Weekend Vist to the Egyptian Museum - The Rosicrucian

Me and my friend setout for a trip to downtown san jose. We decided that we should go to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum at Naglee Avenue in san jose. It was an eccentric place not too much crowd, if you want to learn about the egyptian civilization, how things grew during 5000BC you can find out here. The egyptians had a concept of preserving the deceased in the form of what they call are the "Mummies". They belive that spirit lives after death that should be honoured aftermath of life ends. I came across a new term in the movie Mummy II which i didnt know until i visited the museum called the "ATEN" - Aten was a being who represented the god or spirit of the sun, and the actual solar disk. He was depicted as a disk with rays reaching to the earth. At the end of the rays were human hands which often extended the ankh to the pharaoh. Then we saw the civilization of the ancient egypt and the kings who ruled kingdoms during that era. It was mind boggling to see the kindof ornaments that were designed in 5000 BC - the neclace, bracelets, rings etc. We also saw the types of architectural changes from one egyptian period to another, significant heirogyphic scripting changes. The eygyptian heiroglyphic scriptings on rocks and other monuments are formed by impressions, not sure if its a heat impression though i belive it is.

My friend has been to Egypt when she was in her 6th grade :-) . She knew more than i did so learnt a lot from her as she was quite familiar with different musings around.

Here is an Excerpt from Wiki about this.

The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum (REM), founded by AMORC, is a museum about Ancient Egypt located at AMORC's Rosicrucian Park in the Rose Garden neighborhood of San Jose, California, United States.

Museum managed to become unique by:

• Having the largest exhibition of Ancient Egyptian antiquities in the Western US.
• Being the only such museum in the world with buildings constructed in Ancient Egyptian architectural style.
• Having a purpose-built planetarium adjacent to the museum. The Planetarium was the 5th opened in the United States, and the first with a Star Projector build in the country, constructed by H.Spencer Lewis.
• Its buildings set in an Egyptian revival park.
  

The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum’s child mummy traveled to Stanford University in nearby Palo Alto on May 6, 2005 to be studied under CT scans and other high-resolution methods of remote sensing, in a collaboration between the museum, Silicon Graphics, and Stanford University Hospital and the NASA Biocomputational Lab. The results were released at the 75th Anniversary of the Museum on August 6, 2005, with detailed scans, and these were covered by a Time Magazine article on the subject. One of the scanning images won the 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge 2006co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Science Magazine.

Visitors to the museum will notice Taweret at the entrance, the Ancient Egyptian hippopotamus-like goddess of pregnant women and childbirth. Since 2004, the Museum has been completely renovated


Pic1: The mummy of young female named "Tahure"

Pic 2: The Mummy of Upper Class Egyptian Male in Saite Period

Is AJAX moving into Mobile World ? Exciting Huh !! Power of AJAX

The creators of the excellent Opera web browser have released their SDK for creating mobile web applications. The SDK supports AJAX development, to allow for more dynamic applications without sacrificing platform independence.

Developers can integrate native phone applications with web-based content such as weather or stock data, Opera noted on its site about the platform. Business users could combine phone-stored contact information with a remote enterprise application.

"The full Web browser has proved itself as a central application on mobile phones and is today the main source for data traffic on mobile networks," says says Timo Bruns, Vice President for Business Development, Opera Software.

AJAX technology provides an interface between a web browser and a back-end web server. This allows content displayed in the browser to be updated without refreshing and reloading the entire page. Examples of AJAX can be seen in applications like Google Maps and Yahoo News online.

WiTricity Coming Up - The Wireless Electricity

Its time to get rid of all the cables and wires around the house. I had a terrible experience with Lapotop power cords which walks across the floor plugging into the wall. I had a phone call which i was about to pick it up downstairs i ran and the cord slipped my foot and i got badly hurt. I wished there was something like wirless electricity like wirless internet. And alas now here it is. Scientists and researchers at MIT have devised a new way to harness electricity wirelessly using "Electrical Resonance" Here is the excerpt from the article on this story to read more:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers announced Thursday they had made a 60-watt light bulb glow by sending it energy wirelessly, potentially previewing a future in which cell phones and other gadgets get juice without having to be plugged in.

