The Greatest Speech Ever Made

An exceptional piece of speech from the silent man who moved the world.

Charlie Chaplain in one of his movies of peace, humanity and equality...

Hearing this again and again as the time nears 2am... thought of sharing this..

On Musharraf's speech on PAK's Independence Day

I cannot help but laugh out-loud on hearing his comments. He surely seems so desperate to show his interst in his country by playing the cards so meanfully. By saying kashmir is in every pakistani's nerves, he surely will get on the nerves of the ruling govt. by saying this out-loud in a independence day speech he has not less than proved his credibility as another dictator of our times (The American being another)

this to his surprise is neither gonna buy him some time for his impeachment nor gonna earn him the respect of his own countrymen rather had only triggered the newdelhi responding in cold steel.

How could we've talked for the peace and unity of kashmir with this satan who says uniting kashmir with pak is embeded in the nerves of every pak's adding fuel to the burning fire...
i dont think this neither gonna help him nor his countrymen in improving their credibility with the world.


I think its time Pak stops thinking about India alone and rather concentrate on its own affairs (staking in aplenty)

recycled weapons calls for peace aftet war

After more than 30 years of civil war, ending in 1998, the Cambodian government has collected and destroyed more than 160,000 weapons across the country.

In the name of peace some of those weapons were donated to the PAPC. The PAPC (Peace Art Project Cambodia) is a project that was created in November of 2003 by British artist Sasha Constable and Neil Wilford, small weapons specialist with the European Union.

In the name of peace the weapons were recycled (sculpted, forged or welded) into amazing works of art such as: chairs, tables, bikes, animals and various other sculptures by student artists from the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh.

Isn't there something twisted about sitting on furniture made of guns? Or making art out of AK-47's? What do you think?

Personally I'd like to add the rocking chair made of guns to my list of favorite recycled chairs . It speaks volumes to me. Its dark cold metal eco-frame calls out to me, "Sit and relax!"

Is it comfortable? Maybe not, but I don't plan on sitting in it forever. I just want to get the feel of sitting on a piece of furniture made of parts once composed of a negative past now recycled into hope for a safer more peaceful future.

To find out more about the PAPC visit Sasha Constable's website .

Via Haute Nature

In Celebration of Earth Day: Amazing Recycled Architecture

Ever since the day my mom found out I was writing for an environmentally friendly blog she's continuously suggested I write something on homes made from junk. For Earth Day and in honor of my mom who taught me to be creative, a good person and to love trees, below is a list of unique and innovative homes made of recycled material.

1. Cardboard House

Remember the days when your dad would cut out a door and some windows out of a giant cardboard box and then you got inside box to play house? Well imagine now a giant more sophisticated version of a house made of cardboard and you may see something like inexpensive temporary housing option made from cardboard. All the material in the house is recycled. To find out more about it go to Houses of the Future.

2. Scrap House

Some save scrap in their garage to build stuff for their homes. Others find scrap at garbage dumps and use it to build a home. This is a 700 sq ft single-family house built for Earth Day 2005from salvaged scrap material. The house has furniture, a kitchen, a bathroom, two bedrooms, a deck, and a yard. Watch the video and listen to where some of the scrap comes from and how much it all cost. Check out the funky music in the background too. For more on the scrap house project visit Scrap House .

3. Phone-booth Home

With the Internet available there is hardly any use to look up addresses or phone numbers in the phonebook anymore. Yet still we receive them and since there is no -opt off the phonebook list- available in 2005 a group of Architecture students from Dalhousie University decided to build a one-room home with it. To build it they used about 7,000 phone books. Can you imagine the potential of this?

4. Highway House

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This house was built from dismantled highway pieces. In 2006 Pedini, a civil engineer used steel and concrete left as waste, from a $14.6 billion highway construction project in Boston, to make the "Big Dig House" in just 3 days. The house, which is now on a hill in Lexington, is 4,300-square feet large. The house cost $645,000 to build and kept tons of steel and concrete from ending up in the dump.

5. Bottle House

Environmental activist in Bolivia have created a house that can help the environment as well as those in need by making a house made out of bottles. Thousands of bottles are filled with sand and then connected together and reinforced with cement and steel. Watch the video to take a look at this fascinating environmentally friendly and affordable home. For more pictures on other amazing bottle houses click here.

6. Railroad Car House

In Sausalito, California a house is made of a Pullman car from the San Francisco Northern Pacific Railroad. It is among a community of floating houses and is hooked up to sewage, electricity and water. They are also secured to docks.

7. Shipping Container House

Designer Keith Dewey built this house for his family. He reused eight decommissioned containers (once used to hold consumer goods) to build this two-story house. The inside of the house is eco-friendly too. For example, a reclaimed claw-foot bathtub for the bathroom and the cabinets and floor are made of bamboo. The neat thing about it is that this idea is catching on quickly. More and more designers are using shipping containers to build homes .

