Analysis Shows...


The Canadian Press. Ottawa - If the federal government wants to cut costs, it may want to put bureaucrats through driving school. The government's books show fender benders, involving federal vehicles, in recent years cost taxpayers $28 million in repairs, or write-offs. An analysis by The Canadian Press of the government's audited financial statements since the 2000-01 fiscal year found thousands of federal vehicles have been in accidents. At least 8,511 motor-vehicle accidents have been reported in the Public Accounts of Canada. The actual tally is probably higher, since not all departments report the number of collisions in a given year. Two-thirds of the overall cost of collisions came from the Mounties. Vehicle accidents involving members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police cost the government $18.8 million. The RCMP has been in at least 4,596 motor-vehicle accidents since 2001, more than any other department or agency seen in Public Accounts documents. The RCMP's annual crash tallies have only been reported in the Public Accounts since 2006, so the 10-year total is likely far higher. The force has been getting in more and more accidents over the last five years. The number of RCMP accidents rose from 427 in 2006 to 1,068 last year.

Ventajas de Las Bayas Acai Berry


Baya acai es un hecho que en todo el mundo, la baya Acai ha cruzado la línea hacia el estrellato. Es que se habla en casi cada rincón de la World Wide Web y que ha aparecido en programas de televisión de discusion. Esta fruta se está comercializando a nivel mundial debido a su contenido de antioxidantes muy potentes que realmente puede romper los radicales libres en el cuerpo con el fin de evitar la acumulación que los resultados puedan a daños a las células del cuerpo. Otra razón de su valor de mercado es el aumento de las publicaciones de investigación creciente en las otras vitaminas y minerales que se encuentran en esta fruta misma. Aunque es pequeña, en realidad contiene más nutrientes que uno puede imaginar.
Al igual que la fruta de la baya de Acai, los suplementos de acai berry pretenden proporcionar a los consumidores los mismos beneficios. Según un anuncio de ciertos beneficios, como mejorar la atención mental y el pensamiento, disminución de la incidencia de estreñimiento que lleva a movimientos intestinales regulares, aumento repentino de los niveles de energía, y una limpieza final y los efectos de desintoxicación. La fruta açaí también se sabe que contienen los ácidos esenciales, como las altas cantidades de fitonutrientes, Ácido linoleico comúnmente conocido como el Omega 3 y ácido oleico que se conoce comúnmente como el omega 9 que se sabe que son buenos para el corazón también son reclamados contenidos de el suplemento Berry Acai más para los planes de dieta para las mujeres. Pero la demanda más reciente del complemento alimenticio consiste en la lucha contra el cáncer de colon.

Moral Dilemmas


Okay, i’ve got an idea, let’s try this hypothetical situation. Jack Bauer discovers that a terrorist, who happens to be a member of a certain ethnic group, has a suitcase nuke that he’s going to set off at camp grenada, vaporizing the hapless children of bourgeois east coast whiteys by the dozens. Bauer’s got mere days to act. he knows that if he just rounds up the members of this ethnic group, divides them in half, sends one half to work at slave labor and the other half to be stripped of all worldly possessions down to the skin and then gassed and burned in ovens, would it be justifiable? Take your time. I’ll wait.

