. Studies show that a good way to improve critical thinking is to think of the opposite. Once this habit becomes ingrained, it helps you to not only consider alternative hypotheses, but to avoid traps such as anchoring, confirmation and myside bias.

Stanovich argues that psychologists should perhaps develop tests to determine a rationality quotient (RQ) to complement IQ tests. “I’m not necessarily an advocate of pushing tests on everyone,” he says. “But if you are going to test for cognitive function, why restrict testing to just an IQ test, which only measures a restricted domain of cognitive function?”

 
U of T Magazine
Summer, 2009
By Kurt Kleiner

JAMES BOND

Just The Facts

1. James Bond is an ageless British super-spy with the ability to drink limitless vodka martinis and have sex with any woman he desires.
2. There are 22 Bond films, not counting Never Say Never Again, which is sort of like the adopted child of the Bond movies in that it exists but nobody cares about it.
3. Seven actors have portrayed James Bond–Sean Connery, George ‘Remember Me?’ Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Remington Steele, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig.

James Bond

Introduction

If one were to think as deeply as possible about what one man they wanted to be, who would they come up with? Gandhi? Tom Hanks? Rosie O’Donnell? These are all viable options, but one choice towers over the rest. That choice is James Bond.

"Seriously, I can't see with this shit on."

"Seriously, I can't see with this shit on."

Over the years, 007 has had a huge impact on the culture of the world. Martinis are always ordered, “Shaken, not stirred,”, people introduce themselves with their last names first, and Mike Myers remained relevant for far longer than he should have. When it all boils down to it, James Bond is the epitome of what every man wants to be. He drinks immense amounts of alcohol, has sex with innumerable women and has killed hundreds of people. He also locked a midget inside a suitcase, which sounds like a lot of fun.

Origin

In 1953, a strapping British World War II veteran by the name of Ian Fleming published a novel called “Casino Royale”, which chronicled the adventures of James Bond, an English spy. The character was named for a famous ornithologist who allowed Ian to write at his estate in Jamaica. An ornithologist is sort of like a spy, excpet they watch more birds and kill less people.
Over the next decade, Fleming wrote 12 novels and 9 short stories featuring 007. He also wrote “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, a book that is surprisingly not about pedophilia. In 1961, Fleming sold the movie rights of the Bond series to Harry Saltzman and Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli (The latter of whom got his nickname due to his affinity for wrestling baby grizzly bears).

Connery Era

In 1962, the first James Bond film was produced, starring relative unknown Sean Connery. In the movie, Bond investigates the death of a fellow British agent in Jamaica, the trail leading him to Dr. Julius No’s plot to disrupt American rocket tests. The most substantial change from the book is the death of the titular villain. In the movie, Bond knocks Dr. No into a nuclear reactor’s cooling vat. This is substantially better than the novel’s ending, wherein Bond literally kills Dr. No by dropping bird shit on him.
“Dr. No” was followed by four more Connery vehicles, the next of which was the phenomenal “From Russia With Love”, which featured a solid 120 minutes of Bond kicking Commie ass. Then came the memorable “Goldfinger”, the film that epitomizes Connery’s rendition of 007. In the opening sequence, Bond plants several bombs, slips out of a wetsuit and into a stylish tuxedo, and sips his martini as the buildings explode outside. He then lays the proverbial pipe to a belly dancer and electrocutes a would-be assassin, quipping, “Shocking. Positively shocking.” All in all, the scene amounts to an off day for Bond.
After “Goldfinger”, Connery starred in “Thunderball”, which, aside from having a really awesome name, featured a real life pirate as a villain.

Why yes Anderson Cooper, you DO look sexier with an eyepatch.

Connery finished off this run with “You Only Live Twice”, during the climax of which, he attacks a volcano base with the aid of ninjas and nearly kills Donald Pleasence. This is not a joke. Sadly, after “You Only Live Twice”, Connery was replaced by Australian model George Lazenby for the film “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”. Surprisingly enough, the film was not all that bad, and was noteworthy because James Bond got fucking married and his wife got shot to death.

After this minor setback for 007, Connery returned in the absolutely terrible “Diamonds Are Forever”, one of the low points in the James Bond series. The movie contains an asinine sub plot revovling around two gay assassins as well as a moon buggy chase. It was at this point decided upon that Connery was well past his prime and therefore needed a solid, non-Lazenby replacement.

