Arun's Museum

Friendship Day

2009-07-27T21:08:00.000+05:30

Friendship Day celebrations take place on the first Sunday of August every year. The tradition of dedicating a day in honor of friends began in US in 1935. Gradually the festival gained popularity and today Friendship Day is celebrated in large number of countries including India. On this day people spend time with their friends and express love for them. Exchange of Friendship Day Gifts like flowers, cards and wrist bands is a popular tradition of this occasion.

There is not much literature on Friendship Day history as we celebrate today. However, there are numerous folktales and several instance in mythological legends that shows that friends and friendship have been valued since the beginning of civilized world. As an intrinsically social creature, men love to make friends to further this process of socialization.

History of Friendship Day in US

Considering the valuable role friends play in our life it was deemed to fit to have a day dedicated to friends and friendship. The United States Congress, in 1935, proclaimed first Sunday of August as the National Friendship Day. Since then, celebration of National Friendship Day became an annual event. The noble idea of honoring the beautiful relationship of friendship caught on with the people and soon Friendship Day became a hugely popular festival

Following the popularity and success of Friendship Day in US, several other countries adopted the tradition of dedicating a day to friends. Today, Friendship Day is enthusiastically celebrated by several countries across the world including India.

In 1997, the United Nations named Winnie - the Pooh as the world's Ambassador of Friendship.

Importance of Friendship in Bible
The Bible, the primary text of the western civilization, reflects upon friendship as the bond that forms the foundation to human faith, trust and companionship. Following verses from the bible aptly portray the importance of friends:

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”
Matthew 7:7

“Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
John 15:13-15

Besides, there are several tales from the Old Testament and the New Testament about the value of friendship and how true friendship is a treasure to unearth. A noticeable point is that, both the versions make a difference between the two broad meanings of friendship- one is a mere acquaintance, the other is a more affectionate relation.

In the Old Testament, Abraham is called the “friend of God” because of the intimacy of his relations. God speaks to Moses face to face “as a man…unto his friend” (Ex 33:11). The romantic friendship of Ruth and Naomi, the devotion of the subordinate Hushai for David, or the mutual relation between David and Jonathan - the Old Testament is replete with these interesting tales of friends and friendship.

In the New Testament, the relationship between Jesus and his disciples clearly depicts how human friendship can constantly grow. From being teacher and disciple, to lord and servant their relationship finally grew to an unparalleled friendship.

Importance of Friendship in Mahabharata
In the famous Hindu epic ‘Mahabharata’, Lord Krishna demonstrates the many colors of friendship - affection, romance, brotherhood, protection, guidance, intimacy and even teasing. Friendship is all about these and much more.

Evolution of LOGOs!

2008-10-10T20:18:00.005+05:30

APPLECANON

GOOGLE

IBM

MICROSOFT

MOTOROLA

FIREFOX

NOKIA

NORTEL

XEROX

PALM

The Top 10s!

2008-10-10T20:11:00.009+05:30

Great Failures!

2008-10-10T20:05:00.002+05:30

To succeed in business or life we must continually take remedial actions. Putting yourself on the line day after day can be extremely draining, especially when things do not work out as desired. Hence, each time a disappointing event happens, I like to get reminded of these famous failures:

Bill Gates founder and chairman of Microsoft, has literally changed the work culture of the world in the 21st century, by simplifying the way computer is being used. He was the world's richest man for more than one decade. However, in the 1970's before starting out, he was a Harvard University dropout. The most ironic part is that, he started a software company (that was soon to become Microsoft) by purchasing the software technology from "someone" for only $US50 back then.

Abraham Lincoln received no more than 5 years of formal education throughout his lifetime. When he grew up, he joined politics and had 12 major failures before he was elected the 16th President of the United States of America.

Isaac Newton was the greatest English mathematician of his generation. His work on optics and gravitation made him one of the greatest scientists the world has even known. Many thought that Isaac was born a genius, but he wasn't! When he was young, he did very poorly in grade school, so poor that his teachers became clueless in improving his grades.

Ludwig van Beethoven, a German composer of classical music, is widely regarded as one of history's supreme composers. His reputation has inspired ? and in many cases intimidated ? composers, musicians and audiences who were to come after him. Before the start of his career, Beethoven's music teacher once said of him "as a composer, he is hopeless". And during his career, he lost his hearing yet he managed to produce great music ? a deaf man composing music, ironic isn't!

Thomas Edison who developed many devices that greatly influenced life in the 20th century. Edison is considered one of the most prolific inventors in history, holding 1,093 U.S patents to his name. When he was a boy his teacher told him he was too stupid to learn anything. When he set out on his own, he tried more than 9,000 experiments before he created the first successful light bulb.

The Woolworth Company was a retail company that was one of the original five-and-ten- cent stores. The first Woolworth's store was founded in 1878 by Frank Winfield Woolworth and soon grew to become one of the largest retail chains in the world in the 20th century. Before starting his own business, Woolworth got a job in a dry goods store when he was 21. But his employer would not let him serve any customer because he concluded that Frank "didn't have enough common sense to serve the customers".

By acclamation, Michael Jordon is the greatest basketball player of all time. A phenomenal athlete with a unique combination of grace, speed, power, artistry, improvisational ability and an unquenchable competitive desire. Jordan single-handedly redefined the NBA superstar. Before joining NBA, Jordan was just an ordinary person, so ordinary that was he was removed from the high school basketball team because of his "lack of skill".

Walter Disney was American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor and animator. One of the most well-known motion picture producers in the world, Disney founded a production company. The corporation, now known as The Walt Disney Company, makes average revenue of US $30 billion annually. Disney started his own business from his home garage and his very first cartoon production went bankrupt. During his first press conference, a newspaper editor ridiculed Walt Disney because he had no good ideas in film production.

Winston Churchill failed the 6th grade. However, that never stopped him to work harder! He strived and eventually became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. Churchill is generally regarded as one of the most important leaders in Britain and world history. In a poll conducted by the BBC in 2002 to identify the "100 Greatest Britons", participants voted Churchill as the most important of all.

Steven Spielberg is an American film director. He has won 3 Academy Awards and ranks among the most successful filmmakers in history. Most of all, Steven was recognized as the financially most successful motion picture director of all time. During his childhood, Spielberg dropped out of junior high school. He was persuaded to come back and was placed in a learning-disabled class. He only lasted a month and then dropped out of school forever.

Albert Einstein was a theoretical physicist widely regarded as the most important scientist of the 20th century. He was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect in 1905 and "for his services to Theoretical Physics". However, when Einstein was young, his parents thought he was mentally retarded. His grades in school were so poor that a teacher asked him to quit, saying, "Einstein, you will never amount to anything!"

In 1947, one year into her contract, Marilyn Monroe was dropped by 20th Century-Fox because her producer thought she was unattractive and could not act. That didn't deter her at all! She kept on going and eventually she was recognized by the public as the 20th century's most famous movie star, sex symbol and pop icon.

John Grisham's first novel was rejected by sixteen agents and twelve publishing houses. He went on writing and writing until he became best known as a novelist and author for his works of modern legal drama. The media has coined him as one of the best novel authors even alive in the 21st century.

Henry Ford's first two automobile companies failed. That did not stop him from incorporating Ford Motor Company and being the first to apply assembly line manufacturing to the production of affordable automobiles in the world. He not only revolutionized industrial production in the United States and Europe, but also had such influence over the 20th century economy and society. His combination of mass production, high wages and low prices to consumers has initiated a management school known as "Fordism". He became one of the three most famous and richest men in the world during his time.

Soichiro Honda was turned down by Toyota Motor Corporation during a job interview as "engineer" after World War Two. He continued to be jobless until his neighbours starting buying his "home-made scooters". Subsequently, he set out on his own to start his own company. Honda. Today, the Company has grown to become the world's largest motorcycle manufacturer and one of the most profitable automakers - beating giant automaker such as GM and Chrysler. With a global network of 437 subsidiaries, Honda develops, manufactures and markets a wide variety of products ranging from small general-purpose engines and scooters to specialty sports cars.

Akio Morita, founder of giant electric household products, Sony Corporation, first product was an electric rice cooker, only sold 100 cookers (because it burned rice rather than cooking). Today, Sony generates US$66 billion in revenue and ranked as the world's 6th largest electronic and electrical company.

The Mind Boggling Truth!

2008-10-10T09:08:00.002+05:30

& Now if these Pics Leave u Mind Boggling,How about this Pic below??!!

This Picture shows the Galaxy with the stars spread throughout them!

This is the Picture of several Galaxies that comprise our Universe!

HUMBLING, ISN'T IT?

NOW HOW BIG ARE YOU?

AND HOW BIG ARE THE THINGS THAT UPSET YOU TODAY?

AND DON'T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF!

Lovely Thoughts!

2008-10-09T00:54:00.004+05:30

Who I Am Makes A Difference!

2008-10-09T00:23:00.012+05:30

Solve it,If u can!!

2008-09-22T13:38:00.003+05:30

This puzzle was posted on a website & no solutions were provided for it.
I tried hard,but i wasn't able to Solve it.
Lets see if anybody could solve it!

Here is the Actual PUZZLE:
4 criminals are caught and are to be punished. The Judge allows them to be freed if they can solve a puzzle. If they do not, they will be hung. They agreed.

The 4 criminals are lined up on some steps (shown in picture). They are all facing in the same direction. A wall separates the fourth man from the other three.

So to summarize:-
Man 1 can see men 2 and 3.
Man 2 can see man 3.
Man 3 can see none of the others.
Man 4 can see none of the others.

The criminals are wearing hats. They are told that there are two white hats and two black hats. The men initially don't know what colour hat they are wearing. They are told to shout out the color of the hat that they are wearing as soon as they know for certain what colour it is.

They are not allowed to turn round or move.
They are not allowed to talk to each other.
They are not allowed to take their hats off.

Who is the first person to shout out and why?

Some Brain Teasers for You!!

2008-09-22T11:20:00.005+05:30

I will you give Four Brain Teasers (or Puzzles),you can post your Answers as Comments for the Post..

Rules:

1. No cheating.

2. No googling...

3. First 5 correct answers will be winners...

4. After the winners are selected, they will be asked to reason out their answers.

5. No more answers will be accepted as it causes quarrel amongst the Readers....

PUZZLE: A -[The Man in The Elevator]

A man lives on the tenth floor of a building. Every morning he takes the elevator down to the lobby and leaves the building. In the evening, he gets into the elevator, and, if there is someone else in the elevator - or if it was raining that day - he goes back to his floor directly. Otherwise, he goes to the seventh floor and walks up three flights of stairs to his apartment. How come?

PUZZLE: B -[The 3 Bulbs]

Imagine you are in a room with 3 switches. In an adjacent room there are 3 bulbs (let's say in lamps which are on a regular table), each switch belongs to one bulb. All are off at the moment. It is impossible to see from one room to another. No help from anybody else is allowed.
How can you find out which switch belongs to which bulb, if you may enter the room with the bulbs only once?

PUZZLE: C -[A Mathematical puzzle]

Can u tell two numbers whose product should be one Lakh?
Note:The two numbers should not contain zeroes or decimals in it.

PUZZLE: D -[The Odd Gem]

There are a total of nine gems - all looking alike and with same colour and shape. The only thing is that there is only one real gem and it weighs more than the others. All the other Gems weigh equal.You are given a balance.You can use this balance for a maximum of two times and trace out the real gem which is little heavier than others. How would you do that ?

If u could Trace the Answers,Pls leave them as comments for this Post!!

Throw away your Worries & Enjoy every moment of your Life!!

2008-09-22T11:08:00.003+05:30

Friends,here is a short story i read,with Great Morals of Life in it!!

THE DONKEY

One day a farmer's donkey fell down into a well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do. Finally, he decided the animal was old, and the well needed to be covered up anyway; it just wasn't worth it to retrieve the donkey.

He invited all his neighbors to come over and help him. They all grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well. At first, the donkey realized what was happening and cried horribly. Then, to everyone's amazement he quieted down.

A few shovel loads later, the farmer finally looked down the well. He was astonished at what he saw. With each shovel of dirt that hit his back, the donkey was doing something amazing. He would shake it off and take a step up.

As the farmer's neighbors continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up. Pretty soon, everyone was amazed as the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and happily trotted off!

MORAL :
Life is going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds of dirt. The trick to getting out of the well is to shake it off and take a step up. Each of our troubles is a steppingstone. We can get out of the deepest wells just by not stopping, never giving up! Shake it off and take a step up.

Remember these simple rules to be happy:

1. Free your heart from hatred - Forgive.

2. Free your mind from worries - Most never happens.

3. Live simply and appreciate what you have.

4.Give More & Expect Less.

Interview with Warren Buffet

2008-08-17T08:46:00.006+05:30

For those who don't know Warren Buffet,a brief introduction:

Warren Edward Buffett (born August 30, 1930, in Omaha, Nebraska) is an American investor, businessman and philanthropist.He is regarded as one of the world's greatest investors and is the largest shareholder and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.With an estimated net worth of around US$62 billion,he was ranked by Forbes as the richest person in the world as of February 11, 2008.

Often called the "Oracle of Omaha,"Buffett is noted for his adherence to the value investing philosophy and for his personal frugality despite his immense wealth.His 2006 annual salary was about $100,000, which is small compared to senior executive remuneration in other comparable companies.When he spent $9.7 million of Berkshire's funds on a business jet in 1989, he jokingly named it "The Indefensible" because of his past criticisms of such purchases by other CEOs.He lives in the same house in the central Dundee neighborhood of Omaha that he bought in 1958 for $31,500, today valued at around $700,000.

Buffett is also a noted philanthropist.In 2006, he announced a plan to give away his fortune to charity, with 83% of it going to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.He has donated around $35 billion to charity.In 2007, he was listed among Time's 100 Most Influential People in The World.He also serves as a member of the board of trustees at Grinnell College.

