Announcing New Search Engine!

. Computer genius Iam Savvi announced his new Internet search engine, Giggle™. Savvi claims some of the improvements over competing Internet finding aids include establishing an extensive list of 'stopwords'.

. "Most search engines ignore words like 'the', 'of', ' in' and the like. But we have programmed our search engine to ignore hundreds more, so Giggle™ runs much faster than competing services. Of course people need to be more thoughtful and precise in their choice of keywords. But isn't that an improvement of the intellectual atmosphere in the world?" he opined.

. "We don't want to be finding any webpages that are depressing or boring or unhappiness-making, so this affects our choices of stopwords, like "violent", "calamity", "harm" et cetera," said Savvi, an informal guy who asked us to use his nickname "Savvy".  "They are saying 'Everything is in a name'. Good for the business, too!" he quipped. Savvy avows an interest in making Giggle™ a truly international service in token of which he has adopted the following mottos for his company:

. "Quid pro quo, vere. Sed tamen qui est quid?"

. "Tanzen und singen, die Frühling zu bringen."

. "Es muy macho a decir '¡Viva yo!' "

. "Le roi des poissons? C'est en effet le Poisson d'avril!"

. "Talking and reading, please dear customer, that is how we are doing business," he says from his small office in Varanasi. "Yes, we are telling you truly how up to date we are. You see, our city was called Benares. But going back to the roots is so 'in' now so we readopted the original ancient Sanskrit name Varanasi. Isn't that so frightfully good thinking?"

. When asked how he was able to start up his company so quickly, he replied: "Oh yes, we are being very thankful to the gracious workers at our call centers for working so cheaply. You see, India is now so prosperous that labor costs are flewing the coop, like right over the Himalaya!"

. "But we were able to be establishing our user assistance call centers cheaply, in poorer countries. Presently we are having one in Millinocket, Maine and another in Detroit, Michigan. Soon another is being set up hastily in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and right after that, another in Riverside, California.  The town fathers and mothers of Cambridge, Massachusetts are trying convincingly to have us set up a call center there, too.  (It is very tempting, as I have heard that those talented, but poorly paid citizens, have among them capability to speak 123 languages!)  Isn't that so very nice? We are having agreeable partnerships with America! This makes me very happy, to make friends in the other hemisphere. I feel so totally global now, just right for this modern age, yes?"

. "Being desirous of a representative Asian opinion we looked for someone with a broad perspective. When I asked for a comment on Giggle™ His Humbleness the Dalai Llama was kind enough to explain." Savvi quotes Him as follows:

. "Wherever I go, my main interest or commitment is in the promotion of human values such as warm heartedness – this is what I consider the key factor for a happy life at the individual level, family level and community level. In our modern times, it seems that insufficient attention is paid to these inner values. Promoting them is therefore my number one commitment. Therefore, it's important to use the good potential to be a happier human being. That is what I found so beautiful about Giggling."

Wish On A Star

  Ever wonder what it would be like to travel to a star and see it up close?  Since the time I was little I have looked up to the stars almost nightly, weather permitting.  I became "friends" with them, in the sense of having a connected feeling, and eventually a certain warmth gained from familiarity and fostered by the constancy of the starry sphere.  I was fascinated by the daily and annual cycle of the sight.
  Even the most cursory glance shows that stars have various colors. And certainly, having noticed that some are brighter than others, one has wondered whether that was because they are nearer, or are intrinsically brighter.  In other words they each have an individuality.

  Here is a meditation I try on myself from time to time.  Get up at dawn and find a comfortable place to stay lying on your back for a couple of hours.  Face easterly.  As the glow of dawn increases try to imagine that the planet under you is turning toward the sight of the Sun instead of our commonplace perception that the Sun is rising.

  When the Sun becomes visible at the horizon say to yourself  "Wow, I finally get to travel to a star!  What an amazing thing:  so warm and bright!"

   As more discoveries are made of "exoplanets" around other stars, one begins to get an idea of whether the setup in our solar system is "normal" or not.  In general the ones discovered are much bigger than the Earth (partly an artifact of their greater ease of discovery) and closer to their star.   Some apparently whiz around in their orbits in a matter of weeks or days (as reckoned by Earth time, of course).  Now that's puzzling to me...  Even our closest, Mercury, takes 88 days.   Are we the oddballs in the Universe?

  The standard definition of any planet's "year" is the period of one complete orbit.  With such short years I'd hate to live on one of those speedy exoplanets and have to pay my annual income tax , say every ten days or so!

.  I've always envisioned the Earth as far from the Sun.  A chance reading of this phrase in a travel account having nothing to do with astronomy got me thinking:  "Earth, a planet barely more than a hundred Sun diameters from its star..."  I knew the Sun is approximately 860,000 miles in diameter and that the Earth is 93 million miles from it, but the approximate hundred to one ratio had never jumped out at me.  Now that I am aware of it it seems so close!  But I'm glad.  It's nice and cozy right here.  Just right.  Drawing a parallel with the Three Bears story, astronomers call this the "Goldilocks Zone".  Just right!

   In my sketch above the Sun is represented on the left by a yellow circle.  The dotted line represents the distance of the Earth from the Sun, and is scaled exactly with the Sun's diameter.  At this scale the Earth is too small to see, but can be imagined as the farthest right dot on the line.