Google Wave More Secure than Traditional Email

by Sarah Perez from readwriteweb.com/

Google Wave, the company's new real-time collaboration platform currently in private beta, is more secure than traditional email, claims the company. According to Greg D'alesandre, Google Wave product manager, that's because Google has focused on addressing privacy and security issues as the product was built from the ground up instead of waiting to deal with them later. Speaking to media in Sydney today, he detailed several of Wave's security features which are meant to stop criminals from exploiting the new technology and harming Wave users.

Built In Features to Prevent Spoofing

As reported by Australian news outlet ITNews, Wave has multiple levels of security which are designed to prevent email spoofing. Spoofing, meaning when you receive an email that claims to be from either a person or company you know but is actually from someone else - a hacker in most cases.

D'alesandre says the Wave protocol is more secure because it includes something he jokingly refers to as "crypto fairy dust." That's obviously meant to be a simple and fun way to explain the security complexities built into Wave which involve detailed authentication mechanisms to keep users safe from malicious attacks. In Wave, every bit of info you receive from another Wave user has already been authenticated as to its origin so you can be assured that they are who they say they are.

"You know you are getting the Wave from the person that is sending it to you and it has not changed mid-stream. This is a very big problem in current communication technologies - data can be changed mid stream and you will never know," said D'alesandre.

HTTPS Enabled by Default

For an additional layer of security, all Wave traffic is by default encrypted via HTTPS, a protocol for secure communications. That represents a big change in Google's standard policy regarding use of this protocol. It wasn't until July of 2008 that Gmail users were even given the option to encrypt messages using SSL and to enable it, you had to go into your settings and make a change - something that most mainstream users would never have bothered with. By the end of 2008, Google was only offering SSL as a feature in its other Google Apps programs if users were on either the Premier or Education editions. That meant that for non-paying consumer users, Google Docs, Calendar and other online offerings were only available via unencrypted HTTP sessions.

Today, little has changed. Still, only users of Premier and Education Editions have access to SSL and it's not switched on by default. The protocol is now available for Gmail, Chat, Calendar, Docs and Sites but not the Start page, Google Video or the Google Talk desktop client. Consumers using free Google apps like Docs still don't have SSL unless they type it in the address bar manually.

D'alesandre admitted that switching on encryption in Wave slows down the service a little (which probably explains the company's hesitance to switch it on in other products, too), but they ultimately decided that the security it provides was worth it.

Whitelisting Kills the Noise

A third security feature of sorts coming to Wave in the future is the ability to do "whitelisting." Wave users will be able to select which people they want to collaborate with and place them on a whitelist of approved persons. Only those who are on the list will be able to contact you via Wave and everyone else will be ignored.

That feature should certainly help to address the concerns certain folks have about Wave's "noise level," to some, an overwhelming amount of activity that led them to call out Wave as a distraction and a time-waster instead of the futuristic productivity product it intends to be. By allowing those who can't seem to embrace Wave's cacophony the ability to limit their collaborators, Wave could transfer from noisy attention killer to useful tool in an instant.

Of the three features, the first two are already in place. No date was given on the whitelisting feature, only that it will be "coming soon."

Posted by Mahdi at 10:59 PM

15 Web Tools to Enhance Language Learning

from PickTheBrain | Motivation and Self Improvement by Karen Schweitzer

With the world becoming more culturally diverse everyday, it is becoming increasing important for everyone to learn a new language. Whether you are learning for your career, education, or just want to increase you knowledge of other languages, the Internet provides a wide variety of tools that can enhance your learning experience. Here is a list of 15 free language learning tools to explore today:

Popling – Popling is free online web software that is great for practicing language vocabulary without any real effort. This unique software works by having a window (flash card) pop up at certain intervals on your desktop. You can either click on the window to study the full flash card or ignore it and the window will disappear.

Radio Lingua Network – The Radio Linga Network offers free online podcasts that you can use to enhance listening comprehension and language learning skills for 20 different languages. The podcast episodes range from one-minute quick lessons to longer, five-minute lessons.

Livemocha – Livemocha is a free community language learning tool with online interactive lessons, user created courses, and language partners that are ready to practice with you. The language partners are a great way build your language confidence though conversations with live native speakers. You have the option of either using conversation exercises or submitting text and audio files to native speakers for corrections and edits.

