Actress Thandie Newton has revealed that she had to dump her ex-boyfriend because she fell in love with her future husband Ol Parker.
The ‘RocknRolla’ star said that she was head over heels in love with Parker when she met him in 1997.
“He wrote a screenplay called In Your Dreams that I filmed in 1997. It’’s [...]
Sim Lian Group, the builder cum property developer, says it recorded a profit after tax of $28.3 million in 1QFY2010, 25% higher than the $22.5 million recorded in 1QFY2009.
Revenue from property development division contributed $156.3 million to the group’s revenue in 1QFY2010 compared to $131.3 million in 1QFY2009, an increase of 19%.
Sim Lian says the increase in revenue from property development division was mainly due to percentage recognition of revenue from the following projects: Carabelle, Clover By The Park, The Lincoln Residences, The Amery, Parc Lumiere and Rochelle At Newton. This increase was partially offset by the decrease in revenue contribution from the projects The Premiere @ Tampines and Bleu at East Coast, which have obtained Temporary Occupation Permit in December 2008 and September 2008 respectively.
1675: Gottfried Leibniz writes the integral sign ∫  in an unpublished manuscript, introducing the calculus notation that’s still in use today.
Leibniz was a German mathematician and philosopher who readily crossed the lines between academic disciplines. He had a doctorate in law, served as secretary of the Nuremberg alchemical society and fancied himself a poet.
He also conducted [...]
Apple has rehired Michael Tchao, formerly a developer of the Newton personal digital assistant in the 1990s. Although Apple will likely remain tight-lipped about Tchao’s role, the hiring suggests that Apple could be gearing up to release its long-rumored tablet PC, which would fill a gap in Apples product line between the iPod and the MacBook, and come with a 7- to 10-inch screen and either the iPhone OS or Mac OS X.
– Apple has rehired Michael Tchao, a former developer of the companys long-dead Newton
personal digital assistant, to be its vice president of product marketing,
according to a report published in The New York Times and apparently confirmed
by Apple spokesperson Steve Dowling.
Apple did not ret…
Since publishing a series of posts on dating and living in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been asked several times how I came up with the idea to see dating as a kind of metaphor for life. The immediate source of the story was pretty mundane – someone asked me a question about another article and I used going on a date as an example to illustrate my answer, and thought “hey, there might be something to this more generally!â€
But the response to those stories has gotten me thinking about ideas and creativity more generally. Writers are asked all the time about where we get our ideas. So are musicians, painters, actors, designers, and other creative people. It’s a source of fascination for many, who perhaps see in the talent of others something they feel is missing from themselves.
Interestingly, most of the creative people I know don’t see their creative impulses as particularly exclusive. What separates the creative from the not-so-creative isn’t so much the ability to come up with ideas but the ability to trust them, or to trust ourselves to realize them. That trust lies at least in part in knowing we have the skills to bring forth a finished product from an initial idea, which is why so many creative people tend to take a craftsman’s (or woman’s) approach towards their work (and resent those who squander their ideas by refusing to do the groundwork needed to make them real), but skill is only part of it. There are plenty of skilled but not-particularly-creative people – hacks – in every field. What separates the creative from the not-so-creative is the willingness to take risks with ideas, to push both the idea and the self beyond the safe and comfortable.
There are two schools of thought about where ideas come from. One is the “artist as antenna†concept, in which ideas float in some barely perceptible aether waiting for someone to pick them up, the way a radio picks up a song when it’s tuned to just the right frequency. This is Keith Richards waking up in the middle of the night with the main riff from “Satisfaction†fully-formed in his head.
The second school holds that ideas are the product of hard work and thoughtful concentration. “It’s just work,†says Andy Warhol to Lou Reed about songwriting in Reed’s album, with John Cale, Songs for Drella. Sit down with a pad and pencil and think, and don’t get up until you have something! This school is the writer grinding out his or her 4 pages a day, the mad poet storming up and down the street in search of the perfect word to express exactly what s/he’s feeling, and the designer who sits down with a brief and just starts working.
