News Snippets:

NVIDIA Unveils World's First Personal Supercomputer:
The world's first personal supercomputer, which is 250 times faster than the average PC, has been unveiled. The NVIDIA Tesla Personal Supercomputer is based on the revolutionary NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture and powered by up to 960 parallel processing cores.

David Kirk, chief scientist at NVIDIA, the American company which has designed the new technology, said: "Pretty much anything that you do on your PC that takes a lot of time can be accelerated with this".
Tesla personal supercomputers will cost between £4,000 and £8,000 and look much like an ordinary PC. These supercomputers can improve the time it takes to process information by 1,000 times.


3 Smart Things About Sleeping Late: (For once, there is a good thing about sleeping late :-)
1 You may need more sleep than you think.
Research by Henry Ford Hospital Sleep Disorders Center found that people who slept eight hours and then claimed they were "well rested" actually performed better and were more alert if they slept another two hours. That figures. Until the invention of the light bulb (damn you, Edison!), the average person slumbered 10 hours a night.

2 Night owls are more creative.
Artists, writers, and coders typically fire on all cylinders by crashing near dawn and awakening at the crack of noon. In one study, "evening people" almost universally slam-dunked a standardized creativity test. Their early-bird brethren struggled for passing scores.

3 Rising early is stressful.
The stress hormone cortisol peaks in your blood around 7 am. So if you get up then, you may experience tension. Grab some extra Zs! (I personally find this to be true)

(source http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-01/st_3st)

Scientists Extract Images Directly From Brain
Researchers at Japan's ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed a system that can "reconstruct the images inside a person's mind and display them on a computer monitor."

According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people's dreams while they sleep.

ATR chief researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani says, "This technology can also be applied to senses other than vision. In the future, it may also become possible to read feelings and complicated emotional states."


May be in future you could use this technology to understand why your kid is crying? ;-)

(source http://www.techpark.net/2008/12/17/scientists-extract-images-directly-from-brain/)

How to Win a 'Fifth-Generation' War:
The next generation of war -- the so-called "fifth-generation" -- won't feature armies or clear ideas. It will be what U.S. Army Major Shannon Beebe, the top intel officer for Africa, calls a "vortex of violence," (http://warisboring.com/?p=1444) a free-for-all of surprise destruction (http://warisboring.com/?p=1200) motivated more by frustration than by any coherent plans for the future.

5GW is what happens when the world's disaffected direct their desperation at the most obvious symbol of everything they lack, taking advantage of the tactics and battlefields pioneered by more highly organized fourth-gen warriors. The symbol is the United States, the world's sole super-power. And the fifth-gen fighters' weapon of choice is political "stalemate," contends Marine Lt. Col. Stanton Coer, in a new piece in Marine Corps Gazette. "5GW fighters will win by ... point[ing] out the impotence of secular military might. ... These fighters win by not losing, while we lose by not winning."

(also see
http://www.marinecorpsgazette-digital.com/marinecorpsgazette/200901/?pg=71
http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2005/07/20/dreaming-5th-generation-war.html
http://www.defenselink.mil/dodcmsshare/BloggerAssets/2008-10/10300809453720081029_MAJBeebe_transcript.pdf - I have not read this link fully)

Snippets

"There a huge trust. I see it all the time when people come up to me and say, 'I don't want you to let me down again.'" --George W. Bush, Boston, Oct. 3, 2000.

"Are non-state actors coming from heaven or are they coming from another planet? Non-state actors are operating from the territory of a particular country." - Pranab Mukherjee. Unfortunately, the problem is not where they are coming from, it is where they believe they are getting into.

"When people, ostensibly seeking justice, stoop to violence, peace can never prevail. Peace is always desirable for its own sake, and every other desirable state comes after peace, not along with it. So, the maxim to follow, when peace is the desired state, is, "Ignore the problems, and avail of the opportunities." - Maulana Wahiduddin Khan.

"This woman (Madonna) comes here and in an incredibly shameless manner, she provokes a crazy enthusiasm, an enthusiasm of lust, lustful thoughts, impure thoughts," - Roman Catholic Cardinal Jorge Medina, during his homily at a Mass in honor of the late dictator Augusto Pinochet, who oversaw the deaths of some 3,200 dissidents during his 1973-1990 rule. Cardinal Medina has also said that some of those who claim to seek justice forthe  violations of human rights under the dictator's reign are actually seeking revenge. When I got my first pay, it was for fourteen days, because I had joined my job on the sixteenth of the month. The pay was not much, still I wanted to give something to those close to me out of the income I had first earned. To a cousin, I bought and gave a large poster of Madonna (the Marilyn Monroe look). We were not sex-driven, she just looked so beautiful. I don't know what the world is getting to, mass murder is okay, but lust is bad.

Statistics is scary, you can't really trust them, but they are intriguing, aren't they? In a CBS Poll, it has been found that more than 48 percent of the Americans believe in ghosts... 56 percent of the women believe this, only 38 percent of men do. Though, in all, only 22 percent of Americans claim they have actually seen ghosts.

"Don't mark in red pen (which can be seen as aggressive)- use a different color." - Good Mental Health Rocks kit, distributed in Queensland state. Apparently they are concerned that 14 per cent of Australian children and adolescents suffer from some sort of illness, and would like to do something for them.

The ego is a barrier to receptivity. "There is this story about the son of Ved Vyas. He wanted to be trained by Raja Janak, a wise king. Ved Vyas requested Raja Janak to take his son, Sukh, under his tutelage. Raja Janak asked him to send his son over. Sukh arrived at the appointed hour outside Raja Janak’s study and knocked at his door. "Who is it?" Janak asked. Sukh replied, "Main Sukh (I am Sukh)." Janak didn’t open the door. Sukh knocked again. "Who is it?" Main Sukh. Janak didn’t open the door. This was repeated many times till Sukh was tired of knocking and waiting. Suddenly, a realisation dawned on him. He knocked again. Janak said, "Who is it?" This time Sukh replies, "Sukh." Janak opened the door. Sukh realised that as long as he had the "I", Janak did not wish to take him as his student. -Pavan Choudary

.Summary of Posts On 11.12.2008.

In snippets , we have Kevin Pieterson, who believes it is enough to turn up to win matches, four predictions which went wrong, among them two are by Bill Gates, Swami Anubhavananda who says it is always the case that while nobody is happy, somebody has to be unhappy, and then Pablo Picasso on his experimentations. There is also a Bushism, and a defence of Bush.

There is a post of Gavin Ewert , whose assisted suicide was telecast on Televisions, this thursday. He didn't cop out, but took a brave decision- "I am tired of the disease but I am not tired of living. I still enjoy life enough that I would like to continue but the thing is that I really cannot.

And finally a post on Shane Warne- the Musical , a show that has opened in Australia. This is sure to be filmed sometime soon. I like the sound of "Wbat an SMS I'm In"