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WITandWISDOM(tm) - August 22, 2000 ~~~~~~~ THOUGHTS: The difference between getting somewhere and nowhere is the courage to make an early start. The fellow who sits still and does just what he is told will never be told to do big things. - Charles M. Schwab Source: The Motivation Mailer, motivational_mailer- subscribe@topica.com via http://www.witandwisdom.org ~~~~~~~ SPECIAL THOUGHTS: Each year, this particular church had a student-recognition day, when young people from the church who were students at College or University came to the front and gave a report on how their educational experiences were going. This was a Black Baptist Church from a neighborhood where not everybody had the opportunities that many modern young people enjoy. So the congregation loved to hear how their young people were going. On this particular day, after half a dozen young people had stood and shared their reports, the Pastor got up and delivered his closing words. "Children," he said, "you are going to die. You may not think you are going to die. But you are going to die. One of these days they are going to take you out to the cemetery, drop you in a hole, throw some dirt in your face, then go back to the Church to eat potato salad. When you were born, you alone were crying, and everybody else was happy. The important question I want to ask you is this: When you die, are you alone going to be happy, leaving everybody else crying? The answer depends on whether you live to get titles, or you live to get testimonies. When they lay you in the grave, are people going to stand around giving testimonies of the good things you did for them? Will they list your degrees and awards, or will they tell about what a blessing you were to all of them? Will you leave behind just a newspaper column telling people how important you were, or will you leave crying people who give testimonies of how they've lost the best friend they ever had? There's nothing wrong with titles. Titles are good things to have. But if it ever comes down to a choice between a title or a testimony, - go for the testimony." - From "Who Switched the Price Tags?" by Tony Campolo via http://www.witandwisdom.org Submitted by: Paul Gredig ~~~~~~~ THIS & THAT: THE UGLIER, THE BETTER Is your couch really ugly? Would it need major work just to look good enough to throw out? Then you might consider entering it in Sure Fit's 6th Annual Ugly Couch Contest. The owner of the winning couch gets $5,000. 25 consolation prizes of -- what else? -- slipcovers will also be awarded. The Sure Fit Ugly Couch Contest runs from July 1 through Aug. 25. To enter, send a quality color photograph of you or your family on the offending couch, along with a written paragraph on how your couch is used (or abused), to: Sure Fit Ugly Couch Contest 58 West 40th St, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10018 Entries must be received by Aug. 25 to qualify. To see photos of previous winners, visit the company's Web site at http://www.surefit.net/ucc_2000.cfm To cast your vote for this year's winner, visit Sure Fit's web site between Aug. 28 and Sept. 1. The winner will be announced during September. Source: ArcaMax Humorous News, www.arcamax.com via http://www.witandwisdom.org ~~~~~~~ KEEP SMILING: On a flight to Florida, I was preparing my notes for one of the parent-education seminars I conduct as an educational psychologist. The elderly woman sitting next to me explained that she was returning to Miami after having spent two weeks visiting her six children, 18 grandchildren and ten great- grandchildren in Boston. Then she inquired what I did for a living. I told her, fully expecting her to question me for free professional advice. Instead she sat back, picked up a magazine and said, "If there's anything you want to know, just ask me." Source: Clean Laugh, cleanlaugh- subscribe@egroups.com via http://www.witandwisdom.org ~~~~~~~ TRIVIA: TO CATCH A FIBER-OPTIC SPY, LOOK AT A SINGLE PHOTON Absolute security for e-mail and other communications flowing over fiber-optic networks is almost at hand. Protecting traffic routed via telecom satellites could take a bit longer, but also seems attainable, says Andrew J. Shields, a senior scientist at Toshiba Research Europe Ltd. (TREL), the Cambridge (England) research arm of Japan's Toshiba Corp. On May 10, at the Conference on Lasers & Electro-Optics in San Francisco, Shields revealed that his team at TREL has developed a chip that can detect individual photons, or particles, of light. The key to this remarkable feat is a photosensor covered with so-called quantum dots - tiny semiconductor domes just 30 nanometers wide. (The diameter of a human hair is roughly 100,000 nanometers.) Since the chip is able to detect single photons, it can protect information with quantum cryptography. Here's how that works: According to the laws of quantum physics, anything that tampers with a single photon alters its properties irreversibly. So, should anyone eavesdrop on information carried by a stream of individual photons, an immediate change would be apparent to the legitimate recipient. By inspecting each photon as it arrives, a recipient could spot any trouble en route - and alert the sender to stop transmitting. "Despite the exotic name, quantum cryptography is not as distant a prospect as you might think," says Shields. For terrestrial fiber-optic applications, "we're aiming for commercialization of the detector in three years." By about 2005, quantum physics could also be standing guard over satellite communications. By Otis Port in Business Week, May 29, 2000, Copyright (c) 2000 via http://www.witandwisdom.org |