A Nice Way to be Back


So... today I'm featured at my lovely friend's blog Sarah: Them Pretty Colors. I must say I almost said no to this lovely invitation because I am so shy and uncomfortable about having the focus and the lights on me. Then I decided it was no big deal, that I should just relax and not worry too much. Aren't I right. I'm glad I accepted and honored Sarah thought of me. I haven't posted much lately, not even giving any news. But it was quite for my good! I tend to think that when you need it, a break is always beneficital: I needed it. The truth is that I've been really absorbed by my body matters lately, concentrating on exercizing and way to improve my body shape. I'm an ex morbidly obese girl (I had always been fat all my life and I lost 155 lbs 12 years ago without any help) and it's a really long journey to re-appropriate your body back, polish the angles, shape, cure and forgive. I had been stable for years at US size 12 but thought last November it was time to work on my body again and lose some weight again. It's only last winter I could get rid of water retention (allelujah!), learn how to re-build my feet arches (that were flattened due to years of weight excess), correct my hip posture (and tone up my abs).
I'm trying also to help my loose skin with cosmetotextile clothes (and it works). All these things are done all alone without any help beside my sister's emotional support so, it's a path as long as it is one getting me very rich of experiences and excellent lessons learned. That's mainly why I wasn't there posting about cosmetics. As I'm typing those words I'm in the best shape I've ever been in my opinion (considering my body history, it's all relative) even if it's not won and finished yet. For now I'm a French size 38 (US size 6) for a 5'3'' which I think is not bad for a girl who was more than 290 lbs 12 years ago and more than a US size 24. Maybe someday will I post before/after pictures of me? Who knows! I have never done that. Mainly because I'm not the kind of person to stop, sit and watch behind. Once something is finished I set myself a new land to conquer! Anyway, I have a lot to show cosmetic talking and I hope I can keep a nice routine with my posts. I've been in a total lipstick craze lately, red especially so I'll probably show a lot of lips things I grabed here and there. I have some pictures done already but haven't really finished anything yet. Oh well. I guess everything will be just fine. Have a nice day!

Book Review - The Orchardist


The Orchardist is set in small-town America, on a fruit orchard that was built long before industry claimed the raising of apricots. The book spans several decades but focuses on the first few years at the turn of the twentieth century, between 1897 and 1911. It is threaded with beautiful scenes of the American West: wild horses being corralled, flicking their sweat and majestic manes, thundering their hooves; cowboys watching the twilight from a front porch while they roll their smokes; autumn hills, caught in the frame of the window on a newborn steam engine; Talmadge’s orchard itself, blushing with blossoms. Yet this book isn’t really about being an orchardist in Washington State at the turn of the century. It’s about longing, and the beginning of life and the end of life, and the simplistic living that goes on in the midst of what happens to us. "The trees bordered the pasture, which was filled with long grass, uncut and uneaten by any horses. The sound of water and the sound of wind in the trees, which were fed by the creek and so were partial to the creek, occupied Talmadge as he slept and woke. It was a sound highly expressive, highly communicable. He listened and thought, Yes, Yes". Someone asked me on Twitter a couple days ago if I was "enjoying" this story while I read it. I told her that, given its subject matter, “enjoying” didn’t feel like the right word. The novel touches upon topics that disturb me, that make me angry and disgusted because I know they exist in the world. 

I don’t know that it’s the goal of every book to be enjoyed. Some books are written to speak, to move. To disturb, to challenge. More appropriate than "enjoying", I think, would be to say that this novel got into me. In places, it reminded me of the way my mother tried so hard, for years and years to help my father before she finally understood that his soul had been broken beyond repair. And yet hope, hope is so precious. This novel made me feel. Hours after finishing it, I’m still remembering its scenes, wondering about the characters. Replaying the final few chapters. I especially loved a Christmas scene near the beginning that was so fleeting and yet so lovely, rustic and believably "family at the turn of the century", pressed into the book’s pages like a smile before a day drained of light. And that’s what this book is about family. Fathers, whether bonded by blood or hope. Daughters made, not by nature, but by the bonds that are created when nature pushes mankind into a hollow sinkhole and swallows. People who vanish and yet never really go away, and the feverish yearning to find them inside their anger. I think Coplin’s point in this work is that children carry us. Whether we live in joy or not, we birth a civilization that will go on without us. A future that will both remember and forget us. And maybe there is a certain beauty in the very idea that whatever we do, it can be the past someday. 