Moore Era

With the generally pretty awesome (moon buggies aside) Connery era behind them, it seems as though the Bond producers thought they had earned the right to kick up their heels and produce a couple decades of bullshit. On paper Roger Moore seemed like a great choice for Bond; he had starred in the stylish Bondian TV series “The Saint” for years, and was supposedly a favorite of Ian Fleming himself (Moore was originally considered as the lead for “Dr. No”). Problem was, by the time they actually got around to casting the dude he was pushing 50, and was nearly 60 by the time his final Bond film hit theatres. You should not, in the back of your mind, be afraid James Bond’s heart might give out as he’s boffing a Russian double agent.

The Moore era distilled to it's essence.

Also, apparently someone thought being the embodiment of every male fantasy wasn’t enough anymore, so during the 70s Bond got with the times (and dare we say, downright funky) with blaxplotation, Smokey and the Bandit-esque antics and even a trip to outer space in honor of Star Wars tossed in. Add to this the generally goofy, self-deprecating tone of most Moore-era Bond movies and you had a series that felt as if it was ashamed to be itself even though, ironically, their desperate attempts to make Bond something he wasn’t produced many of the series most embarrassing moments.
The Moore era kicked off in appropriately insane style with “Live and Let Die”, in which Bond proves he has soul by humping Gloria Hendry from “Black Belt Jones” before doing battle with drug dealing voodoo priests, then they followed up with “The Man with Golden Gun” featuring Bond facing off against a midget and Dracula. As much as we’d rather not, we have to be fair and say the next Moore movie “The Spy Who Loved Me” was actually pretty damn good, but the series blasted off to Planet Retarded again with the very next film “Moonraker”. It all came to a merciful end in 1985 with “A View to Kill”, a movie during which you’ll likely find yourself more concerned about the state of James Bond’s fragile hips than the fate of the world. The movie does deserve credit though for it’s ground breaking decision to cast a man as one of the film’s Bond girls.

Uh...hot?

Of course as lousy as the Moore movies were at times, alls forgiven since they actually named a movie “Octopussy” during the era. If nothing else, that took some balls.

Dalton Era

Moore’s run was followed up by a pair of films starring Timothy Dalton, “The Living Daylights” and “Licence To Kill”. “The Living Daylights” revolved around a rather elaborate plot invovling the KGB, arms deals and the Mujahideen. Yes, James Bond aided Afghan freedom fighters.

The film's plot hasn't exactly aged well.

“Licence To Kill” featured Dalton as a harder-edged Bond, sort of like Daniel Craig except much suckier. In the film, Bond attempts to bring down the Hispanic drug lord that nearly killed his friend Felix Leiter. 007 resigns from MI6 and treats the operation as his own personal vendetta. Also, it’s got Benicio del Toro in it, which is pretty cool.

He falls into a cocaine grinder!

Brosnan Era

Unfortunately the decision to take the series in a different, and frankly kind of boring, new direction with the Dalton films didn’t pay off. Adjusting for inflation “License to Kill” was the least successful movie in series history, and so Dalton was shuffled off to spend most of his remaining career acting in no-doubt excellent TV and direct-to-video movies.
For the next Bond they hired the guy they wanted to replace Moore in the first place, Pierce Brosnan. His first movie, GoldenEye, was arguably the best Bond flick since the Connery era, getting the mix of comedy, badassery, boobs and villains with scars on their faces just right. Admittedly though a lot of the good feelings associated with this movie may have less to do with the film itself and more to do with the video game adaptation, which remains one of the most entertaining ways to shoot your friends in the face. Shit, that was a good game.

Is this a scene from the movie, or the game? They kinda start to blend together.

GoldenEye was followed by Tomorrow Never Dies, which was a fairly solid outing for Bond. Unfortunately the makers decided to get all topical and created a villain that was basically a thinly veiled caricature of Rupert Murdoch with several dashes of Bill Gates thrown in for flavor (just in case the character wasn’t already lame enough). Bond villains should be sporting Russian accents and metal teeth, not glasses and an asthma inhaler.
Things really dropped off the cliff with the next movie, The World is Not Enough, which wasn’t memorable for much other than Denise Richards’ once-in-a-lifetime shitbomb performance as nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones. Clearly even their childish innuendo was lacking in this one.
The Brosnan era wrapped up with Die Another Day, a movie that celebrated the Bond film franchise’s 40th year by having James parasurf on an iceberg tsunami and swordfight with Madonna. The movie was painfully stupid, but thankfully it was rescued by an inspired performance by Halle Berry’s tits and made around 500 million dollars worldwide.

