November 2013 – Page 2 – Smriti "Simmi" D. Isaac

Posted on November 21, 2013November 21, 2013 by Simmi D. Isaac — Leave a comment

Google’s Cultural Institute- 150 Years After the Gettysburg Address

Posted by Amy DeWolf on November 19, 2013 at 5:36pm

Today marked the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. To bring the speech alive, so many years later, the Google Cultural Institute added three new exhibits to showcase the different copies of the famous speech. According to the announcement blog, you can:

learn why there are five different versions, and explore how they differ
see the copy that hangs in the Lincoln Bedroom.
enjoy multimedia exhibits written by Lincoln experts for context around the speech
read the 272-word reflections of our contemporaries like former President Jimmy Carter, former chairman of the NAACP Julian Bond, and Google’s Eric Schmidt on the legacy of Lincoln.

What I love about Google’s Cultural Institute is that it brings so many wonderful images, stories, speeches etc into millions of homes. To see these important pieces of work and learn about history, you can simply logon to your computer without leaving the couch. While it obviously doesn’t replace seeing or hearing things first hand, it is an awesome tool.

I encourage you to checkout the new exhibits on Lincoln and the Gettysburg address and check out the rest of the collections here.

Posted on November 20, 2013November 20, 2013 by Simmi D. Isaac — Leave a comment

Here’s How to Sweeten a Conference!

Posted on November 19, 2013 by Simmi D. Isaac — Leave a comment

Teasing My Brain Before Bedtime: Closely Rivals Pillow Talk

Posted on November 19, 2013October 28, 2014 by Simmi D. Isaac — Leave a comment

Gravity, 2013

Not a sci-fi movie technically, but for mere earthlings so far removed from space, it might as well have been one.

Bullock and Clooney are easy on the eyes and the ears, and offer quite the credible performance, which supplemented by the suspense of the story produces quite the viewing experience, but there’s things that could have made the script and screenplay even more credible. Dr. Ryan (Bullock) states early on that she enjoys the silence of space, only later to speak of her endless hours listening to the radio. And I wondered how it is that she is so queasy in her spacesuit after all those months of training…

Still, it is what it is, and you can’t help but feel a sense of wonderment in the sheer possibilities of traversing through space, and a terrible sense of claustrophobia and even doom at the thought of how this is bound to end badly…

But there is a greater divinity that shapes our ends rough hew them how we will, and in a very complicated but masterful way we watch in amazement as the story of a woman trapped in space unfolds.

Watching it in 3D provided an extra sense of reality to an otherwise non-real viewing experience.