Following are the notes taken from the lecture delivered by Steve Jobs:-

Lets continue with our discussion. Steve jobs was lucky to find what he liked to do early in life. He started Apple in his garage when he was 26. In 10 years Apple grew to be 2 billion dollar company with 4000 employees.

At the age of 30, Steve Jobs was fired from the Apple, the company he had started. Steve Jobs feels that being fired by Apple was one of the best things that had happened to him. He decided to start over. He felt like a beginner again. During next five years he started companies like Next and Pixar. Pixar is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

Apple bought Next and Steve Jobs returned to Apple. Only thing that kept him going was the fact that he liked to do what he did everyday as job. Steve says,”Remembering that you are going to die is the best way to avoid thinking that you have something to loose.”

Steve is a cancer survivor. Having closer encounter to death, Steve feels that our time on earth is limited. He believes that following our intuition should be the primary focus of our life. Everything else should be secondary.

These are the notes taken from the lecture delivered by Dan Gilbert:-

Human brain has increased in size over the period of thousands of the years. This helps the human brain today to simulate the future with the help of part of the brain called as frontal cortex.

Year after losing the legs and year after losing the legs, two different people can be equally happy. Different outcomes are more different than they really are. Different results have less impact on the human being over the period of time.

The person who was exonerated after 37 years for the crime he had not committed felt the experience as glorious. We would have thought that he should have felt miserable for losing all those precious years of life.

These are the examples of synthetic happiness created by the human brain. Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we really want. Synthetic happiness is what we create for ourselves when we don’t get what we really want. Synthetic happiness can be as long lasting as real happiness.

Other example of synthetic happiness would be buying a less expensive car when you really want to buy expensive car. Over the period of the time, we convince ourselves our car is the real value for money.

We will continue this discussion in the next part.

As I said each Library have different set of rules, Library Items over due fee is different at each Library. In Menands Library $0.10  per day for over due books and $1 for videos but in Guilderland Public Library $0.20 per day for any item.  I started utilizing these  services since 2002 and I might have been paid more than $250 towards fine in all these years. Initially I used ask to waive over due fee and they used to do it if it reasonable.  Slowly I used to it and I pay with out hesitating for their great service. I prefer to pay to the Library where I reside even though I goes to different Libraries. You can rent up to 50 items on each card, awesome. You can find every thing, you name any category, like   educational, history, art, kids, entertainment etc.,. Each Library have different sections for kids and they have thousands of books and videos.  At William K. Sanford Town Library (Colonie) they carry puzzles too for toddlers. They are very helpful and very Patience.

During Tax season we can find all  tax forms.  They conduct workshops continuously to help the community. At Library you can browse internet at free of charge and kids can play games. You can also get copy and fax service at very reasonable price.  You can reserve room and do group study. This is wonderful place for every one and have wonderful time with out a penny.

Last Friday our family went to The Palace Theater in Albany to watch “Sesame Street Live: When Elmo Grows Up”. This was a show featuring the most popular and recognizable muppets in Sesame Street, like Bert and Ernie, Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch, Grover, and of course Elmo. Over the last decade or so, Elmo has sort of dominated the Sesame Street landscape by virtue of being the most popular among pre-school kids; thus the subtitle “When Elmo Grows Up”.

This wasn’t always the case. First of all, Sesame Street is a relatively old show–it celebrated its 40th anniversary recently. Elmo wasn’t introduced until 1979, after kids my generation have already outgrown Sesame Street and so have never been acquainted with the red muppet until we finally met him (up close and personal) as parents. And so watching kids go ga-ga over Elmo, while our own favorites growing up–Bert & Ernie, Cookie Monster, Grover–are relegated to the background, I can’t help but feel a Sesame Street generation gap.

Some parents my age actually are not that fond of Elmo. Their biggest complaint is that because Elmo refers to himself in the third person (”Elmo wants to know, don’t you?”), their kids have picked up on it and are now speaking in the third person. I can certainly see how frustrating/irritating that can be as a parent. After teaching your child how to properly speak and formulate sentences, here comes a muppet that ruins everything just from 30 minutes of exposure.

Well, good thing our son hasn’t picked up on the habit yet. Later maybe, but if he does, that’s it with watching Elmo

Most of the times, we look at the car as product. In other way, car can be seen as the extension of the personality of the person who owns the car. This brings the emotional angle to the design of the car, which is much different the the mechanical aspect of the car.

People working on car design consider the car as sculpture , which gets perfected through many trial and errors. The designer tries to discover different part of his own personality while designing the new car.

The  design team goes through several designs before finalizing the design for any car model.  Each design is owned by a bunch of designers. Every artist loves their creation. The same happens with car designers. It is difficult for the design team lead to trash the ideas of his design team members in the process of capturing the best design for the new car model.

Engineers are supposed to implement the designs. Designers and engineers need to be on the same page for implementing the car manufacturing process. Once the car designer offloads his design to the engineers, its the job of the engineers to come up with the solution to  blend the design to sustain the engineering forces.