The breakthrough, disclosed in Science Express, an online publication of the journal Science, is being called "WiTricity" by the scientists.

The concept of sending power wirelessly isn't new, but its wide-scale use has been dismissed as inefficient because electromagnetic energy generated by the charging device would radiate in all directions.

Last fall, though, MIT physics professor Marin Soljacic (pronounced soul-ya-CHEECH) explained how to do the power transfer with specially tuned waves. The key is to get the charging device and a gadget to resonate at the same frequency , allowing them to efficiently exchange energy.

It's similar to how an opera star can break a wine glass that happens to resonate at the same frequency as her voice. In fact, the concept is so basic in physics that inventor Nikola Tesla sought a century ago to build a huge tower on Long Island that would wirelessly beam power along with communications.

The new step described in Science was that the MIT team put the concept into action. The scientists lit a 60-watt bulb that was 7 feet away from the power-generating appliance.

The development raises the prospect that we might eliminate some of the clutter of cables in our ever-more electronic world. Is that necessarily a good thing? Soljacic acknowledged "that it's far from obvious how crucial people will find this."

But at least one benefit could be that if devices can get their power through the air, they might not need batteries and their attendant toxic chemicals.

Before that can happen, the technology has a ways to go.

The MIT system is about 40 percent to 45 percent efficient , meaning that most of the energy from the charging device doesn't make it to the light bulb. Soljacic believes it needs to become twice as efficient to be on par with the old-fashioned way portable gadgets get their batteries charged.

Also, the copper coils that relay the power are almost 2 feet wide for now , too big to be feasible for, say, laptops. And the 7-foot range of this wireless handoff could be increased , presumably so that one charging device could automatically power all the gadgets in a room.

The MIT team stresses that the "magnetic coupling" process involved in WiTricity is safe on humans and other living things. And in the initial experiments on the light bulb, nothing bad happened to the cell phones, electronic equipment and credit cards in the room , though more research on that is needed.

The harmlessness apparently extends both ways: The researchers noted that putting people and other things between the coils , even when they block the line of sight , generally has no effect on the power transfer.

EBAY stepping into Radio Advertising - A Challenge to GOOGLE ?

Online auctioneer eBay Inc. (NasdaqGS:EBAY - News) said on Tuesday it is ready to begin auctioning advertising airtime on 2,300 participating U.S. radio stations, expanding on an existing plan to sell cable television ads.

The move, which puts eBay into competition with Web search leader Google Inc.'s (NasdaqGS:GOOG - News) recent expansion into radio advertising, involved eBay partnering with Bid4Spots to power what it calls the eBay Media Marketplace for Radio.

All major radio operators have joined the radio ad auction market, including Clear Channel Communications Inc. (NYSE:CCU - News), the largest U.S. radio advertising network, an eBay spokeswoman said. Google also is selling radio ads with Clear Channel.

The new U.S. auction market for radio advertising will go live on Wednesday and include both conventional terrestrial radio and Internet radio advertising. Stations in all of the 300 top-ranked radio markets are covered, eBay said.

Its cable TV advertising auction push has met with some resistance from cable operators who fear the auctions could put stiff pressure on advertising rates.

But the Cable Television Advertising Bureau, an industry trade group that represents large, ad-supported cable channels, withdrew from trials of the eBay Media Marketplace in April, complaining the system was unworkable.

Last week, however, women-oriented cable network Oxygen became the first cable programmer to agree to use eBay's "Media Marketplace for Cable TV" to sell planned, advertising spots nationwide.

Why Google's Stocks Surged in 2nd Quater 2007 ?

