Saturday, November 1, 2008

NARA'S NOTEPAD


VOLUME 4


NOVEMBER 2008


NUMBER 11


ADOPT A PLANT

MEMO FROM NARA


Thinking is a mental activity. Everyone thinks about something every time. Thinking is of two kinds. One is self-defeating and the other is self-promotional. These two kinds of thinking emerge out of our minds every time. Sometimes one of these two will be dominating. The happiness and success in life depend on the kind of thinking which dominates. If the self-promotional thinking dominates a person can progress well in life with great achievements. He or she can perform the job perfectly well. On the other hand, if the self-defeating thinking starts dominating then one can not understand the strength in him, but only one thinks of the weakness. In fact, one should not overlook one’s accomplishments. Think of whatever good – may be small or big, one has done in life. It will promote the self-promotional thinking. Thinking is like breathing which is very essential for the physical and emotional life. Similarly, thinking that too self-promotional is essential for the emotional life to yield great pleasure. Fantasies can keep a person away from self-defeating thinking. One can think of anything one likes without other’s knowledge and they are generally harmless. Fantasies facilitate secret thinking. It is better to think of things one like but not able to get in reality. One can fly in an airplane and reach any country and holiday in a mountain enjoying Nature without permission, passport or visa. Such fantasies are sometimes known as ‘day dreaming.’ Of course, dreaming or imagination is good for emotional health. But self-defeating thinking in such dreaming or imagination certainly brings unhappiness and distress to anyone. Therefore, thinking the right thing will help us to lead a successful happy life in our society. Let us try and get the benefits.

ECONOMICS OF SUCCESS


You cannot get rich by dreaming or thinking positive thoughts. You can only succeed if you have something to give - in return you will naturally receive all the wealth you can handle. You can't get more out of the system than you actually put in. It's as simple as that.
Businessmen (and women) in any society in the world, talk obsessively about "making money". Leaving aside counterfeiters, only governments make money. The treasury prints the stuff and then declares it valuable (Someone, I think it was another Adam Smith, the 20th Century US "funny money" philosopher, actually George J W Goodman, who joked about money from the treasury, saying that a government is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper and, by adding ink, make it into something worthless).
Nobody "makes money." You trade for it. You earn it.
To understand the economics of success further, Adam Smith introduced the idea of Exchangeable Products. In earning a living, dealing with others and sharing relationships, we are all responsible for doing or making something which we can call a "product."
The product need not be a thing. We can carry out a service. But there is still a SOMETHING at the end of it. A gardener may serve with knowledge and skill of horticulture (plants and crops); what he does, we can call "gardening." But his product would be stated slightly differently. His product might be flourishing healthy plants in an attractive fertile garden setting. You get the difference.
Society has become too complex for us to do everything we need to do for ourselves. So we each specialize and do what we are good at. In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith called this the "division of labor".

By working together on a project, we can achieve many times the success of a single individual working alone. Cooperation is the key to success. What we each produce is our contribution to making all this work, by which we earn our place in society.

- Dr. Keith Scott-Mumby

RADIO-FREQUENCY IDENTIFICATION TAGS (RFID)


RFID are embedded in a growing number of personal items and identity documents. Because the tags were designed to be powerful tracking devices and they typically incorporate little security, people wearing or carrying them are vulnerable to surreptitious surveillance and profiling.

The first radio tags identified military aircrafts as friend or foe during World War II, but it was not until the late 1980s that similar tags became the basis of electronic toll-collection systems. And in 1999, corporations began considering the tags’ potential for tracking millions of individual objects. In that year, Procter and Gamble and Gillette formed a consortium with Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers, called the Auto-ID Center, to develop RFID tags that would be small, efficient and cheap enough to eventually replace the Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode on everyday consumer product.

THEY SAID...


I never did anything by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident, they came by work – Thomas Edison

I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within. It is there all the time –
Anna Freud

In a hospital they throw you out into the street before you are half cured, but in a nursing home they don’t let you out till you are dead –
George Bernard Shaw

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification – Martin Fischer

Knowing is not enough, you must apply; willing is not enough, you must do – Bruce Lee

SENSE OF COMPETENCE


1. Take responsibility for everything you do, think, and feel. Always take responsibility for solutions to your problems. Taking responsibility only for solutions (rather than blame for causes) gives you power.
2. Focus on what you can control – your ability to improve, appreciate, connect or protect – rather than what you cannot control, such as the opinions and behavior of your spouse.
3. Think in terms of solutions rather than problems. Be flexible, think multiple solutions – there’s almost always more than one.
4. Realize genuine confidence – if you make a mistake, you can fix it.
5. Step back and see things in wider contexts, observing the complexity of issues
.

JUST TO LAUGH...


On a tour of a European Castle, a young visitor becomes very nervous. The elderly guide tries to reassure her.
“Don’t worry,” he says.
“I have never seen a ghost in all the time I have been here.”
“And how long is that?” asks the tourist.
“About 400 years.”

If I was to die first, would you marry?” the wife asks.
“Well,” says the husband, “I am in good, so why not?”
Would she live in my house?”
“It’s all paid up, so yes.”
“Would she drive my car?”
“It’s new, so yes.”
“Would she use my golf clubs?”
“No. She’s left-handed.”

A guy finds a sheep wandering in his neighborhood and takes it to the police station. The desk sergeant says, “Why don’t you just take it to the zoo?”
The next day, the sergeant spots the same guy walking down the street-with the sheep.
“I thought I told you to take that sheep to the zoo,” the sergeant says.
“I know what you told me,” the guy responds.
“Yesterday I took him to the zoo. Today I’m taking him to the movies.”

Insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results.

HONEYBEE FACTS


· Honey bees, which are social insects, live in colonies with a division of labor between the various types of bees.
· The queen is the only sexually developed female and is the largest bee in the colony. A two-day-old larva is selected by the workers to be reared as the queen. She will mate in flight with about 18 drone (male) bees, during which time she receives several million sperm cells that last her entire life span of nearly two years. A productive queen can lay 3000 eggs per day.
· Drones are stout male bees which have not stingers. Their sole purpose is to mate with the queen – after which they die.
· Workers, the smallest bees in the colony, are sexually undeveloped females. A colony can have 50,000 to 60,000. Their life expectancy normally is about 28 to 35 days. But workers reared in September and October can live through the winter. Workers feed the queen and larvae, collect nectar, produce honey, guard the hive entrance and even help keep the hive cool by fanning their wings.
· Honey bees’ wings stoke 11,400 times per minute, thus making their distinctive buzz.

-National Honey Board, USA

Stop being your own enemy!
Meet you next month – DECEMBER, 2008

Prof. A. Narayanan, Ph. D., FISPP
# 19, Phase 5, Maharani Avenue, Vadavalli, Coimbatore – 641 041, Tamil Nadu
Telephone: 0422 – 2423017 Mobile: 98422 42301
E-mail: prof_narayanan_a@hotmail.com
arumugakannu@gmail.com
Visit my blogs: http://www.nara2007.blogspot.com/ (NARA’S NOTEPAD)
http://www.nara.tumblr.com/ (NARA’S DIGEST)
http://www.nara1.vox.com/ (NARA’S POSTCARDS)