Pain with Smarphones

Pain with Smartphones

Mobile phone is a smart utility in an emergency and on the move.

But it cannot beat a wired connection in many issues.

If it is an old phone it does not have a memory and the secret service has to bug it and wiretap to get the conversation heard or recorded.

If one is sharp one can easily detect, if the wired phone is tapped.

Poor President Nixon comes to my mind and now it has metamorphosed into email servers. 

It used to be a crude method.

I use to take the receiver and hold it for few seconds to see another link is made.

Even though, I was an ordinary guy and not trained in secretive work but had the wondering mind to investgate at firsthand.

Simply because, I said what I mean, and if it was a political statement sour to the party in power that would mean my immediate transfer to a remote place.

In any case, I worked in a remote place in my first few appointments.

I never pulled wire to get what I wanted.

Usually the party in power does the wiretapping.

With a land phone security is not a issue.

1. With a mobile it is a big issue.

2. Mobile or digital communication has an inbuilt memory and can be recorded for posterity.

This was the cardinal mistake LTTE did when they attacked the Katunayake airport.

Even though, it took some hard work and time Ceylonese Police cracked it and kept that secret for a long time.

Memory is the second problem if one is a criminal.

If you see the classic film “The Day of the Jackal”how the plotters were caught by wire tapping and the hired assassin did not take any risks with even the old telephone.

3. My biggest grouse is the Android utilities.

There are thousands of them and sorting out the most useful is a pain in the neck.

Having downloaded my requirements, it took one whole night to customize to my needs.

4. I use the phone as a minicomputer and my only requirement is to access the web and sign off after few lines of blogging (not an essay).

Unlike a computer signing off or logging off is the most difficult job.

Say if I use Google, Gmail and have Google Drive installed and if I lose the mobile all my private data is exposed.

5. They want you hooked to them and like Facebook won't have delete button (in the drop down menu) to sign off the email button.

That is my “beto noire”.

6. There are many other nuances and each individual has his or her own “Grouse Material”.

Paddy Bird (Wee Kurulla), My Dog's Woolly hair and Leaves of Havari Nuga

Paddy Bird (Wee Kurulla), My Dog's Woolly hair and Leaves of Havari Nuga and dried up leaves of grass 

 

I wanted to write about global warming and constipation but my readers are spared of ignominy thanks to the Paddy Bird.

Let me deal with a copyright issue first.

I wanted to put a picture of my favourite bird with this piece and searched for a free photograph.

I found one but it was copyrighted.

I know this guy has a good camera and never cared for a paddy bird let alone take the husk out of a rice seed (which birds are experts).

He is so selfish he tries to own this birds picture.

He is a sordid bird watcher.

I of course (my wife too) for the last 15 years trying to encourage breeding of these birds in our garden.

I never thought that my rooftop garden (birds' paradise in all other respect with water and insects including dragonflies) was conduce for their breeding.

Couple of weeks ago I was watering the water plants and a paddy bird flew across my ear in an aggressive manner.

I just ignored it and did not give any eye contact.

Thanks to my wife's effort lot of birds visit our mulberry tree daily.

With scorching temperatures, hitting 95 outside most of my terrestrial plants including the two cocoa plants are shedding their leaves at a rate that alarmed me to my bones.

I decided to do an overall and reduce the numbers of plants to the minimum to cut down on our water bill which was above the electricity (which is also very high) first time in my life.

For the last three days, with a planned strategy to ease my blind dog's night prowl (no prey but jasmine flowers and spirit weed to sniff) around the trees, I made a wide pathway so that he does not bump against the plant pots.

On the third day (today) I wanted to uproot the second but the tallest tree (hawari nuga and the tallest is an exotic local plant the name I do not know- I got it from a local gardener who is an expert on medicinal plants) but I could not.

Then I looked at it in a meditative mode, this does not deserve an unnatural death and looked at its long leaves.

Presto!

Empty bird's nest.

Owned by the paddy bird few weeks ago but discarded having got its brood out.

It was made of my dog's woolly soft hair (90%) and few grassy bits and a single leaf of a Havari Nuga.

I thought for a moment not only he contributes his liquid fertilizer to my gardening efforts but gives comfort cushion to avi-fauna's young ones.

He got lovely treat for his indirect contribution.

Birds of feather fly together.

In other word nature nurtures nature.

I hope the guy who sells the photos of birds reads this in full.

In a different note if Europeans did not come and G.B.Henry did not tabulate our avi-fauna, this guy would not know how to name a bird.

Series of reproduction from WiKipedia 

Hair of the dog", short for "Hair of the dog that bit you", is a colloquial expression in the English language predominantly used to refer to alcohol that is consumed with the aim of lessening the effects of a hangover.

The expression originally referred to a method of treatment of a rabid dog bite by placing hair from the dog in the bite wound.