I Like him very much,Not because of his wealth,but his simplicity & attitude.
In this post im going to post the highlights of his one hour interview with CNBC.
After reading this one,i hope everyone will understand why he is the World's Richest Man..

Here are some very interesting aspects of his life:

1. He bought his first share at age 11 and he now regrets that he started too late!

2. He bought a small farm at age 14 with savings from delivering newspapers.

3. He still lives in the same small 3-bedroom house in mid-town Omaha , that he bought after he got married 50 years ago. He says that he has everything he needs in that house. His house does not have a wall or a fence.

4. He drives his own car everywhere and does not have a driver or security people around him.

5. He never travels by private jet, although he owns the world's largest private jet company.

6. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns 63 companies. He writes only one letter each year to the CEOs of these companies, giving them goals for the year. He never holds meetings or calls them on a regular basis. He has given his CEO's only two rules:
Rule number 1: do not lose any of your share holder's money.
Rule number 2: Do not forget rule number 1.

7. He does not socialize with the high society crowd. His past time after he gets home is to make himself some pop corn and watch Television.

8. Bill Gates, the world's richest man met him for the first time only 5 years ago. Bill Gates did not think he had anything in common with Warren Buffet. So he had scheduled his meeting only for half hour. But when Gates met him, the meeting lasted for ten hours and Bill Gates became a devotee of Warren Buffet.

9. Warren Buffet does not carry a cell phone, nor has a computer on his desk.

His advice to youngsters: "Stay away from credit cards and invest in yourself and Remember:

A. Money doesn't create man but it is the man who created money.

B. Live your life as simple as you are.

C. Don't do what others say, just listen to them, but do what makes you feel good.

D. Don't go on brand name; just wear those things in which you feel comfortable.

E. Don't waste your money on unnecessary things; just spend on things that you really need.

F. After all it's your life, then why give others the chance to rule your life."

Beauty of Santorini Island in Greece

2008-08-16T21:41:00.009+05:30

Santorini is a small, circular archipelago of volcanic islands located in the southern Aegean Sea, about 200 km southeast from Greece's mainland. It is also known as Thera, forming the southernmost member of the Cyclades group of islands, with an area of approximately 73 km² (28 mi²) and a 2001 census population of 13,670. It is comprised of the Municipality of Thíra (pop. 12,440) and the Community of Oía (pop. 1,230, which includes 268 inhabitants resident on the offshore island of Therasia, lying to the west). These have a total land area of 90.623 km², which also includes the uninhabited islands of Nea Kameni, Palaia Kameni, Aspronisi, and Christiani (all part of the Municipality of Thira).

Wow,Isn't the Entire village like a Painting!

Politics-Best Explained

2008-04-06T09:55:00.001+05:30

DEMOCRATIC	You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. You feel guilty for being successful. Barbara Streisand sings for you.
REPUBLICAN	You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. So?
SOCIALIST	You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor. You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.
COMMUNIST	You have two cows. The government seizes both and provides you with milk. You wait in line for hours to get it. It is expensive and sour.
CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE	You have two cows. You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.
BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE	You have two cows. Under the new farm program the government pays you to shoot one, milk the other, and then pours the milk down the drain.
AMERICAN CORPORATION	You have two cows. You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one. You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have downsized and are reducing expenses. Your stock goes up.
FRENCH CORPORATION	You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows. You go to lunch and drink wine. Life is good.
JAPANESE CORPORATION	You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains. Most are at the top of their class at cow school.
GERMAN CORPORATION	You have two cows. You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour. Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.
ITALIAN CORPORATION	You have two cows but you don't know where they are. While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman. You break for lunch. Life is good.
RUSSIAN CORPORATION	You have two cows. You have some vodka. You count them and learn you have five cows. You have some more vodka. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.
TALIBAN CORPORATION	You have all the cows in Afghanistan , which are two. You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature's private parts. You get a $40 million grant from the US government to find alternatives to milk production but use the money to buy weapons.
IRAQI CORPORATION	You have two cows. They go into hiding. They send radio tapes of their mooing.
POLISH CORPORATION	You have two bulls. Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.
BELGIAN CORPORATION	You have one cow. The cow is schizophrenic. Sometimes the cow thinks he's French, other times he's Flemish. The Flemish cow won't share with the French cow. The French cow wants control of the Flemish cow's milk. The cow asks permission to be cut in half. The cow dies happy.
FLORIDA CORPORATION	You have a black cow and a brown cow. Everyone votes for the best looking one. Some of the people who actually like the brown one best accidentally vote for the black one. Some people vote for both. Some people vote for neither. Some people can't figure out how to vote at all. Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which one you think is the best-looking cow.
CALIFORNIA CORPORATION	You have millions of cows. They make real California cheese. Only five speak English. Most are illegals. Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.

Disable error reporting in WindowsXP

2008-03-08T12:31:00.000+05:30

If error reporting in XP is bugging you then turn it off.

When a system error occurs in XP, a little dialog box appears asking if you want to report the error to Microsoft.

To disable error reporting, follow these directions:

1. Right-click My Computer and choose Properties.

2. Click the Advanced tab on your System Properties dialog box.

3. Click the Error Reporting button on the Advanced tab.

4. Place a checkmark next to "Disable error reporting."

5. Leave the other radio button unchecked next to the text labeled, "But notify me when critical errors occur."

6. Click OK.

Block Websites in WindowsXP

2008-03-08T12:26:00.004+05:30

Block Websites in WindowsXP(without any software)

Steps

1] Browse C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc
2] Find the file named "HOSTS"
3] Open it in notepad
4] Under "127.0.0.1 localhost" Add 127.0.0.2 www.orkut.com , and that site will no longer be accessable.
5] Done!

example :

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.2 www.orkut.com

- www.orkut.com is now unaccessable

For every site after that you want to add, just add "1" to the last number in the internal ip (127.0.0.2) and then the addy like before.

IE:
127.0.0.3 www.yahoo.com
127.0.0.4 www.msn.com
127.0.0.5 www.google.com

This also works with banner sites, just find the host name of the server with the banners and do the same thing with that addy.

Hope this small tutorial could keep you going in simple way of blocking websites

Hide Disk Drives in WindowsXP

2008-03-08T12:26:00.000+05:30

Open Registry and navigate to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer". Create a new entry by clicking on edit-> new->"Dword value". Name the value as 3fffffff.
Now each drive letter has a number. The value of the key will be the sum of the drive letter numbers. Some of the numbers are :

A:=1, B:=2,C:\4,D:=8,e:=16,f:=32,g:=64,H:=128,I:=256,j:=512,k:=1024,L:=2048 and so on. ..... Now if you want to hide "C:" and "D:" , you just have to enter value as '12'(4+8). Enter as decimal value in the dword key and restart windows.
To get back your drives just delete the key called "3fffffff".

Protecting a Folder in WindowsXP

2008-03-08T12:24:00.001+05:30

Its true that microsoft named all its COM objects with a unique CLSID. This ID is responsible for any behaviorial instinct in your file system. So the trick is very simple. IF we could somehow apply this trick to change the behaviour of a folder created by you with some system defined ones, our job will be over.
To do this let us create a folder named "abc" (without quotes). Now, you need to assign something to this folder so that it could be disallowed to open... Just there is a CLSID to do that.
open notepad and write

"ren abc abc.{2559a1f2-21d7-11d4-bdaf-00c04f60b9f0}" without quotes. Save the file with ".bat" extension. Let us save it as protect.bat (This is the extension of batch files) in the same location where the folder in so that it can be directly be called upon. I mean to say you need to create the batch file in the parent directory of abc. Double click on the file and your folder will be locked.

To unprotect it just change the line to this:
"ren abc.{2559a1f2-21d7-11d4-bdaf-00c04f60b9f0} abc"

Play with REGEDIT in Windows XP

2008-03-08T12:22:00.002+05:30

Well, the total thing is going very long, lets do it in short. Open registry and navigate to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/CurrentVersion/Policies\explorer". Under this create a DWORD-Value and name it from the list below to impose restriction. The value of which will be 1 to restrict and 0 to remove restriction. Lets look at the following list:

NoDeletePrinter: Disables Deletion of already installed Printers

NoAddPrinter: Disables Addition of new Printers

NoRun : Disables or hides the Run Command

NoSetFolders: Removes Folders from the Settings option on Start Menu (Control Panel, Printers, Taskbar)

NoSetTaskbar: Removes Taskbar system folder from the Settings option on Start Menu

NoFind: Removes the Find Tool (Start >Find)

NoDrives: Hides and does not display any Drives in My Computer

NoNetHood: Hides or removes the Network Neighborhood icon from the desktop

NoDesktop: Hides all items including, file, folders and system folders from the Desktop

NoClose: Disables Shutdown and prevents the user from normally shutting down Windows.

NoSaveSettings: Means to say, 'Don't save settings on exit'

DisableRegistryTools: Disable Registry Editing Tools (If you disable this option, the Windows Registry Editor(regedit.exe) too will not work.). So be very careful.

NoRecentDocsHistory: Removes Recent Document system folder from the Start Menu (IE 4 and above)

NoFileMenu _ Hides the Files Menu in Explorer

NoActiveDesktop - No Active Desktop

NoActiveDesktopChanges- No changes allowed

NoInternetIcon - No Internet Explorer Icon on the Desktop

NoFavoritesMenu - Hides the Favorites menu

NoChangeStartMenu _ Disables changes to the Start Menu

NoFolderOptions _ Hides the Folder Options in the Explorer

NoLogoff - Hides the Log Off .... in the Start Menu

NoViewOnDrive – Restrict a drive to open

NoTrayContextMenu - No context menu in tray.

NoStartMenuSubFolders
NoWindowsUpdate
NoViewContextMenu
EnforceShellExtensionSecurity
LinkResolveIgnoreLinkInfo
NoDriveTypeAutoRun
NoStartBanner
NoSetActiveDesktop
NoNetConnectDisconnect

ClearRecentDocsOnExit: Clears the Recent Documents system folder on Exit.

RestrictRun - Disables all exe programs except those listed in the RestrictRun subkey

Under the same key "HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/CurrentVersion/Policies" you can create new subkeys other than the already existing Explorer key. Now create a new key and name it System. Under this new key, system we can create the following new DWORD values(1 for enabling the particular option and 0 for disabling the particular
option):
· NODispCPL: Hides Control Panel
· NoDispBackgroundPage: Hides Background page.
· NoDispScrsavPage: Hides Screen Saver Page
· NoDispAppearancePage: Hides Appearance Page
· NoDispSettingsPage: Hides Settings Page
· NoSecCPL: Disables Password Control Panel
· NoPwdPage: Hides Password Change Page
· NoAdminPaqe: Hides Remote Administration Page
· NoProfilePage: Hides User Profiles Page
· NoDevMgrPage: Hides Device Manager Page
· NoConfigPage: Hides Hardware Profiles Page
· NoFileSysPage: Hides File System Button
· NoVirtMemPage: Hides Virtual Memory Button
Similarly, if we create a new subkey named WinOldApp, we can add the following
DWORD values under it(1 for enabling the particular option and 0 for disabling the
particular option):
Disabled: Disable MS-DOS Prompt
NoRealMode: Disable Single-Mode MS-DOS

Hidden Windows XP Programs

2008-03-08T12:18:00.001+05:30

Below are the lists of some of the Hidden Programs in the Windows XP operating System. Go to start and select Run. There typing the command on right side of the list will open the application in the left side.

