Friday, March 14, 2008

Golfers Need Many Talents

So you think that golf is easy?

O.K., So I toss a little white ball on the ground and puck it with a fat-headed metal stick till it falls in a hole..how hard can that be?

    The Journey Begins:

A friend of mine contends that every round of golf is different even if played on the same course on the same day in the same conditions and I agree with him 100%. golf is one of those sports with so many factors involved so as to make it almost quantum and chaotic by nature. I have often felt like a sea captain, driver in hand standing two meters behind a teed ball and overlooking the sea from the port as I prepare to launch my vessel on a fantastic journey. Bending to the ground to remove a pinch of grass between thumb and forefinger then standing erect to momentarily survey the terrain before tossing the light green strands skywards to get some indication of the winds movement. This ancient ritual alone bonds me with my long dead ancestors who lived before our advanced tools of navigation. Watching the grass gives the golfer and idea of the winds strength and direction. Do these current wind conditions allow me to drive straight or should I play right and let the ball be carried back around by the strong breeze? The golf game now enters the realm of applied mathematics or physics. Each Golf club representing a different distance and height depending on the stance one takes, the individual grip and swing of the golfer (and strength thereof) and the pivot or openness of the golf club face etc. Another factor could be the mental or nervous stress. Are you playing alone or in a tournament? The patience of a vicar and the courage of a G.I. can also be invaluable assets in your golf arsenal. Relatively happy with your drive you leave the safety of the tee and the voyage begins.

    In Full Sail:

Personally I find electric golf carts a nuisance and distraction unless of course you are handicapped or elderly but golf trolleys are fine in order to avert back damage through long years of carrying golf clubs for hundreds of miles. So being in a good health condition is also a requirement for the game of Golf. Striding down the fairway you reach your golf ball and it is plugged in sponge-like ground. Taking out your archeology tools you begin to excavate. Then enters the new aspects of law and conscience as fair play and sportsmanship are required dropping the golf ball the prescribed distance in accordance with the rules of the game. How good is the new placement and how far away from the green are you? Has the wind changed? Oh! Oh! A wide bunker and tall tree stand in the trajectory path so I need to play a high golf shot. I don my aviators cap and prepare for flight. Having plotted in a course both long and high the golf ball leaves the grass runway and sails high out of the metaphoric airport. Pausing momentarily I watch as it lands safely on the green.

    Reaching Your Destination:

The adventure so far has proved rather predictable leaving you with a comforted feeling of smugness. Arriving at the green you prepare to enter the next phase of this multi-personality game of golf. Bending to one knee you survey the grooves and texture of the landscape like an experienced engineer. Walking the distance between golf ball and pin to check for any obstacles that may be laying on the surface the physicist/mathematician returns to calculate the angles and force need to complete the journey. The putter strikes the ball firmly and the echoing hollow plink sound closes a chapter in the days book.

    Epilogue:

true, you may be familiar with every ridge, nook and cranny of a course which you regularly frequent but the constantly changing conditions such as weather, seasons, personal fitness/mental level, course upkeep (pin position/tee distance changes), skill level, playing style, golf club brand etc. can make each round of golf a unique experience.

Nigel Nix has been playing golf on and off since he was 5 years old. He is now 42 and runs a humorous golf blog. Golf Mad Blog For Golf Mad Golfers

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Advertising: Friend, not Foe!

They say advertising is excessive: it interrupts TV series, preceding movie shows and dominating music award ceremonies. Some even lament that advertising not only occupies the media, but is also present everywhere else; the latest music editor softwares could be seen at bus shelters, and online VoIP products pictured in public telephone booths. It is irrelevant and disruptive.

If you agree with my last sentence above, continue reading. You might decide to change your mind.

first of all, I dont think advertisers occupy the media. As a matter of fact, it is the media that courts companies, maybe except for over-popular shows. TV stations need funds to run your favorite programs, and radio broadcasts have to pay for the Music on Demand. It boils down to us consumers: we demand, and the media provides, at a price of course.

Ah, you might now argue that it is the advertisers who flock to the media and pay for available ad space. True! But how many time slots are so coveted over? Shows like the super Bowl Football are rare. Other less endowed channels, in fact, have some hard time securing long-term ad contracts to be financially sufficient. It is thus fair to conclude that advertisers and the media, and us, are in a multilateral relationship.