It can be a hundred years ago. Yet somehow, because we lived, because we dented people, because we tried valiantly to make it and maybe scratch out a square of humanity somewhere in the world, we are beautiful. And that beauty in us can never die, because it is buried in the earth, like the roots of trees. Our children, civilization cannot exist without the fruit we leave on the wind. We are all orchardists. It doesn’t matter when we go; we all lived, we planted lives. This point is made clear in the mirroring of Talmadge’s tale with his growing realization that his life as an orchardist is dying in a twentieth century America that is beginning to rely less on independent farmers and more on raging industry. Life goes forward. What once was makes the future, and the mistakes are the soul of today. I don’t know that there is a conclusion beyond this truth itself: and that is that we go on. Life renews itself, through its children. That the author manages to create hope, life, warmth, peace, even the sense of "coziness" I so prize in books like those by Laura Ingalls Wilder, while peppering the tale with tragedy, is testament to her talent. She manipulates the reader in the very best way, I think: causing a symphony of emotions that mirror real life by stealing the euphoria of joy by violence, hopelessness, and the human tendency to rebel against hindsight’s preferences. It’s exciting to be standing on the cusp of Amanda Coplin’s career. Some people are comparing her to John Steinbeck. I see that.

Book Review - Stop What You’re Doing and Read This


Haddon argues that the novel will endure because it’s the human experience, captured expertly by writers in just the right words placed in just the right order. No other art medium can match it. When we read, we are so immersed in the novel our brains believe we are experiencing the plot itself. We develop empathy and the ability to see life outside our own sheltered sphere because we climb into books and live a character’s experience. The very best writers make it so real to us we enter a mental place where we are living beyond ourselves. I also loved Tim Parks’ “Mindful Reading”, which I’ll sum up simply by quoting the final words in his essay: “The excitement of reading is the precarious one of being alive now, intensely mentally silently alive, and reacting from moment to moment, in the most liquid and intimate sphere of the mind, to someone else’s elusive construction of the precarious business of being alive now.” I underlined that paragraph, wrote “Yes yes yes” in my copy, and then circled it. On the emotional front, Jane Davis’s essay “A Reading Revolution” contains an incredibly moving passage about a group reading a poem in an unlikely setting, and their reaction to it. I won’t reveal that passage (and freely confess that I cry when I am inspired!), but I’ll sum up her essay with her own quote, too: “It is easy to see why, when dealing with literature or life stuff, people think it better if we stick to the surface of things and splash around up there, lightly pretending there are no depths, when the depths seem neither unplumbed and terrifying or, on the other hand, intimidatingly aesthetic, to do with a specialist, professionalized and narrow form of education”. Yes. That. Davis goes on to suggest that our society is afraid to face the inner life, we see it as a secret, a shame, something to keep quiet about.
Literature (poetry!) speaks our universal, silent fears and speaks them beautifully. It unites and inspires us and says: “Why is the soul such a quaking secret? We will be richer if we acknowledge our inner life together, Mrs. Dalloway style.” You see how the above essays seem to encourage reading deeply? For both intellectual depth and emotional acknowledgment? That’s what this collection is about. Reading for life, reading for depth, reading to transform our society. I think where the collection is a bit weak is that the audience for the collection is unclear until the final essay. Some essays seem to be directed at the British government, some at avid readers, some at non-readers, some at writers. It’s difficult to know who is supposed to be reading the book. One could say that the audience is whoever stops to pick up the book, and I’m actually comfortable with that, because I’d love to see everyone read it. But the collection could have been stronger with a bit more cohesion. (Though, in aftermath, I can see now how it all leads to the final essay).

I also wish that people outside Britain had contributed essays, though I appreciate that this is a manifesto written in reaction to the symptoms of a fading literary life in Britain in particular. I think the collection could have been even more universally impactful though, with voices representing the life of literature as it stands around the world  today. All of this said, as a reader, I very much appreciate this collection of essays, and I have a feeling avid readers would agree with me that it’s worth the read. The bits about “mindful reading” and the transformation of the brain and mind (and soul) through literature, were the most impactful, for this reader. The personal anecdotes put humanity itself into the collection. The final essay, which addresses the very real concern that innovations in technology will weaken the autonomy of the brain in the 21st century, offers far more questions than it does answers. But what it accomplishes is that it offers society a literary shake. It challenges whoever reads the book not to become a shallow thinker because of technology, but to use technology to think more deeply, to acquire more knowledge which will inspire still deeper critical thinking.

