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The Stars for December
Happy December (2015)!
You love a good secret on the 3rd and 4th, and for some reason you’re a magnet for people who want to unburden their minds with sordid tales of depravity and debauchery. They don’t have to worry, though, because their secrets truly are safe with you.
So what are these runs about your lack of confidence about? The truth is on the 8th and 9th you’re the very best you that you can be, and the world should be knocking down your door just to get a glimpse of your fine self.
Stumbling upon new ways to organize your stuff or to clean your place is the highlight of your day on the 15th and 16th, and while it might not be exciting to anyone else, hey, it works for you.
It’s important to do your best work when a boss or teacher is watching on the 24th and 25th, especially if you’ve been looking for an advantage in getting ahead.
The 28th and 29th bring challenges that you couldn’t possibly be prepared for, but your ability to persevere no matter what keeps you in the game.
Your competitors have absolutely nothing on you.
Live Longer with This 30-Minute Habit
Or ride your stationary bike. Or dance. Or chase the grandkids around outside. Or shovel some snow. Or all of the above. Just be active for 30 minutes, five times a week. This simple choice cut mortality risk by nearly 20 percent in a recent study.
Walk the Walk
You can’t be your best and be there for others unless you take care of yourself first. So no matter how busy life gets, make time for the active things in life that you enjoy. Doesn’t have to be a killer ab workout or a sweat-till-you-drop spin class. In a study, people who simply did nonvigorous physical activity for 2 1/2 hours a week saw their risk of dying from any cause drop by almost 20 percent compared with the couch potatoes. If there’s no special activity that floats your boat, just walk. Hoofing it for 30 minutes, five times a week, is a small and easy investment to make in your long-term health.
Moving Matters
Of course, a little sweat is healthy, too, so if you want to crank it up a notch, and you don’t have any health conditions in the way, feel free. When the people in the study kicked activity levels into high gear — logging 7 hours of moderate-intensity exercise each week — their mortality risk dropped by 25 percent compared with nonactive folks. Chalk it up to the favorable impact exercise has on weight (active people gain less over time) and blood pressure (exercise helps keep those blood vessel walls nice and relaxed). Make walking a regular part of your life!
Coming Soon. . .
I Love You!
Truth or Dare
Yes, Virginia There is a Santa Claus!
In 1897, Dr. Philip O’Hanlon, a coroner’s assistant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, was asked by his then eight-year-old daughter, Virginia (1889–1971), whether Santa Claus really existed.
O’Hanlon suggested she write to The Sun, a prominent New York City newspaper at the time, assuring her that “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” He unwittingly gave one of the paper’s editors, Francis Pharcellus Church, an opportunity to rise above the simple question and address the philosophical issues behind it.
Church was a war correspondent during the American Civil War, a time which saw great suffering and a corresponding lack of hope and faith in much of society. Although the paper ran the editorial in the seventh place on the page, below even one on the newly invented “chainless bicycle”, its message was very moving to many people who read it.
More than a century later it remains the most reprinted editorial ever to run in any newspaper in the English language.
Dear Editor—
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O’Hanlon
Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
December 2011 Astrology
Thank You. . .
Thanksgiving is a blessing in disguise. With our friends and family near, it’s up to each of us to make this day as special as we can.
Let’s be happy and spread cheer this Thanksgiving and bring joy to everyone we encounter. If we do anything this Thanksgiving, let’s be grateful!
Once a year we get the chance to thank God, our family, friends for every little joy that comes each day.
Expressing true gratefulness is difficult in one day, for grateful deeds need to span throughout the year. So along with our friends and family, and because Thanksgiving is not just about the turkey and pie, wish everyone the heartiest thanks.
God has blessed us with so much love and care. Thanksgiving is the time to thank God for all his blessings.
Thanksgiving is meant to be a time for giving thanks. Giving thanks doesn’t mean the utterance of words, but by meaning them with the heart. Remember, Nobility is served on the plate of Thanksgiving since noble are those able to express gratitude.
If there ever was created a day so pure, so noble, it was none other than Thanksgiving.
Other than family and friends, the forest, the rain, the sun, the water; all of nature also deserves our gratitude. Be thankful for everything and everyone in life. Be thankful to God, who created everything and everyone.
The time has come to give thanks. The time has come to feel blessed. The time has come to have a delicious Thanksgiving dinner. Be thankful as Thanksgiving is here.
Thanksgiving is all about giving to the needy, thanking those we love and cherish. Thank someone for being a part of your life. It’s the best gift you can give them.
Being thankful is a blessed opportunity. An opportunity everyone has access to on Thanksgiving Day. Let’s give thanks to all those who matter to us and make a difference in our life.
