CRAZY WONDERFUL WORLD
June 28th, 2007 by Barry Eaton
A heart warming story that will bring a lump to your throat….
This proves all things are possible through imagination, dedication and heart.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
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In his faded coat, tinted prescription glasses and scuffed shoes, he looks like just another pensioner scraping by on a tight budget. But the man pictured here is Ingvar Kamprad, the reclusive Swedish founder of Ikea. And he is worth £15.7billion. |
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That makes him the world’s seventh richest man, but the 81-year-old admits he is still “a bit tight” with money. |
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He takes easyJet flights, drives himself around in a 15-year-old Volvo, and has furnished his modest house almost entirely with Ikea items – which he assembled himself. |
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He boasted that he changed his barber of many years’ standing after finding another who would cut his hair for only £6. |
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And when he arrived at a gala evening recently to collect a businessman of the year award, the security guards refused to let him in because they saw him getting off a bus when he arrived. |
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A former Nazi sympathiser in the years immediately following the Second World War, he is a self-confessed alcoholic who admits he has an ongoing problem with drink. But he says he has it under control and adds that he “dries out” three times a year. |
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His eagerness to save money extends to his visits to London, when he shuns taxis and prefers to use the Tube or buses. |
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A simple life: Mr Kamprad’s Swiss home, furnished almost entirely with items from Ikea |
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He now lives in semi-retirement with his wife Margaretha in a villa in Switzerland. The couple are often seen dining out in cheap restaurants and haggling over prices in the market. He always does his food shopping in the afternoon, when the prices in his local market start to fall. |
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Recently, a statue of him was erected in his Swedish home town, and he was invited to cut the ribbon. It was reported that instead he untied it, folded it neatly and handed it to the mayor, telling him he could now use it again. |
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Explaining his frugal nature, he said: “I am a bit tight with money, a sort of Swedish Scotsman. But so what? |
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“If I start to acquire luxurious things then this will only incite others to follow suit. It’s important that leaders set an example. |
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“I look at the money I’m about to spend on myself and ask if Ikea’s customers could afford it. |
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“From time to time I like to buy a nice shirt and cravat – and eat Swedish fish roe.” |
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Mr Kamprad was 17 when he founded Ikea in 1943. The name came from his initials, IK, with an E for Elmtaryd, the family farm where he grew up, and an A for Agunnaryd, his home village. |
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He came up with the idea of flat-packed furniture when he was trying to fit a table into the boot of his car – a friend suggested he should take the legs off, and the rest is history. |
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He opened his first store in 1965, only to see the wind smash the neon sign and cause a fire which burned the place down. From that inauspicious beginning-Ikea has grown from a village-based mail order business to a multinational empire with a turnover of nearly £9billion a year. |
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It is 21 years since Ikea opened its first British store, in Warrington, Cheshire, taking the furniture business by storm and bringing the joys – and frustrations – of the flatpack to countless homes. Ikea is now Britain’s fourth biggest furniture retailer despite having relatively few branches. |
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It has been claimed that more people read the Ikea catalogue than the Bible – and that one in ten Europeans have been conceived on an Ikea bed. |
The company is now run jointly by Mr Kamprad’s three sons Peter, 44, Jonas, 41, and Matthias, 39, because their father does not want any one person to have total control.
Jesus Diaz
Herd of cows,
Flock of chickens,
School of fish
And a Gaggle of geese, and
A Pride of lions.
A Murder of crows
(as well as their cousins the rooks and ravens),
An Exaltation of dovesAnd, presumably because they look so wise:
Now consider a group of Baboons.They are the loudest, most dangerous, most obnoxious, most viciously aggressive and least intelligent of all primates………
And what is the proper collective noun for a group of baboons?
Believe it or not ……. A Parliament
YEP….A PARLIAMENT OF BABOONS!
………You just can’t make this stuff up.
Interesting Quotes from the Recent Past
“Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances.”
– Dr. Lee DeForest, “Father of Radio & Grandfather of Television.”
“The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives.”
- – Admiral William Leahy , US Atomic Bomb Project
“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”
– Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
– Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
“640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
– Bill Gates, 1981
This ‘telephone’has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us,”
– Western Union internal memo, 1876.
“The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?”
– David Sarnoff’s associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.
“I’m just glad it’ll be Clark Gable who’s falling on his face and not Gary Cooper,”
–Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in “Gone With The Wind.”
“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out,”
– Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.
“Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy,”
– Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859.
“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
– Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University , 1929.
“Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value,”
– Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre , France .
“Everything that can be invented has been invented,”
– Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, US Office of Patents, 1899.
“The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon,”
– Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873.
And last but not least…
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
– Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
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Memory: Remembrance of things to come
- 08 October 2012 by David Robson
The discovery that memory evolved to allow us to predict the future rather than recall the past has some very strange implications
WHEN thinking about the workings of the mind, it is easy to imagine memory as a kind of mental autobiography – the private book of you. To relive the trepidation of your first day at school, say, you simply dust off the cover and turn to the relevant pages. But there is a problem with this idea. Why are the contents of that book so unreliable? It is not simply our tendency to forget key details. We are also prone to “remember” events that never actually took place, almost as if a chapter from another book has somehow slipped into our autobiography. Such flaws are puzzling if you believe that the purpose of memory is to record your past – but they begin to make sense if it is for something else entirely.
That is exactly what memory researchers are now starting to realise. They believe that human memory didn’t evolve so that we could remember but to allow us to imagine what might be. This idea began with the work of Endel Tulving, now at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, who discovered a person with amnesia who could remember facts but not episodic memories relating to past events in his life. Crucially, whenever Tulving asked him about his plans for that evening, the next day or the summer, his mind went blank – leading Tulving to suspect that foresight was the flipside of episodic memory.
Subsequent brain scans supported the idea, suggesting that every time we think about a possible future, we tear up the pages of our autobiographies and stitch together the fragments into a montage that represents the new scenario. This process is the key to foresight and ingenuity, but it comes at the cost of accuracy, as our recollections become frayed and shuffled along the way. “It’s not surprising that we confuse memories and imagination, considering that they share so many processes,” says Daniel Schacter, a psychologist at Harvard University.
Over the next 10 pages, we will show how this theory has brought about a revolution in our understanding of memory. Given the many survival benefits of being able to imagine the future, for instance, it is not surprising that other creatures show a rudimentary ability to think in this way (“Do animals ever forget?“). Memory’s role in planning and problem solving, meanwhile, suggests that problems accessing the past may lie behind mental illnesses like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, offering a new approach to treating these conditions (“Boosting your mental fortress“). Equally, a growing understanding of our sense of self can explain why we are so selective in the events that we weave into our life story – again showing definite parallels with the way we imagine the future (“How the brain spins your life story“). The work might even suggest some dieting tips (“Lost in the here and now”).
It is still early days, but what’s clear is that we are at the beginning of a long and exciting journey. “The one thing that we really have learned is that memory is extraordinarily more complicated than anyone would have thought 10 or 20 years ago,” says Tulving.
David Robson is a feature editor at New Scientist
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