The answer seems to be, not that we are doomed to become an unintellectual species, but that we need to adapt our brains to technological innovations, and make sure we are continuing to challenge ourselves to both read and  think in the 21st century. The introduction of printed literature did not doom humanity as Socrates predicted, nor need the changes in the transportation of literature put an end to deep thinking in our generation. But we must face the fact that society will intake knowledge differently in the years to come, and develop new ways to enrich the minds of today’s future through literature in its current form. That’s a message I hope every lover of literature stands behind. As for me, having read this collection, I feel better able to answer non-readers who ask me, “Why should I  read a book?” I also feel challenged as a student heading into my first semester of literature next year: I feel warned not  to rely on Google for my papers at school and I feel encouraged by the thousands of years of critical thinking that precedes my life in literature.

How do Audio Amplifiers Work?


More important (for me at least) what is an audio amplifier? Well, first of all it was invented by a man named Lee De Forest, in 1909,  by somewhat of a mistake because initially he invented a device called the triode vacuum tube (more on this in a later post), which was used to play the very first AM radio! How cool is that? It later resulted in the first audio amplifier! So , basically the audio amplifier is actually an electronic amplifier that in some way exacerbates low power audio signals that are usually in between 20 and 20000 Hz (the human frequency range of hearing). Some of the first audio amplifiers were based on vacuum tubes or valves.

Today, they use transistors (BJT, FET and MOSFET), but there are also a few enthusiasts that prefer to use tube-based amplifiers and valves, click here for more audio amplifiers circuits. There are a few important design parameters when it comes to audio amplifiers such as gain , distortion, noise and frequency response. These work independently and often the increase in one disrupts the other ones, so a perfect balance must be reached accordingly to one’s uses with the amplifier. Most of them are linear and part of class AB. Since the digital era, the DVD’s for example, almost all amplifiers are designed to use flat linear signals so usually for these kind of device a selector or a volume button may suffice.

The true purpose of the powerful modern audio amplifier comes in handy when you’re thinking large halls for public speakers and gatherings, stadiums, concerts, cinema halls, theatres, home cinemas and instrument amplifiers such as for guitars! The best contribution by far, in my opinion , in the developing of the state of the art, modern amplifier was that of Peter Baxandall who thought of the comparison of the input distortion with the output distortion. This helped engineers allot in evaluating the distortion process within an amplifier, thus resulting in the better sound quality we get today!

Goji Berry - La Baya Anti-Oxidante


Goji-berry es probable que usted haya visto o escuchado sobre el jugo de Goji Berry. Con frecuencia es exaltada en los medios de comunicación como uno de los super frutos nuevos. Realmente es un fenómeno, pero ¿qué significa realmente para el cuerpo? Bueno, se dice que para acelerar el metabolismo, tiene gran valor nutricional y también puede afectar la longevidad. Análisis y resultados de la investigación han demostrado que el jugo de la baya del goji puede afectar la tasa de crecimiento y puede ayudar a conducir a una vida larga y saludable. Goji es un tipo de baya que no se encuentra comúnmente en los ee.uu. y puede ser usado para hacer este jugo muy especial. Se ha observado que muchas de las personas mayores hacen uso de este como el secreto de su larga vida. Los científicos han observado que contiene algunos anti-oxidantes muy importante. 
Estas sustancias ayudan a evitar que las células del cuerpo se descompongan y mueran, por lo tanto, conduce a una vida más larga. En estos días, el jugo de Goji Berry se ha convertido en un producto común en el mercado por lo que se ha convertido muy fácil de encontrar jugo de Goji sin hacer ningún tipo de búsqueda ardua. Así que hoy en día, este jugo importante puede fácilmente ser utilizado por todos en todo el mundo gracias a los avances en la ciencia y la tecnología. Muchas compañías de comida occidental regularmente promocionan las bayas de Goji Berry y afirman que son un derivado de la baya “goji tibetana”. Sin embargo, el Tíbet es sólo uno de los lugares en Asia donde las bayas de Goji crecen en la naturaleza, de modo que el jugo que compre puede ser o no ser en realidad del Tíbet. Independientemente de dónde se cultiva el grano, pruebe el jugo de goji para ver si usted experimenta cualquiera de los beneficios de salud calificado y experimentado por los orientales durantevarios  siglos.

