This column will change your life: The calm before the storm

Looks like a barrel of laughs, doesn't it? Photograph: Corbis

The Australian meditation teacher Paul Wilson has been labelled "the guru of calm", which seems reasonable given that he's the author of The Calm Technique, Instant Calm, The Little Book Of Calm (famously featured on the sitcom Black Books), The Big Book Of Calm, Calm At Work, Calm Mother, Calm Baby, The Complete Book Of Calm and Calm For Life. Were I to meet him in person, I would be tempted to suggest that, in view of such a hectic publication schedule, it might be time to slow down and smell the roses. However, this would not irritate him. Because he is so calm.

Tranquillity is big business: Wilson – who describes himself as "the only meditation teacher listed in Who's Who" – sits at the pinnacle of an industry of writers, speakers and retreat centres promising (in the words of one such establishment, in California) "a sacred and peaceful environment for healing". So it was refreshing to hear the former Harvard economist and White House advisor Todd Buchholz outline his alternative theory: that calm is the enemy of happiness, and that it's busyness on which we thrive. Railing at the calm advocates he calls "Edenists", Buchholz proposes that striving keeps us neurologically fit: "The people who sit back and relax… those are the people who become truly miserable." Research, he notes, suggests that retirement prompts a reduction in cognitive abilities. "What you really want," he insists, "is to chase your tail, even if you never catch it." His forthcoming book is called Rush: Why You Need And Love The Rat Race.

There's plenty to disagree with here: Buchholz's thesis is a baby-and-bathwater affair, and his fixation on the joys of competition is a free-market fundamentalist's take on happiness. But his viewpoint highlights the fact that there's often something about the ideology of calm that's rather forced – strenuous, even – and therefore hardly calm at all. The most obvious manifestation of this is the effort to make your physical surroundings perfectly tranquil: either you'll fail and grow frustrated, or you'll succeed and find you're still not happy and productive. Arriving at Princeton, the physicist Richard Feynman found he didn't envy the über-geniuses at the university's Institute for Advanced Study, a leafy oasis where they had no obligation but to cogitate: "These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves. So they don't get any ideas for a while… a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you... and nothing happens." In the words of the computer scientist Richard Hamming, "Ideal working conditions are very strange. The ones you want aren't always the best ones for you."

Yet even the more realistic aspiration to remain "calm amid the chaos" of everyday life can turn into a struggle to feel only one category of emotions while suppressing others. We've all run into weirdly affectless people, usually identifying themselves as Buddhist, who seem to be using their commitment to serenity to avoid confronting other psychological issues. Buchholz may overstate how much we "need" frenzied activity. But it's a strange philosophy of wellbeing that would deny us the option of getting swept up in the excitement of it sometimes, and perhaps even knocked off our serene course by it. I always wonder about that stock photo-library image of a woman, cross-legged, meditating on a beach at sunset. She's clearly very calm. But does she ever have any fun?

The mean kitty song

Here's a great song that one man wrote about his kitty, named Sparta. How did this sweet little feline get that name? You'll know after watching this cute video:

Visit SMPFilms's YouTube channel.

As I've mentioned already, the seeming impossible is happening: I am running out of funny cat videos to show you on Caturday mornings. This means I have to either show you (1) funny parrot videos (2) fart videos or heaven forbid, (3) funny dog videos -- on Caturday morning!!

NASA spacecraft is first to orbit Mercury

WASHINGTON: A NASA spacecraft began orbiting Mercury Thursday, becoming the first to fly around the solar system’s innermost planet, the space agency said.

The craft, known as MESSENGER, began the orbit around 9:00 pm (0200 GMT) on a mission to circle the planet for one Earth year in an unprecedented study of the tiny, hot planet.

The spacecraft began its journey more than six years ago, traveling through the inner solar system and embarking on flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury.

NASA said that by achieving orbit, “this marks the first time a spacecraft has accomplished this engineering and scientific milestone at our solar system’s innermost planet.”For the next several weeks, engineers will be focused on ensuring the spacecraft’s systems are all working well in Mercury’s harsh thermal environment.

Starting on March 23, the instruments will be turned on and checked out, and on April 4 the mission’s primary science phase will begin.

MESSENGER was 28 million miles (46 million kilometers) from the Sun and 96 million miles (155 million kilometers) from Earth when it headed into Mercury’s orbit, NASA said.

The first NASA craft to study Mercury since the Mariner mission more than three decades ago, MESSENGER has already been able to return a partial map of the planet’s crater-filled surface after a handful of flybys.

The craft is carrying seven science instruments, including a Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), the Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer (MASCS), and the Energetic Particle and Plasma Spectrometer (EPPS).