8. Boeing 727-200 House

Jo Ann Ussery, a grandma, had the right idea when she bought a Boeing 727-200 and turned this retired jetliner into her new home. The house has three bedroom' news.html?in_article_id? news articles live pages www.dailymail.co.uk http:>http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id"> src="http://inventorspot.com/files/images/knittedHousePA0806_468x316.jpg" alt="" title="" class="image _original" width="468" height="316" />

The Gingerbread House is not eatable nor can it be lived in, but it is an amazing piece of work knitted together from top to bottom. Almost everything in the house, for the exception of a wooden door and windows is knitted. The furniture, the food, the garden, the 12-foot trees, etc are knitted. Designed by Alison Murray, the 140 square foot house was knitted by hundreds of women across the world.

15. Earthship Homes

Earthship is an organization that builds homes made of recycled material. Their main material consists of tires, aluminum, glass and plastic bottles. Want to take a part (volunteer, build etc) in recycled architecture checkout Earthship .

16-22. Is there a unique recycled house I haven't added to the list? Please feel free to send me a link or add it in the comments section.

I hope you have enjoyed the list and that it inspires you to think twice before throwing something in the garbage. You never know what can be turned into a home. Imagine waking up in the morning in your eco-friendly home and everything you see and touch from floor to ceiling has been made from recycled or reused material, but it doesn't look recycled, unless you want that look. Recycled homes come in all shapes and sizes. Some are prettier than the others, but the general goal is the same: to make what some think of as trash into a treasure of shelter for everyone. It can be done. It has been done.

Happy Earth Day!

For more ideas or books to read on recycled architecture visit Green Home Building.

Calling All Mad Scientists - to stop Global Warming...

To stop global warming we may need to start thinking outside the box

In the summer of 1858, a putrid odor of raw sewage arose from the River Thames in London and choked the city in its sickly grip. The Great Stink, as it came to be known, spurred Britain's lawmakers to rush a bill through Parliament to provide the money to build a modern sewer system -- one that would discharge sewage downstream from the river's drinking water intake. Construction of similar structures in the same era in a number of European and American cities, including Paris and Chicago, ended epidemics of typhoid and cholera, which victims contracted by drinking water contaminated with feces. If the Victorians could eliminate these diseases through careful disposal of human waste, why can't we counter climate change by extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and burying it where it can do us no harm?

That radical proposal lies at the core of Fixing Climate, the latest in a spate of books on the seemingly intractable problem of global warming. While most writers stress the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the authors of Fixing Climate -- Columbia University earth scientist Wallace Broecker and the science writer Robert Kunzig -- suggest instead that we view carbon dioxide as a form of sewage: a pollutant with which we have carelessly contaminated the atmosphere, but one that we can remove with the right technology. Doing so is necessary, they argue, because the chance that we will succeed in paring back our carbon emissions with the speed required to avert disaster is quite small.

Broecker and Kunzig embrace a techno-fix that would require us to scrub our carbon dioxide waste from the atmosphere and sock it away in rocks. Their proposal is typically American: upbeat in its can-do spirit, yet pragmatic. The pair are not breast-beating penitents. In fact, they open their book with an eloquent ode to the beauty of the piston engine, acknowledging that fossil fuels have enabled the average American to live as well as a preindustrial king. Yet it's time to shovel away the scum. "We need to create the means for taking our carbon back out of the air and putting it underground, where it came from," they write.

If anyone should be taken seriously on the topic of climate change, it is Wallace Broecker, who has spent more than 50 years studying the climate of the past 200,000 years, and who was one of the first to warn, more than three decades ago, of the dangers of global warming. Born in 1931 ("the same year as Twinkies," the book points out), he arrived in 1952 at what is now Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York. He has spent his entire career there, publishing more than 400 papers and winning numerous prizes, including the National Medal of Science. Over the years, Broecker has developed ways to calculate the rate of gas exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean -- in particular, oceanic uptake of carbon dioxide -- and devised what is known as Broecker's Conveyor Belt, a global scheme of ocean circulation that is thought to drive climate patterns the world over.

As background to their proposal, Broecker and Kunzig devote about a third of their book to explaining the complex history of climate change science; a laudable effort, though at times my eyelids did begin to droop. To their credit, they enliven the text with asides on the notable figures who first figured out the science at hand (among them the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius, whose "ravishing young wife, Sophia" deserted him in 1894 after a year of marriage in the midst of his calculations on planet-warming carbon dioxide).

The book's real focus, though, is a climate fix hatched by Klaus Lackner, now a physicist at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Lackner's company, Global Research Technologies, announced in the spring of 2007 that it had built a prototype "air-capture technology product" to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. When Broecker first heard Lackner talking about his ideas in 1999, he recalled thinking, "This guy is nuts." Lackner, then an associate director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, argued that we should attempt to accelerate the natural chemical breakdown of rocks. The plan: grind up billions of tons of magnesium- or calcium-rich rocks, chemically combine them with carbon dioxide to form another type of rock -- a harmless carbonate -- and then find a place to put the resulting mountains of the stuff. Later on, Broecker found Lackner's tendency to think big-and his willingness to attack a problem from first principles -- "more exciting than crazy," and lured him to Columbia.

