Lithuania set new Rugby World Record

taken from here

Lithuania have written their name into rugby's history books after beating Serbia 77-5 on Saturday to record an 18th consecutive test victory and surpass the previous record in the men's Game held by New Zealand and South Africa.

A nation of three million people, Lithuania's run began on 27 May 2006 with a 23-17 away win over Hungary in Esztergom and has now seen them beat 12 different countries across Europe with only four matches decided by a single score.

Lithuania have already secured the Division 3A title and promotion to the third level of the European Nations Cup, but the record provides a confidence boost ahead of their Rugby World Cup 2011 qualifier with Ukraine on 8 May.

Victories over Israel (19-3) and the higher ranked Netherlands (6-3) have earned Lithuania the play-off with Division 2A champions Ukraine, the winner of which will face Romania home and away to determine Europe's representative in the cross-continental play-off for the 20th and final place at RWC 2011.

"It's great to achieve 18 successive wins and be the record holders, but we haven't yet achieved our goal," captain Mindaugas Misevicius told AFP. "We want to qualify for the World Cup in New Zealand."

Lithuania scored 13 tries against Serbia, centre Gediminas Liutrus and flanker Andrius Martinskas grabbing hat-tricks with Tomas Zibolis, Justinas Vasiliauskas, Egidijus Detronis, Edvardas Zilius, Kestutis Marcijauskas and Marius Andrijauskas the other scorers in the record-breaking win.

The All Blacks had set the record of 17 consecutive test matches between 18 September 1965 and 6 June 1969, a sequence ended with a 17-6 loss to South Africa in Pretoria in July 1970.

The Springboks, then world champions after their success at RWC 1995, equalled this run between 23 August 1997 and 29 November 1998 with England's 13-7 win at Twickenham a week later denying them the record outright.

10 Amazing Life Lessons You Can Learn From Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein has long been considered a genius by the masses. He was a theoretical physicist, philosopher, author, and is perhaps the most influential scientists to ever live.

Einstein has made great contributions to the scientific world, including the theory of relativity, the founding of relativistic cosmology, the prediction of the deflection of light by gravity, the quantum theory of atomic motion in solids, the zero-point energy concept, and the quantum theory of a monatomic gas which predicted Bose–Einstein condensation, to name a few of his scientific contributions.

Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”

He’s published more than 300 scientific works and over 150 non-scientific works. Einstein is considered the father of modern physics and is probably the most successful scientist there ever was.

10 Amazing Lessons from Albert Einstein:

Follow Your Curiosity

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”

What piques your curiosity? I am curious as to what causes one person to succeed while another person fails; this is why I’ve spent years studying success. What are you most curious about? The pursuit of your curiosity is the secret to your success.

Perseverance is Priceless

“It's not that I'm so smart; it's just that I stay with problems longer.”

Through perseverance the turtle reached the ark. Are you willing to persevere until you get to your intended destination? They say the entire value of the postage stamp consist in its ability to stick to something until it gets there. Be like the postage stamp; finish the race that you’ve started!

Focus on the Present

“Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.”

My father always says you cannot ride two horses at the same time. I like to say, you can do anything, but not everything. Learn to be present where you are; give your all to whatever you’re currently doing.

Focused energy is power, and it’s the difference between success and failure.

The Imagination is Powerful

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions. Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Are you using your imagination daily? Einstein said the imagination is more important than knowledge! Your imagination pre-plays your future. Einstein went on to say, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination.” Are you exercising your “imagination muscles” daily, don’t let something as powerful as your imagination lie dormant.

Make Mistakes

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”

Never be afraid of making a mistake. A mistake is not a failure. Mistakes can make you better, smarter and faster, if you utilize them properly. Discover the power of making mistakes. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, if you want to succeed, triple the amount of mistakes that you make.

Live in the Moment

“I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.”

The only way to properly address your future is to be as present as possible “in the present.”

You cannot “presently” change yesterday or tomorrow, so it’s of supreme importance that you dedicate all of your efforts to “right now.” It’s the only time that matters, it’s the only time there is.

Create Value

“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value."

Don’t waste your time trying to be successful, spend your time creating value. If you’re valuable, then you will attract success.

