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Kent State Massacre

The rulers started a war in the other side of the world and forced the people to fight the war. People said no. Students protested. The troops fired. Students died. Liberty, freedom and democracy.

And this was not Egypt or Syria or Libya or China. It was the USA a few years ago. Read Kent State shootings.

Real Sal Tree

This is the real Sal tree, Shorea robusta. The trees under where Prince Siddhartha was born in Lumbini and the trees under where Buddha died.

 
But the following picture is not a Sal tree. It is Couroupita guianensis from South America. However this tree is also found in India for thousands of years.

Walking in the Air

One more thing about Steve Jobs

We take so many things for granted. The mouse, the icons, the cascading and tiled windows, the GUI, the trash can, the beautiful fonts, the click wheel, the carousal of album covers, the touchscreen, the multi-touch, the pinching in to zoom, scrolling lists by the flick of a finger, touchscreen tablets with vivid color screens, phones without rows of keys, auto-rotating screens, podcasts, computer-animated films, so on and on. None of these were invented by Steve Jobs. But Steve Jobs was the first person to make successful mainstream products using them. So those things became the norm.

Apple products are truly artworks in design and simplicity. That must be why people pay $600 for an Apple product  while competitors struggle to sell the same sort of product for $300 and sometimes fail. It is difficult understand how the world would be without Macintosh, iMac, iPod, MacBook Air, iPhone or iPad. One way to understand that is to go back and watch the Steve Jobs’ presentations introducing those products to the world for the first time. Then you will have a feeling of how it was then.

In 1984 when Steve Jobs pulled the Macintosh out of the bag and turned it on to show the world for the first time, people were amazed at even the first scrolling word MACINTOSH in beautiful fonts because it was then a first. Before that there was Xerox Alto with a graphical user interface which had a small device with buttons which when pushed around on the desk in turn moved a pointer on the screen. That never succeeded. But it was the Macintosh which made the mouse-driven GUI a common thing. Now we take it for granted. While Apple was doing all of these the competitors were following in their footsteps. Microsoft created Windows.

Apple introduced the iMac with bright colors and translucent curvy casings and redefined how the computers should look like. Their design evolves in each release. Apple shows how the computers will look like in the future. Unfortunately PCs are still using the same old clunky boxes.

In 1995 Steve’s Pixar created the Toy Story and that changed the movie industry. In 2001 Apple introduced the iPod and changed the way we listen to music.  Now everybody is making iPod lookalikes. Microsoft came up with the Zune. In 2007 iPhone came. It shaped how a phone should look and function. Now everybody from Nokia to Samsung is imitating the iPhone’s keyboard less slab design with touchscreen. Windows came up with the Windows Phone OS. In 2008 Steve Jobs introduced the thinnest notebook MacBook Air by taking it out of an envelope. In 2010 Apple introduced the iPad. Now everyone is imitating the tablet from Samsung to now discontinued HP. Even Microsoft is coming up with tablet friendly Windows 8.

So if not for Steve Jobs the world would have been a much dull and mundane world. Think about the text-based interfaces before Macintosh,  computers before iMac, portable music players before iPod, smart phones before iPhone, tablet PCs before iPad. Steve Jobs thought different and changed the world.

Laos: Crimes against Humanity by USA

Fact #1: Laos is the most bombed country per capita in the history of the world. During the vietnam war, we [USA] dropped 2.1 BILLION TONS of bombs on laos, even though we weren’t even at war with them.  That’s a ridiculously large number of bombs… it works out to a plane full of bombs dropped every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for 8 years.

Fact #2: There are about 200 “accidents” every year in Laos involving unexploded ordnance.  Basically, when you drop 4 trillion pounds of bombs, they don’t necessarily all blow up when the hit the ground.  Some sit around and rust, and never go off.  Others sit around until somebody wanders by and bumps them, and then they decide to go off and blow off a limb or two (actually, with the state of medicine in Laos, you’d be lucky if that’s all you lost).  Sorry about that, I know the war’s been over for over thirty years (and that we were never actually even at war with you, for that matter), but yeah, your leg just got blown off by an american bomb.  I guess it’s just one of those fun little things about war that no one ever really talks about….