SQL Client Configuration - cliconfg
System Configuration Editor - sysedit
System Configuration Utility - msconfig
System File Checker Utility (Scan Immediately)- sfc /scannow
System File Checker Utility (Scan Once At Next Boot)- sfc /scanonce
System File Checker Utility (Scan On Every Boot) - sfc /scanboot
System File Checker Utility (Return to Default Setting)- sfc /revert
System File Checker Utility (Purge File Cache)- sfc /purgecache
System File Checker Utility (Set Cache Size to size x)-sfc/cachesize=x
System Information- msinfo32
System Properties - sysdm.cpl
Task Manager - taskmgr
TCP Tester - tcptest
Telnet Client - telnet
Tweak UI (if installed) - tweakui
User Account Management- nusrmgr.cpl
Utility Manager - utilman
Windows Address Book - wab
Windows Address Book Import Utility - wabmig
Windows Backup Utility (if installed)- ntbackup
Windows Explorer - explorer
Windows Firewall- firewall.cpl
Windows Magnifier- magnify
Windows Management Infrastructure - wmimgmt.msc
Windows Media Player - wmplayer
Windows Messenger - msmsgs
Windows Picture Import Wizard (need camera connected)- wiaacmgr
Windows System Security Tool - syskey
Windows Update Launches - wupdmgr
Windows Version (to show which version of windows)- winver
Windows XP Tour Wizard - tourstart
Wordpad - write
Password Properties - password.cpl
Performance Monitor - perfmon.msc
Phone and Modem Options - telephon.cpl
Phone Dialer - dialer
Pinball Game - pinball
Power Configuration - powercfg.cpl
Printers and Faxes - control printers
Printers Folder - printers
Private Character Editor - eudcedit
Quicktime (If Installed)- QuickTime.cpl
Quicktime Player (if installed)- quicktimeplayer
Real Player (if installed)- realplay
Regional Settings - intl.cpl
Registry Editor - regedit
Registry Editor - regedit32
Remote Access Phonebook - rasphone
Remote Desktop - mstsc
Removable Storage - ntmsmgr.msc
Removable Storage Operator Requests - ntmsoprq.msc
Resultant Set of Policy (XP Prof) - rsop.msc
Scanners and Cameras - sticpl.cpl
Scheduled Tasks - control schedtasks
Security Center - wscui.cpl
Services - services.msc
Shared Folders - fsmgmt.msc
Shuts Down Windows - shutdown
Sounds and Audio - mmsys.cpl
Spider Solitare Card Game - spider
Malicious Software Removal Tool - mrt
Microsoft Access (if installed) - access.cpl
Microsoft Chat - winchat
Microsoft Excel (if installed) - excel
Microsoft Frontpage (if installed)- frontpg
Microsoft Movie Maker - moviemk
Microsoft Paint - mspaint
Microsoft Powerpoint (if installed)- powerpnt
Microsoft Word (if installed)- winword
Microsoft Syncronization Tool - mobsync
Minesweeper Game - winmine
Mouse Properties - control mouse
Mouse Properties - main.cpl
Nero (if installed)- nero
Netmeeting - conf
Network Connections - control netconnections
Network Connections - ncpa.cpl
Network Setup Wizard - netsetup.cpl
Notepad - notepad
Nview Desktop Manager (If Installed)- nvtuicpl.cpl
Object Packager - packager
ODBC Data Source Administrator- odbccp32.cpl
On Screen Keyboard - osk
Opens AC3 Filter (If Installed) - ac3filter.cpl
Outlook Express - msimn
Paint - pbrush
IP Configuration (Display Connection Configuration) - ipconfi/all
IP Configuration (Display DNS Cache Contents)- ipconfig /displaydns
IP Configuration (Delete DNS Cache Contents)- ipconfig /flushdns
IP Configuration (Release All Connections)- ipconfig /release
IP Configuration (Renew All Connections)- ipconfig /renew
IP Configuration(RefreshesDHCP&Re-RegistersDNS)-ipconfig/registerdns
IP Configuration (Display DHCP Class ID)- ipconfig/showclassid
IP Configuration (Modifies DHCP Class ID)- ipconfig /setclassid
Java Control Panel (If Installed)- jpicpl32.cpl
Java Control Panel (If Installed)- javaws
Keyboard Properties - control keyboard
Local Security Settings - secpol.msc
Local Users and Groups - lusrmgr.msc
Logs You Out Of Windows - logoff.....
Accessibility Controls - access.cpl
Accessibility Wizard - accwiz
Add Hardware - Wizardhdwwiz.cpl
Add/Remove Programs - appwiz.cpl
Administrative Tools control - admintools
Adobe Acrobat (if installed) - acrobat
Adobe Designer (if installed)- acrodist
Adobe Distiller (if installed)- acrodist
Adobe ImageReady (if installed)- imageready
Adobe Photoshop (if installed)- photoshop
Automatic Updates - wuaucpl.cpl
Bluetooth Transfer Wizard - fsquirt
Calculator - calc
Certificate Manager - certmgr.msc
Character Map - charmap
Check Disk Utility - chkdsk
Clipboard Viewer - clipbrd
Command Prompt - cmd
Component Services - dcomcnfg
Computer Management - compmgmt.msc
Control Panel - control
Date and Time Properties - timedate.cpl
DDE Shares - ddeshare
Device Manager - devmgmt.msc
Direct X Control Panel (If Installed)- directx.cpl
Direct X Troubleshooter- dxdiag
Disk Cleanup Utility- cleanmgr
Disk Defragment- dfrg.msc
Disk Management- diskmgmt.msc
Disk Partition Manager- diskpart
Display Properties- control desktop
Display Properties- desk.cpl
Display Properties (w/Appearance Tab Preselected)- control color
Dr. Watson System Troubleshooting Utility- drwtsn32
Driver Verifier Utility- verifier
Event Viewer- eventvwr.msc
Files and Settings Transfer Tool- migwiz
File Signature Verification Tool- sigverif
Findfast- findfast.cpl
Firefox (if installed)- firefox
Folders Properties- control folders
Fonts- control fonts
Fonts Folder- fonts
Free Cell Card Game- freecell
Game Controllers- joy.cpl
Group Policy Editor (XP Prof)- gpedit.msc
Hearts Card Game- mshearts
Help and Support- helpctr
HyperTerminal- hypertrm
Iexpress Wizard- iexpress
Indexing Service- ciadv.msc
Internet Connection Wizard- icwconn1
Internet Explorer- iexplore
Internet Properties- inetcpl.cpl
Internet Setup Wizard- inetwiz

GPS-Global Positioning System

2008-02-04T22:07:00.000+05:30

I have been wondering for many days,thinking how the GPS works.Then i finally got an idea of this awesome invention through this article.I hope you too will gain some knowledge about the GPS through this article.

Our ancestors had to go to pretty extreme measures to keep from getting lost. They erected monumental landmarks, laboriously drafted detailed maps and learned to read the stars in the night sky.

Things are much, much easier today. For less than $100, you can get a pocket-sized gadget that will tell you exactly where you are on world at any moment. As long as you have a GPS receiver and a clear view of the sky, you'll never be lost again.

In this article, we'll find out how these handy guides pull off this amazing trick. As we'll see, the Global Positioning System is vast, expensive and involves a lot of technical ingenuity, but the fundamental concepts at work are quite simple and intuitive.

When people talk about "a GPS," they usually mean a GPS receiver. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is actually a constellation of 27 Earth-orbiting satellites(24 in operation and three extras in case one fails). The U.S. military developed and implemented this satellite network as a military navigation system, but soon opened it up to everybody else.

Photo courtesy NASA
NAVSTAR GPS satellite

Each of these 3,000- to 4,000-pound solar-powered satellites circles the globe at about 12,000 miles (19,300 km), making two complete rotations every day. The orbits are arranged so that at any time, anywhere on Earth, there are at least four satellites "visible" in the sky.

Photo courtesy U.S. Department of Defense
Artist's concept of the GPS satellite constellation

A GPS receiver's job is to locate four or more of these satellites, figure out the distance to each, and use this information to deduce its own location. This operation is based on a simple mathematical principle called trilateration. Trilateration in three-dimensional space can be a little tricky, so we'll start with an explanation of simple two-dimensional trilateration.

2-D Trilateration

Imagine you are somewhere in the United States and you are TOTALLY lost -- for whatever reason, you have absolutely no clue where you are. You find a friendly local and ask, "Where am I?" He says, "You are 625 miles from Boise, Idaho."

This is a nice, hard fact, but it is not particularly useful by itself. You could be anywhere on a circle around Boise that has a radius of 625 miles, like this:

You ask somebody else where you are, and she says, "You are 690 miles from Minneapolis, Minnesota ." Now you're getting somewhere. If you combine this information with the Boise information, you have two circles that intersect. You now know that you must be at one of these two intersection points, if you are 625 miles from Boise and 690 miles from Minneapolis.

If a third person tells you that you are 615 miles from Tucson, Arizona, you can eliminate one of the possibilities, because the third circle will only intersect with one of these points. You now know exactly where you are -- Denver, Colorado

This same concept works in three-dimensional space, as well, but you're dealing with spheres instead of circles.

3-D Trilateration

Fundamentally, three-dimensional trilateration isn't much different from two-dimensional trilateration, but it's a little trickier to visualize. Imagine the radii from the previous examples going off in all directions. So instead of a series of circles, you get a series of spheres.

If you know you are 10 miles from satellite A in the sky, you could be anywhere on the surface of a huge, imaginary sphere with a 10-mile radius. If you also know you are 15 miles from satellite B, you can overlap the first sphere with another, larger sphere. The spheres intersect in a perfect circle. If you know the distance to a third satellite, you get a third sphere, which intersects with this circle at two points.

The Earth itself can act as a fourth sphere -- only one of the two possible points will actually be on the surface of the planet, so you can eliminate the one in space. Receivers generally look to four or more satellites, however, to improve accuracy and provide precise altitude information.

Photo courtesy U.S. Army
A GPS satellite

In order to make this simple calculation, then, the GPS receiver has to know two things:

The location of at least three satellites above you
The distance between you and each of those satellites

The GPS receiver figures both of these things out by analyzing high-frequency, low-power radio signals from the GPS satellites. Better units have multiple receivers, so they can pick up signals from several satellites simultaneously.

Radio waves are electromagnetic energy, which means they travel at the speed of light (about 186,000 miles per second, 300,000 km per second in a vacuum). The receiver can figure out how far the signal has traveled by timing how long it took the signal to arrive.

GPS Calculations

On the previous page, we saw that a GPS receiver calculates the distance to GPS satellites by timing a signal's journey from satellite to receiver. As it turns out, this is a fairly elaborate process.

At a particular time (let's say midnight), the satellite begins transmitting a long, digital pattern called a pseudo-random code. The receiver begins running the same digital pattern also exactly at midnight. When the satellite's signal reaches the receiver, its transmission of the pattern will lag a bit behind the receiver's playing of the pattern.

The length of the delay is equal to the signal's travel time. The receiver multiplies this time by the speed of light to determine how far the signal traveled. Assuming the signal traveled in a straight line, this is the distance from receiver to satellite.

In order to make this measurement, the receiver and satellite both need clocks that can be synchronized down to the nanosecond. To make a satellite positioning system using only synchronized clocks, you would need to have atomic clocks not only on all the satellites, but also in the receiver itself. But atomic clocks cost somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000, which makes them a just a bit too expensive for everyday consumer use.

The Global Positioning System has a clever, effective solution to this problem. Every satellite contains an expensive atomic clock, but the receiver itself uses an ordinary quartz clock, which it constantly resets. In a nutshell, the receiver looks at incoming signals from four or more satellites and gauges its own inaccuracy. In other words, there is only one value for the "current time" that the receiver can use. The correct time value will cause all of the signals that the receiver is receiving to align at a single point in space. That time value is the time value held by the atomic clocks in all of the satellites. So the receiver sets its clock to that time value, and it then has the same time value that all the atomic clocks in all of the satellites have. The GPS receiver gets atomic clock accuracy "for free."

When you measure the distance to four located satellites, you can draw four spheres that all intersect at one point. Three spheres will intersect even if your numbers are way off, but four spheres will not intersect at one point if you've measured incorrectly. Since the receiver makes all its distance measurements using its own built-in clock, the distances will all be proportionally incorrect.

The receiver can easily calculate the necessary adjustment that will cause the four spheres to intersect at one point. Based on this, it resets its clock to be in sync with the satellite's atomic clock. The receiver does this constantly whenever it's on, which means it is nearly as accurate as the expensive atomic clocks in the satellites.

In order for the distance information to be of any use, the receiver also has to know where the satellites actually are. This isn't particularly difficult because the satellites travel in very high and predictable orbits. The GPS receiver simply stores an almanac that tells it where every satellite should be at any given time. Things like the pull of the moon and the sun do change the satellites' orbits very slightly, but the Department of Defense constantly monitors their exact positions and transmits any adjustments to all GPS receivers as part of the satellites' signals.

Differential GPS

So far, we've learned how a GPS receiver calculates its position on earth based on the information it receives from four located satellites. This system works pretty well, but inaccuracies do pop up. For one thing, this method assumes the radio signals will make their way through the atmosphere at a consistent speed (the speed of light). In fact, the Earth's atmosphere slows the electromagnetic energy down somewhat, particularly as it goes through the ionosphere and troposphere. The delay varies depending on where you are on Earth, which means it's difficult to accurately factor this into the distance calculations. Problems can also occur when radio signals bounce off large objects, such as skyscrapers, giving a receiver the impression that a satellite is farther away than it actually is. On top of all that, satellites sometimes just send out bad almanac data, misreporting their own position.

Differential GPS (DGPS) helps correct these errors. The basic idea is to gauge GPS inaccuracy at a stationary receiver station with a known location. Since the DGPS hardware at the station already knows its own position, it can easily calculate its receiver's inaccuracy. The station then broadcasts a radio signal to all DGPS-equipped receivers in the area, providing signal correction information for that area. In general, access to this correction information makes DGPS receivers much more accurate than ordinary receivers.

The most essential function of a GPS receiver is to pick up the transmissions of at least four satellites and combine the information in those transmissions with information in an electronic almanac, all in order to figure out the receiver's position on Earth.

Once the receiver makes this calculation, it can tell you the latitude, longitude and altitude (or some similar measurement) of its current position. To make the navigation more user-friendly, most receivers plug this raw data into map files stored in memory .

Photo courtesy Garmin
The StreetPilot II, a GPS receiver with built-in maps for drivers

You can use maps stored in the receiver's memory, connect the receiver to a computer that can hold more detailed maps in its memory, or simply buy a detailed map of your area and find your way using the receiver's latitude and longitude readouts. Some receivers let you download detailed maps into memory or supply detailed maps with plug-in map cartridges.

A standard GPS receiver will not only place you on a map at any particular location, but will also trace your path across a map as you move. If you leave your receiver on, it can stay in constant communication with GPS satellites to see how your location is changing. With this information and its built-in clock, the receiver can give you several pieces of valuable information:

How far you've traveled (odometer)
How long you've been traveling
Your current speed (speedometer)
Your average speed
A "bread crumb" trail showing you exactly where you have traveled on the map
The estimated time of arrival at your destination if you maintain your current speed.

Calendar in 1752

2008-01-14T16:43:00.000+05:30

Have u ever seen the calendar for September 1752???

If you are working in Unix, try this out.
At $ prompt, type: cal 9 1752

September 1752

S  M Tu  W Th  F  S
    1  2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Surprised??? ?

not only in unix, u can also search it in google

The Time that nothing happened.....

Did you know that nothing happened between 3 and 13 September 1752?

In September 1752 the Julian calendar was replaced with the Gregorian calendar in Great Britain and its American colonies. The Julian calendar was 11 days behind the Gregorian calendar, so 14 September got to follow 2 September on the day of the change. The result was that between 3 and 13 September, absolutely nothing happened!