Ebenezer Cobham Brewer writes in the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898): "In Scotland it is a popular belief that a few hairs of the dog that bit you applied to the wound will prevent evil consequences. Applied to drinks, it means, if overnight you have indulged too freely, take a glass of the same wine within 24 hours to soothe the nerves. 'If this dog do you bite, soon as out of your bed, take a hair of the tail the next day.'" He also cites two apocryphal poems containing the phrase, one of which is attributed to Aristophanes. It is possible that the phrase was used to justify an existing practice, and the idea of Latin: similia similibus curantur ("like cures like") dates back at least to the time of Hippocrates and exists today as the basic postulate of classical homeopathy. In the 1930s cocktails known as Corpse Revivers were served in hotels.

Alstonia macrophylla or Hard alstonia, Hard milkwood or Big-leaved macrophyllum is a species of plant in the Apocynaceae family.

It is native to Indonesia (Kalimantan and Sulawesi), Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. It was introduced to Sri Lanka, where it is known as hawari nuga by local Sinhalese people.

Alstonia macrophylla is a tree with a straight trunk and a high, narrow crown. It can become up to 30 meters tall. The trunk and branches contain a white latex. The bark is smooth and has a light grey color. Leaves are in whorls of three to four, simple, penni-veined, membranous, and glabrous above. Leaf-blades are 10 to 50 centimeters long, 5 to 15 cm wide, widest in or above the middle, and cuneate at the base. Flowers are about 7 mm in diameter, white, with narrow corolla tube, placed terminal on twigs. Fruits are about 30 centimeters long, green and filled with many small hairy seeds that are dispersed far and wide by the wind. The heartwood is yellowish, with a straight and shallowly interlocked grain with a moderately fine to rather coarse texture.

The common tailorbird (Orthotomus sutorius) is a songbird found across tropical Asia. Popular for its nest made of leaves "sewn" together and immortalized by Rudyard Kipling in his Jungle Book, it is a common resident in urban gardens. Although shy birds that are usually hidden within vegetation, their loud calls are familiar and give away their presence. They are distinctive in having a long upright tail, greenish upper body plumage and rust coloured forehead and crown. This passerine bird is typically found in open farmland, scrub, forest edges and gardens. Tailorbirds get their name from the way their nest is constructed. The edges of a large leaf are pierced and sewn together with plant fibre or spider silk to make a cradle in which the actual nest is built.

Like most warblers, the common tailorbird is insectivorous. The song is a loud cheeup-cheeup-cheeup with variations across the populations. 
The disyllabic calls are repeated often

Scaly-breasted Munia/Spotted Munia (Lonchura puntulata)

Very common resident bird of grasslands, gardens and paddy fields throughout the island. It lives as flocks of about ten birds and feeds on grass seeds and paddy. Scaly-breasted Munia breeds throughout the year though most nests are found in the period of October to May. The nest is a ball of grass blades in trees or shrubs. 
Thorny trees like lime or orange and sometime areca palm flowers are much favored nesting sites.

GoboLinux

Design of GoboLinux is revolutionary even though based on Linux Kernel.
I am glad they are working on version 16.
Version 15 available at torrent (be a seeder) which I down loaded yesterday.
16 version is alpha and availalbe at point to point download; Please test it and report any mishaps.
Thank you guys and girls at GoBoLinx.

The GoboLinux hierarchy represents a radical departure from the filesystem hierarchy traditionally employed by most UNIX-like operating systems where specific types of files are stored together in common standard subdirectories (such as /bin for executables and /etc for configuration files) and where package managers are used to keep track of what file belongs to which program. In GoboLinux, files from each program are placed under their respective program's own dedicated subdirectory. The makers of GoboLinux have said that "the filesystem is the package manager", and the GoboLinux package system uses the filesystem itself as a package database. This is said to produce a more straightforward, less cluttered directory tree. GoboLinux uses symlinks and an optional kernel module called GoboHide to achieve all this while maintaining full compatibility with the traditional Linux filesystem hierarchy.
The creators of GoboLinux have stated that their design has other "modernisms", such as the removal of some distinctions between similar traditional directories (such as the locations of executables /bin, /usr/bin, and /usr/local/bin). GoboLinux designers have claimed that this results in shell scripts breaking less often than with other Linux distributions. GoboLinux also allows the user to have different versions of the same program installed concurrently (and even run them concurrently). Furthermore, it has been claimed that the package management index could never become unsynchronized with the filesystem, because references to nonexistent files simply become broken links, and thus become inactive. GoboLinux's filesystem changes also allow other innovations, such as an entirely new boot system that does not use System V or BSD style init systems.

Saying Good Bye to OLD Hard Disks

Saying Good Bye to OLD Hard Disks

If you want to buy an external hard drive, my advice is wait a bit, the prices will come down drastically when the market is saturated.

Wait for SSDs.

In my case all my little videos, photos and all my pdf books can be put in a 32 GiB Smart Slim Card.

Why by Mega Disk?

Power cords and casing are extras.

I have over nearly 20 hard disks of various sizes and shapes loaded with over 500 Linux distributions and I use the

Lightest distribution for my work.