Palabea – With this large international language learning community, you can interact with native speakers, find audio and visual learning aids, improve writing and grammar, and even find native speakers in your hometown. Through these tools, Palabea gives everyone the opportunity to learn or study their foreign speaking skills on an international web platform.

Freelang.net – Freelang.net offers free language dictionaries, translations, blogs, and forums to help you increase your language skills. These tools are an excellent way for you to improve your reading, writing, and speaking skills in the language you’re studying. This site also provides links to other translation software, learning tools, and more.

ForiegnWord.com – This site features four different tools that foreign language learners can use to translate text, find language links, and gain access to 265 online dictionaries. Just one of the tools featured on this site, Translate Now, provides access to 28 translators in over 38 different languages.

Lingro – Lingro is a free site with open content dictionaries that provide free online learning in 11 different languages. With this site, you can increase your language comprehension and understanding through online translations, word lists, games, a collaborative dictionary, and more.

Babbel – The Babbel site is a free online learning portal for Spanish, English, German, French, and Italian. Within this site, you will find multimedia learning methods and tools that are easy and fun to use. Babbel also offers a language exchange community with more than 400,000 registered users.

Transparent Language – Transparent Language provides language software that has helped millions of individuals worldwide with language learning. On this site you can find several free resources and tools, including language software, blogs, games, articles, and learning communities to enhance your language skills.

Open Culture – This free site provides podcasts for learning 37 different languages. The podcasts cover everything from Arabic to Yiddish and are perfect for beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners. You can listen to lessons instantly on your computer or download them in MP3 format for listening on the go.

SharedTalk – SharedTalk is an online language learning community that provides tools to practice and study a multitude of different languages. With this site, you can use language partners, voice chat, text chat, and email to enhance your language skills while helping other people to enhance theirs.

Lang-8 – This site encourages language learners to practice writing skills by writing in the language they are studying. Once your writing assignment is complete you can send it to a native speaker for editing and corrections. This site also works as an online exchange community–you will be asked to read and correct the writings of others who are studying your language.

Digital Dialects – Digital Dialects offers free interactive learning games for 58 different languages. The games provide practice with beginning phrases as well as vocabulary builders to help language learners increase their knowledge. The site is updated regularly with new material.

Translation2 – With four free online translators, Translation2 is a good site for increasing your understanding and comprehension in language learning. Translation tools include a text translator, dictionary, text to speech translator, and an IM translator. The text to speech translator is an excellent way to practice pronunciation and can be embedded in emails or web pages.

Posted by Mahdi at 8:20 PM

Impressionist Cake

Flickr user Megpi made this beautiful "impressionist cake."

Posted by Mahdi at 10:54 PM

Why Eggs Could Be Getting Harder to Peel

By Alexis Madrigal from wired.com

Consider the farm-fresh egg, the pristine symbol of the simple days of pre-industrial farming.

People love them, but there’s a problem: They seem to be getting harder to peel. And though I’ve messily discovered this on my own, there’s some science to back this idea up.

Here in food-crazed San Francisco, fresh eggs are everywhere. After purchasing some of these just-collected treasures for hard boiling, I found it nearly impossible to peel off their shells without pockmarking them. My once-beautiful eggs ended up with more craters than the moon.

It couldn’t be my fault, I told myself. I’d been hard-boiling eggs for decades, most intensively during a six-month egg-salad kick in ninth grade. I got my technique down and everything.

What happened, then?

As an egg ages, it loses some carbon dioxide through tiny pores in the shell, making the egg white more basic. At the same time, it loses moisture, which increases the size of the “air cell” at the bottom of the shell, between the inner and outer membranes. The dynamics of this process are, in the words of a University of California, Davis agriculture publication, “not completely understood,” but the combination of these changes makes an old egg a lot easier to peel than a one that is fresh out of the bird.

“The best guarantee of easy peeling is to use old eggs!” wrote Harold McGee, in his monster 800-page tome, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. “Difficult peeling is characteristic of fresh eggs with a relatively low albumen pH, which somehow causes the albumen to adhere to the inner shell membrane more strongly than it coheres to itself.”