It was first in August 2004 and has since traveled 4.9 billion miles (about 7.9 billion kilometers) through “a range of extreme conditions,” NASA said.

Google “20-per cent time” going to help Japan

“A lot of 20-per cent time is being spent on Japan,” Google spokesman Jamie Yood told AFP. – AP Photo

SAN FRANCISCO: Legions of Google workers are devoting a fifth of their work time or more to building technology to help to deal with the disaster in Japan.

Google has long allowed employees to spend 20 per cent of their time on engineering projects that interest them but which don’t fall into their usual area of focus.

The havoc and death wrought on Japan by a powerful earthquake and ensuing tsunami has prompted many “Googlers” to devote their “20-percent time” to crafting Digital Age tools for handling the crisis.

“A lot of 20-per cent time is being spent on Japan,” Google spokesman Jamie Yood told AFP on Thursday.

“There is definitely a group of people in our Tokyo office spending a lot more than 20 per cent of their time on this, and that is supported by Google,” he said.

Google has established a multi-lingual Crisis Response Page with links to resources such as emergency hotlines, relief organizations, maps, and a service for finding loved ones.

“Like the rest of the world, we’ve been transfixed by the images and news coming out of the northeastern part of Japan over the past six days,” Google product manager Nobu Makida said in a blog post on Thursday.

“Googlers in Japan and elsewhere around the world have been working around the clock to try and help improve the flow of information.” The Japanese military Thursday used trucks and helicopters to dump tons of water onto the quake-hit Fukushima nuclear plant in efforts to douse fuel rods and prevent a disastrous radiation release.

The operation aims to keep the fuel rods inside reactors and containment pools submerged under water, to stop them from degrading when they are exposed to air and emitting dangerous radioactive material.

Nvidia's comeback comes under scrutiny

SAN FRANCISCO: Nvidia has given Wall Street one of its best comeback stories in years and has been rewarded with a hefty share rally, but some investors now question how long its new lead in mobile chips will last.

Snubbed for years as a one-trick pony in video game graphics, Nvidia -- whose chief executive, Jen-Hsun Huang, has a penchant for fast cars -- now seems to be having the ride of its life.

The company is applying its technology to powering mobile devices, and the recent appearance of its chips in new smartphones and tablets made by Motorola, LG and Dell have won the company admirers on Wall Street.

Its Tegra 2 chips made a splash in January at the Consumer Electronics Show and ignited a share rally.

But a 47 percent surge since the start of 2011 has raised eyebrows as some investors ask whether the graphics specialist can defend its early advantage in new tablets from major rivals like Qualcomm and Texas Instruments.

"While they are riding the early stages of the wave and should be rewarded for having the foresight to help define that market, it's not going to be a long window because they have some very serious competition," said Cody Acree, an analyst at Williams Financial Group.

Nvidia's leap into the mobile market with its well-reviewed, cutting-edge Tegra 2 processors comes as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices squeeze its traditional business of designing graphics chips, or GPUs, for personal computers.

With Intel largely absent so far in mobile, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and Nvidia are at the center of a battle to supply the brains behind the newest crop of devices. Marvell, Broadcom and Samsung are also competing.

With years more experience designing processors for mobile phones, Texas Instruments and Qualcomm may have advantages over Nvidia in areas like energy efficiency -- key for smartphones and tablets -- and are talking about cutting-edge tweaks to their chips like next-generation modems and gesture sensing.

Eager to maintain its edge, Nvidia on Tuesday showed reporters at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a tablet using its yet-to-be-released quad-core processor. It said the chips, codenamed Kal-El and currently being sampled by customers, would have five times the processing power of Tegra 2 and appear in tablets around August and in smartphones by Christmas season.

For a table comparing Nvidia's key valuations with rivals, please click http://link.reuters.com/der97r

RALLYING

Last year, fears that Nvidia was trapped in a shrinking graphics market hammered its shares by 40 percent until the fourth quarter, when the company's upcoming mobile processors began to attract more attention and its stock began to recover.

Nvidia and most of its competitors design their chips for smartphones and tablets using architecture licensed from Britain's ARM Holdings, an energy-efficient technology that is shaping up to be the mobile industry's standard.

The combination of ARM technology and its expertise in graphics has enabled Nvidia to get itself back on the scoreboard.

"ARM has democratized the CPU," Huang, once a competitive table-tennis player, told a CES audience in January.

Unlike central processors, or CPUs, which make huge calculations one after another, GPUs excel at carrying out several small calculations at once. That makes them ideal for processing the high-definition video and multimedia content consumers increasingly want.

But in a sign of the formidable competition that Nvidia faces, Hewlett-Packard chose Qualcomm's dual-core Snapdragon for its "TouchPad" tablet to compete against Apple's iPad.

