forsv: potpourri of thoughts

jest for pun (September'05)

September'05 BlogThoughts

Every calendar's days are numbered.

Somebody's Darling

American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers. - W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965)

Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years. - Gracie Allen

You don't know a women till you've met her in court. - Norman Mailer

Gone with the water.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose. - Bill Gates

Marie La Coste: Somebody's Darling

MARIE LA COSTE
1845 - 1935

After the death of Marie's unnamed fiancée, a captain in the Confederate Army, apparently in 1862, the young French teacher became nurse and visitor at local hospitals for wounded Confederate soldiers. Her poem, which is sung at historical events today, is a distinctive memorial to those soldiers.

SOMEBODY’S DARLING

Into a ward of the white washed walls,
Where the dead and dying lay,
Wounded by bayonets, shells and balls,
Somebody’s darling was borne one day.

Somebody’s darling so young and brave
Wearing yet on his pale sweet face,
Soon to be hid by the dust of the grave,
The lingering light of his boyhood’s grace.

Matted and damp are the curls of gold
Kissing the snow of that fair young brow;
Pale are the lips of delicate mold -
Somebody’s darling is dying now.

Back from the beautiful blue-veined brow
Brushed all the wandering waves of gold;
Cross his hands on his bosom now;
Somebody’s darling is still and cold.

Kiss him once for somebody’s sake,
Murmur a prayer soft and low;
One bright curl from it’s fair mates take;
They were somebody’s pride you know.

Somebody’s hand has rested there;
Was it a mother’s soft and white?
And have the lips of a sister fair
Been baptized in the waves of light?

God knows best! He was somebody’s love,
Somebody’s heart enshrined him there.
Somebody wafted his name above,
Night and morn on the wings of prayer.

Somebody wept when he marched away,
Looking so handsome brave and grand;
Somebody’s kiss on his forehead lay;
Somebody clung to his parting hand.

Somebody’s watching and waiting for him,
Yearning to hold him again to her heart;
And there he lies with his blue eyes dim,
And the smiling child-like lips apart.

Tenderly bury the fair young dead,
Pausing to drop on his grave a tear;
Carve on the wooden slab at his head,
“Somebody’s darling slumbers here.”

Written by Marie La Coste
and subsequently published by
J .C. Schreiner & Son of Augusta, Georgia in 1864

(click here for Gujarati translation by Jhaverchand Meghani)

Mysterious Stars Surround Andromeda's Black Hole

Stars race around a black hole at the center of the Andromeda galaxy so fast that they could go the distance from Earth to the Moon in six minutes.

The finding, announced today, solves a mystery over the source of strange blue light coming from Andromeda's center. But it generates a new puzzle: The stars' phenomenal orbital velocity suggests they should never have formed in the first place.

Astronomers first spotted the blue light near Andromeda's core in 1995. Three years later, another group determined that the light emanated from a cluster of hot, young stars. Nobody knew how many were involved.

Continue reading.

Keystrokes Reveal Passwords to Researchers

BERKELEY, Calif. - If spyware and key-logging software weren't a big enough threat to privacy, researchers have figured out a way to eavesdrop on your computer simply by listening to the clicks and clacks of the keyboard.

Those seemingly random noises, when processed by a computer, were translated with up to 96 percent accuracy, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

"It's a form of acoustical spying that should raise red flags among computer security and privacy experts," said Doug Tygar, a Berkeley computer science professor and the study's principal investigator.

Researchers used several 10-minute audio recordings of people typing away at their keyboards. They fed the recordings into a computer that used an algorithm to detect subtle differences in the sound as each letter is struck.

Contiune reading.

Ask Jeeves decides to axe Jeeves

Search site Ask Jeeves is getting rid of the iconic valet that has been its companion since its earliest days.

Citing "user confusion" over what the butler character represents the search site has said that Jeeves will soon be phased out.

However, Ask's research revealed that Jeeves was getting in the way of people realising that the search site had changed and that it can handle many more types of queries than just straightforward questions.

"As a result," said the Ask statement, "the character may be phased out as the prominent icon of the brand, although no timeline or details have been determined."

In line with a series of changes made to the Ask site last year, Jeeves got a makeover which saw him get slimmer and more tanned.

In its statement Ask said that no decision had yet been made on the new brand name it will adopt to show how the search site had evolved.

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Psychopaths could be best financial traders?

LONDON (Reuters) - "Wanted: psychopaths to make a killing in the markets."
Such an advert will not be appearing in the world's newspapers any time soon, but it may have a ring of truth after research revealed the best wheeler-dealers could well be "functional psychopaths."

A team of U.S. scientists has found the emotionally impaired are more willing to gamble for high stakes and that people with brain damage may make good financial decisions, the Times newspaper reported Monday.

In a study of investors' behavior 41 people with normal IQs were asked to play a simple investment game. Fifteen of the group had suffered lesions on the areas of the brain that affect emotions.

The result was those with brain damage outperformed those without.

Continue reading.

A Female Sensibility

Videogame makers have ignored half their potential market. Now they're having a second look, and altering the possibilities of gaming.

Videogame economics are such that companies are willing to hemorrhage money selling consoles like the Xbox and the Sony PlayStation at a loss to build market share, then make money selling the games. But the kind of growth that's needed to make that model work is hard to imagine unless more women are brought into the market. "Whoever takes that philosophical leap—'We're solid enough to appeal to our core, we can reach outside our demographic'—they're going to win out in the end," says Ankarino Lara, director of GameSpot.com, a popular gaming Web site. "Female gaming is the last frontier; 2006 is going to be a milestone year."

Continue reading.

How smart are you?

Hardly a week passes without headlines about academic standards. Are exams getting easier? Are people getting smarter?

Well, here's a chance for Magazine readers to test themselves - first on English - then on maths.

Well, if you can't even trust a hitman..

TOKYO (Reuters) - A Japanese woman called in the police after a hitman she paid to kill her lover's wife failed to carry out the job.
The 32-year-old Tokyo woman was arrested Wednesday for incitement to murder, the Daily Yomiuri newspaper said Friday.

The woman contacted a private detective through a Web site last November and paid him 1 million yen in cash to murder her love rival, the paper said.

The 40-year-old detective accepted the money and suggested he could carry out the job by chasing the victim on a motorcycle and spraying her with a biological agent in a tunnel.

Police also arrested the private detective and found the alleged target safe and well, the paper said.