The USDA provides a complementary explanation more focused on the air cell, which you can see in the schematic, sitting between the outer and inner shell membranes.

“As the contents of the egg contracts and the air cell enlarges, the shell becomes easier to peel,” the USDA Shell Eggs from Farm to Table fact sheet states. “For this reason, older eggs make better candidates for hard cooking,”

McGee also suggests an easy cooking chemistry solution.

“If you end up with a carton of very fresh eggs and need to cook them right away, you can add a half teaspoon of baking soda to a quart of water to make the cooking water alkaline (though this intensifies the sulfury flavor),” he wrote.

While I’ve noticed the Peeling Problem most distinctly with superfresh farm eggs, the eggs you buy at the supermarket could be getting fresher too. Most American eggs are produced and distributed by agribusiness concerns like Cal-Maine and Rose Acre, which each have more than 20 million hens cranking out eggs just for you.

Statistics on the time it takes for an egg to go from hen to supermarket have not been calculated, a USDA representative told Wired.com, but there’s some reason to believe that new production techniques could be delivering eggs to markets faster.

A 1998 report by the agency found that big consolidated chicken egg facilities, which wash and package the eggs on-site instead of sending them to a separate processing location, could reduce the time from farm to store from 100 hours to 53 hours. And, according to Cal-Maine’s SEC filings, the industry continues to centralize, squeezing out the old facilities in favor of the new ones.

Eggs tend to sit on the retail shelf longer than they spend in processing and distribution, so the few extra days of freshness might not make the eggs as dramatically hard to peel as farm eggs.

But if you have any trouble, consider another technofix: automatic Eggstractor egg peeler, anyone?

Posted by Mahdi at 10:51 PM

Funny animals

Funny animals

from smilepanic.com

We prepared this first selection of the Funny Animals series. All kinds of pet lovers should go crazy on this page. Enjoy! Smile & Panic

Posted by Mahdi at 9:23 PM

Dear Microsoft, please keep your lousy mitts off my Firefox install

Dear Microsoft, please keep your lousy mitts off my Firefox install

by Lee Mathews from downloadsquad.com

This isn't the first time Microsoft has taken liberties with Firefox users. There's that whole .Net thing that happened back in May of this year.

So what gives, Redmond? Why - especially after the fallout from the last incident - would you go and push a Windows Presentation Foundation plugin on my Firefox install? I didn't ask for it, and I don't really want it. Plenty of people consider software that installs in this kind of underhanded way to be malware.

Not to mention a security risk. You know, the same way you (Microsoft) consider Google's Chrome Frame to be a security risk for your own browser. I'll need someone to explain to me how MS figures the situation is different when the shoe is on the other foot.

I'll clear something up for you right now - and this goes for all software companies, not just Microsoft. I expect control over what gets installed on my system and what doesn't. Go ahead and offer me updates, add-ons, and plugins. But please, give me the choice to install.

Heck, I can choose to put off Windows updates forever if I want and some of those are pretty critical patches. So why should I not be given the choice to opt out of something as trifling as a WPF plugin for my non-IE browser?

Get your filthy hands off my browser, you damn, dirty ape!

Posted by Mahdi at 10:48 PM

Spring Design’s Alex: the first Android-based, dual display e-book reader

By Darren Quick from gizmag.com

Spring Design's Alex dual-screen Android-based e-book reader

Alex from Spring Design is the first Android-based e-book reader that comes with dual screens. The upper display is a 6-inch E-Ink monochrome electronic paper display (EPD) screen, while below it sits a 3.5-inch color LCD screen. The device features full Internet browsing capabilities that, through the use of the device’s Duet Navigator interface, allows hyperlinked text displayed on the main EPD to be clicked on to bring up supporting multimedia information such as video, images, and notes on the secondary color LCD screen.

Spring Design says this supplementary content can be used to complement, clarify or enhance whatever is being read on the main screen. The company says it has been working with major bookstores, newspapers and publishers over the past two years to share its vision and the capabilities of the dual screen device, but until such outlets start releasing “enhanced” content, users will be able to produce their own personalized multimedia “add-on” editions by saving additional photos, video or text on the device’s removable SD card.