Qualcomm on Monday outlined its plan for its own much faster quad-core processor for future mobile devices.

Texas Instruments last week announced its newest mobile processor, the OMAP 5, which promises a fivefold increase in graphics processing and will be available for tablet and phone makers to test in the second half of 2011.

Vicious competition, short product cycles and supply swings in Nvidia's core PC graphics business have made for erratic quarterly earnings over the years, making its stock a tough sell to conservative investors. Expansion into the mobile market may help Nvidia reduce its earnings volatility.

"We'd have to see a very strong case to be made for sustained profitability with the stock at this price," said Pat Becker Jr., a principal at Becker Capital Management who follows technology stock but does not own Nvidia shares.

The recent rally in Nvidia on the perception it is a strong mobile play has pushed its valuation far above those of its peers, raising concerns it may now be expensive given that most of its sales still come from PC graphics chips.

It trades at 23 times forward earnings, far surpassing TI's 13.5 or Marvell's 11.4, according to Thomson Reuters Starmine.

"The multiple on the stock right now is coming from a perception that they're sweeping smartphone and tablets, but the reality is this is still a PC-driven story," said JMP Securities analyst Alex Gauna.

Nvidia reports fourth-quarter results on Wednesday and is expected to show a healthy profit increase over the previous quarter with higher sales of PC graphics chips during the holiday season and only minor early sales of Tegra 2 chips.

In 2011, Tegra sales could amount to $460 million of Nvidia's estimated $3.6 billion in revenue, with the rest coming mostly from PC graphics chip sales, according to Gleacher & Company analyst Doug Freedman.

"The mobile space is growing like crazy," said Gamble Jones Investment Counsel portfolio manager Hampton Adams, who holds shares of Nvidia but says uncertain market estimates discourage buying more. "It's more art than science, but unless we can make a reasonable approximation of what it's worth, we don't want to take a stab at it." (Reuters)

Smartphone makers woo developers at trade show

BARCELONA: The shotgun marriage of Nokia and Microsoft's smartphone platforms puts software developers and companies at center stage at the annual Mobile World Congress starting on Monday in Barcelona.

Nokia and Microsoft, the global leaders in mobile phones and software, announced a wide-ranging alliance on Friday which they hope will give them a chance of building an iPhone killer -- but it is still regarded as only a slim chance.

Apple and Google's Android have already taken the high ground in the lucrative smartphone battle by attracting hordes of developers who make the small software applications, or apps, that make smartphones come alive.

Apple's iPhone was praised for its design when it launched in 2007, but it was its App Store that transformed the industry by allowing users to personalize their iPhones with easy-to-install games, shopping aids and business tools.

Total sales from all app stores are expected to triple this year to $15 billion, Gartner said last month.

"Most developers are doing Android and Apple; they don't want to do anything else, even if they are paid for it. It's going to be very, very difficult for the others," said Magnus Jern, chief executive of mobile software house Golden Gekko.

The open-source Android software platform, unleashed on the market just two years ago by Google, has already stormed to the top of the smartphone platform popularity charts, overtaking Nokia's Symbian at the end of last year.

Device makers such as Samsung, HTC and Sony Ericsson have embraced it as it offers features and functions they could never hope to develop on their own as quickly.

On Sunday Sony Ericsson and Samsung unveiled new models running on Android, with Sony Ericsson in a long-awaited move bringing Sony's PlayStation brand to the mobile market.

Many manufacturers will also be trying in their own right to attract software developers at the Mobile World Congress with special events laid on for them.

A consortium of telecom carriers, who have so far largely failed to profit from the apps boom, will also launch their own app platform, named WAC, on Monday.

Operators are hoping their wholesale store - from which operators' individual stores will take content - gives them a scale which is big enough to battle with Apple and Google. (Reuters)

Apple working on smaller, cheaper iPhone: report

SAN FRANCISCO: Apple Inc is working on a smaller and less expensive version of the iPhone, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing sources.

The prototype device is about one-third smaller than the iPhone 4, the report said, citing a person who had seen it.

Apple has considered selling the new iPhone for $200 without a two-year wireless contract, Bloomberg reported.

Apple is aiming to unveil the device around the middle of this year, but the launch may be delayed or canceled altogether, the report said.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

The company often develops products it never brings to market.

According to the report, Apple is also working on a dual-mode phone that would be able to work with the world's two main wireless standards.

AT&T, which carries the iPhone on its wireless network in the United States, declined to comment. Verizon Wireless, which also carries the device, could not be reached for comment.

Shares of Cupertino, California-based Apple closed down 1 percent at $354.54 on the Nasdaq on Thursday. (Reuters)