Saturday, February 27, 2010

CROP ART - INCREDIBLE !!!

Stunning crop art has sprung up across rice fields in Japan. But this is no alien creation - the designs have been cleverly planted.


Farmers creating the huge displays use no ink or dye. Instead, different colours of rice plants have been precisely and strategically arranged and grown in the paddy fields.

As summer progresses and the plants shoot up, the detailed artwork begins to emerge.





Smaller works of crop art can be seen in other rice-farming areas of Japan. The farmers create the murals by planting little purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru roman variety to create the coloured patterns between planting and harvesting in September.

The murals in Inakadate cover 15,000 square metres of paddy fields.
From ground level, the designs are invisible, and viewers have to climb the mock castle tower of the village office to get a glimpse of the work.

Rice-paddy art was started there in 1993 as a local revitalization project, an idea that grew out of meetings of the village committee.


Closer to the image, the careful placement of thousands of rice plants in the paddy fields can be seen.


The different varieties of rice plant grow alongside each other to create the masterpieces.

In the first nine years, the village office workers and local farmers grew a simple design of Mount Iwaki every year. But their ideas grew more complicated and attracted more attention.

In 2005 agreements between landowners allowed the creation of enormous rice paddy art.

A year later, organizers used computers to precisely plot planting of the four differently colored rice varieties that bring the images to life. The largest and finest work is grown in the Aomori village of Inakadate, 600 miles north of Tokyo, where the tradition began in 1993.

The village has now earned a reputation for its agricultural artistry and this year the enormous pictures of Napoleon and a Sengoku-period warrior, both on horsebacks, are visible in a pair of fields adjacent to the town hall. Napoleon on horseback can be seen from the skies, created by precision planting and months of planning between villagers and farmers in Inkadate.


A Sengoku warrior on horseback has been created from hundreds of thousands of rice plants; the color's created by using different varieties, in Inakadate in Japan.


More than 150,000 visitors come to Inakadate, where just 8,700 people live, every summer to see the extraordinary murals. Each year hundreds of volunteers and villagers plant four different varieties of rice in late May across huge swathes of paddy fields. Another famous rice paddy art venue is in the town of Yonezawa in the Yamagata prefecture. This year's design shows the fictional 16th-century samurai warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife, Osen, whose lives feature in television series Tenchijin. Fictional warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife Osen appear in fields in the town of Yonezawa, Japan.


And over the past few years, other villages have joined in with the plant designs. Various artwork has popped up in other rice-farming areas of Japan this year, including designs of deer dancers.


Saturday, February 20, 2010

INDIA TRIP - KANYAKUMARI - TAMILNADU

I went to Kanyakumari couple of weeks before. Kanyakumari is a town in Kanyakumari district in Tamilnadu State which is located at the southernmost tip of the Indian Peninsula. It is also known by its former name Cape Comorin.



























Kanyakumari takes its name from the Kumari Amman or Kanyakumari Temple, situated in the town, on the sea-shore, the very confluence of the three water-bodies - the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Mannar and the Indian Ocean.





























The Kumari Amman or the Kanyakumari Temple, located on the shore, is a Shakti Peetha dedicated to a manifestation of Parvati, the virgin goddess who did penance to obtain Lord Shiva's hand in marriage. The temple and the adjoining ghat is situated overlooking the shore.
































On two rocky islets just off the shore, southeast of the Kumari Amman temple, are the Vivekananda Rock Memorial, built in 1970, and the gigantic 133 feet (40।5 m) tall statue of Tamil saint-poet Thiruvalluvar (Completed on January 1, 2000 by the legandary Dr. V. Ganapati Sthapati, Chennai) is one of the biggest statues in Asia.

One of the rocks called Sri Padhaparai is said to bear the footprints of the virgin goddess. Swami Vivekananda is said to have seated on this rock in deep meditation. Also on this rock, there is a Dhyana mandapam, an area for meditation.


































I enjoyed Kanyakumari trip very much. It was one of the best trip in India.


Sunday, February 14, 2010

VALENTINES DAY


Valentinus was a priest in Rome during the 3rd century and at that time rules by emperor Claudius II. It is said that Valentinus was executed because he disobeyed an order of the emperor. In fact Emperor Claudius wanted to abolish marriage and convince males to not have any intimate or emotional attachment with females.

The Emperor thought that men without wives and family are better soldiers. As such he made marriage an illegal thing. Valentinus was opposed to this and conducted secret marriage ceremonies for lovers. When the Emperor was alerted of that practice, he ordered that Valentinus to be killed.

Since then, Saint Valentinus became the symbol of love and the angel that unite lovers.



Valentines day was introduced so that the Lupercalia Pagan festival can be christianised and accepted. Lupercalia was a somehow barbaric festival using sacrificial blood and doing lottery like “women choosing”.




Saint Valentine's Day (shortened to Valentine's Day) is an annual holiday held on February 14 celebrating love and affection between intimate companions.


The holiday is named after one or more early Christian martyrs named Valentine and was established by Pope Gelasius I in AD 496. It is traditionally a day on which lovers express their love for each other by presenting flowers, offering confectionery and sending greeting cards (known as "valentines").




Valentine's Day is a day to celebrate love, the most beautiful feeling in the world.

February has long been called the month of romance and many experts recognized the day of 14th February as the most celebrated and enjoyed among the participants. The way of commemorating this day has developed over the years since it was used to be celebrated in early ages.

As the month of February starts, people start finishing and finalizing their plans for it to show their love ones how much they love, how much they care, promises are made between the couples and it helps them to increase the love and need for each other by wishing each other.

Monday, February 8, 2010

HISTORY OF COMPANY NAMES

HEWLETT-PACKARD

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.


YAHOO!

The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver's Travels। It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.


XEROX


The Greek root "xer" means dry. The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his Product Xerox as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing Wet copying.


SUN MICROSYSTEMS



Founded by four Stanford University buddies, Sun is the acronym for Stanford University Network.


SONY

From the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.


SAP


"Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formed by four ex-IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Application s/Projects' group of IBM.'


RED HAT



Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. He lost it and Had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone!


ORACLE


Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such).


MOTOROLA


Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was Called Victrola.


MICROSOFT


It was coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was Removed later on.


LOTUS



Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from the lotus position or 'padmasana.' Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.


INTEL


Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.


HOTMAIL



Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing email via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for The mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for Hotmail as it included the letters "HTML" - the programming language used to Write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casings.


GOOGLE


The name started as a jockey boast about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders - Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google'.


CISCO


The name is not an acronym but an abbreviation of San Francisco. The company's logo reflects its San Francisco name heritage. It represents a stylized Golden Gate Bridge.


APPLE COMPUTERS


Favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 o'clock.


APACHE


It got its name because its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA's httpd daemon। The result was 'A PAtCHy' server - thus, the name Apache.


ADOBE


The name came from the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.

Monday, February 1, 2010

HOUSE MADE OF EMPTY BOTTLES