January 15, 2010 • 4:24 pm
I am not a great believer in Luck.
But people say Luck knocks your door only once. If you didn’t open the door, then it is gone. Congratulations,You have missed your best deal. Paulo Coelho describes about beginners luck in his book, i forgot the name, it must be Alchemist. It is something that works in favor of you when you begin something. The same thing happened to us, when we started looking for a house to buy.
Somehow because of some misunderstandings and wrong information, we let go of a good deal and until now that missed deal comes before us dancing and mocking at us when ever we start to look for house to buy. Market has become bullish since then and we can no more afford to buy a house.
No one knows if the missed deal is good or bad. But as of now it looks good.As of now.
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Today the world witnessed the longest solar eclipse of the century. It was seen clearly in the southern part of India. I wish I were there.
Twitter had become an enormous power in the internet world. Now Google is including the Twitter messages for the search key word you have given. Just type Solar Eclipse; you’ll see flood of Twitter updates pouring in from all corners of the world. Loads of updates.
Out of all messages I liked the following tweet:
“Your face is like solar eclipse; who ever sees it goes blind“
People, these days, have lot of time and got really nothing to do. Believe me!
Anyway I didn’t see the solar eclipse!
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Filed under: Astronomy, Rants, Science , Buy HDB, HDB, Luck, Solar Eclipse
November 7, 2009 • 2:32 am
It’s a game. Observation game. I have given a video down here that shows few youngsters standing in a circle weaving in and out and passing basket ball to each other. Your job is to count how many times the basket ball is being passed among them? As simple as that. The video runs for 25 seconds. So 25 seconds is all you have got.
Here is the video link.
Done? Ok now answer me:
- How many times was the ball passed?
- How many of you actually saw a gorilla?
I think most of you would have seen it, somehow in video, it sort of looked obvious. But in real, the fact is, surprisingly most of the observers were dumbstruck when the researcher asked them if they saw a gorilla in the game. The researcher was Illinois professor Daniel J Simon. He did this research to prove the frailness of “Eyewitness”.
The famous evolutionist Richard Dawkins was one among the observers and he says in his new awesome book The Greatest Show On Earth that,surprisingly, he too didn’t took much notice of the gorilla. And most of the observers also didn’t saw the gorilla, they were busy counting the number of times the basket ball was being passed. They were focussed to their job in hand. In this 25 second video the gorilla appears and waves its hand and begs the observers to “see” it for a whole 9 seconds,almost one-third of the entire length of the video. And yet most of them didn’t see it.
If you can just spot the gorilla in the video, don’t immediately come to a conclusion that this entire game and research does not make much sense. Remember that circumstances and seriousness of the game could change the mentality of the observers and could easily divert their focus.
Filed under: Science, Social Issues , Daniel J Simon, Eyewitness, Observation, Richard Dawkins, The greatest show on earth