The calendar switch also influenced the way George Washington's birthday is celebrated. He was born on 11 February 1731, but the anniversary of his birth is on 22 February because of the 11 days eliminated from the calendar switch. At the same time, New Year's Day was changed from 25 March to 1 January, thus according to the new calendar, Washington was born in 1732.

The first Roman Calendar (introduced in 535BC) had 10 months, with 304 days in a year that began in March. January and February were added only later. In 46BC, Julius Caesar created "The Year of Confusion" by adding 80 days to the year making it 445 days long to bring the calendar back in step with the seasons. The solar year - with the value of 365 days and 6 hours - was made the basis of the calendar. To take care of the 6 hours, every 4th year was made a 366-day year. It was then that Caesar decreed that the year begins with the 1st of January.

In 325AD Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman emperor, introduced Sunday as a holy day in a new 7-day week. He also introduced movable (Easter) and immovable feasts (Christmas).

In 1545 the Council of Trent authorised Pope Paul III to reform the calendar once more. Advised by astronomer Father Christopher Clavius and physician Aloysius Lilius, Pope Gregory XIII ordered that Thursday, 4 October 1582 was to be the last day of the Julian calendar. The next day was Friday, 15 October. For long-term accuracy, every 4th year was made a leap year unless it is a century year like 1700 or 1800. Century years can be leap years only when they are divisible by 400 (e.g. 1600). This rule eliminates three leap years in four centuries, making the calendar sufficiently correct for all ordinary purposes.

Protestant rulers ignored the new calendar that the Pope ordered. It was not until 1698 that Germany and the Netherlands changed to the Gregorian calendar. As mentioned, Britain made the change only in 1752. Russia adopted the new calendar in 1918, China in 1949.

In spite of the leap year, the Gregorian year is about 26 seconds longer than the earth's orbital period. Thus the beginning of the third millennium should have been celebrated at 9:01pm on 31 December 1999. But considering that the Gregorian calendar starts with Year 1, and not Year 0, adding 2000 years means that the third millennium started at 21h00:34s on 31 December 2000. However, because Dionysis Exeguus - the 6th Century monk whose task it was to pivot the calendar around the birth of Jesus Christ - miscalculated the founding of Rome by about 4 years (and left out the year 0), the TRUE THIRD MILLENNIUM actually started on 31 December 1995

Great Indians

2008-01-13T22:30:00.000+05:30

ARYABHATT
(476 CE)

MASTER ASTRONOMER AND MATHEMATICIAN

Born in 476 CE in Kusumpur ( Bihar ), Aryabhatt's intellectual brilliance remapped the boundaries of mathematics and astronomy. In 499 CE, at the age of 23, he wrote a text on astronomy and an unparallel treatise on mathematics called "Aryabhatiyam." He formulated the process of calculating the motion of planets and the time of eclipses. Aryabhatt was the first to proclaim that the earth is round, it rotates on its axis, orbits the sun and is suspended in space - 1000 years before Copernicus published his heliocentric theory. He is also acknowledged for calculating p (Pi) to four decimal places: 3.1416 and the sine table in trigonometry. Centuries later, in 825 CE, the Arab mathematician, Mohammed Ibna Musa credited the value of Pi to the Indians, "This value has been given by the Hindus." And above all, his most spectacular contribution was the concept of zero without which modern computer technology would have been non-existent. Aryabhatt was a colossus in the field of mathematics.

BHASKARACHARYA II
(1114-1183 CE)

GENIUS IN ALGEBRA
Born in the obscure village of Vijjadit (Jalgaon) in Maharastra, Bhaskaracharya's work in Algebra, Arithmetic and Geometry catapulted him to fame and immortality. His renowned mathematical works called "Lilavati" and "Bijaganita" are considered to be unparalled and a memorial to his profound intelligence. Its translation in several languages of the world bear testimony to its eminence. In his treatise " Siddhant Shiromani " he writes on planetary positions, eclipses, cosmography, mathematical techniques and astronomical equipment. In the " Surya Siddhant " he makes a note on the force of gravity: "Objects fall on earth due to a force of attraction by the earth. Therefore, the earth, planets, constellations, moon, and sun are held in orbit due to this attraction." Bhaskaracharya was the first to discover gravity, 500 years before Sir Isaac Newton . He was the champion among mathematicians of ancient and medieval India . His works fired the imagination of Persian and European scholars, who through research on his works earned fame and popularity.

ACHARYA KANAD
(600 BCE)

FOUNDER OF ATOMIC THEORY
As the founder of " Vaisheshik Darshan "- one of six principal philosophies of India - Acharya Kanad was a genius in philosophy. He is believed to have been born in Prabhas Kshetra near Dwarika in Gujarat . He was the pioneer expounder of realism, law of causation and the atomic theory. He has classified all the objects of creation into nine elements, namely: earth, water, light, wind, ether, time, space, mind and soul. He says, "Every object of creation is made of atoms which in turn connect with each other to form molecules." His statement ushered in the Atomic Theory for the first time ever in the world, nearly 2500 years before John Dalton . Kanad has also described the dimension and motion of atoms and their chemical reactions with each other. The eminent historian, T.N. Colebrook , has said, "Compared to the scientists of Europe , Kanad and other Indian scientists were the global masters of this field."

NAGARJUNA (100 CE)

WIZARD OF CHEMICAL SCIENCE
He was an extraordinary wizard of science born in the nondescript village of Baluka in Madhya Pradesh . His dedicated research for twelve years produced maiden discoveries and inventions in the faculties of chemistry and metallurgy. Textual masterpieces like " Ras Ratnakar ," "Rashrudaya" and "Rasendramangal" are his renowned contributions to the science of chemistry. Where the medieval alchemists of England failed, Nagarjuna had discovered the alchemy of transmuting base metals into gold. As the author of medical books like "Arogyamanjari" and "Yogasar," he also made significant contributions to the field of curative medicine. Because of his profound scholarliness and versatile knowledge, he was appointed as Chancellor of the famous University of Nalanda . Nagarjuna's milestone discoveries impress and astonish the scientists of today.

ACHARYA CHARAK
(600 BCE)

FATHER OF MEDICINE
Acharya Charak has been crowned as the Father of Medicine. His renowned work, the " Charak Samhita ", is considered as an encyclopedia of Ayurveda. His principles, diagoneses, and cures retain their potency and truth even after a couple of millennia. When the science of anatomy was confused with different theories in Europe , Acharya Charak revealed through his innate genius and enquiries the facts on human anatomy, embryology, pharmacology, blood circulation and diseases like diabetes, tuberculosis, heart disease, etc. In the " Charak Samhita " he has described the medicinal qualities and functions of 100,000 herbal plants. He has emphasized the influence of diet and activity on mind and body. He has proved the correlation of spirituality and physical health contributed greatly to diagnostic and curative sciences. He has also prescribed and ethical charter for medical practitioners two centuries prior to the Hippocratic oath. Through his genius and intuition, Acharya Charak made landmark contributions to Ayurvedal. He forever remains etched in the annals of history as one of the greatest and noblest of rishi-scientists.

ACHARYA SUSHRUT (600 BCE)

FATHER OF PLASTIC SURGERY
A genius who has been glowingly recognized in the annals of medical science. Born to sage Vishwamitra, Acharya Sudhrut details the first ever surgery procedures in " Sushrut Samhita ," a unique encyclopedia of surgery. He is venerated as the father of plastic surgery and the science of anesthesia. When surgery was in its infancy in Europe , Sushrut was performing Rhinoplasty (restoration of a damaged nose) and other challenging operations. In the " Sushrut Samhita ," he prescribes treatment for twelve types of fractures and six types of dislocations. His details on human embryology are simply amazing. Sushrut used 125 types of surgical instruments including scalpels, lancets, needles, Cathers and rectal speculums; mostly designed from the jaws of animals and birds. He has also described a number of stitching methods; the use of horse's hair as thread and fibers of bark. In the " Sushrut Samhita ," and fibers of bark. In the " Sushrut Samhita ," he details 300 types of operations. The ancient Indians were the pioneers in amputation, caesarian and cranial surgeries. Acharya Sushrut was a giant in the arena of medical science.

VARAHAMIHIR (499-587 CE)

EMINENT ASTROLOGER AND ASTRONOMERA
renowned astrologer and astronomer who was honored with a special decoration and status as one of the nine gems in the court of King Vikramaditya in Avanti ( Ujjain ). Varahamihir's book "panchsiddhant" holds a prominent place in the realm of astronomy. He notes that the moon and planets are lustrous not because of their own light but due to sunlight. In the " Bruhad Samhita " and " Bruhad Jatak ," he has revealed his discoveries in the domains of geography, constellation, science, botany and animal science. In his treatise on botanical science, Varamihir presents cures for various diseases afflicting plants and trees. The rishi-scientist survives through his unique contributions to the science of astrology and astronomy.

ACHARYA PATANJALI (200 BCE)

FATHER OF YOGA
The Science of Yoga is one of several unique contributions of India to the world. It seeks to discover and realize the ultimate Reality through yogic practices. Acharya Patanjali , the founder, hailed from the district of Gonda (Ganara) in Uttar Pradesh . He prescribed the control of prana (life breath) as the means to control the body, mind and soul. This subsequently rewards one with good health and inner happiness. Acharya Patanjali 's 84 yogic postures effectively enhance the efficiency of the respiratory, circulatory, nervous, digestive and endocrine systems and many other organs of the body. Yoga has eight limbs where Acharya Patanjali shows the attainment of the ultimate bliss of God in samadhi through the disciplines of: yam, niyam, asan, pranayam, pratyahar, dhyan and dharna. The Science of Yoga has gained popularity because of its scientific approach and benefits. Yoga also holds the honored place as one of six philosophies in the Indian philosophical system. Acharya Patanjali will forever be remembered and revered as a pioneer in the science of self-discipline, happiness and self-realization.

ACHARYA BHARADWAJ (800 BCE)

PIONEER OF AVIATION TECHNOLOGY
Acharya Bharadwaj had a hermitage in the holy city of Prayag and was an ordent apostle of Ayurveda and mechanical sciences. He authored the " Yantra Sarvasva " which includes astonishing and outstanding discoveries in aviation science, space science and flying machines. He has described three categories of flying machines: 1.) One that flies on earth from one place to another. 2.) One that travels from one planet to another. 3.) And One that travels from one universe to another. His designs and descriptions have impressed and amazed aviation engineers of today. His brilliance in aviation technology is further reflected through techniques described by him:
1.) Profound Secret: The technique to make a flying machine invisible through the application of sunlight and wind force.
2.) Living Secret: The technique to make an invisible space machine visible through the application of electrical force.
3.) Secret of Eavesdropping: The technique to listen to a conversation in another plane.
4.) Visual Secrets: The technique to see what's happening inside another plane.
Through his innovative and brilliant discoveries, Acharya Bharadwaj has been recognized as the pioneer of aviation technology.

ACHARYA KAPIL (3000 BCE)

FATHER OF COSMOLOGY
Celebrated as the founder of Sankhya philosophy, Acharya Kapil is believed to have been born in 3000 BCE to the illustrious sage Kardam and Devhuti. He gifted the world with the Sankhya School of Thought. His pioneering work threw light on the nature and principles of the ultimate Soul (Purusha), primal matter (Prakruti) and creation. His concept of transformation of energy and profound commentaries on atma, non-atma and the subtle elements of the cosmos places him in an elite class of master achievers - incomparable to the discoveries of other cosmologists. On his assertion that Prakruti, with the inspiration of Purusha, is the mother of cosmic creation and all energies, he contributed a new chapter in the science of cosmology. Because of his extrasensory observations and revelations on the secrets of creation, he is recognized and saluted as the Father of Cosmology.

Facts from Guinness book of world records

2008-01-12T16:04:00.000+05:30

Some Facts from Guinness Book of Records

1. Highest walk on air balloon.

Mike Howard (Mike Howard) from Britain walked the beam that can extend between two balloons at an altitude of 6522 m. near the city Yovil, County Somersetshir, UK, September 1, 2004 This feat was captured on videotape for the television show "Guinness records : 50 years, 50 of Records."

2. The most stretchable skin.

Harry Turner (Garry Turner) from Britain could spread to the abdominal skin to see 15,8 This is due to a rare disease known as syndrome Elersa- Danlosa violation connective tissue, affecting the skin, ligaments and internal organs. Collagen, strengthens skin, and is responsible for its elasticity, damaged, which, among other things, is the weakening of the skin and joints razboltannost. In more severe cases, this can result in the destruction or rupture of blood vessels, leading to death.

3. The longest dog ears. .

The longest dog ears and see the size 34,9 34,2 cm-right and left, respectively, measured on September 29, 2004 They belong Tiggeru (Tigger), Jr., whose owners Brian and Christine Flessner (Bryan and Christina Flessner) lived in the city of St. Joseph, Illinois.

4. The highest paid attraction in slow decline.

The highest attraction slow fall called "Sky Jump" (Leap from the sky) and is located in the tower and entertainment center crossovers Macau. Fall begins with a 61-level towers at a height of 233 m. over land, and continues for 17-20 seconds. Solemn leap committed A. J. Hackett (A. J. Hackett) from New Zealand on August 17, 2005

5. The heaviest apple.

The heaviest weighing 1,849 kg apple. Chisato raised Iwasaki (Chisato Iwasaki) for its apple farm in the town of Hirosaki (Hirosaki), Japan, which was thwarted by October 24, 2005

6. An old man, who committed lowering a rope.

The oldest person spustivshimsya a rope from a height of more than 30 metres. a britanka Doris Long (Doris Long), which on June 10, 2006 has descend from the building Millgate House-60 m. from the roof to the ground, at the age of 92 years and 24 days (she was born on May 18, 1914). The building is located in an area of St. George in the city of Portsmouth, England.