In fact, there is nothing all that revolutionary about pulling carbon dioxide out of the air; it is done on every space shuttle and submarine to prevent crews from asphyxiating on their own exhaled breath. Lackner built his prototype on a budget of $5 million from the late Gary Comer, the founder of Lands' End. In this device, crushed rocks have been replaced by a plastic compound that reacts with CO2 to form sodium bicarbonate: essentially, baking soda. If Lackner's vision comes to fruition, 20-foot-tall carbon-sucking towers-each resembling an erect Tower of Pisa-could be arrayed all over the planet. The final step in this massive cleanup project would be to extract CO2 from the bicarbonate and inject it into the ground in liquid form.

Each tower would extract about one ton of carbon dioxide a day, so it would take an awful lot of towers to scrub the 80 million tons we emit daily. The sheer scale of the problem dwarfs any single solution, but in Broecker and Kunzig's view, Lackner's invention is "the only hope." Their reasoning is simple: the towers can be placed anywhere -- far easier and more practical than attaching a CO2 scrubber to every car and airplane on the planet. And because CO2 disperses quickly through the entire atmosphere, removing it in one spot helps the whole world.

By contrast, say Broecker and Kunzig, collecting CO2 from the flues of power plants would entail transporting the gas perhaps hundreds of miles to a dumping ground. Nevertheless, this too promises to be an important means for steering us from the path of doom, should we manage to make it happen. In January, the Department of Energy scrapped plans for FutureGen, a coal-fired plant that was to collect and dispose of its own CO2 emissions.

The Norwegian oil company Statoil currently captures CO2 from its drilling operations at the Sleipner natural gas field in the North Sea, and it then injects a million tons of the gas each year under the seabed. There are plenty of other places to put the heat-trapping gas. Iceland, for example, is made entirely of basalt, a volcanic rock rich in calcium silicates, which bind with CO2. This fall, Reykjavik Energy plans to begin pumping carbon dioxide half a mile deep into basalt deposits. Vast banks of basalt also exist elsewhere: in the United States, volcanic rock covers more than 60,000 square miles of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon.

Detractors will inevitably dub such schemes misguided or deluded. Tim Flannery, for one, argues in his 2005 book, The Weather Makers, that the volume of carbon dioxide we create is "so prodigious that it seems impossible for Earth to tuck it away without suffering fatal indigestion." The authors of Fixing Climate are not oblivious to the scale of the problem or the expense of the solution. If we choose Lackner's original proposal, then large mounds of carbonate must be piled or buried somewhere. That would transform the landscape, but so would covering hundreds of square miles with solar panels. "There is no free lunch in solving the CO2 problem," Broecker and Kunzig say.

As for Lackner's current proposal to array carbon-capturing towers across the globe, they admit that it sounds utopian. "If the amount [of CO2] the world produced in a single year were spread over Manhattan, it would rise three-quarters of the way up the Empire State Building. On the other hand, if all the wastewater produced in the United States alone were spread over Manhattan, even the radio antenna on top of the Empire State would be far beneath the waves. Yet somehow in the twentieth century we managed to get our sewage problem under control." With our own Great Stink now threatening to overpower the entire planet, we owe it to ourselves and our descendants to consider the merits of such ambitious technological fixes before we suffocate in our own stifling waste.

Feeling happy - Musings !!!

What does it take to make anyone feel happy ???

Not loads of money, or not lots of great things, and certainly not the pleasures we kneel for. Its more than often just small simple things that make you happy

I feel very happy and my face automatically lights up

When I see a small kid - color, creed, caste, religion definetly no bar - when it smiles its innocent smile, the whole world turns to be very bright.
When I see a dog frolicking around
When I see on stage the coparticipants smile at one another sharing some private joke - it shows how much they are part of a team
When I see a flower opening up its petal
When I feel the rain falling down on me
When I feel the wind on my face
When I see a friend
When I see a good deed done by any one
Like this I can go on, it is not something is special about me, for every one all simple matters also make them feel happy, but they dont realise that, they think and feel that only big events or great things bring out happiness.

I am blessed tobe born as what I am. I am thankful to the Lord for giving me all things I want, wanted and may be wanting and not giving me those things that I dont deserve. yes at times, I have felt that God has let me down, when what I have prayed for hasnt been granted. But is only later that I realise that God has only taken care of me. I feel very special because I am beign taken care of in a very soft manner. Even in the worst times of my life, He has handled me a delicate flower, protecting me all the time, making life bearable or giving me the strength to bear the toughest challenge and come victorious out of that situation. I am truly grateful to him for always keeping me in his palm and taking care of me in a very special way.