Facts of Albert Einstein

Considered as 20^th Century’s most influential physicist, Albert Einstein is one of the most popular scientists of modern science. He was the greatest genius of our times whose contributions to physics have been matched only by a handful of others in history. Even so, nowadays Einstein is associated just with one formula: E = mc2. It has been called the most famous formula in the world, and even people who have no idea what mass-energy equivalence is still know it. However, there was a lot more to the man than that. 

1. Einstein was born in Germany on March 14, 1879. The place of birth was Ulm, Württemberg. He died on April 18, 1955 at the age of 76 in Princeton, New Jersey, United States.

2. At birth his head had a weird shape. It is being said that the back of his head was very large but within the first few weeks, the shape gradually changed to normal.

3. He was born in a middle-class Jew family and had a sister named Maja who was two years younger to him. 

4. Sources say that Einstein was plagued by speech difficulty and could not speak until he turned 4 years old.

5. Albert Einstein completed his elementary education from Munich’s Luitpold Gymnasium.

6. The first scientific paper he wrote was at the age of 16. The paper was titled “The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields.” 

7. He never failed math. This is a popular “fact” promoted on the internet, maybe in an attempt to relate to genius. However, it is simply not true. Overall, Einstein was an average student, but math was one area where he excelled, unsurprisingly. 

8. Einstein encouraged the development of the nuclear bomb. His involvement is often misinterpreted, with some claiming that he helped create the atom bomb. In reality, what he did was write a letter to President FDR encouraging him to begin work on such a weapon, which led to the Manhattan Project. Although a dedicated pacifist and, later, an anti-nuke spokesman, Einstein was convinced that America needed the atomic bomb before the Nazis.

9. He was a great musician. If the whole “genius” thing didn’t work out, Einstein could have become a violinist. His mother played piano so he had the love of music instilled in him—via violin lessons—at the young age of five. 

10. He could have been the President of Israel. When Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, died, Einstein was offered the position, but he declined.

11.  He married his cousin. After Einstein divorced his first wife, Mileva Maric, he married his cousin, Elsa Lowenthal. He was, actually, quite a bad husband to his first wife in their later years. He had affairs he never tried to hide, he moved the entire family to Berlin without discussion, and treated her more as a servant than a wife.

12. He won the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics. This alone isn’t particularly surprising. What is surprising is the fact that he didn’t receive it for the general or special theory of relativity, but rather for the photoelectric effect. 

13. He loved to sail. Ever since university, Einstein sailed as a hobby. But by his own admission, he never made a particularly good sailor. In fact, he didn’t even know how to swim. 

14. He really didn’t like socks, and usually didn’t wear them. In fact, in a letter to Elsa, he bragged about getting away “without wearing socks” while at Oxford.

15. He had an illegitimate daughter. This wasn’t known until the 1980s, but according to correspondence between Albert and Mileva it was determined that the two had a daughter in 1902 called Lieserl. At one point, all mention of her in letters stopped so her fate is unknown. 

16. His brain was stolen. After Einstein died, the pathologist who did his autopsy took his brain without permission. He eventually got the permission necessary from Einstein’s son, but he was fired from Princeton when he refused to turn the brain over. He kept it for over forty years before finally returning it in 1998. 

17. In 1894, his father’s electrical company failed to get an important contract and the family was forced to move to Italy’s Milan. Einstein was however, left at Munich’s boarding house to complete his studies. Einstein was very unhappy about the idea of joining compulsory military duty when he reached the appropriate age and hence, he decided to join his parents in Milan. He left school without notice by using a doctor’s note and went to Italy. 

18. Einstein then joined Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule (Swiss Federal Polytechnic School) based in Zürich, Switzerland. His exceptional talent in mathematics and physics grabbed attention but he actually failed in other subjects of the entrance exam. School authorities decided to accept him provided he completed his formal schooling. So, he joined Jost Winteler’s special high school and graduated at the age of 17.  

19. At the age of 17 Einstein also renounced his German citizenship to avoid military service. During his schooling with Jost Winteler, he became very close to the family and fell in love with Marie – Winteler’s daughter. He also enrolled in Zürich’s school after renouncing his German citizenship. 

