Exactly..!!

If we are confident about a plan, then we don't plan for an alternative.

Facts About Scholarships:

David Letterman created a scholarship for the average “C student,” recognizing that it’s not all about marks some are extraordinary and amazing in other ways.

When a millionaire gave everyone in a Florida neighborhood free college scholarships and free daycare the crime rate was cut in half and the graduation rate jumped from 25% to 100%. He did this after being fired from Walt Disney World because his bosses didn’t think he could be a ‘company man’.

An Italian schoolboy who was selling snacks on campus at a lower price than the cafeteria was suspended for 10 days. He also received a prestigious scholarship from an institute that said the boy’s initiative should be “encouraged, not persecuted”. 

The Colt’s punter borrowed $100 for poker and turned it into $1,400. He used the funds for a trip to Miami to take part in a kicking competition for prospects. He made 9 consecutive field goals starting at 25 yards and moving 5 yards out each time. He was then offered a scholarship to WVU. 

In 2012, Miss America claimed to make $45 million of scholarship money available to women annually, where in reality, in 2012, the Miss America Foundation gave out less than $500,000 in cash scholarships.

Usain Bolt got offered track scholarships from many American colleges but turned them down to train in his homeland, Jamaica. 

Morgan Freeman turned down a drama scholarship because he dreamed of being an Air Force fighter pilot. He spent four years as a tracking radar repairman. At age 65, he finally earned his private pilot license.

In 2004, An NYU Student spent 8 months living in the college library due to being unable to afford tuition and room & board despite a $15000/yr scholarship and working 30 hours a week. Upon learning about this, the university gave him free accommodation through the summer.

A Chinese mathematical genius who had won a gold medal in the International MathsOlympiad denied a full Scholarship to MIT and chose to become a monk in a Buddhist Monastery.

Oregon gave US college football Heisman winner Marcus Mariota a scholarship after watching him play at one football camp despite him never starting a varsity game and being relatively unknown.

Billy Crystal attended Marshall University on a Baseball Scholarship but never played due to the program being suspended.

Dolph Lundgren had a Fulbright scholarship to MIT to study chemical engineering, and road-tripped up from NYC on a motorcycle and rolled onto campus with his then-girlfriend Grace Jones on the back.

Every year the Chinese government offers 60 students full scholarships to North Korean universities. Chinese students enjoy more freedom to wander around the country than tourists and are permitted to travel from city to city without a tour guide and take the Pyongyang subway. 

Rachel Maddow was the first openly gay or lesbian American to win an international Rhodes Scholarship. She used it to earn a Doctor of Philosophy in politics from Oxford University.

Research by the Pew Foundation found that 9 out of 10 Generation X parents believed their child would receive a scholarship or grant to go to college, which actually caused millennials to have to take on more debt themselves.

The Official Federal Presidential Public Memorial of Harry S Truman is not a statute or a state park, but a scholarship foundation.

Robert Morris University offers athletic scholarships to League of Legends players. 

Cooper Union is a privately funded college located in NYC which was founded in 1859 on the principle of education being “open and free for all”. All admitted students were granted a full-tuition scholarship. That policy was changed in 2013 and all future students will now be charged tuition.

Forest Whitaker went to Cal Poly on a football scholarship, hurt his back, switched his major to music and sings Opera. He got another scholarship to Berkeley to study drama. 

The money paid for tickets to the Great Exhibition in 1851 is still being used to pay for scholarships and grants for the researcher.

Interesting Facts About Puzzles:

The inventor of the Rubik’s Cube didn’t realize he’d built a puzzle until he scrambled it the first time and tried to restore it.

The day before the 1996 U.S. presidential election, the NYT Crossword contained the clue “Lead story in tomorrow’s newspaper,” the puzzle was built so that both electoral outcomes were correct answers, requiring 7 other clues to have dual responses.

In 2011, people playing Foldit, an online puzzle game about protein folding, resolved the structure of an enzyme that causes an Aids-like disease in monkeys. Researchers had been working on the problem for 13 years. The gamers solved it in three weeks.

Will Shortz, the New York Times crossword puzzle editor, is the only person in the world to have a degree in enigmatology, the study of puzzles.