I wanted to build an archive (fearing nobody will store them in the cloud) and the Smart Phones and Andoids spoilt the soup.

As far as Android is concerned it has big security HOLES, especially the Wireless Protocols.

So do not retire the WIRED connection till YOU die.

It is the fastest and the safest, if you use Linux TOR.

Fireroptic does not serve YOU well if your computer's RAM is only 1 GiB.

8 GiB is my recommendation it is roughly Rs.1000/= for I GiB.

I use the cloud for storage which is probably a smarter choice.

The technology is pacing at fast rate and we are getting old very fast.

So saying Good Bye to Linux, Internet and assortment of Emails are on the card and in the distant horizon.

Dragonflies

Dragonflies
Dragonfly is a clever engineering design of nature which is better designed for flying rivalling even  a modern helicopter.
Dragonflies are powerful and agile fliers, capable of migrating across oceans, moving in any direction, and changing direction suddenly. 
In flight, the adult dragonfly can propel itself in six directions: upward, downward, forward, back, to left and to right. 
They have four different styles of flight. 
A number of flying modes are used that include counter-stroking, with fore wings beating 180° out of phase with the hind wings, is used for hovering and slow flight. This style is efficient and generates a large amount of lift. Phased-stroking, with the hind wings beating 90° ahead of the fore wings, is used for fast flight. This style creates more thrust, but less lift than counter-stroking; synchronized-stroking, with fore wings and hind wings beating together, is used when changing direction rapidly, as it maximizes thrust; and gliding, with the wings held out, is used in three situations: free gliding, for a few seconds in between bursts of powered flight; gliding in the updraft at the crest of a hill, effectively hovering by falling at the same speed as the updraft; and in certain dragonflies such as darters, when "in cop" with a male, the female sometimes simply glides while the male pulls the pair along by beating his wings.
The head is large with very short antennae. 
It is dominated by the two compound eyes, which cover most of its surface. The compound eyes are made up of ommatidia, the numbers being greater in the larger species. The number (ommatidia) can be as high as 25,000 of varying sizes. 
It has an amazing sight and we perfected catching them by tail as kids. We could do that because there were so many 60 years ago.
 In other words all its activities are on the wing, eating, drinking, mating, just fooling around and dogfights.
It is amazing that one of the oldest insects of our world developed all these skills which the man cannot reproduce by machine. Of course the 300 million odd years of existence made them much versatile.
Its armory in catching prey is much better than military design. The lower jaw has a huge, extensible labium, armed with hooks and spines, which is used for catching prey. This labium is folded under the body at rest and struck out at great speed by hydraulic pressure generated by the abdominal muscles.
I thought of writing this simply because this was the first insect that ventured into my water garden on the rooftop for laying eggs. 
In the beginning there were only blue one, then a brown one started coming and perhaps a third one yellow in colour. All the other insects including butterflies started coming much later and the birds were the last.
No bees at all.
I did not know they clean up our mosquitoes and larvae.
There is a significant reduction in the mosquito population and I thought my guppies were doing an onerous job.
Not really, dragon fly nymphs can clean up my fish too.
Dragonfly nymphs vary in form with species and are loosely classed into claspers, sprawlers, hiders, and burrowers. 
Their internal hydraulic system is better than water sprayer or a pump.
Whereas damselfly nymphs have three feathery external gills, dragonfly nymphs have internal gills, located around the fourth and fifth abdominal segments. Water is pumped in and out of the abdomen through an opening at the tip. The naiads of some clubtails (Gomphidae) that burrow into the sediment, have a snorkel like tube at the end of the abdomen enabling them to draw in clean water while they are buried in mud. Naiads can forcefully expel a jet of water to propel themselves with great rapidity.
 
1. Dragonflies were some of the first winged insects to evolve, some 300 million years ago.
 
2. There are more than 5,000 known species of dragonflies, all of which (along with damselflies) belong to the order Odonata, which means “toothed one” in Greek and refers to the dragonfly’s serrated teeth.
 
3. In their larval stage, which can last up to two years, dragonflies are aquatic and eat just about anything—tadpoles, mosquitoes, fish, other insect larvae and even each other.
 
4. At the end of its larval stage, the dragonfly crawls out of the water, then its exoskeleton cracks open and releases the insect’s abdomen. Its four wings come out next.
 
5. Dragonflies are expert fliers. They can fly straight up and down, hover like a helicopter and even mate mid-air. If they can’t fly, they’ll starve because they only eat prey they catch while flying.
 
6. The flight of the dragonfly is so special that it has inspired engineers who dream of making robots that fly like dragonflies.
 
7. Most of the adult dragonflies live for only a few weeks.
 
8. Nearly all of the dragonfly’s head is eye, so they have incredible vision that encompasses almost every angle except right behind them.
 
9. Dragonflies, which eat insects as adults, are a great control on the mosquito population. A single dragonfly can eat 30 to hundreds of mosquitoes per day.
 
10. A dragonfly called the globe skinner has the longest migration of any insect—11,000 miles back and forth across the Indian Ocean.
 