The reality is probably somewhere in the middle – we get ideas from within ourselves and from without, or more to the point, from the interaction of the two. It is in the active engagement of the artist with his or her world, through preparation, conscious attention, curiosity, effort, and a dash of serendipity, that ideas are born:
These elements of creativity all play together, of course. How many millions of baths were taken before Archimedes had his “Eureka!†moment? Yet it was Archimedes who was prepared to understand what it meant when he climbed into his bath and saw the water level rise, Archimedes who paid attention to what he saw, Archimedes who was curious enough to wonder what was happening, Archimedes who was willing to do the follow-up work to translate his experience into a general principle about volume and displacement, and Archimedes who just happened to bring all this with him into the bath on that fateful day.
The thing is, these are all things each and every one of us can cultivate in her or his own life. They aren’t God-given gifts reserved to the few. And they apply well beyond the world of the arts – marketers, parents, teachers, factory workers, salespersons, electricians, computer programmers, and just about everyone else face situations that call for creative responses, though we often miss them for lack of preparation, attention, curiosity, effort, or serendipity. Start making a conscious effort to develop these elements, though, and I bet you’ll start engaging with your world more creatively in short order.
Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer’s Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he’s not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
1736: German physicist and instrument maker Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit dies in the Netherlands. His pioneering work on thermometers means he will live on, to a degree.
Fahrenheit (Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit in some accounts) was born in the Royal Prussian city of Danzig (now the Polish city of Gdansk) on May 14, 1686. His dad was a [...]
1982: It’s more than a quarter century since the start of the U.S.-Soviet space race. A decade after the seventh and final manned moon mission. Reusable space shuttles are already making regular sojourns, taking squads of astronauts back and forth into low-level orbit. But on this day, starry-eyed geeks get to witness something really special: [...]
Forget visits to stately homes, what about our geek heritage, asks Bill Thompson
About ten years ago I went on a family holiday to Cornwall, and one day I dragged my unwilling kids to a delightful but otherwise undistinguished beach so I could point out to them the spot where the world’s first undersea telegraph cable came ashore in 1870.
They were about as impressed by Porthcurno beach as they had been on our trip to the fabled Saxon burial site of Sutton Hoo, which my son memorably recalls as ‘mounds in a field’, but I felt a moment of geek joy that has stayed with me since.
That first cable linked Britain to India, and helped create a communications revolution that transformed the world.
The telegraph, as Tom Standage makes clear in his excellent book, was ‘The Victorian Internet’, and undersea cables were vital to its development. The cable at Porthcurno was the precursor of the Seacom cable that has just gone live in Kenya, and is a direct antecedent of the complex web of fibre-optic cables that make today’s internet possible.
The museum was closed on the day I made it to the beach, and no amount of persuasion would convince my kids that the drive was worth making a second time. But if I’d had The Geek Atlas with me I would have been able to plan my trip properly and managed to make it into tunnels, dug during the Second World War, and explored the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum.
GPS tracker
"It’s our geek heritage, and the more we make people aware of it the more likely it is to be preserved in some way"
Bill Thompson
Geek guide to tech treasures
John Graham-Cumming’s book The Geek Atlas is a travel guide for those interested in the history of science, mathematics and technology, and lists 128 sites around the world, including Porthcurno and nearby Polhdu from which Marconi made the first transatlantic radio transmission. And if I have to explain why there are 128 entries you shouldn’t be reading the book.
Locations range from the Jacquard Museum in Roubaix, France, where you can see the punched-card weaving technology that inspired Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine and led to modern computers, to the Stadtfriedhof in Gottingen, Germany.
Max Planck, Friedrich Wohler and David Hilbert are among the many notable scientists and mathematicians buried there, while Carl Gauss can apparently be found just across town in the Albanifiedhof.