Halle Berry

Craig Era

Despite Die Another Day making an obscene amount of money the producers, in a frankly shocking show of integrity, decided they wanted the next Bond to actually be a good movie even if they risked alienating fans of Halle Berry’s breasts.
Speculation ran wild over whether Brosnan would return for a 5th movie, and when it became clear he wouldn’t, who would replace him. Eventually Daniel Craig was named his replacement and the Internet did what the Internet does best, responding to the announcement with hysterical nerd rage. Folks flocked to Danielcraigisnotbond.com, petitions were circulated calling for Brosnan’s return and generally people just got inordinately angry about the fact that they’d dared to cast a dude with blonde hair instead of brown hair as James Bond.

Blonde hair?

Thankfully Craig’s hair color didn’t stop Casino Royale from being a 120-minute cinematic wet dream for Bond fans. The movie, a reboot of the series, was the first in over 30 years to be based on a Fleming novel and delivered a more back-to-basics, human character. Bond hadn’t been this cool since Goldfinger, and never half as complex. Fans went from burning Craig in effigy to hanging him on their ceilings.

While some are prematurely calling Craig the best Bond ever, it remains to be seen what his legacy will be. Craig followed up Casino Royale with Quantum of Solace, a movie that was apparently both named and filmed by drunk people. Will Craig become a Connery level legend or a Brosnan-like one-hit wonder? We’ll find out because, as always, James Bond Will Return.

क्योंकि सपना है अभी भी..... (Kyonki sapna hai abhi bhi....)

...क्योंकि सपना है अभी भी
इसलिए तलवार टूटी अश्व घायल
कोहरे डूबी दिशाएं
कौन दुश्मन, कौन अपने लोग, सब कुछ धुंध धूमिल
किन्तु कायम युद्ध का संकल्प है अपना अभी भी
...क्योंकि सपना है अभी भी!

तोड़ कर अपने चतुर्दिक का छलावा
जब कि घर छोड़ा, गली छोड़ी, नगर छोड़ा
कुछ नहीं था पास बस इसके अलावा
विदा बेला, यही सपना भाल पर तुमने तिलक की तरह आँका था
(एक युग के बाद अब तुमको कहां याद होगा?)
किन्तु मुझको तो इसी के लिए जीना और लड़ना
है धधकती आग में तपना अभी भी
....क्योंकि सपना है अभी भी!

तुम नहीं हो, मैं अकेला हूँ मगर
वह तुम्ही हो जो
टूटती तलवार की झंकार में
या भीड़ की जयकार में
या मौत के सुनसान हाहाकार में
फिर गूंज जाती हो

और मुझको
ढाल छूटे, कवच टूटे हुए मुझको
फिर तड़प कर याद आता है कि
सब कुछ खो गया है - दिशाएं, पहचान, कुंडल,कवच
लेकिन शेष हूँ मैं, युद्धरत् मैं, तुम्हारा मैं
तुम्हारा अपना अभी भी

इसलिए, तलवार टूटी, अश्व घायल
कोहरे डूबी दिशाएं
कौन दुश्मन, कौन अपने लोग, सब कुछ धूंध धुमिल
किन्तु कायम युद्ध का संकल्प है अपना अभी भी
... क्योंकि सपना है अभी भी!

~Dharmveer Bharti

Guy kawasaki on Steve Jobs

I don't know if everybody has heard, but about ten minutes ago, Apple announced that Steve Jobs died today. And so, I have to tell you, I don't think it's appropriate nor probably the best thing to do for any of us to necessarily be focusing on Facebook marketing right now.

And so, I am going to talk about Steve Jobs and Apple, and what Steve has meant to me, what Steve has meant to the industry, and personal computing, and just Internet and everything, if you don't mind, rather than talking about Facebook marketing. I hope that is okay with all of you.

This announcement literally happened as we were prepping and getting all our things together for the conference that we are now attending. It could not have happened with less notice to us. So, I hope it's okay with you that I'm going to switch topics completely.

And my phone, my cell phone and my other phone, is just ringing off the hook with people trying to get quotes from me. But I'm going to do this webinar instead.

Here's the story. I joined Apple in 1983. My past at Apple was that I interviewed for a job with Apple the first time in order to work in what was called the Apple University Consortium. And the Apple University Consortium was Steve Jobs' vision that the place to seed Macintoshes would be universities.

At the time, K-12 was pretty much dominated by the Apple II, so he saw that the next level of computing would be, of course, colleges. So he created a program, it was headed by a guy named Dan'l Lewin, whose charter was to convince universities to use Macintoshes. And it started with places like Carnegie Mellon and Stanford.

