Saturday, January 26, 2019
Taj Mahal Guards Take Up Slingshots Against Monkey Menace
NEW DELHI — Outside the white marble facade of the imposing Taj Mahal, tourists are facing a menace: gangs of hungry, rosy-bottomed monkeys. They bite. They scratch. Occasionally, they kill.
Now, Indian security guards are cracking down, taking to the streets of Agra, India, where the monument is, to scare off the animals. Their weapon of choice?
Cityblog Feature PJ of the Day
I waited and stayed up all night and tried to figure out where the sun was.
Then it dawned on me.
Friday, January 25, 2019
The Play Deficit
For more than 50 years now, we in the United States have been gradually reducing children’s opportunities to play, and the same is true in many other countries. In his book Children at Play: An American History (2007), Howard Chudacoff refers to the first half of the 20th century as the ‘golden age’ of children’s free play. By about 1900, the need for child labour had declined, so children had a good deal of free time. But then, beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began chipping away at that freedom by increasing the time that children had to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing children’s freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of school and not doing homework. Adult-directed sports for children began to replace ‘pickup’ games; adult-directed classes out of school began to replace hobbies; and parents’ fears led them, ever more, to forbid children from going out to play with other kids, away from home, unsupervised. There are lots of reasons for these changes but the effect, over the decades, has been a continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children’s opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways.
Over the same decades that children’s play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing. It’s not just that we’re seeing disorders that we overlooked before. Clinical questionnaires aimed at assessing anxiety and depression, for example, have been given in unchanged form to normative groups of schoolchildren in the US ever since the 1950s. Analyses of the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. Over the same period, the suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has more than doubled, and that for children under age 15 has quadrupled.
Thursday, January 24, 2019
A meteor hit the moon during the lunar eclipse. Here's what we know.
On Sunday, January 20, viewers across the Western Hemisphere were treated to the rusty hues of the decade's last “blood moon” eclipse. But as people across the planet watched the moon glow crimson, some lucky observers caught an unexpected delight: the flash of a space rock striking the lunar orb.
“It's a rare alignment of infrequent events,” says Justin Cowart, a Ph.D. candidate at Stony Brook University in New York. “A [meteoroid] about this size hits the moon about once a week or so,” he says. But if this event is confirmed, it may be the first time such an impact has been recorded during a lunar eclipse.
Cityblog Feature: PJ of the Day
You know why you never see
elephants hiding up in trees?
Because they’re really good at it.
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
IBM CEO says this is what could topple the digital economy
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said one of the biggest issues for every government right now is privacy of consumer data but that a barrage of regulations could destroy the digital economy.
"Every government is itching to regulate, and the risk we all have is that there's a great overreaction. The casualty is the whole digital economy," she told CNBC's "Squawk Box" at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday.
Rometty said there are other ways to protect consumers. She points to what she refers to as "precision regulation."
Cityblg Events Corner
२४ ते २ॠजानेवारी २०१९ या कालावधीत
*पु. ल. देशपांडे उद्यान, तानाजी मालुसरे पथ (याला लोक सिंहगड रस्ताही म्हणतात)*
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Survey: Most people don’t understand science, want their kids to do it
Recently, we had a look at a global survey of the state of science, which tracked the efforts different countries are putting into training scientists and pursuing research. That set of "science indicators" included a bit of information on how the public viewed science, even though that wasn't the primary purpose of the report.
So we were happy to find out that someone had done a thorough job of looking into the global attitudes toward science. 3M, a company that views itself as research-driven, commissioned surveys in 14 different countries with a mix of developed and developing economies, and the results are pretty encouraging. Despite the many cultural differences, people consistently feel that science has an overall positive impact on global society, and they're excited by what we learn.
But buried in the positives are a few areas of concern. Most people don't recognize the impact that science has had on their daily lives and view it as something that their kids might be involved with. Yet younger people are more likely to view themselves as skeptical of science and not trusting of what scientists have discovered.
Book Review of Bestsellers Authors: John Grisham , Tom Clancy
The Reckoning by John Grisham
Plot
In 1946, months after returning home to Mississippi from fighting in the Philippines, decorated war hero Pete Banning strolls into the local church and shoots pastor Dexter Bell dead. Even when facing the electric chair, he won't say why he murdered his old friend.
Did it have something to do with word that in Pete's absence his wife, Liza, was seen with Bell, who was known for straying from his marriage? Liza, who three years before her husband's shocking return had been traumatized by a notification that he was missing in action and presumed dead, is in no condition to answer any questions. She is in the state mental hospital, where Pete, head of a prominent farm family in Clanton, got her committed for iffy reasons after his homecoming. Brutally tortured by the Japanese, he himself appears to be in a reduced mental state. This being a Grisham (The Rooster Bar, 2017, etc.) novel, we spend a fair amount of time in the courtroom, first with the insistently tight-lipped Pete's trial and then after Bell's widow files a wrongful death suit against Pete's family that stands to wipe them out. As usual, Grisham does a solid job of portraying a Southern town at a particular moment in time, touching upon social issues as he goes. But the book never overcomes the hole at its center. It's one thing to create a character who is a mystery to those around him, quite another to reveal next to nothing about that character to the reader. After a while, Pete's one-note act becomes a bit of a drag.
NayakGiri Comments:
Grisham' entertaining wartime novel is not lacking in ambition or scope, but the spark of imagination that would grease its pages is largely missing. The courtroom drama is missing for long uninteresting sequence of events. War stories in Phillipines are predicatble as its not Grisham territory. There is whole lot of narrative on typical southern life in USA in those days of slavery and racial acrimony. I was introduced to Grisham as a pass out college student. For me film The Firm came ahead of reading the novel. I was just recruited off campus the story of yuppie stuck in fraud kind off stuck. Later Grisham’s novels were bread and butter for reading experiences be it daily home or travel. I was hungry at international airport reading Playing for Pizza. That was foodie in Grisham which was great to read . Over recent years the quality of writing has really gone south.