According to Spring Design, Alex’s enhanced Android OS is optimized to support integration between the color and monochrome displays while preserving battery life. The dual screen setup also allows users to capture and cache web content displayed on the LCD screen, and toggle to view it on the EPD screen to conserve the battery. Earphones and speakers are also included for audio and video content.

Alex supports Wi-Fi and 3G, EVDO/CDMA and GSM mobile networks and includes smart phone capabilities, although Spring Design hasn’t detailed exactly what these are just yet. Spring Design plans to release Alex by the end of the year at a price yet to be announced.

Posted by Mahdi at 10:45 PM

How Do Countries Choose Which Side They Drive On?

How Do Countries Choose Which Side They Drive On?

by Linda Rodriguez from mentalfloss.com/

Chaos has descended this week on the tiny Pacific island of Samoa after government officials decided to force the entire nation to switch sides of the road on Monday. While Samoan officials insist there have been no accidents as a result of asking drivers to switch from driving on the right side of the road to driving on the left, many non-driving Samoans have been left stranded because the island’s buses now open to the middle of the road.

Samoa is the first nation since the 1970s to switch sides and did so, they say, to end their reliance on left-hand drive vehicles imported at great expense from America. All well and good, but the real question here is why do different nations drive on different sides of the roads? Here in England, where traffic comes from the right, it took me more than a few weeks to stop looking left every time I went to cross the street—training that was completely undone when I went to France for two weeks at the end of the summer.

So what is the deal with the “wrong” side of the road? How do countries decide which side they drive on?

Because The Pope Said So

According to some sources, about a quarter of the world drives on the left, as they do in Britain. This isn’t too surprising, since at one time Britain owned about a quarter of the world. Traveling on the left side of the road was a practice that started with the feudal societies of Western world, like the proto-British empire – back in the day, you never knew who’d you pass on the road, so best to keep your sword arm between you and them. In 1300 AD, Pope Boniface VIII codified the practice with a law that decreed that pilgrims headed for Rome should keep on the left.

The Birth of the Left-Hand Drivers’ Seat

Things were going fine until the advent of market-based agriculture on a grand scale. In the 1700s, farmers in the US and France began hauling their products to market in big rigs pulled by many horses. Because these wagons typically had no place to sit, drivers would sit on the rear left horse, with their right arm free to whip the team along – and the left-hand drivers’ seat was born. Drivers naturally tended to ride on the right side of the road now, because it was safer to meet oncoming vehicles from where you could see their wheels. In 1792, a Pennsylvania law required that vehicles keep right, other states following soon after.

Because Napoleon Said So

Another explanation blames Napoleon. Because Napoleon was left-handed, he demanded that everyone approach from the right, so he could keep his sword arm between himself and anyone he’d meet. That’s not exactly true; the custom of keeping to the right actually pre-dated Napoleon, but he did make sure his troops followed it whilst they spread their Empire, and from Napoleon’s lips to law. Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Spain, which were all at one point under Napoleon’s either direct control or influence, subsequently drive on the right.

It’s an England/France Thing

So on two different continents, the “keep right” rule was becoming entrenched – while in England, keeping left remained the only way to go, especially after a 1756 city ordinance decreed that all traffic on the London Bridge must keep to the left. From there, it was all about influence.

Though not a hard and fast rule, places that were under French and US influence kept right, while those under the British Empire and its influence still kept left.

In Japan in 1859, for example, a British ambassador was able to convince the government there to keep left, a major coup for the lefties and Britain (this is what the Brits say; the Japanese, however, may disagree and claim that their decision to keep left had more to do with samurai warriors and their needs).

Because Hitler Said So

With the invention of the automobile, countries had good reason to pick a side and stick to it, although not all did. By 1938, there was another reason: Wherever Hitler invaded, he forced the native populations to drive on the right. Parts of Austria, including Vienna, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, that had historically driven on the left now had to drive on the right.

Ask Your Neighbors

Countries were still making “which side?” decisions well into the second half of the 20th century. Sweden, for example, switched to driving on the right in 1967 because by then, most of the countries their burgeoning car industry sold to were right-side countries. By this time, the clearest indicator of which side a country drives on became what its neighbors did, and with whom they traded.