Besides its commercial relevance, there is more to this misunderstood industry that we often miss out on, like how advertisements might effect cultural understanding, especially in this globalizing world of business. HSBC features newspaper ads of cultural differences across countries. FedEx has their TV ads filmed in Japan, showing the way Japanese people live and work. And I actually learned from a MasterCard ad that in India, people release white doves for luck. Interesting, isnt it?

In addition, informative ads feed useful information to our preoccupied minds. Public service messages could be conveyed effectively through ad-works on air. And people get to know the latest products available on market during review hours. I mean, it would be a pity if we work so hard to produce all these commodities just to, in the end, know nothing of them. And because we work so hard, we could hardly afford to find out about whats going on ourselves. Informative ads keep our society functioning as it is meant to.

But most of all, advertisers are creative (e-mails are not advertisements; they are spam). The appealing advertisements that crack you up or hook your eyes for the hundredth time take much more than the 30 seconds of airtime. Creativity, and the resulted attention, increases sales, and the advertising environment is so competitive nowadays it truly stimulates the human edge of creativity and nurtures it to flourish. Advertising signifies the human drive to succeed.

To me, what makes modern advertising desirable, besides bridging cultural gap, informing the populace or generating new ideas, is that it empowers every individual possible. It no longer takes an established firm to put up an ad. Any one anywhere can promote their ideas, products and even themselves through the thriving medium of the internet. 15-year-olds can now economically design and effect ads to promote their companies (yes, dont look down on these young entrepreneurs). Any one could adopt different voices using voice changer softwares, and edit audio as well as video ads with the many music editor softwares and video editor softwares available. Because advertising could so omnipotently enable far-reaching creativity of expressions, it is relevant to our human society that values progressing thoughts and selective reception of ideas.

The staunchest critics of advertising might ask, what would be the future of advertising, now when people are able to get rid of the commercials. MythTV offers a plug-in that automatically filters out commercials during recording, whereas video editor softwares allow you to freely cut out unwanted ads from pre-recorded clips. Yes, people are actually paying to be free of advertisements.

But hey, think again! Advertising is not that inconsiderate. Have you ever listened to radio broadcasts so excessively loaded with audio commercials its impossible to follow? And advertising might be excessive and disruptive, but I suppose only to a minority few. In fact, like I have said, informative ads are actually desirable. Dont you or your children feel excluded if you are not aware of the new iPod, or the latest music editor gadgets?

Trust the media. They are doing their work. Isnt Google putting into place keyword-related ads to better suit your preference? Trust the authority, too. They approve all circulating ads, or at least those we often see. And most of all, trust the advertisers. We are mutually dependent; we need them for our TV shows, and they need our money votes.

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Cell Phone GPS Tracking - Privacy Issues

Although there are many advantages to cell phone gps tracking, there are also privacy concerns. As most people carry their cell phone with them at all times, the ability is in place to track the exact movements of all individuals. Is this a case of Big Brother, and who can access to this information?

Cell Phone gps tracking can prove useful in many walks of life and especially when an emergency arises. Picture the scene of a road accident where injuries have occurred. A 911 call made from a gps cell phone would significantly speed up the arrival of the emergency services if the GPS signal from the cell phone can be pin-pointed to an exact location. This feature alone could save many lives.

For these reasons the FCC has instructed that wireless network providers provide the cell phone GPS tracking location information for 911 calls which have been made from cell phones. This is known as E911. In essence this is no different than a 911 call made from a land line, as the land line is registered to an address and the relevant emergency services can be quickly dispatched to that address.

However, where the difference occurs is that a property does not move but the tracking of a GPS cell phone is registering the day to day movements of an individual, and that has given rise to the privacy concerns of who can access such private information.

However, the relevant law relating to E911 is fairly explicit. It allows carriers to provide tracking location information to third parties for e911 emergency calls only, however not under any other circumstances whatsoever without the consent of the cell phone owner.