7. The biggest hamburger, which can be bought.

The biggest hamburger weighing 35.6 kg. included in the menu bar grill Bob's BBQ & Grill on the beach in Pattaya, Thailand on July 31, 2006

8. The largest mirror ball.

The largest mirror ball is 5.01 m. in diameter. Imaginate Events. His boat Nigel Burrows (Nigel Burrows) from the company Imaginate Events. Shaer was demonstrated in the city of Reading, England, October 13, 2006

9. The quickest office.

The quickest office is a table specially equipped to ride on the roads, and moving with a maximum speed of 140 km / h. His boat Briton Edd China (Edd China), and he also has held across Westminster Bridge in London on November 6, 2006 on the Day Guinness World Records.

10. The biggest leap riding on a lion.

The biggest leap riding on a lion to a distance of 2.3 m. Askold committed and Edgar Zapashnye (both Russian) - Russian State Circus performers, the circus scene Perm July 28, 2006

11. The largest number of concrete blocks, broken karatistom one minute.

Ninety concrete blocks for one minute broke his arm Norwegian Narve Laeret on televisions transfer "Senkveld" television TV2 on November 9, 2006 in Oslo.

12. The largest number of snakes gremuchih held in his mouth.

American Jackie Bibby (Jackie Bibby) was able to hold in his mouth without assistance 10 gremuchih snake tails for a period of 10 seconds on the Day Guinness World Records on November 9, 2006

13. The largest number of needles in the head.

One 1,790 needles for acupuncture was votknuto in the head and face Shengchu Chinese Wei (Wei Shengchu) on March 23, 2004 in the city of Nanning, China.

14. The longest fingernails on both hands.

Nelvin Feyzel Booz (Nelvin Feizel Boothe) from the city of Pontiac, Michigan, not strig nails 25 years, bringing the total length of 1910 amounted to 931 nails see

15. The strongest vypuchivanie eye.

Kim Gudmen the United States can vypuchit eye of the eye of 11 mm. This fact was recorded in the television show "Guinness World records : Praymtaym" June 13, 1998

16. Smallest and most of the living horses.

On July 7, 2006 the smallest of the living horses were Tambelina (Thumbelina) , miniature mare, whose growth was 44.5 Bobcats see Her owners, Kay and Paul Gesling (Kay and Paul Goessling) live on a farm in Goose Creek the city of St. Louis, Missouri. Growth Radar (Radar) - Belgian upryazhnoy horses, has been measured with Horseshoe on July 27, 2004 and amounted to 202 see Radar owned firms Priefert Manufacturing Inc. city of Mount Pleasant, Texas. Both horses are brought together for a photo in the Guinness Book of September 3, 2006

17. The biggest pick-up.

Height truck Bigfoot 5 is 4.7 m height tires-3 pm-weight 17,236 kg. This is one of the 17 pickups such established Bob Chandler (Bob Chandler) from the city of St. Louis, Missouri. It was built during the summer of 1986, he is now permanently berthed in the city of St. Louis and occasionally appear on the local festivities.

18. The most hirsute men.

Victor "Larry" Ramos Gomez (Victor "Larry" Ramos Gomez), pictured in the photos, and Gabriel "Danny" Gomez (Gabriel "Danny" Gomez) (both from Mexico) belong to one family, consisting of 19 members, has five generations which are rare disease known as a common congenital Ray, and characterized by excessive hair on the face and Volvo. Traits cover women's family can be described as a light or average, while 98% of men covered with thick body hair, except for the hands and feet.

19. 's Longest jet of milk produced from the eye.

Ilker Yilmaz (Ilker Yilmaz) from Turkey issued a strict eye milk 279.5 see Record was recorded on September 1, 2004 at the Hotel Armada Hotel in Istanbul, Turkey.

Evolution of Google

2008-01-03T21:22:00.000+05:30

Back to the past lets see how Google has evolved in this post. I will try to be as brief as possible.
It was in Nov 11,1998 the day Google was born, developed by two stanford university geeks Larry page and Sergey Brin. This is the view of the so called Google! website in 1998, look at the ! at the end of Google! and this is the one and only BETA version that was released by Google. They updated the server only twice in that year.Actually they hosted the website in stanford university's server since the patentship belonged to them initially and also it was only developed as a project work by the team.At the right corner , thers a subscribe button where u get Google updates monthly once. hehe :-) now you can get it once in 5 min...
The archive button on the right lands u to the official Google! forum, it looked like this.

In 1999, they revised the server 12 times, this is the look of Google! in 1998, Google also won
the Pc magazine's award and was a damn big success. We have to submit our website to be cached in Google, now when each page is born, Google is capable to cache itself.In 1999, it was revised 12 times.But still it remained as a BETA version only.There is a huge difference in the logo, the ! is gone. The change was due to the similarity with YAHOO!. They revised the website for about 75 times during 2000.

The year 2001 is a break through for Google since in this year it was revised 600 times. Everything had changed , Google gained its popularity and was capable to search images also, the filtering option was appended during this year.
Google indexed around 1 billion pages . This made a huge success. There was also Google web directory which provided a variety of groups for surfing through Google. They also appended the News tab during this year. The year 2002 and 2003 didn't bring a huge difference to Google.They made changes in server 265 times.2004 was an amazing year for Google, coz it launched gmail ( April ) - the best public mail server in the whole world. Froogle, one of the best online market came into existence during this year. Blogger, orkut came under the copyrights of Google. Google gained its popularity due to the mail server only.
Google in 2006 appended the Video tool where we can upload and watch movies, but later it purchased youtube for $1.65 billion in October. Google has the whole control of internet. From a complex Mail server to simple bookmarks it has solution.Google Earth was also launched during this year. It wasn't a success though but gained crowd.Google is now recognized as the best company.Just type "google buys" in ur search tool bar. It proves. Now you have a search engine, mail server, social networking groups like orkut, blogger, bookmarks analytics etc etc under a single lay and thats Google..

Marten Airport

2007-12-29T18:18:00.001+05:30

These are some photos of St Marteen Airport. The planes impress most people on the beach, flying over just seconds before touching down at Princess Juliana airport. Paradise for the beach lovers, having a lovely tropical beach, and for the aviation fanatics that spend hours on end observing the very low flying skills of giant commercial plane pilots.

12 Boeing 747s operate daily to St. Marteen. The heavy
jumbo is the most impressive of all and attracts the looks
of everybody around...

In this photo, from inside one 747 of Air France,
it possible to have one idea of the small strip of beach
just before the head of the landing strip for planes in
St. Marteen

Amazing 3D paintings by artist Julian Beever

2007-12-29T18:03:00.000+05:30

Artist Julian Beever!!!

His art is extremley unique and very amazing. This guy makes
his paintings on the footpaths and pavements but when you
look at them from a certain angle, they appear to be 3D !!!
And in some cases they are just lifelike!

I strongly feel that everybody should know about such an
amazing artist and get a chance to praise his unique art!

Here is the first one - Check it out!

Looks like someone put a 3D globe in the middle of
the road ! But this is actually painted on the road
in such a strerched manner that when viewed from
this angle, It look 3D!

Look at the same painting from a different angle -

Now can you see the trick ???

Now here is an ultra cool one -

Would you believe that this sony laptop is
actually drawn on the pavement !!

Very Impressive, Isn't it?

Here is one I found on the web -

Now if this was not at all computer edited,
and made totally by the artist, This artist is
worshipable man!

Here is one Awesome Art -

Check out the water closely !!!
This Artist is just amazing !

Check this one out -

Look at the virtual depth he creates on the ground !!!

Check out the next one -

A really Big box of crayons !

A whole city under the pavement !!

Enjoy !!!

Would you Believe that he is just sitting on the pavement !!!

Another superhero to his rescue !!!

Enjoy !!!

Did he just break a part of the pavement he was
drawing on ???

Or is it something else !!! Figure it out !

Look at this monstrous lobster -

The baby is real by the way, somebody put it
there to get a funny photo !!!

Look at the church, well it is real!
But look at the reflection in the little pond -

That is the work of our artist !!!

This is our artist's idea of how the politicians should
meet their fate !!!

Oh My God, Look at this-

Not just the boat or just the water, but everything upto
the very depression on the road is painted stuff !!!

Microsoft's Surface computers

2007-12-26T20:17:00.000+05:30

See these awesome videos of Microsoft's latest invention the "SURFACE COMPUTERS".

BILL GATES demonstrates

Other demonstrations

Steven Spielberg-The Legend

2007-09-23T11:51:00.000+05:30

STEVEN SPIELBERG

Nationality: American.

Born: Cincinnati, Ohio, 18 December 1947.

Education: California State College at Long Beach, B.A. in English, 1970.

Family: Married 1) actress Amy Irving (divorced 1989), one son, one daughter; 2) actress Kate Capshaw, one daughter.

Career: Won amateur film contest with 40-minute film Escape to Nowhere, 1960; on strength of film Amblin', became TV director for Universal, late 1960s; TV work included episodes of Marcus Welby, M.D., Columbo, and Night Gallery, and TV films, including Duel, then given theatrical release; directed first feature, The Sugarland Express, 1974; formed own production company, Amblin Productions; produced television series Amazing Stories, late 1980s, and seaQuest DSV and others, 1990s; formed new Hollywood studio DreamWorks SKG, with David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, 1995.

Awards: David Di Donatello Award (Italy) for Best Foreign Director, Kinema Jumpo Award (Japan) for Best Foreign Director, National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Director, and L.A. Film Critics Award for Best Director, for E.T., 1982; Directors Guild Award for Best Director, and British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award for Best Director, for The Color Purple, 1985; Irving G. Thalberg Award for body of work, Motion Picture Academy, 1986; D. W. Griffith Award, National Board of Review, for Empire of the Sun, 1987; Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Film, L.A. Film Critics Best Film, New York Film Critics Circle Best Film, D. W. Griffith Award for Best Film, and National Society of Film Critics Best Film and Diretor, for Schindler's List, 1993; Golden Lion for Career Achievement, Venice Film Festival, 1993; Life Achievement Award, American Film Institute, 1995; Distinguished Public Service Award, U.S. Navy, 1999.

Agent: Jay Moloney, Creative Artists Agency, 9830 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA 90212, U.S.A.

Address: Amblin Entertainment/Dreamworks SKG, 100 Universal City Plaza, Bungalow 477, Universal City, CA 91608–1085, U.S.A.

Films as Director, Scriptwriter, and Producer:

1969: Amblin' (short)
1971: Duel (for TV)
1972: Something Evil (for TV)
1974: The Sugarland Express (+ co-story)
1975: Jaws
1977: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (2nd version released 1980) (+ story)
1979: 1941
1981: Raiders of the Lost Ark
1982: E.T.—The Extraterrestrial (co-pr)
1983: episode of The Twilight Zone—The Movie (co-pr)
1984: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
1986: The Color Purple (co-pr)
1987: Empire of the Sun (co-pr)
1989: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
1990: Always (co-pr)
1991: Hook
1993: Jurassic Park (+ co-exec pr); Schindler's List (+ co-exec pr)
1997: The Lost World: Jurassic Park; Amistad (+ pr)
1998: Saving Private Ryan (+ pr)
1999: The Unfinished Journey (short)
2001: A. I. (+ co-sc, pr)
2002: Minority Report (+ pr)

Other Films:

1973: Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies (Erman) (story)
1978: I Wanna to Hold Your Hand (Zemeckis) (pr)
1980: Used Cars (Zemeckis); The Blues Brothers (Landis) (role)
1981: Continental Divide (Apted) (co-exec pr)
1982: Poltergeist (Hooper) (co-pr, co-story, co-sc)
1984: Gremlins (Dante) (co-exec pr)
1985: Back to the Future (Zemeckis) (co-exec pr); Young Sherlock Holmes (Levinson) (co-exec pr); Goonies (Donner) (co-exec pr)
1986: The Money Pit (Benjamin) (co-exec pr); An American Tail (Bluth) (co-exec pr); Innerspace (Dante) (co-exec pr); *batteries not included (Matthew Robbins) (co-exec pr)
1988: Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Zemeckis) (co-exec pr); The Land before Time (Bluth) (co-exec pr)

1989: Dad (Goldberg) (co-exec pr); Back to the Future, Part II (Zemeckis) (co-exec pr); Joe vs. the Volcano (Shanley) (co-exec pr)
1990: Arachnophobia (Frank Marshall) (co-exec pr); Back to the Future, Part III (Zemeckis) (co-exec pr); Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Dante) (co-exec pr)
1991: Cape Fear (Scorsese) (exec pr); An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (Nibbelink) (co-pr)
1993: We're Back: A Dinosaur's Tail (co-exec pr); Trail Mix-up (exec pr)
1994: I'm Mad (exec pr)
1995: To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (Kidron) (co-exec pr); Balto (exec pr); Casper (exec pr)
1996: High Incident (for TV) (exec pr); Twister (exec pr)
1997: Men in Black (exec pr)
1998: Toonslyvania (series for TV) (exec pr); Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain (series for TV) (exec pr); Invasion America (series for TV) (exec pr); Deep Impact (exec pr); The Mask of Zorro (exec pr); The Last Days (exec pr); Paulie (exec pr); Small Soldiers (exec pr); Antz (exec pr); The Prince of Egypt (exec pr); In Dreams (exec pr)
1999: Forces of Nature (exec pr); The Love Letter (exec pr); The Haunting (exec pr); Wakko's Wish (for video) (exec pr); American Beauty (exec pr); Freaks and Geeks (series for TV) (exec pr); Galaxy Quest (exec pr)
2000: The Road to El Dorado (exec pr); The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (exec pr); Gladiator (exec pr); Road Trip (exec pr); Small Time Crooks (exec pr); Chicken Run (exec pr)
2001: Jurassic Park 3 (exec pr); The Martian Chronicles (pr); Anne Frank: The Whole Story (for TV) (exec pr); Band of Brothers (for TV) (exec pr);

Publications

By SPIELBERG: books—

The Sugarland Express—Spielberg, Barwood and Robbins, Zsigmond, edited by Rochelle Reed, Washington, D.C., 1974.