Of course, some places, like the US Virgin Islands, confuse the issue even more by driving left-hand side cars on the left side of the road – it’s the only place under US purview that does so.

Posted by Mahdi at 7:21 PM

Bing nails search deals with Twitter, Facebook

by Caroline McCarthy from cnet.com

Microsoft executive Qi Lu will reportedly make a big announcement onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco later on Wednesday morning: that its search engine, Bing, has inked deals with both Twitter and Facebook to bring real-time status updates and tweets into search results. That's something you can't find on Google.

According to AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, neither partnership will actually turn into a product for "weeks, if not months," and that both Twitter and Facebook have also been talking to Google about similar deals.

When asked about the deal announcement earlier on Wednesday at Web 2.0 Summit, Microsoft director of search Stefan Weitz declined to comment, saying, "I have no idea."

Facebook's mum, too. "We don't comment on speculation," a statement e-mailed on Wednesday morning by Facebook spokeswoman Kathleen Loughlin read. "Later today, COO Sheryl Sandberg and VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer will be speaking at Web 2.0 at which time they will be available to answer questions regarding Facebook."

Rumors started swirling earlier this month that Twitter was looking to make big search-results partnerships with Google and Microsoft.

Microsoft already has a stake in Facebook, which it obtained when it invested $240 million in the social network--allegedly beating Google to the punch then, too--two years ago.

While Twitter is far smaller than Facebook, it's already a step ahead in searchability: it acquired third-party Twitter search app Summize last year and built it into the powerful, real-time Twitter Search. Facebook used to keep all of its data behind a log-in wall, but two years ago started to make the first steps toward becoming more accessible to search engines when it gave members the option to let their profiles show up in "people search" queries on the likes of Google.

More recently, it's been making additional small moves toward opening profile content to the Web, like redefining its privacy controls so that members can specify which of their information and updates can be made public.

Posted by Mahdi at 10:41 PM

You Are Neglecting Your Most Important Relationship

from PickTheBrain | Motivation and Self Improvement by Ali Hale

There’s one crucial relationship in your life that I’m pretty sure you’re neglecting. And if you’re one of those people who gives a lot of themselves to others and always drops everything to give a friend a hand, you’re definitely neglecting it. Nope, it’s not your relationship with your partner, your mom, or even your kids. Important as those are, this is even more crucial. It’s a relationship I can guarantee you’ll have from the day you’re born till the day you die.

It’s your relationship with yourself.

So often, the one person in life who we criticise, judge, condemn and ignore is ourself. We decide that our needs don’t matter. If everyone else in our life walked out, this one relationship would be all we had left. And when we disregard our relationship with ourself, all other aspects of our life suffer: however hard we strive for success, things will always feel empty.

There are three key factors in your relationship with yourself that you need to pay attention to:

Acceptance and Love

Think of a person who you love. Maybe your partner, or a close friend. Do they have faults? Is there anything about them that irritates you at times? Of course… but that doesn’t stop you loving them, does it? They’re not perfect – no-one is – but you accept that, and you love them, warts and all.

So why don’t you treat yourself the same?

Most of us have a negative, critical internal voice that berates us for being less-than-perfect. We beat ourselves up over little mistakes … that birthday we forgot, that silly typo in an email, that time we were late, the hasty words we didn’t really mean. And we fail to recognise the many, many times that we get things right.

When we try to adopt new habits, we’re very quick to blame ourselves for not succeeding overnight. When we have big dreams and plans, we dismiss them as unrealistic.

Would you treat your partner like that? Your best friend? Your kids? Then why do you treat yourself that way? Do all the harsh things you say to yourself help you to improve your life … or do they make you feel unhappy and low in confidence?

Quality Time

I’m sure you make the effort to spend time with the people you love. You nurture your relationship with them by going out to dinner, or watching a movie, or playing a game together. We’re all familiar with the phrase “quality time”, and we know how important this is to our relationship with our spouse or kids.

When did you last spend any quality time with yourself?

If you’re an introvert like me (and like 50% of the world), you get your energy from being on your own: being around other people constantly can make you feel in need of some alone time. And even extroverts need some time to simply be themselves – away from the rest of the world.