The privacy of cell phone GPS tracking has also been backed up by a number of recent court hearings. Recent court hearings have disallowed the requests of law enforcement agencies to obtain cell phone GPS tracking information from the cell phone companies for suspects. The courts have ruled that Congress have not authorized location tracking without actual evidence of wrongdoing and that probable cause is not sufficient reason for the release of records.

These events will ensure that the advantages of cell phone GPS tracking will not be compromised by privacy issues and that its long term future and usefulness is secured.

For more information on cell phone GPS tracking and other GPS products visit http://www.satnav-gps.info today.

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Why It Is Becoming Hard To Decrease Flood Insurance Premiums In The UK?

The last few years have seen the amount of rainfall in the UK increase and in the past few months especially there have been horrific scenes of homes devastated and in some cases entire towns cut off for weeks at a time. It is with all of this in mind we take a look at why it is becoming hard to decrease flood insurance premiums in the UK.

Over the past 5 decades the UK has seen a massive boom in the need for housing as the population of the country has grown from around 36 million people to a massive 58 million people . This has put a massive strain on the need for affordable housing and many new estates with the expansion of towns have been built on flood planes!

A flood plane would have been the land that in times of heavy rain and swelling rivers would have flooded and offered some relief to the rivers during the flooding and the waters would have drained away. Unfortunately due to the fact that there are now properties and roads built on this land the water still floods but doesn't drain away as easy.

This leaves behind it a great deal of devastation as the waters don't only cause damage as they flood the properties but the mud and the disease that the waters can leave behind can make the properties uninhabitable for months to come. This is some of the reason that getting a decrease flood insurance premium is less likely than before.

There is also the gamble of flood insurance, if you get flood insurance included in your policy then you are likely to get an increase on the cost, however you will in the next few years see an increase in the price of home and content insurance as the insurance companies continue to regain the money that it will be costing them (an estimated 3 Billion Pounds) to put right the issues that the current floods have caused.

Can you expect to see a decrease flood insurance premium over the next few years, probably not, as the climate continues to change and the unexpected weather conditions get worse and more unpredictable then the cost will more than likely rise but is it worth not getting the insurance? Personally I think you would be mad not to protect your home and belongings.

Find more valuable information from Home Flood Insurance and make sure that you are not caught by the next major weather event.

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Importance of Controlling Your Mind

Since ancient times, the human philosophers have realized the importance of mind in governing the human affairs. They knew that a persons external circumstances were the result of his internal thoughts. They were aware that if the person thought riches, he would be riches, while the thoughts of poverty, success and failure would produce the corresponding effects in the persons circumstances. Today, modern science has acknowledged the truth of these findings. Hence it becomes crucial for a person to control his mind.

yoga has specific techniques which deal with the science of mind control. We will study the nature of mind as is recognized by yoga in this chapter. Shankaracharya has defined mind in four different ways as per its functions: manas for the job of resolving and doubting; buddhi for the decision and judgment; asmita for the consciousness of its individual existence and chita for remembering the previous experiences. Mind is a vast collection of thoughts and traces of the past experiences. When you are born, your mind is the collection of samskaras collected over the previous births. Those samskaras, whose fruits have already been enjoyed have been wiped out. But as you grow up, new samskaras are being added continuously due to various acts performed by you from birth to death. This translates into the law of karma which states that the events one faces in his life are the results of the activities done by him in the past and his mind at birth contains the samskaras from his previous births. Our

yoga recognizes five factors, basic to the mind of every person. They are called kleshas because they are the forefathers of every human misery. They are: avidya which is the false knowledge or ignorance of ones true self in relation to the objects; asmita or ego feeling since in yoga, body and soul are two different aspects; raga is the liking of pleasurable experience; dvesha or aversion to pain; abhinivesha or fear of death. yoga understands the human behaviour from the perspective of these five qualities which are assumed to be present in a person since birth and are considered as the impurities of the mind. They make a person unstable and agitated. Hence yoga has given way of dhyana and pranayam to cleanse your mind.

Kevin Pederson, the webmaster for Yogawiz,mentions all about http://www.yogawiz.com importance of yoga, history of yoga, mind control and meditation technique through Mantra Yoga. Yoga recognizes the importance of having a healthy mind in your life.

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