Cityblog Special: Laws they dont teach at school
OWEN'S LAW:
As soon as you sit down to a cup of hot coffee, your boss will ask you to do something which will last until the coffee is cold...!!!
Monday, January 21, 2019
Cityblogpune : Free Promo offer
Promote your content, event, issue, news, music, jobs on Cityblog : Exclusive free offer : Write us cityblogpuneonline@gmail.com to avail your promo offer:
Sunday, January 20, 2019
What You Don't See When You Watch UCLA Gymnast Katelyn Ohashi's Viral Floor Routine
Click Above
A video of UCLA gymnast Katelyn Ohashi has gone viral this week after the 21-year-old scored a perfect 10 for her floor routine.
The video, posted by the UCLA Gymnastics Twitter account, has racked up nearly 40 million views since Saturday. In it, we see Ohashi performing two minutes of powerful gymnastic moves, energetic dances and jaw-dropping feats of athleticism – all with a smile on her face. Her routine is flawless and she seems to be having the time of her life.
What we don’t see in the video, however, is that Ohashi lives with two chronic illnesses, ulcerative colitis and granuloma annulare.
Cityblog Feature: Nayakgiri: Bestsellers Book Review Part 1 Bill Clinton & James Patterson, Frederick Forsyth
The President is missing: Bill Clinton and James Patterson
Plot
The novel opens with the commander in chief, President Duncan, preparing for a House select committee. His staff has strongly advised him against testifying. “My opponents really hate my guts,” Duncan thinks, but “here I am”: just one honest man “with rugged good looks and a sharp sense of humor.” Facing a panel of sniveling political opportunists intent on impeaching him, Duncan knows he sounds “like a lawyer” caught in “a semantic legal debate,” but darn it, he’s trying to save the United States! Although Congress insists he explain exactly what he’s been up to, he can’t reveal the details of his secret negotiations with a terrorist set on destroying the country.
As a fabulous revision of Clinton’s own life and impeachment scandal, this is dazzling. The transfiguration of William Jefferson Clinton into Jonathan Lincoln Duncan should be studied in psych departments for years. Both men lost their fathers early and rose from hardscrabble circumstances to become governors. Both men met their brilliant wives in law school, and both couples have one daughter.
But then we come to the curious differences: Rather than shrewdly avoiding military service, President Duncan is a celebrated war hero. Rather than being pleasured in the Oval Office by an intern, Duncan was tortured in Iraq by the Republican Guard. And rather than being the subject of innumerable rumors about extramarital affairs, Duncan was wholly devoted to his late wife and now lives in apparent celibacy.
Even incidental details provide weird echoes of the Clinton era: Duncan’s closest adviser is a woman publicly branded by a crude reference to oral sex.
But onward! After all, this is, at least partially, a James Patterson book, and soon we’re crashing through his famous two-page chapters. The whole 500-page novel takes place in just a few days as a terrorist named Suliman Cindoruk plots to activate a computer virus devised by a beautiful Abkhazian separatist with a hard, agile body and a “voracious appetite for exploration, in the world of cyberwarfare and in the bedroom.” Her virus has infected every server, computer and electronic device in America.
In a matter of hours, the country’s financial, legal and medical records will be erased; the transportation and electrical grids will crash. Hungry and Twitterless, without access to porn, fake news or Joyce Carol Oates’s cat photos, America will be plunged into the Dark Ages.
Only one handsome man can stop this, but it’s not easy for the president of the United States to slip out of the White House and foil international terrorists, particularly with those congressmen hot on his tail, intent on impeachment. Fortunately, Duncan gets some makeup help from an actress who is “one of the twenty most beautiful women on the planet.” A little beard stubble, some quick work with an eyebrow pencil and — voila: The leader of the free world is ready to go underground and defend Western civilization.
And as we zoom through these chapters, it’s easy to tell which author is holding the reins. Sometimes, the pages spark to DEFCON 1 with spectacular shootouts, car crashes, Viper helicopters and a pregnant assassin code-named Bach who “is known only by her gender and the classical-music composer she favors.”
Nayakgiri Comments
Title does not make sense. We always know where president is as it is narrated by president himself. So we always know his whereabouts. When we pick up a thriller we expect lot of action. Clinton lacks that action and speed. For eg thrills are limited to giving us Cabinet members questioning each other over Skype. President Duncan spends an awful lot of time consulting with world leaders. He lectures at us about the proper function of government and the responsibilities of NATO. Several segments read like little admonitions to current president.
The Scope of the Novel is cramped. Author’s over belief in pervasiveness of IOT (Internet of Things) is futuristic. There’s no thrum of national panic, no sense of the wide world outside this very literal narrative. And so much of the plot is stuck in a room with nerds trying to crack a computer code. That struggle feels about as exciting as watching your parents trying to remember their Facebook password: “Did you spell it with an O? Did you try a capital letter?”
Cityblog Special: Laws They Dont Teach you at School
BREDA'S RULE:
At any event, the people whose seats
are farthest from the aisle arrive last.
Cityblog Feature: PJ of the Day
"I am
hungary."
"Maybe you should czech the fridge."
"I'm russian to the kitchen."
"Is there any turkey?"
"We have some, but it's covered in greece"
"ew, there's norway I'd eat that!"
"Maybe you should czech the fridge."
"I'm russian to the kitchen."
"Is there any turkey?"
"We have some, but it's covered in greece"
"ew, there's norway I'd eat that!"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)