pearls in the Internet ocean

A Drawing Excercise

Try this drawing excercise… pay careful attention to the instructions… dont
worry too much about accuracy… its more about how your brain
works than your artistic skills . Btw the book (see the home page) is
supposed to be pretty good too and enhances creative thinking, etc in addition
to teaching drawing.

http://www.drawright.com/vaceface.htm
(you could even try the applet at the bottom of the page)

Awaken The Artist Within You

Fun With A Pencil by Andrew Loomis is a neat online book that teaches drawing
available at http://www.saveloomis.org/

--- Excerpt from the introduction ----
MR. WEBSTER DEFINES DRAWING
AS DELINEATION. THAT DOESN’T
TELL YOU HOW MUCH OF A REAL
"BANG" THERE IS IN IT. MAYBE
HE NEVER KNEW. MOST FOLKS
LOVE TO DRAW EVEN WHEN
THEY KNOW LITTLE ABOUT IT. IT
STARTED WITH THE CAVE MAN,
AND STILL SURVIVES ON THE
WALLS OF PUBLIC PLACES... BECAUSE
IT’S SO MUCH FUN, AND
SO EASY, IT’S A SHAME NOT TO BE
ABLE TO DO IT BETTER.
ANDREW LOOMIS

ALL THAT YOU NEED TO KNOW, TO START
THIS BOOK, IS HOW TO DRAW A CIRCLE. . . .

Don’t start out with that old gag, "I couldn’t draw a straight
line." Neither can I, freehand. If we need a straight line, we
can use a ruler. Now please try it, just for fun.
And it can be as lopsided as the family budget, and
still work out.

--- End of Excerpt ----
									

Unleash The Music Composer Within You

Intelligence alone will not solve problems,
unless it is linked with observation.
First observe, and then use the intelligence.
	---------
Use your intelligence to control the body
Before starting the movements of the body.
In the beginning,
The brain moves faster than the body;
later, the body moves faster than the brain.
The movement of the body and the intelligence of the brain
Should synchronize and keep pace with each other.

About Sudha Murthy… wife of Mr. Narayan Murthy,
CEO, Infosys

http://nipun.charityfocus.org/inspire/infosys.html

Zen
Stories

These are very small interesting stories typically
not more than a short paragraph or two. Yet inspite of their simplicity,
they offer surprisingly profound insights into human nature and the cosmos! And
more importantly, they’re a lot of fun to tell since they are also witty
and typically puzzling. The stories usually dont have one single obvious
‘moral’. They cause you to think, and different people interpret
different meanings in them. Talking about those meanings with your friends and
family can be a truly educational experience!

Hence you could use them as handy conversation
pieces, to help you and others talk, think, and laugh about the wondrous and
mysterious details of this thing we call Life.

http://www.rider.edu/users/suler/zenstory/zenframe.html

http://www.thesegoto11.com/zen/index.php3

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/7948/Zen.html

Vedic Mathematics

How does Vedic mathematics differ from its more conventional counterpart? Mr.
Glover answers with an illustration. “Take the Wimbledon tennis competition.
There are 128 entrants, they play in a knock-out manner,” he says. “The first
round has 64 games, the next has 32 games until you reach the quarter-finals,
semifinals and the final.

“The problem is to find out how many matches there are all-together. The
conventional approach is to add the number of games- 64 plus 32 plus 16 plus
eight plus four plus two plus one-to get to the answer, which is 127.

Now the Vedic approach, which uses one of the sutras, argues in the following
way :-

“Since there are 128 players and only one person wins the competition, there
must be 127 losers and for each loser there is a match, so there are 127
matches.” Thus, Vedic mathematics teaches you different approaches to problems
systematically. That’s what makes it such a useful educative tool.

Vedic Maths Tutorial

Vedic Maths is based on sixteen sutras or
principles. These principles are general in nature and can be applied in many
ways. In practice many applications of the sutras may be learned and combined
to solve actual problems. These tutorials will give examples of simple
applications of the sutras, to give a feel for how the Vedic Maths system
works. These tutorials do not attempt to teach the systematic
use of the sutras. For more advanced applications and a more complete coverage
of the basic uses of the sutras, we recommend you study one of the texts
available.

A Gentle Introduction To South Indian Classical (Karnatic) Music
B y Mahadevan Ramesh

What is the focus of this primer?