20. In 1902, Einstein’s financial conditions were awful. He did not have a job and his father’s company went bankrupt. That is when Einstein started tutoring children. 

21. Einstein eventually grabbed a Swiss clerical job after a recommendation from Marcel Grossman’s father. Marcel Grossman was Einstein’s lifelong friend. 

22. Einstein’s father died shortly after that because of illness but before death, approved of Einstein’s and Maric’s wedding. The couple got married in 1903. The next year they had a son named Hans Albert and in 1910 they had a second son named Eduard. 

23. During his study at the polytechnic school, Einstein went through the electromagnetic theories that were developed by James Maxwell – a Scottish Physicist. 

24. Einstein, through the studies of those theories, had found out that speed of light was constant and this fact was not known to Maxwell. Einstein’s discovery was a direct violation of Newton’s laws of motion. This led Einstein to develop the relativity principle. 

25. The year 1905 is known as the ‘Miracle Year’ of Einstein. That year he submitted his doctorate paper and 4 of his papers were published in one of the best know physic journals – the Annalen der Physik. The 4 papers that were published were Equivalence of Matter and Energy, Special Relativity, Brownian Motion and Photoelectric Effect. These papers eventually altered the very fabric of modern physics. 

26. It was in his paper on ‘Equivalence of Matter and Energy’ where Einstein gave his famous formula E=mc². 

27. After gaining popularity, Einstein had to frequently travel and this started causing troubles in his family because of poor finances.

28. Eventually, Einstein concluded that the marriage was over and got into a relation with his cousin named Elsa Löwenthal and later married her. 

29. Mileva Maric and Albert Einstein eventually divorced in 1919 on an agreement that if ever Einstein wins a noble prize, Maric will receive the entire money that he wins. 

30. Einstein had actually set some weird rules for his first wife Maric. The rules included – ‘she had to stop talking when Einstein asked her to’, ‘she had to serve him three meals a day’ and ‘she could not expect any physical intimacy from him’.

31. In many letters that Einstein wrote to Elsa, he actually acknowledged the fact that he was involved in several extramarital affairs. 

32. His first wife Maric actually received the money he won as a part of Noble Prize.

33. Einstein’s eyeballs are preserved in a safe box in New York City.

Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Listening To Music

The brain can work in ways we can’t comprehend. In numerous studies they have been able to see just how much normal things like music can effect, and even alter, it completely. These facts about music will give you an insight into the complexity of your own mind.

1.The chills you get when you listen to music, is mostly caused by the brain releasing dopamine while anticipating the peak moment of a song.

Dopamine is a feel-good chemical released by the brain. This chemical is directly involved in motivation, as well as addiction. These studies found a biological explanation for why music always has been such a huge part of emotional events around the world since the beginning of human history.

2.Music that gives you chills might make you more generous too.

Research published last year in the journal Frontiers In Psychology found that people were more likely to choose to give money to others if their favorite chill-inducing was playing. If music that they said they didn’t like was playing instead, they gave significantly less money. Just 22 people took part, so take the results with a pinch of salt, but it’s an intriguing finding.

3.Listening to sad music provokes more nostalgia than sadness.

A study published last year in PLOS One looked into why people seek out and actually like listening to sad music.

People in the study reported that sad music brought up “a wide range of complex and partially positive emotions, such as nostalgia, peacefulness, tenderness, transcendence, and wonder,” write the study authors.

Surprisingly, nostalgia, rather than sadness, was the most frequently reported emotion.

4.There are few activities in life that utilizes the entire brain and music is one of them.

With Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI), a research team recorded a group of individuals who were listening to music. They found that listening to music recruits the auditory areas, and employs large-scale neural networks in the brain. In fact, they believe music can activate emotional, motor, and creative areas of the brain.

5.Cows produce more milk when listening to relaxing music.

As reported by the BBC in 2001, listening to relaxing music can lead to cows producing more milk. The study involved 1,000 cows being exposed to fast, slow, or no music for 12 hours a day over a nine-week period.