11. Fossils of very large dragonfly ancestors in the Protodonata are found from 325 million years ago (Mya) in Upper Carboniferous rocks; these had wingspans up to about 750 mm (30 in). About 3000 species of Anisoptera are in the world today. Most are tropical, with fewer species in temperate regions.

Nature and stock market

Nature has bounty when that is the order of the day but equally thrifty when the demand is less favourable.
 
I guess an economist cannot fine tune our stock market with such precision.

Global Warming and its Effects on Cloud Formation

This is a tiny bit from my (probably) last book "Living with Nature".
I would concentrate on Linux which is 25 years Young!

Global Warming and its Effects on Cloud Formation
There is a distinct change in cloud patterns with global warming taking its toll on weather, especially the rain clouds. 
Nimbus and cumulus cloud formation are distorted but cirrus formation is promoted, are my beliefs and of course are reinforced by my routine observations.
This is especially so when the wind currents are slow and there is no obstruction to the movement and flow from the mountains. 
With the North East monsoon that blows inward from the East of the country the clouds break into two and move in two  directions when they hit the Hantana range.
One goes towards Kandy and other lifts up the hill and raises towards Katugastota. 
That is the normal pattern it used to be. 
If the cloud come low down to the Hantana range it usually rains in either in Kandy or Katugastota. 
But with a warm air currents below over the landmass the clouds remain high and they do not form into cumulus and later nimbus rain clouds. 
In other words the clouds do not increase in height or mass.
Instead, they become flatter at the bottom and as they become flatter they lift up as they move towards the Kandy city and the grey or dark colour of the cloud changes to fluffy and white. 
The Kandy city which has lost its tree cover is warmer and that is the very reason the clouds that are normally destined to become nimbus or rain clouds turn gradually to cirrus variety.
 
At a distance at the same level away from the hills one sees the cirrus clouds and no nimbus clouds.
 
There is a distinct lack of breaking of the cloud mass into two. Even, if it breaks and move towards Katugastota, those clouds will remain high due to comparably warmer Katugastota landmass.
 
If I summarize the events from Hantana Range to Herassagala, it goes like this.
 
1. Cloud that reach Hantana range from Gampola are cirrus with a touch of cumulus ans nimbus (for description cirrus should be taken as High level clouds, altostratus should be Mid level and cumulonimbus clouds are Low level rain clouds). 
That means clouds have to gather more water for them to become rain clouds.
The word cirrus means curly or cotton wool and stratus means thin and layered and cumulus means heavy or thick clouds.

2. By Heerasagala within about 20 to 30 minutes and a distance of only 3 kilometers (without heavy winds) the clouds break into three to five fragments.
 
3. This is what happens next.
The clouds breaks into pyramidal lumps as they rise up slowly. As they rise up the pyramids change into the shape of (similar to fuel exhaust tail of air planes) thin tails.
In other words cirrus becomes thin tails.
One never sees more than three pyramids or three tails, simply because, in no time tails disappear and the pyramids change to tails and no cumulus clouds reach Kandy.
So we have to go to Maligawa and invoke blessing from unseen current Devas. 
Buddha having attained Parinibbana would not interfere with human affairs until the next in line Metta Buddha appears in time measured in eons. 
By that time Kandy becomes a concrete jungle and the only way to have some respite is to sneak to city center before 8.30 P.M. before air-conditioning is switched off.
Coming back to clouds away from city dwellings;
The rain that is used to come by 3 P.M. or late in the evening never comes. Mind you temperature at 3 P.M. is 90 degrees Fahrenheit and it falls to 84 at mid night. 
If it rains it is well past midnight and towards the morning and the showers are light since they have not become cumulus by the constant warming effect of the landmass. 
The delay of few hours make the cloud to move towards the sea which is cooler and the rain lands on the sea or perhaps in India.
So Ceylon has less rain and some parts of India which never has the same amount of rain gets downpours.
These rain clouds hold much more water due to the higher temperature that preceded their formation.
It does not rain but it pours.
I have not watched the South West monsoon but my gut feeling is that this pattern would repeat itself albeit in a minor degree. The reason being, the South West monsoon produce bigger clouds and the atmospheric temperature is little lower during this season.
If the temperature remains as high as 90s my guess would be there will be less rain even in the South West monsoon.
The landmass has to cool below 78 degrees Fahrenheit or below for the precipitation to occur and the temperature is usually above 80s during the North East monsoon.
We are really seeing the effect of global warming.
One of my exotic flowers bloomed and there were two tiny fruits. I forgot to water for three days and the stem which was green is now gone brown and it is bent down and does not have the turgidity to remain erect. 
That is the end of the formation of the fruit.
This is the second time this happened in two seasons.

At 18 years old, he donated a kidney. Now, he regrets it.

Reproduction

One should read this fully.

His claim that he was not "fully informed" is a chilling tale.

I wish him all the luck in this world and his Metta would protect him in this life and the next.