How about going for a walk on your own, or going to a movie on your own? Could you take yourself out to lunch or for a coffee – without family or friends in tow? What activities and hobbies do you enjoy that are purely for you?

Don’t be afraid to be selfish. If you don’t nurture yourself, and take time for your relationship with yourself, it’ll show in your relationships with others.

Exploration

The final key to having a good relationship with yourself is exploration. In your friendships and romantic relationships, you enjoy learning about the other person. You hear their history, you get to understand what makes them tick, and you watch them grow and develop.

How well do you know yourself?

Ways of exploring yourself could include meditation, prayer, learning a new skill, or reading about personal development. Exploring who you are might lead you to conduct experiments to see what habits and structures suit you best: are you a morning person? Do you like to be alone at lunch, or in the evening? What dreams do you have? What’s your mission in the world? What contributions can you make?

Taking serious time to reflect and explore the workings of your mind can lead you in new directions. It can help you discover a hidden passion. You might find that your potential is far greater than you realised. You may well have to do some work to destroy some of your preconceptions; those statements about yourself that start with “I always…” or “I never…” or “I can’t…”

What’s your relationship with yourself like? If you’ve been neglecting that relationship – and almost all of us have – how are you going to start restoring balance in your life?

Posted by Mahdi at 8:02 PM

Fried Lettuce, Slug Entrails and Other Insomnia Cures

Fried Lettuce, Slug Entrails and Other Insomnia Cures

by Linda Rodriguez from mentalfloss.com/

Today’s insomnia cures are slightly more scientific than the back in the day. But they’re also less interesting, which is why we’ve rounded up some of the weirder insomnia treatments handed down through the ages. From what to rub on your feet, to what to line your belly with, here are 6 bizarre prescriptions for when you’re tired of counting sheep.

1. Rub Your Feet in Dormouse Fat

In Elizabethan England, people who couldn’t sleep would often rub dormouse fat onto the soles of their feet. Why dormouse and why feet has been lost to the ages, however, the dormouse has retained its snoozy image: The dormouse slept through most of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland.

2. A spoonful of Sea Slug Entrails

Most cultures have their own folk remedy, usually involving food, for putting insomniacs to sleep. I remember when I was a little girl, my mom would make me hot chocolate when I couldn’t sleep. Little girls in Japan, however, might have gotten a plate full of sea slug entrails. In France, it could have been fried lettuce and in places in the US, a raw onion.

3. Pay to Hear a Sleep Concert?

A new craze is sweeping Japan and while there’s always a new craze sweeping Japan, this one may offer some hope to sleepless office workers. They’re called sleep concerts: Basically, you buy a ticket to the concert, plunk yourself down in a comfy seat, and drift off. One such concert, titled “Dreams: Good Sleep Concert,” featured major Japanese musicians playing music that had been scientifically tested to induce sleep; a CD of the concert was later sold and won Japan’s 22nd annual Gold Disc Award for Best Instrumental Album of the year in 2008.

4. Ancient Ambien

Sleepless Greeks and Egyptians used opium, typically mixed with several other herbs that probably had no effect, to induce sleep. The only problem with opium is the highly addictive nature of the poppy-derived narcotic. But drugs have always played a part in helping people sleep: Cannabis, typically smoked in cigarette form, was a popular sleep aid up through the 19th century. Some, especially those in college or who maybe spent some time touring with the Grateful Dead, might say it still is. And when all else fails, there’s the time-honored tradition of drinking until you pass out.

5. Toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble

Potions have long been a part of the insomniac’s medicine cabinet. Tinctures made from valerian root, mandrake root, and lettuce seeds are a few of the debatably helpful but generally innocuous variety, whilst the Middle Ages prescription of “drinking a potion made from the gall of a castrated boar” is just gross. Incidentally, the castrated boar juice was also included in a concoction to knock victims – er, patients – about to undergo surgery in the Middle Ages as well. So many uses for castrated boar gall, who knew?

6. Carry a compass to bed with you

In the Victorian era, people tended to be interested in slightly dubious spiritualist theories, including those involving magnetic fields and their impact on human health. Charles Dickens, who suffered from insomnia and for a time, tried a combination of opium and alcohol that left him with a wicked hangover, ultimately found relief after placing the head of his bed due north.