The first job I interviewed was to work in that group. I don't know, it just wasn't a good fit for me. So about six months went by and then the second job I interviewed for at Apple was to be software evangelist. And a software evangelist job was to meet with soft and hard companies and convince them to do Macintosh products.

That's the job that I took. The second job that I tried for at Apple. And if you really want to know the inside story, the reason why I got that job is because my college classmate Mike Boich was working in the Mac division. And so he hired me because we knew each other, we were friends. So one could say it was purely nepotism.

Let's talk about the Macintosh division. The Macintosh division, I think, was probably the greatest collection of egomaniacs in the history of California, and that is saying a lot, believe me. So the closest thing I can say to describing what it was like to work there…

You know how after the Superbowl, there's a TV camera on the winning quarterback and the TV camera says, "Where are you going to go now?" to the quarterback, and the quarterback says, "I'm going to Disneyland." Well, working in the Macintosh division in the mid 80s was like working at Disneyland, or more accurately, being paid to go to Disneyland.

Basically, the division was on a mission, a mission from Steve, as opposed to God. And this mission from Steve was that we wanted to prevent worldwide domination of information and freedom from IBM. So we looked at IBM as the enemy.

This was the whole point of the 1984 commercial. That if IBM ruled the world, it would be boring, totalitarian, George Orwellian--just an ugly society of mediocrity and conformity and thought control. And Apple was going to send the proverbial act into the image of big brother. It was religious fervor in the sense that we were fighting a mighty opposite. Which was IBM, the totalitarian mainframe company.

And so we were I'd say about fifty people. We had a building on Mariani Drive. There's a story about how someone put a pirate flag above the building, that's true. Steve Capps, the person who wrote the Finder, got a pirate flag and put it up there because we were going to be pirates. Knock the establishment. This was Steve's division.

What we did is we worked very, very hard because we truly thought we were on a mission to improve people's creativity and productivity and prevent totalitarianism, primarily of IBM. The group was a very interesting collection of people. There were people like me who had MBAs, and I was hired despite having an MBA.

There were people like Burrell Smith, who Steve found working in an Apple II repair department. Andy Hertzfeld, who wrote much of the Macintosh ROMs and was an old -- or, not old, no one was old at the time -- but an experienced Apple II programmer. It was a collection of just great software and hardware engineers.

There were artists like Susan Kerr, who created much of the early graphics and icons of Macintosh. Joanna Hoffmann was the first person who did the marketing function for the division. Mike Boich, as I said who I worked for, he and I went to Stanford together. He went to HP, the calculator division of HP in Corvalis. He was recruited out of there.

The person who recruited him was a guy named Mike Murray. Mike Murray was the director of marketing of the Macintosh division. Subsequently, he went to work for Microsoft and he became Microsoft's VP of HR. So, it was a merry band of pirates. Steve himself had only attended one semester of Reed, a college in Oregon, so here we were, on paper not so qualified.

We had a few PhDs. One person was Bruce Horn, he was a PhD student from I believe Carnegie Mellon. He was the coauthor of the Finder with Steve Capps. And so, it was a great place to work because, man, we were going to change frickin' history. And I can't tell you how euphoric it was to work there. Because it was such bright people and we had such a mission to change the world. So that was the Macintosh division. I guess one of the high points of that division… [interrupted by vibrating phone]

Anyway this was the division. Some aspects of the division that you might interesting. Steve bought the division a Bösendorfer Grand Piano. And some of the people played Bösendorfer Grand Piano. There was a BMW motorcycle for the division. We also had a travel policy that any flight over two hours qualified for first class. I tended to interpret that rule as the two hours begins at the moment you leave your apartment. So I lived in Los Altos. Los Altos to SFO can be 45 minutes or so, so I basically flew first class everywhere. It was a great time.

Across the street was the Lisa division. The Lisa division was creating basically a very large Macintosh. But it was $7,000. Big footprint. Arguably, the Lisa taught us many lessons that we applied to the Macintosh and made Macintosh successful. A social media analogy would be that Google Buzz is to Google Plus was Lisa is to Macintosh. So that was the Macintosh division. Macintosh was announced on January 24, 1984, in De Anza College where Steve unveiled it. At the time, he was not wearing a black mock turtleneck. His thing was a double-breasted suit with a bowtie. So he introduced it, and that was one of the most enchanting moments of my life: to watch Macintosh be introduced by Steve Jobs.

