Terrific entrepreneurial endeavor that is changing villages and lives!
A Light in India
Bach – Orchestral Suite No.3 In D, BWV 1068
via youtube.com
Johann Sebastian Bach – Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068
1. Overture
2.Air*
3.Gavotte I/II
4.Bourrée
5.Gigue
Instrumentation: Trumpet I/II/III, timpani, oboe I/II, violin I/II, viola, basso continuo.
*The Air is one of the most famous pieces of classical music. An arrangement of the piece by German violinist August Wilhelm (1845 – 1908) has come to be known as Air on the G String.
Sanur Beach Sunrise Photo – Bali Picture – National Geographic Photo of the Day
Exquisite! Chris, my dear friend from Australia currently vacationing in Bali is taking in these views, I am sure! (and therefore has no use to check this post on FB!)
Endless Simmer: Top 10 New Food Travel Destinations for 2011
A Poem For Sunday – The Daily Dish
Click on the link above to see the poem on the Daily Dish website. It is titled ‘Sourwood’ by R.T. Smith; first published in The Atlantic Monthly in May 1998.
Christmas 2010 Eats and Treats
I would be remiss to not have a blogpost devoted solely to all the sweet and savory snacks that my mother made during her brief visit with me over the holidays.
And so, the objective of this post is to highlight via pictures all the many goodies that were made– many of them typically made during the Christmas holidays in India: karjakais, kalkals, ladoos, chudva, murukus, fruitcakes, the list goes on. Back in the old country, you made them in large quantities so as to have them ready on hand to serve when guests came calling for a friendly holiday visit, or to serve to the carolers after they caroled outside your house, or to serve with tea and coffee during the holiday season. And then for a few weeks after Christmas and New Years’, you’d still have boxes and tins of these goodies neatly stored in your pantry that would tide you over at least the month of January.
Well, my mother came to visit for Christmas, and she did exactly this: she made all these yummy sweet and savory eats that we’re now nibbling on even two weeks later!
Here are some of the pictures in the slideshow below. If you’re familiar with these eats, you wouldn’t care to read the captions that go with each photo, but you’re not, you might find it interesting.
Study: Love music? Thank a substance in your brain
NEW YORK — Whether it’s the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure, a new study says.
The brain substance is involved both in anticipating a particularly thrilling musical moment and in feeling the rush from it, researchers found.
Previous work had already suggested a role for dopamine, a substance brain cells release to communicate with each other. But the new work, which scanned people’s brains as they listened to music, shows it happening directly.
While dopamine normally helps us feel the pleasure of eating or having sex, it also helps produce euphoria from illegal drugs. It’s active in particular circuits of the brain.
The tie to dopamine helps explain why music is so widely popular across cultures, Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal write in an article posted online Sunday by the journal Nature Neuroscience.
The study used only instrumental music, showing that voices aren’t necessary to produce the dopamine response, Salimpoor said. It will take further work to study how voices might contribute to the pleasure effect, she said.
The researchers described brain-scanning experiments with eight volunteers who were chosen because they reliably felt chills from particular moments in some favorite pieces of music. That characteristic let the experimenters study how the brain handles both anticipation and arrival of a musical rush.
Results suggested that people who enjoy music but don’t feel chills are also experiencing dopamine’s effects, Zatorre said.
PET scans showed the participants’ brains pumped out more dopamine in a region called the striatum when listening to favorite pieces of music than when hearing other pieces. Functional MRI scans showed where and when those releases happened.
Dopamine surged in one part of the striatum during the 15 seconds leading up to a thrilling moment, and a different part when that musical highlight finally arrived.
Zatorre said that makes sense: The area linked to anticipation connects with parts of the brain involved with making predictions and responding to the environment, while the area reacting to the peak moment itself is linked to the brain’s limbic system, which is involved in emotion.
The study volunteers chose a wide range of music – from classical and jazz to punk, tango and even bagpipes. The most popular were Barber’s Adagio for Strings, the second movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Debussy’s Claire de Lune.
Since they already knew the musical pieces they listened to, it wasn’t possible to tell whether the anticipation reaction came from memory or the natural feel people develop for how music unfolds, Zatorre said. That question is under study, too.
Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, an expert on music and the brain at Harvard Medical School, called the study “remarkable” for the combination of techniques it used.
While experts had indirect indications that music taps into the dopamine system, he said, the new work “really nails it.”
Music isn’t the only cultural experience that affects the brain’s reward circuitry. Other researchers recently showed a link when people studied artwork.
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Online:
Dopamine, people!
Touch Of God
Whether or not what we experienced was an ‘According to Hoyle’ miracle is irrelevant. What is relevant is that I felt the touch of God. God got involved.
– Jules Winnfield in the movie Pulp Fiction, 1994.