Thanksgiving is not just for expressing thanks for what we have. It is also a time to be grateful for what we are going to have.
Thank you for everything you mean to me and may you have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
The Golden Age of the Robot is Upon us
[Reprint Alert: Original is here]
We may be poised for the rise of robots after all. Popular sci-fi culture in the 1970s loved tales of robot overlords promising to overtake humans. And we waited for them to come true. Nothing happened. But now, we might just be on the edge of robot revolution.
Smart Planet recently reported on the dropping cost of an open-source robotic platform, meant to greatly increase the amount of robotic research around the world. And many claim the robot revolution will cause just as much upheaval in our lives as did the Internet and the PC over the last three decades. Better technology, falling prices and a new-found surge in open source operating systems set the stage for significant growth within the next decade.
In two years there will be 1.2 million robots working on Earth, that is one robot per 5,000 humans. As of 2010, there are 34 robots working per 1,000 people in Japan (see info graphic below from Focus and the World Robotics report.) It is estimated that by 2025 robots will have taken over a whopping half of all jobs in the U.S. The hardest hit industries are predicted to be: manufacturing, automotive and food services.
Already robots can climb walls, scramble up cliffs, drive cars, and plug themselves in to wall sockets. If you bought something on Zappos.com recently, chances are that item was retrieved by a robot.
Apparently that doesn’t mean Americans will become obsolete, rather the hope is that robots will make Americans more productive, especially in the automotive industries. This is according to Ryan Calo, director of privacy and robotics at the Stanford Center for Internet & Society, who was recently interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle. Calo claims we are closer to the age of robots because of more powerful technology and slashed prices (reminiscent of Moore’s Law?) He points to Microsoft’s Kinect which sells for mere hundreds of dollars but would have cost thousands just three years back.
At the heart of innovation is the push for open source programming. Right now a companies like the Silicon Valley-based Willow Garage provide open-source operating systems that any academic can program for any purpose. It’s this ability to experiment quickly (they don’t need to re-build hardware every time they want a new type of robot) that will support a significant increase in robotic capability.
It reminds us of third party development for platforms like the iPhone and Android that then led to the proliferation of apps and other new uses for phones. Calo notes that this sort of openness within robotics comes with trepidation. He imagines the consequences if some bored hack decides to program his Roomba to play Frogger on a real highway.
Companies do not want to be held responsible for the craziness of humans. Calo believes that we need to start thinking about such situations and provide the same protections that were in place during the early days of the Internet. A small part of the Communications Decency Act of the 1990s that emerged intact from Supreme Court hearings, may be the savior of innovation. Section 230 states that the platform will not be liable as the publisher of what users publish. Imagine, Calo asks, if Facebook or Craigslist, or any news commenting system, would exist at all if such legality did not exist? This immunity helped pave the way to innovation in the Web. We need the same sort of immunity for manufactures of open robotics, says Calo. We cannot keep manufacturers liable for what the users might choose to program into their robots. If we do then companies like Willow Garage and others will simply not take the risk, and so academics are not able to quickly and voraciously experiment.
Calo points to what happened with Sony’s AIBO robot dog. Basically the software allows the user to raise it from puppy to dog, along with giving the dog a bunch of voice commands. Users wanted to expand so the enterprising ones wrote their own programs and applications and it turned into a “vibrant library that everyone was excited about.” But Sony intervened, sued over copyright issues, and the backlash caused Sony to close the entire line of AIBO. Later Sony rethought their decision and allowed the dog to ship with a software development kit included.
One of the more immediate examples of robots hanging out alongside us is the implementation of self-driving cars. This has already brought fear. The other week one of Google’s self-driving Prius’ slammed into another Prius. Google reported it had nothing to do with the software and the blame was on human error. Still, it makes us think of the possibilities. Calo commented:
…whether or not a crash involving an autonomous vehicle causes a backlash will depend on the circumstances.
If an autonomous car is programmed to avoid strollers and shopping carts, but is confronted by both at once and swerves into stroller, then yes, robot driving is over in the United States. There’s a lot of fear of robots, so maybe not matter what, as soon as a robot car fatality happens, that’s it.
But my hope is that it won’t. Hopefully, you’ll have thousands and thousands of hours of uneventful driving and you can point to the statistics that show we have enormously reduced fatalities.
Unfortunately statistics never provides comfort to Americans, or any human for that matter. Next time you are taking off try telling your phobic neighbor that they have a greater chance of drowning in a bathtub than dying in a plane crash. You’ll see first hand just how successful stats are.
Happy Birthday Robert!
The Miller Minute 