When listening to the slow music (e.g. “Everybody Hurts” by REM) the cows produced 3% more milk per day than when they listened to fast music (e.g. “Space Cowboy” by Jamiroquai).

“Calming music can improve milk yield, probably because it reduces stress,” Dr Adrian North, who carried out the study, told the BBC.

According to Modern Farmer, music is something the dairy industry had been playing about with before the psychologists got involved too. Dairy farmer Kristine Spadgenske from Minnesota told them: “At our farm you can always tell when the radio is not on because the cows are way more jumpy and less likely to come into the parlor.”

6.Repetitive choruses are the key to a hit song.

Joseph Nunes at the University of South Carolina looked into what makes a song commercially successful in a paper published last year in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

“Once you got on the hot 100, the more you repeated the chorus, the more word repetition, the less complex the song, the better it did,” Nunes told NPR earlier this year.

In fact, for each extra repetition of the chorus “a song’’s likelihood of making it to Number One, as opposed to staying at the bottom of the Billboard chart, increases by 14.5 percent,” Nunes and his co-authors wrote. There is a limit, though. Nunes and his colleagues saw a “ceiling affect”, above which more repetitions harmed, instead of helped, a song’s chances.

7.Playing music regularly will physically alter your brain structure.

Brain plas­tic­ity refers to the brain’s abil­ity to change through­out life. Changes asso­ci­ated with learn­ing occur mostly at the con­nec­tions between neu­rons. When studying musicians, they found that the cor­tex vol­ume was high­est in pro­fes­sional musi­cians, inter­me­di­ate in ama­teur musicians, and lowest in non-musicians.

8.The brain responds to music the same way it responds to something that you eat.

 As stated above, dopamine is a chemical released by the brain. This chemical is connected with the feeling of euphoria which is associated with addiction, sex, and even eating. Dopamine is what enables a person to feel the pleasures of such things. A study using only instrumental music proves that anticipation for a musical rush released the same kind of reactions in the brain as anticipating the taste of your food.

9.The “mere exposure effect” makes us like certain music just because we hear it a lot.

But, crucially, there’s a point at which it then really really starts to grate – and you get an inverted-U graph like the one above.

In an essay at Aeon, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, director of the music cognition lab at the University of Arkansas, explains why repetition makes us like music: “People seem to misattribute their increased perceptual fluency – their improved ability to process the triangle or the picture or the melody – not to the prior experience, but to some quality of the object itself.”

Basically, hearing a song you’ve heard before makes you feel clever, because your brain has already figured it out.

10.Listening to music while exercising can significantly improve your work-out performance.

Dissociation is a diversionary technique which lowered the perceptions of effort. This technique can divert the mind from feelings of fatigue, and heighten positive mood states like vigor. By using music during low to moderate exercise intensities, you will find yourself with an overall more pleasurable experience while working out.

11.An emotional attachment could be the reason for your favorite song choice.

Favorite songs are often context-dependent. Even though many people often change their favorite song depending on the most recent releases, it is proven that long-lasting preferences are due mainly to an emotional attachment to a memory associated with the song.

12.Your heartbeat changes to mimics the music you listen to.

Music is found to modulate heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration. The cardiovascular system mirrored deflating decrescendos, and swelling crescendos in a study of 24 volunteers. Distinguishing changes in sound patterns were even found to be equipped in those as small as a developing fetus.

13. Listening to happy vs. sad music can affect the way you perceive the world around you.

The brain always compares the information that comes through the eyes with what it expects about the world, based on what you know. The final results in our mind are what we perceive as our reality. Therefore, happy songs that lift your spirits make you see the world around you differently than that of a sad person.

14. An “ear worm” is a song that you can’t seem to get out of your head.

An ear worm is a cognitive itch in your brain. This “brain itch” is a need for the brain to fill in the gaps in a song’s rhythm. The auditory cortex is a part of your brain that will automatically fill in a rhythm of a song. In other words, your brain kept “singing” long after the song had ended.

15.Music triggers activity in the same part of the brain that releases Dopamine, the “pleasure chemical”.