Discover the talents and gifts that you possess, learn how to offer those talents and gifts in a way that most benefits others.

Labor to be valuable and success will chase you down.

Don’t Expect Different Results

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

You can’t keep doing the same thing everyday and expect different results. In other words, you can’t keep doing the same workout routine and expect to look differently. In order for your life to change, you must change, to the degree that you change your actions and your thinking is to the degree that your life will change.

Knowledge Comes From Experience

“Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.”

Knowledge comes from experience. You can discuss a task, but discussion will only give you a philosophical understanding of it; you must experience the task first hand to “know it.” What’s the lesson? Get experience! Don’t spend your time hiding behind speculative information, go out there and do it, and you will have gained priceless knowledge.

Learn the Rules and Then Play Better

“You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”

To put it all in simple terms, there are two things that you must do. The first thing you must do is to learn the rules of the game that you’re playing. It doesn’t sound exciting, but it’s vital. Secondly, you must commit to play the game better than anyone else. If you can do these two things, success will be yours!

What If?

What if I can achieve more than I dream?
What if I can do more than I believe?
What if I am better than I think?
What if I aim too low?
And what if I only ever achieve what I aim for?
What if the world never sees what I really can do?
What if I never see it, either?
What if my ideas never leave my head for fear of failure?
What If my biggest hurdle to jump over is me?
What if I never fly because I don’t believe in my wings?
Before you can change the world, you have to change your own.

OK Go - This Too Shall Pass

This is great for a little bit of R&R...

Your Personal Memory Device.

It will happen some day. It is inevitable. In the near future, someone will decide to record every moment of a human life from birth to death in digital storage. This will be more than an extreme reality TV stunt. It will mark the era of personal memory offloading, an adaptive memory technology that records and indexes every single moment of your life. Offloading personal memory begins with a personal memory device, or a PMD. The basic PMD would be no more complex than a small video and sound recorder that captures your every experience. A PMD could be easily fitted shortly after birth; the least invasive option would be like a Bluetooth headset worn over the ear connected wirelessly to a local device no larger than a cell phone. Once installed, the PMD would capture and upload all first-person memories to a centralized database for indexing, search, and recall.

Data captured by the PMD would be linked over the internet into distributed software services like GPS, Google Maps, facial recognition, speech/text recognition, brainwave analysis and so on. It would create an ongoing record of the people, terrain, and objects in your vicinity. Contextual memory stored in the PMD’s back-end database would be total, like tracking your avatar moving through the World of Warcraft or Second Life, except plotting actual data from real life in real time. Whatever you do will be captured by the PMD for later playback and recall. Your PMD will remember every place you visit, every person you meet, every conversation you have, every object you look at, every movie you watch, every meal you eat, every page you read, every email you write, everything.

Would the PMD remember where you parked? Always. Will it warn you when you are about to walk away and leave your hat and sunglasses on the bench behind you? Totally. Will it send you birthday reminders, schedule your meetings, remind you to pick up your dry-cleaning and let you program your DVR with voice commands? Yes. Will it find your car keys and remote control for you? Maybe. Will it record your innermost thoughts? Probably not. It won’t always be perfect, but it will greatly extend your normal range of memory, and over time it will become like an indispensable part of your brain.

Brain on motherboardExternal data is easy to record and index, but internal memory such as feelings, thoughts, ideas, and dreams present some engineering challenges. The PMD could be fitted with an invasive brain implant to extend functionality, but to keep things simple, let’s consider some cheap, non-invasive solutions. Biometric data such as temperature, galvanic skin response, brainwave activity, pulse, respiration rates, and perspiration levels can monitor mood, arousal, activity levels, and so on. This biometric data, no matter how spotty, can be used to generate a dynamic emotional profile for any individual as they move through their day. Speech and behavioral analysis can also track levels of focus and activity to indicate mood and engagement in reality. Facial gestures and voice pitch can be tracked to sense subtle emotional reactions to stimulus. There could be a service that monitors your diet and daily routines to see if you are acting in healthy or unhealthy ways. If environmental data capture is complete, filling in emotional data from biometric analysis would be a simple software task.