He is a brave guy and he will become a good physician one day.

My only advice is do not regret and believe in his mum who was a great lady producing a kid like him.

 

At 18 years old, he donated a kidney. Now, he regrets it.

When I was 18, my stepfather’s brother had been on dialysis for just over a year. He was thin, he exercised regularly and he seemingly was in perfect health, but inexplicably his kidneys began to fail him. Although I was just about to leave for college, I’d heard enough about the misery of dialysis to decide to get tested as a possible donor. In the back of my mind, I knew that the chances of our compatibility were incredibly low because we were not related by blood. Perhaps that made it easy for me to decide to get tested.
When we received the results, I was stunned to find out that he and I were a match. The transplant team gave me plenty of opportunities to back out of the donation, and it put me through countless evaluations, physical and psychological. Much of my family was steadfast against my becoming a donor. Looking back, who could blame them? Their son-grandson-nephew was going to undergo a major operation with no benefit to himself.
However, I continued to be confident in my choice. I relied on the one fact that would be repeated to me many times: “The rate of kidney failure in kidney donors is the same as the general population.” Why wouldn’t everyone donate a kidney, I wondered.

[New approach to organ transport: Instead of ice, a little warmth]

My mother was the only one to — reluctantly — support my decision. She accompanied me to San Francisco, where the surgery took place, and we settled in for the weeks that I would spend recovering. On the day of the surgery, anesthesia flowed into my arm and the world swiftly slipped away. Then, just as quickly, it seemed, I awoke, nauseated and confused. So much preparation for such a short nap. The anxiety I’d felt about the surgery was now gone — as was one of my kidneys.

  Michael Poulson regrets giving that kidney away. (University Photo)

An uneventful recovery came and went. I returned to college and resumed a normal life. Likewise, my step-uncle did very well and is living a full and healthy life, as is my donated kidney.
Five years after the surgery, when I was 23 and getting ready to go to medical school, I began working in a research lab that was looking at kidney donors who had gone on to develop kidney failure. For that research, I talked to more than 100 such donors. In some cases, the remaining kidneys failed; in others, the organ became injured or developed cancer. The more I learned, the more nervous I became about the logic of my decision at age 18 to donate.

Content from JaguarAfter these rogue moments nothing was the same again

Journey through the moments in time that shaped the way we live our lives now.

And then in 2014, a study looking at long-term risks for kidney donors found that they had a greater risk of developing end-stage renal disease. Another study that same year raised the possibility that they may face a heightened risk of dying of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality (although this point remains controversial).
Other studies and surveys, though, suggest that the risk, while greater, is still fairly small.
The truth is, it is hard to get good numbers about what happens to donors. Hospitals are required to follow them for only two years post-donation, which does not catch such long-term complications as chronic kidney disease, cardiovascular issues or psychiatric issues. There is no national registry for kidney donors or other large-scale means of tracking long-term outcomes.

[So many people are dying of drug overdoses that they’re easing the donated organ shortage]

The result is that we know neither the denominator (the total number of kidney transplants that have occurred over the decades) nor the numerator (the number of donors who have gone into kidney failure). And what we do know is incomplete. Yet the need for donors remains great, as the number of Americans needing a kidney transplant has steadily increased — to more than 120,000 — while the number of transplants performed has remained relatively steady — at about 30,000 per year.
Donors are lauded for their altruism and bravery for what is promoted as a benign procedure with low long-term risk. We are told about neither the reality of donation risks nor the scarcity of data that’s available.
As a medical student and soon-to-be physician, I’ve come to better understand the imperfections in the idea of informed consent. We work with the data we have, and patients aren’t always told that it may not be that solid. At the time of my surgery, I thought the system was designed to protect me as a donor. Yet, now, more than eight years later, I am angry that I was never fully informed of the lack of research or the unknown long-term health implications for me.
Mostly I’ve come to terms with the increased risks of being a kidney donor. But I’d be lying if I said I don’t get anxious about it. I feel vulnerable. Sometimes I can think of nothing but my remaining kidney. I’ll feel pressure on my ribs, and I think, “Is that my kidney acting up, or simply back tension?” Or I’ll wonder: “Should I be feeling this lump? Am I going into kidney failure?”
Being a kidney donor has become a part of my identity. Some people — particularly in medical school — have put me on a pedestal for my altruism and bravery. But often I find myself hiding the fact that I donated, which I’d like to think of as an act of modesty. The sad and difficult truth is this: Knowing what I know now, I regret donating in the first place.

Read more:

Here’s what would happen if Americans were paid to donate their kidneys

Popular heartburn medicine linked to chronic kidney disease

Kidney disease? I was only 33 years old, and I felt fine.

Researchers: Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States

Currently there are over 120,000 people in need of a kidney transplant; 3,000 are added to that list every month. Yet in 2014 there were only 17,000 kidney transplants performed with a third coming from living donors. The need is real, as is the push to attract more living kidney donors.

Mosquitoes

Mosquitoes
This is a prescription of remedies I proposed an old lady on the web, which she was probably looking for.
 