Posted by Mahdi at 7:16 PM

Bullets are slow

By Jason Kottke

You're going to spend the next 10 minutes watching bullet impacts in super slow motion.

The really amazing part -- nope, not the instant bullet liquification (!!!) -- is how quickly other things happen after the bullet hits something. Glass seems to crack almost instantly, even at a million fps, making the bullets seem pokey in comparison.

Posted by Mahdi at 7:06 PM

The Science of Getting Rich

http://www.pickthebrain.com

“Abundance” – courtesy of Geeart.com

If you don’t read any other book this decade on financial prosperity, you must read “The Science of Getting Rich.” The Science of Getting Rich is a great (short) book which was written by Wallace D. Wattles back in 1910. It provides a basic roadmap teaching on how anyone can become financially free.

I will briefly share with you the major points of the book in this article.

The book starts off discussing how there are:

• Smart people that are rich, and
• Blockheads that are rich
• Intellectually brilliant people that are rich, and
• Mentally slothful people that are rich
• Big spenders that are rich, while
• Many frugal people remain in poverty

The authors point in making these observations is to note that riches are not contributable to luck, the right family, or the right neighborhood; but something else.

This article will recap the basic principles taught in “The Science of Getting Rich,” so that you can start practicing the science today, even if you’re a blockhead.

Here are the 4 major principles that the book teaches:

Principle # 1 – Visualization and Though Control

“Greatness is attained only by the thinking of great thoughts.”

The book tells you to take time daily to visualize what you want in great detail. The book states: …”do not do this as a mere dreamer or castle builder…,” but you must do it in faith knowing that your vision is going to become a reality.

The book requests that you do this whenever you have spare time throughout your day. It also asks that you be very specific and detailed in your visualizations.

My commentary: I recommend that you think about specific pre-meditated events that you want to occur in your life, and try to visualize them for at least 30 minutes a day. You have to pre-play your future. This will provide you with the motivation needed to accomplish your vision. Motivation is the fuel to any destination you want to reach.

You have to see it, before you can have it. As it is written, “without a vision, the people perish.”

Principle # 2 – Right Action

“Every day is either a success or a failure, and if every day is a success, you cannot fail to get rich.”

The book states that you should give 100 percent effort in your daily actions, and tells you to complete an honest day’s work every day. However, the book also states that you should never over work, because it’s not the number of items that you complete, but the importance of each item that matters. If you complete enough important items you will succeed.

My commentary: Whatever your goal, be sure to give 100 percent effort towards it every day. Complete the items that are sure to take you to your goal, postpone the busy work.

Never let a day go by without getting closer to the goals that you want to achieve!

If you have “a passion” to achieve a goal, then you have the power to achieve it. Passion is power.

Principle # 3 – Avoid Bad News

“If you want to become rich, you must not make a study of poverty. Things are not brought into being by thinking about their opposites.”

The book says you should diligently avoid all bad news.

My commentary: Avoid all negative media, videos, TV and movies showing poverty, doom, gloom and lack; you should also avoid conversations that include the above mentioned. There is no reason to fill you mind with all of the negativity in the media. Garbage in, garbage out! You will become what you constantly give your attention to. I recommend you give your attention to what you want to become, and to avoid that in which you do not want to become.

The book says that you should only talk of prosperity and the great possibilities when you speak. Speaking of lack and poverty only hinder your ability to create prosperity…

Principle # 4 – Gratitude

“…faith is born of gratitude. The grateful mind continually expects good things, and expectation becomes faith.”

Finally, the book states that you must remain in a state of gratitude at all times; for everything that you have.

My commentary: Always speak, think and feel grateful throughout your day for all of the “good” that’s in your life. Place things in your environment which remind you to be grateful. A grateful heart will attract great things.

These are the four principles taught in the Science of Getting Rich, memorize them, and put them into action; they will change your life.

About the author: this guest post was written by Mr. Self Development. Please support Mr. Self Development by subscribing to his blog at mrselfdevelopment.com; Mr. Self Development is a motivational author that offers a practical guide to success and wealth.

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Posted by Mahdi at 7:55 AM