The Story of the Statue of Liberty


The Statue of Liberty from New York or "Liberty Enlightening the World" (in everyday speech Miss Liberty or Lady Liberty) is a monument situated in Liberty Island port from New York City. It was placed at the entrance port of the island in 1886 in order to convey greetings of welcome to travelers arriving on American soil. The United States received this statue as a gift from France at the celebration of 100 years of U.S. independence. The statue has a height of 46.5 m without socket and of 93 m with socket. Its structure consists of an iron skeleton which is covered by a copper coating. The monument has a weight of 225 tons, and the color of the statue became green due to copper oxidation. Its star-shaped base is made of stone. Inside the statue is a open museum. The statue represents the goddess of liberty standing with one foot on the broken chain of slavery.

The goddess holds a plate in her left hand with the inscription "July IV MDCCLXXVI" (4 July 1776), the date on which the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America was ratified. In its right hand the statue holds a torch with a golden flame. The goddess wears a crown on its head, which is adorned with seven beams of light that symbolize the seven seas and continents, the 25 windows symbolizing the 25 gems of the world. The copper shell of the statue was designed by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi of Alsace and the metal frame by the engineer Gustave Eiffel, the famous architect, structural engineer and builder of the Eiffel Tower. The idea for the project of the Statue of Liberty is based on an observation that the French lawyer and politician Édouard René de Laboulaye made in 1865. In a conversation after a festive dinner at his home near Versailles, the enthusiastic supporters of the Northern States observed during the Civil War: "If a statue would be built in the United States, which commemorates its independence, then I think it is only natural that it arises through combined forces, a collaborative work between two nations".

These words inspired the sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, who was present as a guest at the feast. The first model at a small scale and cast in bronze was made in 1870 and presented at the Universal Exhibition from Paris in 1900. Since 1906, the model is held at the Jardin du Luxemburg, Paris. The initial project was meant to be a monumental lighthouse, planned to be located at the entrance of the Suez Canal, with the Colossus of Rhodes as a motive of inspiration. It should be noted that for the construction of this giant, 300 sheets of 2.5 mm brass hammer, weighing 80 tons, and internal reinforcement, weighing 100 tons, that were projected by the famous engineer Gustave Eiffel, were used. The statue has been built in Paris in 1884 but arrived in the U.S. only in 1886. The Statue of Liberty is today the emblem of the United States and one of the best known symbols of freedom and democracy from the whole world. Read more facts about science here.

Sooner Later or Never?


There are perfect crimes after all. Even when all the evidence points in one direction it is not strong enough to make a case. We have one of those cases right now in New York. The suspect is being released in a couple of months. There are many more cases that can compare of suspects that walk free after the most heinous crimes . Makes you wonder how many are in jail that shouldn’t be and how many are out that should be in. We have it backwards, it appears. Of course, that is the exception, or we hope. In those crimes and any unpunished wrong doing we are left to hope that at some point justice will be done for what they have done onto others. That the essence of true fairness of Divine Justice will call them to order or that their Karma, all their bad energy put out will return to them with the same impact. "You get what you give" either in this life or another life. That kind of justice seems to rely on vagueness and hope that some form of retribution will be done eventually. But if it delays or never comes, I always wonder whether there is punishment already in knowing we have done wrong onto others. Can we sleep at night or are we haunted by the ghost of our actions? I would hope that our conscience be our most just and rigid prosecutor. It is possible to escape every law but I hope it is not possible to escape ourselves. The crimes and wrong doing might not be as perfect as our sense of justice or at least I would hope so.