The first time I saw a Macintosh was in the back of that building, the Macintosh division building. At the time, I was in the jewelry business and my friend Mike Boich showed me a Macintosh, and I was an Apple II user and that was a religious experience also because back then with an Apple II you were fortunate if you had a 24x80 terminal screen, you moved the cursor around with cursor keys. Graphics was using Xs and Os to draw things. The first time you saw a Mac, right, was multiple fonts, and multiple sizes, and multiple styles—integration of text and graphics. And the first time you saw Mac Paint with graphics, paint cans, brushes—it was a magical experience.

Now, what happened after that was that we had a very successful launch. The goal was to sell a quarter million Macintoshes in the first hundred days and we achieved that goal. Back then, the whole thing with Macintoshes and developers were we told them three stories: it was a very rich technical environment, this great programming environment, very rich ROM set; we told them that it was a good financial bet because we were going to bring people to personal computing who had never used a personal computer before; and finally, it was a good hedge because at the time the IBM personal computer division was starting to publish software, so we were explaining to people that if IBM started publishing software in your segment under their own label, you would be dead. So that was our evangelism pitch.

And I think mostly what appealed to developers was the richness of the Macintosh programming environment. Back then, the decision was being made by engineers and nerds, not MBAs and marketing people. So that's what really sucked people in. It was very, very interesting albeit challenging programming environment.

SNow we're in mid-1984, things are going pretty good. We're selling a lot of Macs, had that post-launch glow. Sort of hit the wall because businesses were not embracing Macintoshes. It didn't have some crucial pieces of software thanks to me. It was slow in a lot of operations. It took us a good two years to significantly revise that product. I think mostly because we were still tired from shipping it at all.

And after that, there was what I called the Wonder Years. I wonder when there will be software, I wonder when we'll turn the corner. As businesses were rejecting it, we went through this period of euphoria, then we went through this period of down in the dumps. This is one of those major times when according to all the experts Apple was supposed to die. We brought in some adult supervision, i.e., John Sculley. A lot of interesting things happened. It culminated with some layoffs, culminated with a board decision picking between John Sculley and Steve Jobs.

So Steve Jobs was out. He went out and started NeXT: the big black cube computer built on UNIX. And things did not exactly pick up. A few years went by, they made Mike Spindler CEO, and then they made Gil Amelio CEO. Gil Amelio decided to buy NeXT, I think, for $400 million dollars. Steve came back to Apple first as an advisor, temporary, to help Gil and stuff. And then, eventually, Gil started imploding and Steve came back, introduced the iMac.

And from there, the rest is kind of history, right? So, the iMac, if you remember, it was that teardrop shape-looking computer that came in colors like blueberry and cherry and, I don't know, tangerine and stuff. That sort of, the industrial design of that computer, I think, was really sort of what rekindled people's enthusiasm for Macintosh. And fast forward a few years and we have things like the iPod and iPhone and iPad. Macintosh flipped to less than 5% market share; it subsequently has returned. I don't ever know if it will be more than 10%, but it's definitely on the upswing.

I can tell you with total certainty that Steve Jobs was a great, if not the greatest, influence in my life. From him I learned, one is an appreciation of design, an appreciation of elegance and simplicity. I learned how far you can push people, that you can get the best work out of people by pushing them with great challenges. Steve wasn't exactly a warm and fuzzy guy, but he got the best results out of people. He could drive you crazy because the trash can icon didn't look right or a certain shade of black wasn't black enough. He was heavily influenced by Paul Rand, the logo designer.

I consider it an honor to have worked for him in the Macintosh division. And only 100 or so people can say that, so what a time! What a time! And if you look back, no matter how you feel about Apple, you have to say it was among the starters of the personal computer industry. It definitely made the graphical user interface go mainstream. If you look at it, Steve Jobs created the, in a sense, the Apple I standard, the Apple II standard, the Macintosh standard, then he created his smartphone standard iPhone, iPod standard, iPad standard. Lots of companies and people are fortunate to create one revolution, but Steve Jobs arguably created four or five.

I truly do believe that if you look at all the CEOs over the history of business, I don't think there's a CEO who has done more for his employees, his shareholders, and his customers. The world is a lot worse off without Steve Jobs. May he rest in peace. But wow what a job he did for everybody, personally for me, and many, many people who worked for the Macintosh division. And I think in many ways, for many of the people who use Apple products that these Apple products made them more creative, more productive and brought joy and enchantment to their lives.