The Last Days, New York, 1999.

By SPIELBERG: articles—

Steven Spielberg Seminar, in Dialogue on Film (Washington, D.C.), July 1974.

"From Television to Features," an interview with M. Stettin, in Millimeter (New York), March 1975.

"Close Encounter of the Third Kind: Director Steve Spielberg," with C. Austin, in Filmmakers Newsletter (Ward Hill, Massachusetts), December 1977.

"The Unsung Heroes or Credit Where Credit Is Due," in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), January 1978.

Interview with Mitch Tuchman, in Film Comment (New York), January/February 1978.

"Directing 1941," in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), December 1979.

"Of Narrow Misses and Close Calls," in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), November 1981.

Steven Spielberg (second from left) on the set of Saving Private Ryan

Interview with T. McCarthy, in Film Comment (New York), May/June 1982.

"Dialogue on Film: Steven Spielberg," in American Film (Washington, D.C.), June 1988.

"A Revealing Interview with Steven Spielberg," in Film Threat (Beverly Hills), vol. 19, 1989.

"Always," an interview with S. Royal, in American Premiere Magazine (Beverly Hills), no. 6, 1989/90.

"China and the Oscars," written with Kathleen Kennedy, New York Times, 25 March 1991.

"A Close Encounter with Steven Spielberg," an interview with D. Shay, in Cinefex (Riverside, California), February 1993.

"Chase, Crush and Devour," an interview with Stephen Pizzello, in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), June 1997.

On SPIELBERG: books—

Pye, Michael, and Lynda Myles, The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took over Hollywood, London, 1979.

Kolker, Robert Phillip, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, Oxford, 1980; revised edition, 1988.

Crawley, Tony, The Steven Spielberg Story, London, 1983.

Goldau, Ant Je, and Hans Helmut Prinzler, Spielberg: Film als Spielzeug, Berlin, 1985.

Mott, Donald R., and Cheryl McAllister Saunders, Steven Spielberg, Boston, 1986.

Smith, Thomas G., Industrial Light and Magic: The Art of Special Effects, London, 1986.

Weiss, Ulli, Das Neue Hollywood: Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Munich, 1986.

Godard, Jean-Pierre, Spielberg, Paris, 1987.

Sinyard, Neil, The Films of Steven Spielberg, London, 1987.

Slade, Darren, and Nigel Watson, Supernatural Spielberg, London, 1992.

Taylor, Philip M., Steven Spielberg: The Man, His Movies, and Their Meaning, New York, 1992; revised, 1994.

Somazzi, Claud, Steven Spielberg: Dreaming the Movies, Santa Cruz, 1994.

Brode, Douglas, The Films of Steven Spielberg, New York, 1995.

Oskar Schindler and His List: The Man, the Book, the Film, the Holocaust, and Its Survivors, Forest Dale, Vermont, 1995.

Ferber, Elizabeth, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, New York, 1996.

Sanello, Frank, Spielberg: The Man, the Movies, the Myth, Dallas, 1996.

McBride, Joseph, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, New York, 1997.

On SPIELBERG: articles—

Eyles, A., "Steven Spielberg," in Focus on Film (London), Winter 1972.

Cumbow, R. C., "The Great American Eating Machine," in Movietone News (Seattle), 11 October 1976.

Cook, B., "Close Encounters with Steven Spielberg," in American Film (Washington, D.C.), November 1977.

Jameson, R. T., "Style vs. 'Style'," in Film Comment (New York), March/April 1980.

Geng, Veronica, "Spielberg's Express," in Film Comment (New York), July/August 1981.

Auty, Chris, "The Complete Spielberg?," in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1982.

Turner, G. E., "Steven Spielberg and E.T.—the Extra-Terrestrial," in American Cinématographer (Los Angeles), January 1983.

McGillivray, D., "The Movie Brats: Steven Spielberg," in Films and Filming (London), May 1984.

Smetak, J. R., "Summer at the Movies, Steven Spielberg: Gore, Guts, and PG-13," in Journal of Film and Popular Television (Washington, D.C.), Spring 1986.

Britton, Andrew, "Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment," in Movie (London), Winter 1986.

Combs, Richard, "Master Steven's Search for the Sun," in Listener (London), February 1988.

"Cinematheque Honors Spielberg," in New York Times, 3 April 1989.

Griffin, Nancy, "Manchild in the Promised Land," in Premiere (New York), June 1989.

Abbott, Diane, "Steven Spielberg," in American CinemEditor (Encino, California), no. 1, 1990.

Cientat, M., "Le phenomene Spielberg ou la nouvelle cinephilie," in Cinemaction (Conde-sur-Noireau), January 1990.

Torry, Robert, "Politics and Parousia in Close Encounters of the Third Kind," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 3, 1991.

Peacock, John, "When Folk Goes Pop: Consuming the Color Purple," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 3, 1991.

Greenberg, Harvey Roy, "Raiders of the Lost Text: Remaking as Contested Homage in Always," in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), Winter 1991.

Gordon, Andrew, "Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun: A Boy's Dream of War," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 4, 1991.

Schruers, Fred, "Peter Pandemonium," in Premiere (New York), December 1991.

Davis, Ivor, "I Won't Grow Up!" in Los Angeles Magazine, December 1991.

Wood, G., "On Spielberg: A Tale of Two Steves," in Cinefantastique (Forest Park, Illinois), no. 4, 1991.

Green, C., and others, "Steven Spielberg: A Celebration," in Journal of Popular Film (Washington, D.C.), no. 4, 1991.

Andrews, S., "The Man Who Would Be Walt," in New York Times, 26 January 1992.

Sheehan, Henry, "The Panning of Steven Spielberg," in Film Comment (New York), May 1992.

Sheehan, Henry, "Spielberg II," in Film Comment (New York), July/August 1992.

Perlez, J., "Spielberg Grapples with the Horror of the Holocaust," in New York Times, 13 June 1993.

Wollen, Peter, "Theme Park and Variations," in Sight and Sound (London), July 1993.

Secher, Andy, "Directing the Dinosaurs," in Lapidary Journal (San Diego, California), July 1993.

Jameson, L., "Spielberg's Theory of Devolution," in Film Threat (Beverly Hills), August 1993.

Place, Vanessa, "Supernatural Thing," in Film Comment (New York), September/October 1993.

Gellately, Robert, "Between Exploitation, Rescue, and Annihilation: Reviewing Schindler's List," in Central European History (Atlanta, Georgia), no. 4, 1993.

Richardson, John H., "Steven's Choice," in Premiere (New York), January 1994.

Maser, Wayne, "The Long Voyage Home," in Harper's Bazaar (New York), February 1994.

Gourevitch, Philip, "A Dissent on Schindler's List," in Commentary (New York), February 1994.

White, Armond, "Toward a Theory of Spielberg History," in Film Comment (New York), March 1994.

Louvish, Simon, "Witness," in Sight and Sound (London), March 1994.

"Schindler's List: Myth, Movie, and Memory," roundtable discussion in Village Voice (New York), 29 March 1994.

Thomson, David, "Presenting Enamelware," in Film Comment (New York), March 1994.

Schiff, Stephen, "Behind the Camera: Seriously Spielberg," in New Yorker, 21 March 1994.

Nagorski, Andrew, "Schindler's List and the Polish Question," in Foreign Affairs (New York), July 1994.

Epstein, Jason, "Rethinking Schindler's List," in Utne Reader (Minneapolis, Minnesota), July 1994.

Lane, Randall, "I Want Gross," Forbes (New York), 26 September 1994.

O'Shaughnessy, Elise, "The New Establishment," in Vanity Fair (New York), October 1994.

Manchel, Frank, "A Reel Witness: Steven Spielberg's Representation of the Holocaust in Schindler's List," in Journal of Modern History (Chicago), March 1995.

Corliss, Richard, "Hey, Let's Put on a Show!" in Time (New York), 27 March 1995.

Masters, Kim, "What's Ovitz Got to Do with It?" in Vanity Fair (New York), April 1995.

Hartman, Geoffrey, "The Cinema Animal: On Spielberg's Schindler's List," in Salmagundi (Saratoga Springs, New York), Spring 1995.

Griffin, Nancy, "In the Grip of Jaws," in Premiere (New York), October 1995.

Scorsese, Martin, "Notre génération," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1996.

Piazzo, Philippe, "La peur aux trousses," in Télérama (Paris), 14 August 1996.

Däuber, Daniel, "Forever Young: Peter Pan oder der Kindskopf in Manne," in Zoom (Zürich), April 1997.

Biskind, P., "A 'World' Apart," in Premiere (Boulder), May 1997.

McBride, J., "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," in Boxoffice (Chicago), May 1997.

Bart, P., "Watching Steven Sizzle," in Variety (New York), 18/24 August 1997.

White, Armond, "Against the Hollywood Grain," in Film Comment (New York), March-April 1998.

Doherty, Thomas, "Saving Private Ryan," in Cineaste (New York), vol. 24, no. 1, 1998.

* * *

Perhaps any discussion of Steven Spielberg must inevitably begin with the consideration that as the new millennium gets underway after a century of cinema, Spielberg remains the most commercially successful director the world has known—an incredible, if mind-boggling proposition which, in another time, might have immediately made the director's films ineligible for serious critical consideration. Yet the fact that Spielberg's combined films have grossed well over one billion dollars attests to their power in connecting to the mass audience and offers the analyst an immediate conundrum which may take a more distanced generation of critics and filmgoers to answer fully: What does Spielberg know? And why has so much of his work invited such audience approval?

Spielberg has worked in a variety of genres: the television film Duel is a thriller; Jaws is a horror film; 1941 is a crazy comedy; Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a science-fiction film; Raiders of the Lost Ark is an adventure film patterned after film serials of the early 1950s; E.T.—The Extraterrestrial is a fantasy/family film combining elements from The Wizard of Oz, Lassie, and Peter Pan; The Color Purple is a social drama; Empire of the Sun is an expansive wartime epic. And yet virtually all of Spielberg's films are united by the same distinctive vision: a vision imbued with a sense of wonder which celebrates the magic, mystery, and danger that imagination can reveal as an alternative to the humdrum and the everyday. The artistic consistency within Spielberg's work is demonstrated further by his narratives, which are structurally similar. In the typical Spielberg film, an Everyman protagonist has his conception of the world enlarged (often traumatically) as he comes face to face with some extraordinary and generally non-human antagonist who is often hidden from the rest of the world and/or the audience until the narrative's end. In Duel, a California businessman named Mann finds himself pitted against the monstrous truck whose driver's face is never shown; in Jaws, the water-shy sheriff must face an almost mythological shark whose jaws are not clearly shown until the final reel; in Close Encounters, a suburban father responds to the extrasensory messages sent by outer-space creatures who are not revealed until the last sequence of the film; in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones quests for the Lost Ark which, at film's end we discover is Pandora's Box of horrors when summoned up by those who would attempt to profit from it; and, of course, in E.T., a small boy whose life is already steeped in imagination keeps secret his adoption of a playful extra-terrestrial (although one could easily argue that the non-human antagonist here is not really the sensitive E.T., but the masked and terrifying government agents who, quietly working behind the scenes throughout the narrative, finally invade the suburban house and crystallize the protagonist's most horrific fears). Structural analysis even reveals that Poltergeist, the Spielberg-produced, Tobe Hooper-directed film which relates to Spielberg's career in the same way the Howard Hawks-produced, Christian Nyby-directed The Thing related to Hawks's career, is indeed a continuation of the Spielberg canon. In Poltergeist, a typical American family ultimately discovers that the antagonists responsible for the mysterious goings-on in their suburban home are the other-worldly ghosts and skeletons not shown until the end of the film, when the narrative also reveals the villainy of the real estate developer who had so cavalierly disposed of the remains from an inconveniently located cemetery.

Technically proficient and dazzling, Spielberg's films are voracious in their synthesis of the popular culture icons which have formed the director's sensibilities: Hitchcock movies, John Wayne, comic books, Bambi, suburban homes, fast food, the space program, television. His vision is that of the child-artist—the innocent and profound imagination that can summon up primeval dread from the deep, as well as transcendent wonder from the sky. If Spielberg's early films particularly are sometimes attacked for a certain lack of interest in social issues or "adult concerns," they may be defended on the grounds that his films—unlike so many of the "special effects" action films of the 1970s and 1980s—derive from a sensibility which is sincerely felt. A more subtle attack on Spielberg would hold that his interest in objects and mechanical effects (as in 1941 and Raiders of the Lost Ark), though provocative, may not always be in perfect balance with his interest in sentiment and human values. Spielberg himself acknowledges his debt to Walt Disney, whose theme "When You Wish upon a Star," a paean to faith and imagination, dictates the spirit of several Spielberg films. And yet certainly if intellectual and persuasive critical constructions be sought to justify our enjoyment of Spielberg's cinema, they can easily be found in the kind of mythic, Jungian criticism which analyzes his very popular work as a kind of direct line to the collective unconscious. Jaws, for instance, is related to the primal fear of being eaten as well as to the archetypal initiation rite; Close Encounters is constructed according to the archetypal form of the quest and its attendant religious structures of revelation and salvation; and of course E.T. has already been widely analyzed as a retelling of the Christ story—complete wth a sacred heart, a ritual death, a resurrection brought about by faith, and an eventual ascension into heaven as E.T. returns home.

If Spielberg is especially notable in any other way, it is perhaps that he represents the most successful example of what has been called the film-school generation, which is increasingly populating the new Hollywood: a generation which has been primarily brought up on television and film, rather than literature, and for whom film seems apparently to have replaced life as a repository of significant experience. And yet if the old Hollywood's studio system is dead, it has been partially replaced by a solid, if informal matrix of friendships and alliances: between Spielberg and a fraternity that includes George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Lawrence Kasdan, John Milius, Bob Zemeckis, Robert Gale, Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, Melissa Mathison, and Harrison Ford.