Many of us have grown up in India, where we were exposed
to Indian classical music in one form or another. However, if you are not from
a musically inclined family, the odds are that you perceived classical music to
be something esoteric that only a selected few could understand and appreciate.
An occassional devotional song or a ‘classically tuned’ film song would have
made you stop and take note. Your curiosity could have been aroused. But, you
may have quickly ignored the instinct and made a beeline for the usual pursuits
in life. Even if you were interested enough to find out about classical music,
you did not know what books to read or who to talk to. Even if you managed to
talk to someone, it is likely that the person made you feel inadequate about
your lack of musical abilities or proceeded to give you a long lecture about
music with a million buzzwords that confused you and weaned you off your
curiosity. It is unfortunate that there is an almost total lack of simple,
readable, introductary texts on Indian classical music, especially when
compared to volumes and volumes of elementary books available on Western
Classical music. No wonder an average college-educated person in the USA is at
least mildly knowledgeable about Western classical music whereas an average
Indian is by and large ignorant about the technicalities of Indian classical
music. This primer is a feeble attempt to introduce Karnatic music in a gentle
way, in a language presumably we all can understand. I want to be able to
rekindle your interest and help you discover some of the ‘method’ and grammar
of Karnatic music. Even though these notes are aimed at introducing Karnatic
music, a lot of of what I have to say also apply to Hindustani Classical music.

http://www.aunet.org/ramesh/gentle1.html
http://www.aunet.org/ramesh/gentle2.html
http://www.aunet.org/ramesh/gentle3.html
http://www.aunet.org/ramesh/gentle4.html

A Brief Introduction to Carnatic Music

By Candida Connolly

Carnatic music is the classical music of South India, with ‘classical’ taken as
meaning a style ‘adhering to an established set of principles of regularity,
balance and purity of form marked by stability of form, intellectualism and
restraint’ (Collins dictionary).

The Carnatic raga is presented through various styles of composition,
improvisation – both a-rhythmically and within rhythmic structures – and
rhythmic patterns precomposed within various mathematical calculations. The
complexity of these rhythmic ideas has been and is being developed and refined
through the ages, by the rigorous practice and perfection of rhythmic
calculations, creating arguably the world’s most sophisticated rhythmic form.
The legacy of previous great musicians is also captured in their compositions
which are handed down to the next generation of musicians and are notated using
‘sargam’ – a script-dependent syllabic notation. Thus it is a style which both
preserves the musical ideas of great masters of the past and evolves with the
performances of living musicians.

http://www.amc.org.uk/education/articles/A%20Brief%0Introduction%20to%20Carnatic%20Music.htm

So you think you know all about Mahatma Gandhi?

Sure? Confident? Based on what I remember about history in school and movies and
the media, I was too… until I had a look at this excellent article…. a
real eye-opener especially the last paragraph on Satyagraha.

Mahatma Gandhi and His Myths
By Mark Shepard
http://www.markshep.com/nonviolence/Myths.html

Jonathan Livingston Seagull
By Richard Bach

I KNOW youre all very very busy, I KNOW you generally don’t have much leisure
time…

BUT…

Take my word for this just once. Buy this book (or print it out, its available
online at this link… http://www.42.dropbear.id.au/jls.html
)

Its so small you wont take more than an hour to finish it.

The first time I read it, I got bored after a few paras… but luckily
rediscovered it a few months later… and this time finished it at almost
one reading! It really made me feel… I wont tell you, hope you read it… but
its one of those small powerful books meant for both the young and old. So…
if at all you find it boring in the beginning… make an attempt to reach
atleast two pages till you give up! 🙂

This book can be read many times, each time we can learn something new from it!

Maslovs Heirarchy Of Needs

Maslow is a humanistic psychologist. Humanists focus upon potentials. They
believe that humans strive for an upper level of capabilities. Humans seek the
frontiers of creativity, the highest reaches of consciousness and wisdom. This
has been labeled “fully functioning person”, “healthy personality”, or as
Maslow calls this level, “self-actualizing person.”

Maslow has set up a hierarchic theory of needs. All of his basic needs are
instinctoid, equivalent of instincts in animals. Humans start with a very weak
disposition that is then fashioned fully as the person grows. If the
environment is right, people will grow straight and beautiful, actualizing the
potentials they have inherited. If the environment is not “right” (and mostly
it is not) they will not grow tall and straight and beautiful.

Maslow has set up a hierarchy of five levels of basic needs. Beyond these
needs, higher levels of needs exist. These include needs for understanding,
esthetic appreciation and purely spiritual needs. In the levels of the five
basic needs, the person does not feel the second need until the demands of the
first have been satisfied, nor the third until the second has been satisfied,
and so on.

http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/maslow.htm

What the Matrix was actually about

Many people didnt really appreciate the movie the Matrix much. They felt its
a boringly confusing movie with nothing but special effects and action to
its credit. (Maybe they had fixed ideas of what a “good movie”
should be like, and the Matrix dissapointed them when it didnt meet such
expectations.)

For some others, the movie got them thinking. They might agree with
Socarates who had said, “The life which is unexamined is not worth
living.”

I hope both kind of thinkers like this link… it shows the many diverse
kinds of ideas and thinking that went into the making of the Matrix.

Just to give an idea…
“At the beginning of The Matrix, a black-clad computer hacker known as Neo
falls asleep in front of his computer. A mysterious message appears on the
screen: “Wake up, Neo.” This succinct phrase encapsulates the plot of
the
film …”

http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/index_phi.html