There is a cryptic organization called Cicada 3301 that posts challenging puzzles online, possibly to recruit codebreakers and linguists.

Klotski originally was a mechanical puzzle.

Artificial Intelligence has crushed all human records in the puzzle game “2048,” achieving a high score of 839,732 and beating the game in only 973 moves without using any undo.

Jigsaw puzzles soared in popularity during the great depression, as they provided a cheap, long-lasting, recyclable form of entertainment.

When the New York Sun was relaunched in 2002, its first edition carried the solution to the last crossword puzzle that the earlier Sun published before it folded in 1950.

In 1979, a British artist published a book containing riddles and puzzles about the location where he had buried an 18kt gold filigree and jeweled pendant, setting off a worldwide treasure hunt which lasted over two years, and ended in scandal. 

In the 1920s, people feared that crossword puzzles would contribute to illiteracy.

In 1944, by a huge coincidence, a crossword puzzle was printed with answers all containing D-Day operation code names, which sent MI-5 into a panic thinking their invasion plans had been discovered.

Soapy water can solve the “connect the towns” puzzle in seconds, connecting four posts with the minimum possible road length between them, thanks to its tendency to minimize its free energy.

In 1980, Ronald Graham offered a prize of $100 for anyone who could solve his “Boolean Pythagorean Triples Problem.” Last year, three computer scientists solved the puzzle, using a supercomputer over the course of 2 days, and came out with a proof that takes up 200TB of storage space.

The word ladder puzzle was invented by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Most crossword puzzles are vertically symmetrical, meaning they look the same if you flip them upside down.

In Canada, a mathematical puzzle must be solved in order to win the lottery to classify it as a “game of skill” not gambling.

When studying the reason for affirmative action, researchers found that black and white people scored the same when given a complex series of puzzles, but only the black score fell dramatically when told the puzzles tested for intelligence. 

The mathematical puzzle solved by Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting is a straightforward graph theory problem.

In 2007, a puzzle was released and $2 million prizes were offered for the first complete solution. The competition ended at noon on 31 December 2010, with no solution being found.

The phrase “thinking outside the box” was popularised from the solution to a topographical puzzle involving 9 dots in a box shape.

The original King’s Quest, in one of the most infamously difficult puzzles in video game history, required the player to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name backwards, but using an inverted alphabet (A=Z, B=Y, etc). The correct answer is”Ifnkovhgroghprm”. 

A children’s book author wrote a story containing a coded word puzzle leading to prizes worth $1,000,000. Readers had to decipher codes and clues hidden in the story to find tokens hidden all around the United States. Each token found received a jeweled animal worth over $50,000.

The puzzle “Number Place” was originally created in the United States but did not reach popularity until it was shown in Japan, in Japan the puzzle was renamed “Sudoku”. It later came back to the U.S. but kept the name “Sudoku”.

Blank spaces in the crossword puzzles are called “Light” as they help in giving clues for other answers as well.

Individuals with Prader-Willi Syndrome, a rare intellectual disability that reduces IQ to 60pts and impairs speech, are much more skilled with jigsaw puzzles than able-bodied children.

Interesting Facts About Astronomy:

Most of our modern understanding of astronomy is based on the work of scientists from the city of Babylon over 2000 years ago. After conquering the city, Alexander the Great ordered the translation of the Babylonian astronomical records, thus causing the knowledge to spread worldwide.

Bakhtiyar Khilji, the Muslim general destroyed the ancient university and library of Nalanda in 1193 in hopes of uprooting Buddhism. The destruction of the library is considered responsible for the demise of ancient Indian scientific thought in Astronomy, Maths, Alchemy, and Anatomy.

By using astronomy, we have guessed the date that Odysseus took back the throne of Ithaca as described in Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’: April 16th, 1178 B.C.

Harlow Shapley, the man who discovered where our sun is in relation to our galaxy, picked astronomy to study as his major because it was the first one he saw in the course catalog.

Before Neil deGrasse Tyson went on The Daily Show, he paid attention to how many sentences Jon Stewart usually allowed before interrupting. He picked up on the kind of phrases Stewart liked to pick up on, which is why he described astronomy using sexually suggestive language. 