It is noteworthy that Hollywood, though consistently accused of a preference for box-office appeal over critical acclaim, has nevertheless refused (until Schindler's List in 1994) to valorize publicly Spielberg's work, despite his popular and critical success. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has consistently chosen to pass over Spielberg's films and direction—in 1975 bypassing Jaws in favor of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Milos Forman; in 1977, bypassing Close Encounters for Annie Hall and Woody Allen; in 1981 bypassing Raiders of the Lost Ark for Chariots of Fire and Warren Beatty (as director of Reds); in 1982 bypassing E.T. for Gandhi and Richard Attenborough; and in 1985 bypassing The Color Purple for Out of Africa and Sydney Pollack.

More than requiring an explanatory footnote in film history texts, these "slights" made it clear that the industry of the time had come to hold Spielberg responsible for the juvenilization of the American cinema in the late 1970s and 1980s. If the Coppolas and the Scorseses attempted to remake Hollywood to their own vision of a freer, more European, artistic sensibility (and by and large failed), should Spielberg now be held responsible for betraying earlier victories and turning Hollywood into a Disneyland? And although Spielberg became the richest man in Hollywood, the most commercially savvy, the man everyone most wanted to make a deal with, the most influential, he could not easily become anything at all like its most serious, respected artist. Spielberg's longtime insistence on avoiding adult themes, instead taking refuge in nostalgia, special effects, remakes, and sequels, seemed to be directly responsible for rather perniciously preventing non-Spielberg-like films from being produced. As well, the overwhelming number of Spielberg imitators, many producing films under Spielberg's own auspices, have largely contributed commercially successful hackwork.

Hollywood noted the irony, too, that it was in the Spielberg production of The Twilight Zone movie (directed by John Landis) that two children and actor Vic Morrow should have been killed in a clearly avoidable accident in which the children's employment violated child-labor law. The Color Purple, although conforming to Spielberg's typical pattern of the hidden antagonist, backed off from an explicit representation of Celie's lesbianism, turning her instead into a cute E.T.-like creature. Thus the confrontation of the hidden antagonist (Celie's true nature) became a kind of missing climax in a film which many critics ridiculed. After The Color Purple, when receiving the Irving Thalberg award from the Motion Pictures Academy, Spielberg gave a widely quoted speech which seemed surprisingly to admit responsibility for the state of American film culture: "I think in our romance with technology and our excitement at exploring all the possibilities of film and video, I think we have partially lost something. . . . It's time to renew our romance with the word; I'm as culpable as anyone in exalting the image at the expense of the word. . . . Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers." Spielberg's speech was followed by arguably his finest work: from a screenplay by famed dramatist Tom Stoppard, Empire of the Sun, set in Asia during World War II, includes some of Spielberg's most startling set-pieces (such as a crowd sequence which rivals Eisenstein's use of montage in "The Odessa Steps" sequence of Potemkin, or an unusually expressive evocation of the atomic bombing at Hiroshima), as well as more adult themes relating to war and peace, community integration and disintegration. Nevertheless, when this film was overshadowed in many ways by Bertolucci's Asia epic, The Last Emperor, Spielberg seemed to beat a hasty retreat into safer material.

Always, a remake of A Guy Named Joe in which Spielberg portrayed adult relationships within a fantasy context including helpful ghosts, was both a critical and financial failure. Even more distressing was the critical failure of the 1991 Hook, in which Spielberg's professed appreciation for the word disappeared under the weight of charmless Hollywood juveniles having onscreen food fights amidst special effects gleefully presented by Spielberg as artistic entertainment. Although critics had for years suggested that the source material Peter Pan would provide Spielberg his most natural material (a boy not wanting to grow up), many were stunned when Spielberg's version finally arrived: bloated, overlong, overproduced, looking more like a vapid amusement park ride or a multimillion dollar commercial for a new attraction at the Universal Studio Tour than a film. Its artistic message—that its adult Peter Pan should work less and spend more quality time with his children—was in ludicrous contradiction to the herculean effort required by all, including its director, to devote themselves to such a high-budget, effects-heavy project; thus the film emerges as the most cynical, hypocritical attempt to play on audience sentiment to attract boxoffice in the Spielberg oeuvre. The year 1993 marked a turning point for Spielberg—with the release of two films in the same year that could not have been more different. Jurassic Park, a cinefantastique wonder showing dinosaurs wreaking havoc in a contemporary theme park, was a roller-coaster ride which fast became the most commercially successful film of all time, bypassing even Spielberg's own E.T. Although the special effects were mostly marvelous and definitely the reason for the film's appeal (can anyone who has seen the film ever forget the startlingly graceful images of apatosaurs grazing in the forest?), many critics were startled by a certain desultoriness in the construction of the narrative: loose ends here and there, scenes which seemed not all to pay off. And indeed, deficiencies may be attributed to Spielberg losing some interest in the project—for the other Spielberg film released in 1993 was the film which would finally, irrevocably answer his critics: a black-and-white film photographed in a radically different camera style, devoid of the famous Spielberg backlighting as well as his traditional over-the-top orchestrations, using virtually unknown actors, and all on the single most unremittingly serious subject of the contemporary world: the Holocaust. Spielberg's Schindler's List was his most striking, overwhelming work; with it, he finally won his Academy Awards for film and director, as well as best film awards from the L.A. and New York critics groups, the Board of Review, and the National Society of Film Critics—a startlingly unanimous achievement. For a serious film, Schindler's List was also amazingly successful with the public, which was powerfully moved and horrified by the film. Based on the real-life story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who actually saved over a thousand Jews by employing them at his factory, Schindler's List, keping with the Spielberg ethos, emphasized the most hopeful components of the story without minimizing or denying its horrifying components. The film's coda, which showed the actors along with their real-life counterparts who survived because of Schindler visiting the gravesite of the real Schindler, was criticized by some, but this strategy insisted the audience understand the story as historical and gave the film an even greater emotional depth. Although time will tell whether Schindler's List will retain its instant reputation as a great, towering achievement comparable to, say, Alain Resnais's short Night and Fog, the definitive Holocaust film, the film has—according to his own testimony—altered Spielberg's life, sensibility, and career. The first artistic work that allowed Spielberg directly to explore his Jewish heritage, Schindler's List so consumed him that he has since embarked on what he has called his most important life's work: a video project documenting the survivors of the Holocaust for educational purposes. In interviews given before his multiple Academy Award wins, Spielberg has also said that he could no longer imagine going back to directing the kinds of films he made before Schindler's List. Either Spielberg's sincerity must be regarded as suspect or his resolve as short-lived, for he followed the winning of his first Academy-award by directing The Lost World, a Jurassic Park sequel unnecessary for any motive except craven profit, in the process becoming more a designer of amusement park attractions than an artist. Psychologically vacuous, The Lost World shows men with gadgets who say things like "Lindstrade air rifle. Fires a sub-sonic impact delivery dart." The exposition is obligatory, the villains cardboard, a black Disney child improbably appears to improve the film's demographics, and characters behave stupidly so that dinosaurs can attack them. When at one point, we even see a man ripped in half by two dinosaurs competing for their dinner, we understand that the humanism of Schindler's List has been replaced by the expediency of efficient, crowd-pleasing violence: it feels almost like a pornographic vision. The few pleasures in The Lost World come from its irony—Jeff Goldblum, for instance, responding to a colleague's awe at the dinosaurs: "Yeah, 'ooh, ahhh,' that's how it always starts. But then later there's running and then screaming." A few scenes invoke Hitchcock's The Birds, generally to The Lost World's disadvantage, but only the climactic scenes showing a tyrannosaurus rex drinking from a swimming pool in suburban San Diego evoke, through their surreal wit, any lasting sense of awe.

Amistad, a noble subject in the tradition of Schindler's List, deals with the 1839 shipboard revolt of fifty-three African slaves. Despite the film's idealism and the genuine interest of its historical narrative, much of Amistad is problematic. In a surprising review in the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan put forward the thesis that for Spielberg, "There's been leakage from the no-brainers to the quality stuff and . . . bad habits picked up in the mindless movies are driving out better [habits]." Turan's comments seemed shocking then, particularly delivered in Spielberg's own hometown community, and seem prescient still. Dialogue in Amistad seems incredibly stilted, as reflected in this retort to John Quincy Adams, which passes as conversational: "There remains but one task undone, one vital task the founding fathers left to their sons before their thirteen colonies could precisely be called United States, and that task, sir, as you well know, is crushing slavery." Not all performers escape seeming like high school students dressing up for an historical pageant. As well, there are conceptual lapses: the moral outrage of slavery has little to do with the thunder and lightning Spielberg uses in many of the shipboard sequences, and Spielberg's traditional backlighting—particularly during the Middle Passage of the slaves' journey—adds a sheen of romanticism totally inappropriate to his subject. Although the black slave leader's passionate outburst in court is certainly moving, that it comes after he sees a picture of Christ and that it is accompanied by a theme, which (if African) is orchestrated in the style of a heavenly choir directly out of The Ten Commandments, seem conceptually suspect, too: is it only with the inspiration of Christian myths of sacrifice that black slavescan find their African voice? These failings exist simultaneously with wonderful, expressive moments, particularly those which are silent: an ebony-muscled body framed against a black sky full of stars—an image suggesting the rapturous universal beauty of black. Unforgettable, too, is a slave mother falling backwards and overboard with her newborn baby in order to commit suicide rather than submit; even more horrifying is the sight of fifty slaves, shackled together in a line and tossed into the ocean, each one dragged by the weight of the other, as if they were only so much ballast. Although Spielberg has gotten Hollywood credit for making socially significant films, his "social" films take respectably safe subjects: can anyone be in favor of concentration camps or slavery? So far Spielberg has avoided contemporary stories of anti-Semitism, racial injustice, or social inequity which might alienate some spectators, raise controversy, or invite more ambivalent emotions. Of course, Spielberg is more interested in story-telling than in changing the world. Even in Amistad, John Quincy Adams' advice on how to win a case sounds suspiciously like Spielberg's mantra: "What is their story?" says Adams, noting that whoever tells the best story generally wins. Later, when Adams offers tribute to the leader of the slave revolt, his comment that "if he were white . . . the great authors of our time would fill books about him, his story would be told and be told. . ." itself seems a self-congratulatory pat on Spielberg's own back for being one of these great auteurs/authors.

Amistad was followed by another excursion into the past: Saving Private Ryan, a war story which begins with the June 6, 1944 D-Day storming of Omaha Beach. Saving Private Ryan seems to be that rarest entity: an instant classic—particularly in its D-Day sequence, which presents the confusion and the terror, the beach running red with blood, the literal viscera of graphic violence. General audiences were stunned, and many surviving WWII veterans were emotionally unhinged. Valorizing a generation of veterans, Saving Private Ryan presents their sacrifice with great emotional expressiveness and good old-fashioned patriotism. If The Thin Red Line, the long-awaited Terrence Malick war film released the same year, was more philosophical and profound, Spielberg's film was nevertheless the more coherent story, emotionally perfectly pitched. Although Spielberg won the Academy award for best director, his film's surprising defeat for best film by the comedy Shakespeare in Love was yet another sign that Hollywood retains Spielberg reservations. And certainly critics disparaged Spielberg's framing device as unfairly obscuring the identity of the American pilgrim ostensibly telling the story—itself an unfair criticism for a rhetorical flourish totally appropriate for a story told. If the last hour of Saving Private Ryan seems like an extraordinarily good episode of the TV series Combat, even this criticism seems a quibble, because of the film's accumulating emotional power. Certainly, so many images are unforgettable: the soldier who collects dirt samples from each country he does battle in; the bag filled with hundreds of dog tags, each representing a dead American; a German soldier slowly inserting a knife directly into a GI's heart. The art design and hisorical reconstruction of the film are flawless, its final images of the D-Day battlefield absolutely awe-inspiring (even more so because we never see the beach in long shot until the battle is over). Moving, too, is the Iowa sequence showing a bereaved mother framed in the doorway, its evocation of the opening of The Searchers effortlessly suggesting that the titular search for her surviving child will be successful (just as was the search in the John Ford film Spielberg so obviously admires).

On other fronts, Spielberg has continued to consolidate his position in Hollywood as its most powerful man. His company, Amblin Entertainment, has long been involved with television production, either Spielberg and/or Amblin involved in television series as disparate as Amazing Stories, seaQuest DSV, the top-rated drama ER, and the children's show The Animaniacs. Spielberg has continued to produce the films of others, and at least one post-Schindler film, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, though a traditional Hollywood film in its warmth and sentiment, takes on a contemporary hot-button issue: homophobia in America. More monumentally, in one of the most publicized entertainment stories of 1994, Spielberg formed a new Hollywood studio called DreamWorks SKG in partnership with two of the other most powerful men in Hollywood, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. In 1999, DreamWorks released American Beauty, a savage satire about bankrupt values and homophobia in the suburbs, which won the Academy award for best film. In 2000, inspired by the success of Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg was in the process of producing (in conjunction with Tom Hanks) a series of TV films with World War II stories. As Spielberg moves closer to being an all-powerful, modern-day studio mogul in the style of Walt Disney or Harry Cohn, will his Schindler's experience inspire a greater devotion to serious, artistically ambitious projects requiring no apology, or will the lure of big bucks for sequels and popular entertainments prove too great a temptation for DreamWorks to forego? Although Spielberg executive-produced The Last Days, the 1998

Academy-award winning documentary on Hungarian holocaust survivors, his Amblin released early in 2000 the lowbrow Viva Rock Vegas, the Flintstones sequel. Reportedly, Spielberg is also currently preparing at least one more Jurassic Park sequel. Perhaps Spielberg will find some way of mediating his apparently contradictory goals with enough integrity and skill to retain his critical respectability as a serious artist, as well as his popular appeal.