It’s primarily a guidebook, with details of the historic importance of each site accompanied by visitor details and, of course, the precise latitude and longitude of each place listed so you can plug in into your GPS tracker and make sure you’re on exactly the right spot. If you don’t have a GPS tracker you’re probably outside the target market.
Summer break
But each entry also has background information on the science, maths or technology itself, with entries covering complex numbers (Broom Bridge, Dublin), penicillin (Alexander Fleming Laboratory, at St Mary’s Hospital, London) and the infinite loop (Apple HQ, Cupertino, CA), so it’s worth picking up even if you’re stuck inside during a typical British summer deluge.
Geeks cover the world, and the atlas offers places to visit in Australia, Ecuador, Japan and the Ukraine, but forty-five of them are in the UK and therefore more accessible than the magnetic north pole or the White Sands missile testing range in New Mexico, USA.
So if you’re planning a summer break in the UK this year, whether because of the financial situation, your desire to reduce your C02 output or just because it’s a lovely country, you should pack The Geek Atlas along with your National Trust handbook and good hotel guide.
Modern world
First stop, of course, has to be 51° 59′ 47.44" N, 0° 44′ 33.94" W – better known as Bletchley Park, home of the British code breaking efforts during the Second World War and now also the location of the fabulous National Museum of Computing, but you might also find time to visit Manchester for the Science Walk and the Eagle pub in Cambridge.
The site of the old Mathematical Laboratory where the EDSAC computer was built doesn’t get an entry, perhaps because it’s now a modern lecture theatre with a plaque on the wall, but I’m prepared to forgive that omission and head off to discover places I hadn’t even heard of, and find out more about the places where science, mathematics and technology happened or is still happening.
It’s our geek heritage, and the more we make people aware of it the more likely it is to be preserved in some way.
After all, the work that Hooke and Boyle and Newton did during the Enlightenment has had at least as much impact on the modern world as that of the artists, architects, authors and musicians who make it into the big national museums.
Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
By Denise Winterman
BBC News Magazine
Former boxing world champion Chris Eubank is having his teeth fixed and hopes it will cure his lisp. But is a speech impediment a barrier to success
Churchill, Newton, Darwin, Eubank – can you spot the odd one out If you’re talking about speech impediments then there isn’t one, they all had or have one. But in case of former boxing world champion Chris Eubank, not for much longer.
He is spending £30,000 on getting his teeth fixed and hopes it will cure his pronounced lisp. "Before long nobody will be able to accuse me of having a lisp," he says.
For a man who goes to great lengths to stand out from the crowd – note his penchant for tweeds, monocles and seven-tonne articulated lorries – it seems a strange move. After all, his lisp is one of the things he is best known for.
But his expensive dental work suggests he is still conscious of it at the age of 42. And judging by the bad puns in the papers’ coverage of the news, he has good reason. So how do you deal with a speech impediment
We will never really know with Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton, but we do know their stutters certainly didn’t hold them back professionally. The same can be said of Winston Churchill, he defined history with his words and actions – not his stammer.
Jonathan Ross famously cannot pronounce his Rs, a phonetic difficulty that is technically known as rhotacism. It hasn’t affected his multi-million pound career as a chat-show host and presenter, but it’s definitely one of the things that defines him in the public eye.
For James Alexander Gordon it was case of tackling it head on and overcoming it. As a child he suffered from slurred speech, a condition known as dysarthria, but it didn’t stop wanting to be a radio presenter.
‘Sobbing’
He has been the voice of the football results on BBC radio for over three decades, and his voice is so distinctive students in Sweden use it to practice their inflection.
"Speech therapists didn’t even exist back then but I had two strong-willed parents who drove me on," he says.
"I loved language and sounds from an early age and was encouraged to read and speak all the time. This love meant overcoming my impediment was a challenge, but never horrid or a chore.
SPEECH PROBLEMSSource: Speech Disorder
"I just kept at it and it took a combination of the mental and physical to succeed. Because of the support of my family I never thought I wouldn’t get rid of my slurred speech, it didn’t enter my head.