This discussion has even stimulated writers of the Scientific American, to write about mosquitoes.
 
I have subjected myself to extensive examination by all types of mosquitoes (they actually research on me and my behaviour rather than I do on them-I am the Guinea Pig) and I will roll out my own (not proven but very probable) theories too.

I hate cats and mosquitoes but unlike a cat I can kill mosquitoes.
 
Currently, I believe in control rather than killing of them.
The reason of that statement is that the larvae of mosquitoes have a biological role which we still do not understand yet.
I am going to write how to control them in detail in my blog post when I find time but for you I give some tips.

1. There are over 400 varieties (I am going by my memory and not by any search or research).
 
2. Only few of them carry diseases like Dengue and Malaria.
 
3. So I do not believe in WHO strategy of spraying and killing all the other insects too.
 
4. Do not believe WHO for a dime (most illiterate of doctors do research for WHO and most of them come from American Drug companies) but I believe in the clout dollar has on world economics including China.
 
5. Mosquitoes have remarkable property to adapt (probably the best genetic make up to resit and survive killer drugs within one year of its spray, much better than the fruit fly)
 
6. With global warming, they will migrate from tropic to temperate regions
 
7. They have elementary but properly developed sensors to find an unwilling prey and make a hot meal (37 C) at midnight when everybody is trying to drop to sleep.
 
Control
1. One must get the name/s of the mosquitoes in your neighbourhood.

2. Know their life cycle
 
3. If the life cycle include larvae in water, the control is easy.
 
4. Breed some fish in the water and the Guppy fish will do fine.
You must choose a type of fish which survives in winter. In the case of Guppy one can raise them indoors in winter and release them come summer to the pools.
They are easy to breed and very hardy fish and also very colourful.
 
5. My recent finding vary with WHO.
 
They breed in the cesspit and they love that feature.
 
If one is a scatologist this is for you.
 
Larvae thrive on residue of human feacal matter, which is mainly  a cocktail of aerobic and anaerobic bacteria.
 
It has some fine biological tuning here (not the adult mosquito and that is why I consider they have a biological role).
 
If we look at how much rich Americans eat a day, a cesspit won’t last even a few days, if not for the ability of the mosquito larvae to get involved in bio-transformation and production of bio-gas, the pit will be full in no time.
 
I am a believer Americans can produce enough bio-gas from their faecal matter to supply even China (just for record they eat one pig in three years and one bull in 10 years -from 5 to 10 cows/bulls before they turn (50) fifty.
 
Things that one can do is to cover the commode when not in use. 
Mosquito laying eggs is prevented.
 
Look at where the cesspit is located and cover all the exit holes from where the adult mosquito escapes including the pipe that releases bio-gas (with a mosquito net and a rubber band).
 
You must tell all your neighbours to do the same and 
I can assure you it will cut down the mosquito population to 85% of the population.
 
With fish I have cut it down to 95% and the rest if they come to my bed room is of criminal intent and procedure.
 
No spraying for me, since they kill other insects except cockroaches.
 Cockroaches are resistant and survived even dinosaurs!

If all this fails move to a higher ground with  cooler temperature where they do not breed.
 
Over 5000 ft and what matters is not the height but the average temperature below 65 F.
 
Activity
    When we are active, mosquitoes do not approach us.
    May be our movements hinder their ability to home in or focus on the target chemical.
Our bodies produce chemicals which have diurnal variation (steroids) of waste metabolites.
    
Drinking beer:
    The reason isn’t exactly clear, but mosquitoes are more likely to be attracted to you after you’ve had some alcohol or beer.  
I have two chemicals, the ketone and urea in your breath.
    But most plausible is they get a little more kick out of a meal with pure alcohol.
    Alcohol is a social attractant even in the insect world. 
Dirty Feet: 
    Mosquitoes are attracted to our toe-jam (smelly feet) but not mine. 
Body heat:
    Mosquitoes have sophisticated heat sensors, that is why they target our ears first and then target our breath
    When we are down with fever mosquitoes make sure they are around to provide background music to entertain our recuperating souls. 
Moisture: 
    The moisture we exhale in breath and sweat in perspiration (urea and CO2) attract mosquitoes. 
Relative darkness: 
    Mosquitoes are attracted to relative darkness, evenings and early morning and they hate bright lights (may be dry heat switch off the heat sensors) and within seconds of switching the lights they emerge from under the bed or from roof.
Blood type:
    People with O and A type blood are more likely to attract mosquitoes and especially if they’re young. This is a conjecture and I am blood group A and my son is AB and they do attract me more than my son.  American Scientists.
    They are discovering various sensors with micro-imaging and gene technology.
    They try to transplant gene segments of mosquito to Fruit Fly at various stages of (larvae) development and study the effects and the details are too heavy for a blog site like this.

My Analysis of "Metta"- Loving Kindness

My Analysis of "Metta"- Loving Kindness
 
We had a little gathering.
 