With your PMD you would be able to say, “Remember the time I did (activity) with (person) at (location)?” and your PMD would search your memory database and stream the audio, video, and emotional rendering of the experience to your cell phone. Or you could ask, “Remember that book I read on chimpanzees? Who was the author?” Multiple memories may fit your query and be returned as a basic search list with text, video, and audio links. Similar memories with substituted variables might be offered up as tangents. Your request may provide you with “links” to other activities at that same location or to other books you have read by the same author. Beyond that, you could watch yourself relive important memories, or if friends and family members had similar devices, you could share personal events and watch group memories through multiple perspectives. Human memory integrity need no longer rely on lossy neural compression and the unreliable he-said/she-said narratives that compose written history. It would all be a matter of public record stored in time-stamped relational database tables for all of history. At the very least, it may save a few arguments between married couples.

Brain resoucesThe PMD sounds like science fiction, but the technology for creating it exists today. It could be an iPhone app. The engineering hurdles would be the physical disk space and CPU cycles needed for daily storage, compression, and indexing of video and audio data for every person with a PMD. Let’s assume storage and CPU cycles are solvable problems and that indexing and compression of video and speech data will only get better and faster over time. So pretty soon, for a moderate monthly fee, you could get a PMD system bundled with your cable, cell-phone, or internet bill. With a pocket or desktop unit, your daily memory will be locally stored and indexed. The relevant data points would then be uploaded to a central server for global storage and cross-indexing with other personal memories and digital records over the course of your lifetime. Like a Tivo, your PMD would be able to predict which memories you want to save, which memories your friends and family will like, and which memories are private, redundant, or expendable. It would be easy to customize these features for each individual, making indexing personal memory an intuitive task that would involve automatically setting user preferences based on daily routines; mirroring actual learning and memory networking in the brain.

Engineering a PMD is a relatively simple challenge, but the ramifications of such a device go far beyond personal memory storage. If a smart device is tracking and indexing your personal memory, every aspect of your life can then be recreated in virtual space and reviewed from any angle. Each night, our personal memory would be indexed and compressed while we slept. This would be a sort of “digital dreaming” — our digital dreams would naturally grow over time to mirror our personal dreams. Your digital memories and preference files from any period in your life could be assembled to create a virtual avatar that looked, talked, and behaved just like you. You could have a digital ghost that acts out probable behaviors in hypothetical scenarios, like a dream projecting itself into a videogame future. This digital version of you would exist long after your physical body was gone. People in the future would be able to log on and meet you, relive your memories, or place your avatar into a virtual simulation. It is not immortality, but it beats a MySpace page by a long shot.

Will it warn you when you are about to walk away and leave your hat and sunglasses on the bench behind you? Totally.

Most interestingly, the PMD can be used a social memory or cloud memory device. If you select the social memory networking option, then your public memories can be shared with anyone who shares overlapping memories with you, making shared social memory (the collective consciousness) an instantly accessible reality. This raises some privacy issues, but cell phones already track our location and capture audio and video; capturing every moment of environmental data for cloud-memory rendering is merely the logical endpoint of this technology. You could jump in on a friend’s memory stream and share their experiences over the internet; you could watch a rock concert through the eyes of the guitarist, lead singer, or anyone in the crowd. Then you could replay that concert over and over from different angles. With environmental data capture from multiple PMDs, recreating any event in virtual space becomes a matter of video crunching and graphics rendering. Rendered PMD cloud data could recreate crime scenes or accidents for review in court; create virtual classrooms and training centers; or make vacation memories available to friends on Facebook. You would never again have to ask, “Remember that time…?” All you would have to do is send a link to their PMD. They will remember.

taken from Your Personal Memory Device. You Could Have One Today | h+ Magazine

To the crazy ones

Steve Wheeler wrote this on his blog (link here) and I think it makes me think:

"Are you considered a little crazy? Are your ideas looked on with scorn, or with mild amusement? Well, don't give up. Twice I have come across the same quote today, in two different versions, and I now think that someone, somewhere is trying to tell me something. So I share it here with you. I'm not sure whether this is even the complete quote, but it's one that really inspires me, and the words also turn up within the amazing portrait by Dylan Roscover of Apple guru Steve Jobs (link):

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.
They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward.
And while some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

And here's the 'Think Different' video"

Modern Life?

true?