"The first time I read the news on BBC radio my parents were listening at home. My father disappeared from the room and my mother found him sobbing in their bedroom. He said ‘the wee bugger has done it’. He was proud and I’m proud of what I’ve overcome and achieved."
Specialists are quick to point out there is a wide array of speech impediments and communication disabilities, and like any spectrum some are more severe than others.
The causes are also varied and complex. Some people are born with them, while others acquire them because of anything from a stroke to acute shyness. In some cases specialists simply don’t understand why they happen.
‘Comfort zones’
But everyday, millions of people in the UK are coping with speech impediments which impact on every area of their lives.
"It’s inevitable because speaking is the way we conduct relationships and a way we get across our emotions and feelings," says Melanie Derbyshire, chief executive of the charity Speakability. "Relationships are involved in nearly everything we do."
For some people accepting their impediment is a large part of coping with it. From there techniques and exercises can help them manage it or lessen it.
Jaik Campbell has always had a stammer and it was actually speech therapy that made him take up stand-up comedy. It’s something he says he may never have done if things had been different.
"I had speech therapy to tackle my severe stammer and it encourages you to push your comfort zones and speak as much as you can," he says. "We’d go out with our teacher and have to ask strangers for directions, things like that. I just took it to the extreme."
He explains his stutter to the audience as part of his act, but it’s not central to it. While it hasn’t hindered his career, he says some venues are wary of booking him because they are unsure what to expect. In his opinion stuttering has made him a better comedian.
"Some venues are worried I will stutter so badly I won’t be able to get much out of my mouth," he says.
"But I have coping strategies, like learning my material word for word. I think that makes me better at what I do because I know my act inside out. I’ve seen comedians without a speech impediment try to wing it and completely bomb."
‘Exhausting’
But he feels he has also experienced discrimination. He’s been turned down for lots of jobs and was even asked if he was cold and needed the heating turned up in one interview because of his stammering.
He says talking about speech impediments is important, as once people understand a lot of the pressure is off the person who has it and who they are talking to.
However, for many people their speech impediment is always on their mind and influences nearly everything they do.
Gail Thretton suffers from cluttering, when syllables or phrases are repeated multiple times literally leaving a person’s speech cluttered with words
"The reality is my speech problems are on my mind all the time and I adapt my behaviour constantly and avoid situations," she says.
"I try to explain my problem to people, but it’s just exhausting doing that all of the time. If I’m not having a good day I just don’t go out so I don’t have to mix with strangers.
"I can laugh at my problem and see the funny side of it, but sometimes I just don’t want to. It’s not such a giggle if you live with it day and night."
Maybe in the case of Eubank, who on occasion has played along with the media’s jokes about his lisp, he’s had enough of people laughing at him and not with him.
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This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
My father’s garden gained momentum in May amassing to one thrilling river of colors and scents. But Inside my house, life wasn’t as pretty.
Yesterday, I was walking in my old neighborhood in Newton, MA, and I passed a house that I think of as “Ginny Hyde’s house.” It’s…
What it time? Is it the uniform, steady flow envisaged by Newton that helps us follow our daily routines? A spooky, purely subjective feeling? A dimension of Einstein’s space-time? Or simply the phenomenon that stops everything from happening all at once?
Science writer Dan Falk is on hand to discuss the neuroscience, the physics and the philosophy of chronology and poses the question – do we really know what time is?
James Randerson and Nell Boase join Alok for a round-up of the week’s science news including claims that vegetarians are 45% less likely to develop cancer of the blood compared with meat eaters, a monster haul of new dinosaur species discovered in the Australian outback, and the G8 nations’ battle with climate change.
We also visit the Royal Society’s Summer Exhibition to sink our teeth into some of the latest creations of science. Among the exhibits were a virtual cow, lasers that can treat cancer – and a very excitable and science-literate bunch of schoolchildren.
Don’t be shy …
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