Instead of the traditional gifts of a watch and pair of long pants, rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun’s mother gave him a telescope for his Lutheran confirmation, sparking his passion for astronomy.

Far from holding back science, “The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial aid and support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other, institutions.”

The Sagan Planet Walk – a 1.2km, 1:5bn scale representation of the solar system in Ithaca, NY was expanded in 1997 to include Alpha Centauri (the closest neighboring star). It is located at the Imiloa Astronomy Center at the University of Hawaii, making it the world’s largest exhibition.

Martin Luther said to Copernicus “There is the talk of a new astrologer who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead…. The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down. However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth.”

There is a nearly 10km wide asteroid named after Mister Rogers called “26858 Misterrogers”. Rogers, who had a lifelong love of astronomy, even produced a planetarium show called “The Sky Above Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”, which is still shown at planetariums across the United States.

A critical step in the creation of Wi-Fi was a byproduct of research into improving astronomy imaging.

Ethiopia’s first observatory opened in 2014 and astronomers hope that its space ventures will kick-start a scientific culture in sub-Saharan Africa, a region where currently very little astronomy is taught.

Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the CCD (image sensor), information theory, the operating system Unix, and the programming languages C and C++ and they’ve won 8 Nobel Prizes.

The Vatican has its own observatory for the sake of pursuing the science of astronomy.

The calendar date of Easter is based on astronomy. It is generally the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox.

Bill Nye, the Science Guy is the Executive Director of the Planetary Society, an astronomy organization founded by the great Carl Sagan.

The famous astronomer, Tycho Brahe, known for helping revolutionize astronomy in the 1500s, lost a chunk of his nose in a sword duel with a fellow student over the legitimacy of a math formula, causing him to live the rest of his life with a metal insert over the missing chunk. 

One of al-Battānī’s (c. 858 – 929) best-known achievements in astronomy was the determination of the solar year as being 365 days, 5 hours, 46 minutes and 24 seconds.

There is an extensive Wikipedia article on what astronomy is like from a Martian POV.

Humans were considered the first computers starting in the early 17th century. These individuals would compute long calculations pertaining to astronomy, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.

NASA has an observatory onboard a Boeing 747 named SOFIA i.e. Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. 

Anyone can help sort and measure our galaxy because of a public astronomy project called The Milky Way Project.

Princeton did not allow women into the graduate astronomy program until 1975.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was the first person to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College (Harvard) and discovered what the Universe is made of.

NASA has been publishing an Astronomy Photograph of the Day since mid-1995

In 2012, the National Reconnaissance Office gave NASA two leftover space telescopes of greater quality than the Hubble space telescope at no cost. Those telescopes were designed as spy telescopes but could be useful for astronomy if NASA ever launches them.

The moon appears to wiggle and shifts if observed throughout a whole lunar cycle. That is why an observer on Earth sees more than 50% of the moon’s surface. In astronomy, this is called Libration.

Edgar Allen Poe provided an answer to a great paradox in astronomy before scientists could. 

After introducing gypsy moths to North America, E.L. Trouvelot lost interest in entomology. Instead, he focused on astronomy, he ended up making about 7000 astronomical illustrations and has craters named after him on the Moon and Mars.

Before 1925, in the field of astronomy, a date officially began at Noon instead of Midnight. 

Clyde Tombaugh enrolled in university two years after his discovery of Pluto. He wanted to take an introductory course in astronomy but the professor wouldn’t let him as he thought it would create awkward academic implications for a discoverer of a planet to be taking beginning astronomy. 

Astronomy Fact: After a few million years our local group will contract to form a new Spiral galaxy and eventually we would not be able to observe radiation from other local groups.

Astronomer Nancy Roman could not gain tenure after completing her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1949 because she was female. So she went on to become the first Chief of Astronomy at NASA and the “mother of Hubble” instead.

Highway Hypnosis..!!

Hilarious..!!

We never read terms and conditions. Do we?

The New Year Begins.. Happy New Year 2018

The new year stands before us, like a chapter in a book, waiting to be written. We can help write that story by setting goals.

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.

Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.

Believe you can and you're halfway there.