The nucleus accumbens is a part of your brain that releases Dopamine during eating, and sex. The most interesting part is that the nucleus accumbens is just a small part of the brain that gets affected by music. It also affects the amygdala, which is the part of the brain used to process emotion for music

16.Music is often prescribed to patients with Parkinson’s disease and stroke victims.

Music therapy has been around for decades. Music triggers networks of neurons into organized movement. The part of the brain the processes movement also overlaps speech networks. These two key elements help patients overcome the obstacles that most effect them such as basic motor skills, and speech difficulties.

17.According to a study, Learning a musical instrument can improve fine motor and reasoning skills.

In a study of children, it revealed that those with three or more years of musical training preformed better in fine motor skills and auditory discrimination abilities then those who had none. They even tested better for vocabulary and reasoning skills, even though those are quite separate from music training.

Facts of Karnataka and Kannada

Kannada, the one language which resides in the heart of every Kannadiga. The glory of this language dates back to centuries and though it is used only in the state of Karnataka, the richness of this language has spread across the world. As we are celebrating the Rajyotsava festival as a mark of the formation of Karnataka state. 

Name: The word “Karnataka” is derived from the Kannada words “Karu” and “Nadu” which means “Elevated Land”.

Existence: On 1^st November 1956, Karnataka was created by the States Reorganization Act and named it as State of Mysore. In 1973, it was renamed to Karnataka.

Boundary: Karnataka is surrounded by the Arabian Sea, Laccadive sea, Goa, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

Population: The total population of Karnataka is 61,130,704. Karnataka holds 9^th position in population wise.

Land Area: The Land area of Karnataka is 191,791 sq. km. Karnataka holds 8^th position in area wise.

Language: The Official Language of Karnataka is Kannada.

Literacy: The Literacy Ratio is 75.60%.

City: Its Capital City is Bangalore. Bangalore is also the largest city of Karnataka.

District: It has 30 districts located here.

Connectivity: Karnataka is well connected in roadways, railways and airways. Karnataka has some domestic airports also. These are in Bangalore, Mangalore, Hubli, Belgaum etc.

Festivals: Ganesh Chaturthi, Basava Jayanthi, Deepavali, Ramzan, Ugadi, etc. are some of the important festivals celebrated in Karnataka.

Religion: In Karnataka, 83% and 11% population are Hindu and Muslim respectively and remaining others includes Christian, Jain and Buddhist, etc

Unknown facts about Kannada and Karnataka

1. Kannada is one of the oldest Indian languages
   
2. Kittur Rani Chennamma (1778-1829):
   
   Queen of the princely state of Kittur she was the first woman to lead an armed rebellion against British governance and kappa tax in 1824. This was more than three decades before Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi in 1857, after the British refused to recognize her adopted heir Shivalingappa. She was captured and imprisoned in Bailhongal fort where she died in 1829. Rani Chennamma’s statue was unveiled in the Indian Parliament complex by President Pratibha Patil.
3. Karnataka Khadi Gramodyoga Samyukta Sangha (KKGSS):
   
   The KKGSS, in Bengeri in Hubli, is the only unit in India that is authorized to manufacture and supply the Flag of India. Set up in 1957, the khadi flag conforms to the Bureau of Indian Standards benchmarks.
4. The Kannada language is as old as 2000 years
   
5. Purandara Dasa (1484-1564):
   
    Known as the “Father of Carnatic Music”, he was born near Tirthahalli in Shivamogga (Shimoga) district. He systematized the entire system of teaching Carnatic music that is followed to this day. He introduced the basic scale for music instruction (composing Raga Mayamalavagowla) and fashioned a series of graded lessons. He fused bhava, laya and raga in his compositions. The standardisation of varna mettus has been attributed entirely to Purandara Dasa. About 1000 of his compositions are still extant. His influence on Hindustani music too has been profound. For example, Tansen’s teacher, Swami Haridas, was Purandara Dasa’s disciple. 
6. Kannada is the only Indian language for which a foreigner Ferdinand Kittel wrote a Dictionary 
   