The reason being we pulled out few wine bottles (bought few years ago with old prices) off VAT from the attic.
 
Why pull out the old?

Yes we got a few replacements from abroad “Duty Free”.
 
They will go to the attic till another replacement comes by our way.
 
About the prices one reflection would suffice.
 
Good old days we could buy a good “Thambili Wine” (small bottle) for Rs.275/=.
 
You know the current prices, one pays Rs. 200/= (half 
a peg or 50 grams) and they do not dish out less than 150 grams nowadays (Rs.600/= in total).
 
By the way VAT added.
 
We had many good ideas but I would pen only one.

What good we achieved during the last 20 years?
 
I thought that was a good one because that was the period SLFP (minus two years) was in power.
 
We went round the table.
Answer went like.
None.
None.
None.................
 
And finally it got to me.
 
I had to do the closing comment.
 
I said minus.
 
Why was the question?

I was in UK and New Zealand 20 odd years ago.

I did not have hate problem.
 
I did not have a nationality problem (I was a "Worldly Being")

I had piece in my mind.
 
The family was happy.
 
I came to this blessed country to SERVE.

What did I get.
 
War.
War and more War.
 
Why do you say minus (Question again)?
 
There hate is inbuilt in me NOW.
 
I have to go into "Metta Mode" every time I see a politician on the TV especially the “Wira Wansa” and “Gon (Hol) Man” Pilla type.

The “Metta” was innate in me twenty years ago and after 20 years of SLFP,  I have to remind myself that there is something called Metta.
 
But every time I see the President (he is half Metta and half political Hate=Neutral).
I cannot say that with Prime Minister.
He is never with the better half or the “Maithree”.
I think he should come out with her once in away to show he has bit of Metta in him.

World with many Views but Mind Neglected

World with many Views but Mind Neglected

Intention
There is an attempt to use meaning of Dhamma for political needs (Constitution) in Ceylon.
 
This is in perspective of an apprentice meditator in mind.
 
Advanced meditator won't get involved in academic exercises.
 
However, I need to get the core idea across and work on purifying the Mind (not get involved in phenomenology or the mechanics).

Dhamma
The word Dhamma in perspective of an apprentice in meditation found wanting.
It needs total detachment of academic exercise.
In that sense some qualifying tenets are attempted.

Dhamma has no parallels in philosophy, politics or science.

It is boundless and timeless and permeate all human mental activity.

It is not an institution in a religious sense.

It does not belong to a particular country or race or a constitution or an individual.

It belongs to the human mental capacity untapped.

Having said that it does not disregard existence of the right of other living beings.

It accepts the presence of extraterrestrial beings of higher or lower order to human beings.

It is a way of life with special attention to mental purity (getting rid of defilements).

It has a very simple moral code of self realization even though, self as an all abiding entity is precluded.

It has no rigid rules and bylaws but focuses on attention depending on the individuals intelligent capacity.

Above all it is open to Question or Inquiry (but not at global sense) but at Individual Level while working through the mental cultivation of purity of thinking.

That is why it should not be taken as religious practice but as a simple way of 'life experience' for every individual with an iota of intelligence.

However, It does not exclude the mentally weak and that is why it emphasizes the “Sardha” or the Devotion and reverence to the exalted one for absorbing the core mental culture.

If all all the above qualifications are taken into consideration, it should be "Above of All the World Constitutions" and not within a structured articles of intent, (be that it may be United States or Ceylon).

Constitution
Constitution in brief is a piece of paper article to govern weak subjects by supposed to be powerful and the elite by coercion or rigidity of laws and bylaws.

It took almost 2500 years for the Human Rights Charter to be declared (only on paper but violated left, right and center depending on the declared sovereignty of a state or government).

We cannot do without a constitution even though few countries have no written constitution.

It is the political will of a set or group or collection of people.
It got to be simple to interpret.
It should have a practical value.
It should have the political will to harness harmony and disengage discrimination.

On all the above grounds it cannot be called a perfect article of faith.
It is a near enough document but since it is not perfect it should be scrutinized, restructured, revised on a regular basis.

Dhamma does not need any of the above revisions and that is why it should be kept above all constitutions.
That is a point of view. 

By putting Dhamma on paper called constitution won’t achieve any objective, except some a cosmetic value.

The above said won’t apply to Christianity and Muslim religions since they are invariably bound by power, politics, commerce, money and may be even conspiracies to cover up corruption.

In exalted ones and the ones who are on the path of Dhamma are completely detached from power, money and corruptions, conspiracies of all kinds.

Dhamma is for the Mind and not for an Institution.

That is why Buddha did not appoint a successor and let the boundless Dhamma takes it own course.
It does not mean Dhamma could survive on its own since there is always room for distortion within and from without.
That is the very reason these thoughts are penned down here to save its status of universality.