Entertainment book is one of the topics, which I selected for this week. The reason why I selected is, because some people are not aware of it, when they hear about it they might have a plenty of questions like.

What is entertainment book? Why we need entertainment book? Is it necessary to a buy an entertainment book?
Entertainment book contains a lot of deals and coupons, which includes restaurants, movies, shopping, car service, travel, attractions, furniture’s for home and lot of free coupons like free movie ticket on our birthday etc.

All the coupons in entertainment book covers only cities within the state for example, if we buy in Albany, it covers only cities within the New York state. We can use this entertainment saving coupons either by entertainment savings card (in order to use the card, we need to register through online)or printing the coupon through online or cut the coupon in entertainment book.

This is first time I’ve purchased the Entertainment book for this year. I felt coupons in this entertainment book are very much useful because all the coupons in this entertainment book are valid from December 1st 2009 through November 31st 2010. This Entertainment book is very much useful to me because I bought this book for 20$ and saved 50$ up to now.

Changing daily life style and changing laws is the key factor to address the climate change crisis.The examples for changing the life style cane be increase in the use of
hybrid cars, increase in the use of solar power and reducing the use of the fossil fuels.

Current effects of the climate crisis,which are observed widely all over the world can be named as:- temperature increase and acid rain.

The north polarized cap roughly has the same size as that of
the United States of America. As per the data given by snow and ice data center in Colorado in 2005, the area of the north polarized cap reduced almost 30 percent in size in 28 years. The remaining size of the polarized cap can disappear in next 7-8 years.

Earth and Venus are essentially about the same size and
emit about the same amount of carbon. On Earth, most of the carbon is leached out of the atmosphere and gets deposited in the
ground as oil,coal and natural gas. On Venus, most of the carbon emissions stay in the atmosphere. The average temperature of earth is 59 degree Fahrenheits and the average temperature on the surface of Venus is 855 degree Fahrenheits. This indicates the danger which we are getting ourselves into by emitting more carbon in atmosphere.

We will continue this discussion next time.

Following are the notes taken from the lecture by Henry Markram:-

One of the key steps in human evolution is understanding the human brain. Currently scientists are working on building the realistic computer model of the human brain.The reasons for the research being we can not afford to rely on the data received from research done on the animals which needs to be used for developing the drugs for around 2 billion people which are affected by brain related diseases. These drugs are mostly based on empirical assumptions.

There are many theories about how the brain works. As of one of the theories, the brain creates image of the world around us and projects this version of the universe all around us for each individual.The reason why we feel that moon is so huge when its near horizon is because of the perception power of the brain is limited and it compares the things near to the eyes against the moon which is far away and makes us realize that moon is huge.

Thus we can say that everyone has his own perceptual bubble and we infer the universe around us as it is perceived by our brain.We can think of the neocortex as the bunch of processors packed in an infinite space which led to folding of the cortex into layers as the human brain continued to evolve. The base in understanding the functioning of the brain is in understanding the design of the neocortex.

We will continue this discussion in next blog.

Actually I don’t have plan to post today, but I am forced to do it to save my four positive points. All this because of Veteran’s day and didn’t get positive point, Otherwise I will have 5 points from Thursday to next Wednesday and which are sticky and one bad point for not posting. By next Thursday I get another 5 points and will erase 2 negative points got because of not posting. All these can maintain as long as no other negative points. We have to be cautious with wait program, at least require to maintain your weight, so you end up with getting one negative point. I hope I can maintain this during this winter.

Now I would like to post some helpful points to save gas expenses I learned this week

1) Driving a car at 55 mph instead of 70mph speed improves 21% of gas mileage
2) properly inflate tires at recommended pressure and check periodically
3) Change oil and replace air filters and Tune up at recommended mileage / interval
4) Avoid hyper-miling, which is dangerous too
5) During summer try to fill gas during night time. Basically density of gas is more in cold weather compare to hot weather you get more gas per gallon
6) Don’t fill the gas when the Gas station under ground tank is filling with the gas from Gas tankers because chances of getting dust particles are more
7)

We have reached a quandary in our daughter’s education. Should we allow our daughter to watch TV or Not?. I don’t want to become one of those families that are defined by the TV, watch it in the morning while breakfast instead of having a conversation or that used the TV as a cheap babysitter but at the same time, TV can allow us to have a quite time as well as to provide some education to our daughter. Plus this is one opportunity that we can use to teach her to distinguish good TV from horrible TV. Or we can try to avoid TV.

What to do? After some debate ( I was for not TV, Miriam for some TV), we settled for a comprise. We will select only a few shows for her to see, which are:

Plaza sesamo: The Spanish version of sesame street. It is filmed in Mexico and it has some of the characters from Sesame Street as well as some original characters.

Nouky and friends: A French show for kids, which is about 3 friends (Noukie, Paco and Lola) that play and learn together. Now even though is a French show, it is in Spanish.

We will add shows as we review them but so far these have been a success.