7. Sir M Visvesvaraya (1860-1955),
   
   Bharat Ratna awardee: He was born in Muddenahalli village about 40 miles from Bengaluru. His birthday 15^th September is celebrated as Engineer’s Day in India. He was a pre-eminent engineer, scholar, statesman and also the Diwan of the princely state of Mysore from 1912-1918. He was the chief engineer for the KRS Dam in Mysore, designed the flood protection system for Hyderabad, Khadakvasala (Pune) and Gwalior and a sea erosion protection system for Vishakapatnam. He also set up the UVCE Engineering college in Bengaluru in 1917, the Mysore Soap Factory, the Parasitoide Laboratory, the Mysore Iron & Steel Works (now known as Visvesvaraya Iron and Steel Limited) in Bhadravathi, the Sri Jayachamarajendra Polytechnic Institute, the Bangalore Agricultural University, the State Bank of Mysore, The Century Club, Mysore Chambers of Commerce and numerous other industrial ventures. He encouraged private investment in industry during his tenure as Diwan of Mysore. He was instrumental in charting out the plan for road construction between Tirumala and Tirupati.
8. When the Kannada  literature “Kavirajamarga” was written by Amogavarsha, English was a baby in the cradle and Hindi was not born at all. 
   
   So called International language -- English does not have its own Script. English is written in "ROMAN" .So called National Language -- Hindi does not have its own script. Hindi is written in "Devanagari". Though Tamil has a script, logically it is imperfect -- as common letters are used for many pronunciations. KANNADA is as old as 2000 years. You can write what you speak and you can read what you write. 
9. Akashvani (All India Radio):
   
   This is what the All India Radio is officially known as since 1956. The term Akashvani was coined by MV Gopalswamy of Mysore after setting up the nation’s first private radio station in his residence, “Vittal Vihar” in 1936. Akashvani means celestial announcement.  The word, of Sanskrit origin, is often found in Hindu mythology. When the gods wished to say something, an akashvani occurred. Literally, “akash” means “sky” and vani means “sound” or “message”. Thus, Akashvani seemed suitable for  a radio broadcaster and was later adopted by the All India Radio after independence.
10. Vijayanagara Empire (1336-1646):
    
     Hampi (a UN World Heritage Site) belongs to this and has the most famous set of archaeological remnants. It has lasted longer than the Mughal Empire and covered an area that was comparable if not larger. 
11. Karnataka State: 
    
    The state of Mysore state was formed on November 1^st  1956 after the States Reorganization Act. Effective from 1973, the state became known as Karnataka. 
12. Kannada is 99.99% perfect logically and scientifically 
    
13. Devanahalli:
    
     This is now the site of the new Bengaluru airport and is the birthplace of Tipu Sultan. 
14. SHRI VINOBA BHAVE called KANNADA script as QUEEN OF WORLD SCRIPTS "Vishwa Lipigala Raani - KANNADA” 
    
15. Chanakya or Kautilya’s Arthashastra
    
    (one of the world’s oldest and finest treatises on statecraft, economic policy and military strategy written in 4th century BC): The oldest surviving manuscript of the Arthashastra is in the Oriental Research Institute set up as the Mysore Oriental Library in 1891. Scholar and Indologist, Rudrapatna Shamasastry, discovered the manuscript in its original Grantha script in 1905, translated it into Sanskrit in 1909 and into English in 1915. This gave Indians and the world a masterpiece.
16. The only Indian author who got maximum awards for literature is Shri Kuvempu who is a proud Kannadiga 
    
17. Kannada is the only Indian language which got maximum GyanaPeetha Awards.
    
    Kannada -8, Hindi -6,  Telugu -2, Malayalam -3 and Tamil – 2 
18. Kannada is one of the Indian languages to feature in Wikipedia logo
    
     
19. Charition mime, an ancient greek play  ( In 2nd century) had used Kannada phrases  
    
20. Ragale Saahithya can be seen only in KANNADA which is of a rare and different kind of literature. 
    
21. KANNADA Chandassu (shatpadis) out pared all other languages.