The Great Pyramid of Giza

2007-07-22T12:26:00.000+05:30

Most of the photos in this tour were taken from the out of print 4 volume set "Pyramidology" by Adam Rutherford (released between 1957- 1972). Adam Rutherford was one of the greatest Pyramidologists that ever lived. These pages may take some time to load but I think it is worth the wait. There are 40 photos on 6 pages.

Before we enter the interior of the Great Pyramid, let us look at some EXTERIOR views.

(1) Arial View of the Great Pyramid

The Great Pyramid of Giza stands on the northern edge of the Giza Plateau, located about 10 miles west of Cairo. The Greeks listed the Great Pyramid of Giza as the first wonder of the world and it is the only one of the seven still remaining to this day.

(2) Northern Part of the EAST side

The Great Pyramid is composed of over 2 ½ million blocks of limestone which weigh from 2 to 70 tons each. Its base covers over 13 acres and its volume is around 90,000,000 cubic feet.

(3) Southern Part of the EAST side with other Giza pyramids in the background

Next to the Great Pyramid stands 2 additional large pyramids. The Great Pyramid is thought, by traditional scholars, to have been erected around 2600 BC during the reign of Khufu (whom the Greeks called Cheops) of the 4th Egyptian Dynasty. The slightly smaller one is attributed to Cheop's son and successor, Kephren. The other, still smaller, is attributed to Kephren’s successor, the grandson of Cheops, Mykerionos. Recent geological studies indicate that the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx may be at least 10,000 years older than traditional scholars have thought.

(4) North-East Corner. Adam Rutherford is seated on a camel.

James Ferguson, in his great work, the History of Architecture, describes the Great Pyramid as "the most perfect and gigantic specimen of masonry that the world has yet seen. No one can possibly examine the interior of the Great Pyramid without being struck with astonishment at the wonderful mechanical skill displayed in its construction."

(5) Looking down from the top of the S.W. Corner.

It is 454 feet high which is equivalent to a modern 48-story building. There are 203 courses or steps to its summit. Professor Greaves, astronomer, in his book, Pyramidographia says "The structure of it hath been the labour of an exquisite hand."

(6) Central part of the Summit (Top) of the Great Pyramid.

It appears that the Great Pyramid was never finished since the top is flat, and not pointed, as it should be. It has a truncated summit which is coarse and uneven and measures about 30 square feet. Most pyramids were crowned with a top-stone that completed their structure. This pyramid does not currently have one and it appears that it never did.

(7) Tourists and guides climbing the Great Pyramid in the early part of the 20th century.

H.E. Licks, mathematician states: "So mighty is the Great Pyramid at Gizeh and so solidly is it constructed that it will undoubtedly remain standing long after all other buildings now on Earth have disappeared."

Casing Stones still remaining at the base of the north end of the Pyramid.

The beautiful smooth blocks which covered the entire exterior, thus encasing the whole structure, became known as Casing Stones. At the present, only a few of these are left in position on each side at the base, most of the others having been stripped off by the Arabs and cut up to build mosques in Cairo. One of the largest remaining Casing stones is nearly 5 feet high by 8 feet at the bottom, and weighs about 14 tons.

Casing Stones on the south side which have been ground down by the sand-storms of thousands of years

Before the Arabs began to tear off the very beautiful casing stones about 600 years ago, it was magnificent to behold. The ancient writer, Strabo, said of the Great Pyramid, "It seemed like a building let down from heaven, untouched by human hands." It has been calculated that the original pyramid with its casing stones would act like gigantic mirrors and reflect light so powerful that it would be visible from the moon as a shining star on earth.

Now we will approach the entrance to the Great Pyramid

The following diagram will help you locate where you are.
Refer to the numbers in red.

NOTE: If you click on the underlined red numbers below the picture captions, it will take you to the source diagram below - then just use your BACK button on your browser to take you back to where you were.

(1) The original entrance (center and with angle blocks over the top) and Al Mamoun's forced cavity (below and to the right of the original entrance) on the North side.

As far as we know, the first people to enter the great pyramid since the time of its contruction were the Arabs in 820 AD. Under caliph, Al Mamoun, the Arabs broke into the great pyramid (since they could not find the hidden entrance) by boring into the limestone with crude instruments. After months they did manage to break in and find the descending passage.

(1) Close up of Angle blocks over the original entrance

Strabo, a geographer, in 24 B.C. took a trip up the Nile. He describes an entrance on the north face of the Great Pyramid made of a hinged stone which could be raised but which was indistinguishable from the surrounding masonry when it lay flush.

(2) Entrance to Al Mamoun's forced passage on the North side made in 820 AD

Al Mamum decided to bore direct center on the North face of the pyramid and on the level of the 7th course. The original entrance was placed ten courses higher and 24 feet east of the main axis than Al Mamum had guessed. Thus, he started 10 courses too low and too far to the west.

(3) In Al Mamoun's forced passage looking South

The only object that Al Mamun's men found in the Great Pyramid was the coffin in the King's Chamber. They searched frantically to find treasure but found nothing. Legend has it that to pacify "his" disappointed men Al Mamum had a treasure of gold hidden in the pyramid at night, amounting to just the wages due to his men, and explained the coincidence on the wisdom of Allah.

(4) Adam Rutherford examining masonry in the upper part of the Descending Passage

The original entrance leads into the descending passage which slopes down at an angle of about 26 degrees. It is a narrow passage which measures about 3 1/2 feet wide by almost 4 feet high. The distance of this descending passage to the beginning of the horizontal Subterranean chamber passage is about 344 feet.

(5) The Granite Plug - lower end

In the ceiling 97 feet down the descending passage is a granite plug which blocks the entrance to the ascending passage. It is made of very hard quartz, mica and feldspar. There are 3 granite plugs side by side. Al Mamoun's men dug around these plugs through the softer limestone to gain entrance into the ascending passage.

(6) The First Ascending Passage - Looking South (up)

Once around these granite plugs we are in the ascending passage. The ascending passage slopes up at a 26-degree angle (same angle as the descending passage slopes down) and has the same dimensions as the descending passage (3 1/2 feet high by almost 4 feet wide). Following the ascending passage for 124 feet, we finally arrive at a large open space known as the Grand Gallery.

(7) Junction of Grand Gallery (above) and Queen's Chamber Passage (below and running horizontal)

At this point of intersection, you can take one of two routes. You can continue going up the grand gallery and eventually end up in the King’s chamber or continue in a horizontal direction through another passage (127 feet long) and wind up in the Queen’s chamber.

(8) The Grand Gallery - North end

The ascending passage opens up into a large open space known as the Grand Gallery. It is a hall 153 feet long and 7 feet wide at the floor level and about 28 feet high It continues upward at the same slope as the ascending passage.

(8) The Grand Gallery - North end - at a different angle

The walls rise in seven courses of polished limestone each corbeled 3 inches toward the center, making the gallery narrow from 62 inches at the base to 41 inches at the top. The first corbeling is 7 feet high.

(9) The Grand Gallery - Looking South (up)

On both sides of the central 2 foot passage are two narrow ramps 18 inches wide and slotted at regular intervals. The purpose of these ramps is unknown.

(Between 9 and 10) The Great Step in the Grand Gallery

At the top of the Grand Gallery lies a huge stone step which measures 6 feet wide by 3 feet high. It forms a platform 8 feet deep. It is very worn and chipped.

(Between 9 and 10) King's Chamber Passage from front of the the Great Step

Past the Great Step is another low, horizontal passage 41 inches square which leads to the King's Chamber.

(Between 9 and 10) King's Chamber Passage (looking south)

A third of a way along this passage, it rises and widens into a sort of antechamber, the south, east and west walls of which are no longer limestone but red granite.

(10) King's Chamber - Entrance door and northern air shaft

The King’s Chamber, made out of granite, measures about 34 feet by 17 feet and is about 19 feet high. It should be noted that all the passages in the Great Pyramid are all in the same vertical plane, parallel to the north-south axis of the pyramid. They are not in the direct center of the pyramid but off 24 feet to the east of center. Thus the entrance to the pyramid is not in the centerline of the north side, but to the east of it by 24 feet. Also all the chambers extend westward from the vertical plane of the passage system, and none extend eastward.

(10) King's Chamber - West End with Coffer

The only item ever found in pyramid is the coffer in the King's Chamber. It is a lidless box cut from a solid block of granite. It's dimensions are 6 feet 6 inches long, 2 feet 3 inches wide, and 3 feet deep. It may have once had a sliding lid since there is a ridge along the top edge of the coffer. It is chipped at one corner.

(Above 10) Campbell's Chamber - The upper most relieving chamber

Above the roof of the King's Chamber are found a series of 5 cavities or chambers. These have been labeled "relieving chambers" by Egyptologists since they think that the purpose of these spaces is to prevent the collapse of the King's Chamber from the tremendous weight of the masonry above the chamber area which amounts to several million tons. This reason has been recently questioned and the purpose of these chambers is still being debated.

(11) Queen's Chamber Passage with its Drop

As mentioned before, if you continue at the junction of the ascending passage and Grand Gallery through the horizontal passage which runs for 127 feet you wind up in the Queen’s Chamber. This passage is 3 feet 9 inches high and 3 feet 5 inches wide. A sudden drop of 2 feet occurs towards the end of the passage before the entrance to the Queen's Chamber.

28- Queen's Chamber - showing entrance door (center), air shaft (left), and part of Niche (right)
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The Queen's Chamber has a rough floor and a gabled limestone roof. The name Queen's Chamber is a misnomer. The custom among Arab's was to place their women in tombs with gabled ceilings (as opposed to flat ones for men), so this room came to be labeled by the Arab's as the Queen's Chamber. The walls of this chamber are mysteriously encrusted with salt as much as much as 1/2 inch thick. The chamber dimensions are 18 feet 10 inches by 17 feet 2 inches. It has a double pitched ceiling 20 1/2 feet at its highest point, formed by huge blocks of limestone at a slope of about 30 degrees.

29- The Niche in the east wall of the Queen's Chamber
(The passage through the back of the Niche is an excavation made by Colonel Vyse in 1837.)
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The Niche was originally 3 feet 5 inches deep but a passage has been hacked through the back for several yards. The Niche is just over 16 feet high.

30- Opening to Northern Air Shaft in the Queen's Chamber
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The airshafts from the King's Chamber were found to exit to the outside of the pyramid. It appears that the Queen's Chamber airshafts do not lead to the outside but may terminate at an entrance to a secret chamber within the pyramid.

31- The Unknown Door at the end of the southern air shaft.
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Rudolf Gantenbring in 1993 sent a small robot with a camera up the southern air shaft in the Queen's Chamber. After traveling about 200 feet up the air shaft it came to a small door complete with copper handles. The air shafts are about 9 inches square. As far as we know, this door has not been opened and what is inside remains unknown.

32- Lesser Subterranean Chamber and Subterranean Chamber Passage
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The distance of the descending passage to the beginning of the horizontal Subterranean chamber passage is about 344 feet. This shorter horizontal section leads to a small lesser subterranean chamber and then continues into the large subterranean chamber.

33- The Lower eastern half of the Subterranean Chamber as viewed from the upper western half
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This large chamber is a strange place, measuring 46 X 27 feet with a height of about 11 feet. It is cut deep into the bedrock almost 600 feet directly below the apex of the Pyramid. Its ceiling is smooth and and the floor is cut in several rough levels, making it look unfinished. It has also been referred to as the "upside down room".

34- The Pit in the Subterranean Chamber
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In the center of this chamber on the east side is a square pit which is known as the "bottomless pit". It is called the "bottomless pit" since at the time of its discovery, it was not known how deep it was.

35- Subterranean Chamber showing contour around the Pit and entrance doorway (upper left)
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The Pit was 12 feet deep in 1838 , but was dug deeper by the explorer Colonel Vyse in the hope of finding an outlet that would lead to a hidden chamber.

36- The Western Half of the Subterranean Chamber
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The Edgar brothers account of their visit to the pyramid in 1909 state that "In the unfinished floor of the subterranean chamber appears the large, squarish mouth of a deep vertical shaft. We had always to avoid walking too near its edge, for the rough uneven floor of the chamber is covered with loose crumbling debris".

37- The Dead End passage in the Subterranean Chamber
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In the south wall, opposite the entrance, is a low passage (about 2 1/2 feet square) which runs 53 feet before coming to a blind end.

38- The Grotto and Well-Shaft
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At the intersection where the ascending passage meets with the Grand Gallery is a hole which leads to a shaft (known as the well shaft) which connects with the descending passage below. This near vertical tunnel is about 3 feet in diameter. As it continues downward a grotto opens off the shaft. The shaft than continues downward to connect with the lower part of the descending passage.

39- The Well-Shaft looking almost vertically upward from the bottom
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The purpose of this well shaft remains a mystery.

40- Close up of the Coffer in the King's Chamber
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To end this tour, let us go back and look more closely at the most mysterious part of the Great Pyramid, the empty coffer in the King's Chamber. This beautiful granite shaped box made was made from a solid block of chocolate-colored granite and is even harder than the granite walls of the King's Chamber. For thousands of years, many have wondered about its purpose. Ancient legend says that it came from Atlantis or even from America. It was never inscribed or decorated. Also, since it is too large to pass through the low passages leading into the King Chambers, it must have been placed in the chamber before the chamber was closed and passages sealed. The volume of the Coffer is equal to that of the Ark of the Covenant. It is 89.8 inches long, 38.7 inches wide and 41.2 inches high. The sides are close to 6 inches thick and the bottom 7 inches thick.