Here are the top reasons why google is able to grow indefinitely:

Google Inc.'s stock price surged to a new high Tuesday after online software pioneer Salesforce.com Inc. joined the Internet search leader's efforts to lure even more businesses into the Web's largest advertising network.

Google Inc.'s stock price surpassed $500 for the first time Tuesday, marking another milestone in a rapid rise that has catapulted the Internet search leader into the corporate elite.

Continuing a recent surge driven by Wall Street's high expectations for the company, Google's shares rose $9.67, or nearly 2 percent, to $504.72 in morning trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

That left Google with a market value of about $154 billion just eight years after former Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin started the business in a Silicon Valley garage.

The Mountain View-based company is now Silicon Valley's most valuable business, eclipsing the likes of Intel Corp., the world's largest computer chip maker, and Hewlett-Packard Co., a high-tech pioneer that also famously started in a garage 67 years ago.

Google's remarkable success has minted Page and Brin, both 33, as multibillionaires along with their hand-picked chief executive, Eric Schmidt.

Hundreds of other Google employees are millionaires because so many investors want to own a piece of a company that has become the Internet's most powerful financial force while building a brand so ingrained in society that it has become part of the English language.

Google currently has made most of its money selling brief, written ads that are posted alongside search results and other online content, but management believes it can mine even bigger profits by expanding into video and delivering more messages to mobile computing devices.

Management also wants to extend Google's advertising clout beyond the Web. The company is currently testing a program to place ads in 50 of the nation's largest newspapers and hopes to begin distributing radio ads by the end of this year.

Those grand ambitions are one of the reasons that Google shares keep climbing. The run-up makes Google's stock look fairly expensive by one widely used barometer known as the price-to-earnings, or p/e, multiple.

Analysts, on average, predict Google will earn $13.70 per share next year, leaving the company's p/e at about 37. By comparison, the p/e of Microsoft Corp.—the world's most prized technology company with a market value of nearly $300 billion—is about 21, based on analyst's 2007 earnings projections.

AR Rahman Concert @ Oracle Arena

As you all know that Oracle bought the oakland arena stadium next to the colliseium. There was a Concert of AR Rahman Live performance. Tickets were sold out over the weekend and there were few tickets listed on craigslist and in www.ticketmaster.com. We were doing research the day before for getting good seats in the concert as the tickets were too expensive starting at 25$ [upper level] and going upto 500$. We thought lets take a chance and give it a try for 25$ each. It was pretty ok with almost all seatings booked in the upper level by lotsof indians. We werent allowed to bringin cameras inside the concert. Went and got the tickets around 7:30 pm despite the traffic on 880N to oakland [one of the most hated highways in SFO]. Got there and to our surprise the tickets were still available at the counter, pooled in money and bought the tickets.


The concert began with a songs from GURU, and Rahman made his appearence on stage in his grey paijama suit. His voice wasnt audible so much but it was ok and the music was tremendous as it used to be when we listen on audio CDs or mp3's thats the speciality of Rahman show. There were songs screened for the movie Shivaji - all new songs rocked the show with dance nos. sequenced, it was lot of fun to watch hariharan, madhushree, shukwinder singh , chitra and lot of other playback singers with their beautiful and shrill voice that made us dance to the vibes. Rahman played the piano for Guru theme music, i just loved the piece. The concert lasted for almost 3.3 hrs and i really njoyed the show. Its was truly fantastic as i'm a great fan of Rahman. His music is everlasting and stays in your ears for ever. If anyone gets a chance to go to AR Rahman concert dont miss it. He performed this yr at Hongkong, Atlanta and then he came to San Franciso [Red wood city] then he has two more performances in Texas and NJersey i think....

This is the Tallest Tree with huge branches. If you would remember watching the Tree in Lord of the Ring you would know how significant is the trees growth.

This is the OCEAN View Trail. The home to mountain is 1.7 miles and is roughly 2.8 kms.