Dhamma is boundless and timeless.
It permeates all reams and universes (There is no one world but many worlds).
Four abodes of the enlightenment or the sublime states are;

Metta (Loving Kindness)
Karuna (Kindness)
Muditha (Sympathetic Joy)
Upekka (Equanimity)

Way forward is Meditation either;
Samatha Bhavana-Concentration or Focused Attention to the Present
Samatha Bhavana, the development of mental tranquility with concentration, is accompanied by three benefits; it gives happiness in the present life, a favorable rebirth, and the freedom from mental defilements which is a prerequisite for attainment of insight.

Vipassana Bhavana-Insight Meditation
Vipassana bhavana is realization of the three signs of being, anicca, dukkha, and anatta,

The focus of attention be given to Metta Meditation and Moment Meditation,too.

Do not throw away rice to birds

Do not throw away rice to birds
Why I say so?
 
1. First reason is animals not domesticated (except perhaps cats and dogs-even that I may be wrong) eat raw food or ripened fruits.
 
2. There digestive enzymes are able to deal with grains unlike hours.

3. Birds scatter seeds (not rice) helping the ecosystem.

4. Cooked rice get contaminated with bacteria because of the high content of water.
 
4. One of the nasty one is Bacillus cereus (means coming from cereals)
It causes under 24 hour illnesses (within 2 hours vomiting or food poisoning or after 8 hours infection with diarrhoea).

5. Infectious one was named Cholera cereus decades ago why they gave a respectable name, I am puzzled.
 
6. The toxins are heat resistant and mild heating does not destroy them.
 
7. They form endospores which are also heat resistant.

8. Cooling and reheating encourage spore formation and these spores can contaminate other food items in the fridge/freezer.
 
Rice uncooked can be preserved in dry condition for ages.
 
Cooked rice can be kept only for two hours the most.
 
So eat your rice and do not throw away the rice to rot and then  expects the birds to eat.
Bird do not eat the stale rice but the ant do take them and store.
 
9. You have more ants in your pantry or back garden.
My advice is to cook only the desired amount of rice or if you are lazy buy a rice packet.
 
10. Birds prefer the seeds and better still watch them split the husk before eating.
House sparrows (extinct species) were very clever at that.
Their bills are built for that purpose and for building nests.
If you watch how a parrot takes the bean out of the pods one by one, you will never throw rice at them.
The bottom line is, the stale rice is very unpleasant sight and awful.
Why do want your pantry smelling?

11. Mind you our gecko loves cooked rice (apart from all the insects) and they grow in numbers and are very active at dusk.
 
I hate gecko specially their smelly droppings but not so much the cockroaches. There is a nasty venomous snake that love geckos as food.
Otherwise we can never exterminate them.
You may have t breed the deadly snake (Thel karawala or the Ceylon krait) instead.
 
Below is a American lady’s experience with rice. 
Yes Americans do eat rice.
Reproduction
4 Signs Your Cooked Rice Has Gone Bad
Rice is one of those pantry staples that seems to have an indefinite shelf life. And while this is mostly true with uncooked rice (the exception being brown rice), cooked rice has a limit to how long it will last. You've done the sniff test, but are you still not sure? Maybe you can't remember how long it's been in the fridge? Here's how to make the call on when to toss it.

As for how long cooked rice lasts, it can vary, and it largely depends on how the rice is cooled and stored. But it's generally a good idea to call it quits if you've had it for three to four days.

Most foods offer telltale signs that they've gone bad, but with rice it's not always quite so obvious. You also need to rely on other (less obvious) signs that your rice has gone bad.

1. It's super hard and dry.
This is your visual clue that the cooked rice in your fridge has reached the end of its days. Leftover rice will dry out more each day it sits in the fridge. But once the grains have become super hard, dry, or even crunchy, chances are that it's been in the fridge well over a few days. Rice is best when eaten a few days from when it's cooked. Any more than that and it's safest to just toss it. Maximize the shelf life of cooked rice by storing it in an airtight container.

2. It was left unrefrigerated for too long.
It's best to minimize the time cooked rice is left at room temperature. The moisture-rich environment offers ideal conditions for bacterial growth. And while refrigeration doesn't stop that growth altogether, it certainly slows it down.

Uncooked rice can contain spores of a bacterium known as Bacillus cereus. Even after cooking, these spores can still survive. When the cooked rice isn't handled, cooled, stored, or reheated properly, the bacteria can cause food poisoning.

So, if you left cooked rice sitting at room temperature for more than two hours before stashing it in the fridge, it might be better to cut your losses and toss it in the compost or trash.

3. It's been cooled and reheated multiple times.
It's best to minimize the number of times rice (and most foods, for that matter) are cooled and reheated. This presents an ideal environment for bacteria to grow. A good rule of thumb is to reheat leftover rice no more than once. After that it's safest to toss any additional leftovers.

Instead, if you find yourself with more rice than you can eat in a meal or two, go ahead and freeze the leftovers for another time.

4. It has an unpleasant smell.
If there's an unpleasant smell coming from your rice, it's a clear sign that it's time to toss it immediately. By this time that rice has certainly been in the fridge for more than four days, and it's no longer safe to eat.