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June 25th, 2010 by Leelja Baur-Davidson
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TEA CULTURE
June 16th, 2010 by Leelja Baur-Davidson
At an organic tea garden in India’s Darjiling region, Camellia sinensis leaves are plucked by hand, as they have been since the British began widespread tea cultivation in the 1830s. Producing around two billion pounds (900 million kilograms) a year, India is the globe’s largest tea grower.
Here is more on tea. My passion for drinking tea led me to research and I found fascinating material I would like to share here from time to time. See for yourself and let me know what you think. It is so inspiring to learn more about the cultures of the world.
Part 1
Indian tea culture
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The cultivation and brewing of tea in India has a long history of applications in traditional systems of medicine and for consumption. The consumption of tea in India was first clearly documented in the Ramayana (750-500 BC). Research shows that tea is indigenous to eastern and northern India, and was cultivated and consumed there for thousands of years. However, commercial production of tea in India did not begin until the arrival of the British East India Company, at which point large tracts of land were converted for mass tea production.
Today, India is one of the largest tea producers in the world, though over 70% of the tea is consumed within India itself. A number of renown teas, such as Darjeeling, also grow exclusively in India. The Indian tea industry has grown to own many global tea brands, and has evolved to one of the most technologically equipped tea industries in the world. Tea production, certification, exportation, and all other facets of the tea trade in India is controlled by the Tea Board of India.
India produces and consumes more tea than any other country in the world, except for China, including the famous Assam tea and Darjeeling tea.
The cultivation and brewing of tea in India has a long history of applications in traditional systems of medicine and for consumption. The consumption of tea in India was first clearly documented in the Ramayana (750-500 BC). For the next 1000 years, documentation of tea in India was lost in history. Records re-emerge during the first century AD, with stories of the Buddhist monks Bodhidharma and Gan Lu, and their involvement with tea.
Research shows that tea is indigenous to eastern and northern India, and was cultivated and consumed there for thousands of years. Commercial production of tea in India did not begin until the arrival of the British East India Company, at which point large tracts of land were converted for mass tea production.
Today, India is one of the largest tea producers in the world, though over 70% of the tea is consumed within India itself. A number of renown teas, such as Darjeeling, also grow exclusively in India. The Indian tea industry has grown to own many global tea brands, and has evolved to one of the most technologically equipped tea industries in the world. Tea production, certification, exportation, and all other facets of the tea trade in India is controlled by the Tea Board of India.
I will continue to write here about tea occasionally. What would you like to find here? Do you have a “Tea Story” you like to share? You are invited to share it here.
TEA OR DISH-WASHING-WATER?
June 7th, 2010 by Leelja Baur-DavidsonPart 1
The other day I was talking to my tribal friend Steve in Canada. You know how it goes we talked first business but after a while we ended up talking about tea.
Have you ever been to a restaurant – assuming you like to drink black tea – and ordered hot tea? What did you expect? What you get usually is a small pot of little more than lukewarm water and a teabag with some black stuff in it. You put that baggy in the teapot and after a while you pour yourself a brownish brew in a cold cup, dropping the temperature even more. Drinking it without any sweetener, milk or lemon is almost impossible because it tastes like heavily used dish-washing-water.
It is so easy to make a great cup of tea just need to know how to do it.
For a good cup of black tea take boiling hot water, pour it over the tea in a strainer or the teabag, and let the tea steep for 3-5 minutes. The longer you steep the tea the more bitterness will be in your cup of tea, and has nothing to do with good flavor. Important is that you move the strainer or the teabag in and out of the water draining the water out several times to get all the antioxidants in your brew.
The flavor of black and green tea depends on many factors. What you usually buy in cheap teabags is ground waste material from the production of higher quality teas.
No matter how expensive the tea you buy,
if you brew it wrong, it’s awful.
This is a lesson many beginners learn the hard way. Most people who claim that they “don’t like the taste” were repelled by an incorrectly brewed tea. This can create a terrible misconception that can last a lifetime… and can also be easily avoepided with better brewing techniques.
Most restaurants, cafés and households that serve tea try to cut corners by simply throwing all teas into the same temperature water and serving visitors without any direction. This makes about as much sense as opening a premium wine bar and serving white wines at room temperature, or opening a prime steakhouse and serving all steaks well done.
Steeping good tea does not take a PhD, but it is also not as simple as chucking it into boiling water and letting it stew. There are easy ways, however, to steep the perfect cup. In fact, there are nearly as many brewing methods as there are teas.
The trick to steeping tea correctly comes in five parts: water, weight, temperature, time and equipment.
So far for today – we will have more on water, weight, temperature, time and equipment next time. There will be an extra post on Green Tea, the science behind it and more. Preparing tea can even be celebrated in a ceremony. Have you ever heard of the Japanese “Tea Ceremony”?
I would love to hear from you, what are your experiences with tea, tea brewing, your tips and tricks.
WHAT IS CLOUD COMPUTING?
May 13th, 2010 by Leelja Baur-DavidsonThis morning I was listening to NPR and for the first I heard Cloud-Computing. Here is a short overview what it is.
Cloud computing is a technology that uses the internet and central remote servers to maintain data and applications. Cloud computing allows consumers and businesses to use applications without installation and access their personal files at any computer with internet access. This technology allows for much more efficient computing by centralizing storage, memory, processing and bandwidth.
A simple example of cloud computing is Yahoo email or Gmail etc. You don’t need a software or a server to use them. All a consumer would need is just an internet connection and you can start sending emails. The server and email management software is all on the cloud ( internet) and is totally managed by the cloud service provider Yahoo , Google etc. The consumer gets to use the software alone and enjoy the benefits. The analogy is, ‘If you only need milk , would you buy a cow ?’ All the users or consumers need is to get the benefits of using the software or hardware of the computer like sending emails etc. Just to get this benefit (milk) why should a consumer buy a (cow) software /hardware ?
Cloud computing is broken down into three segments: “applications,” “platforms,” and “infrastructure.” Each segment serves a different purpose and offers different products for businesses and individuals around the world. In June 2009, a study conducted by VersionOne found that 41% of senior IT professionals actually don’t know what cloud computing is and two-thirds of senior finance professionals are confused by the concept, highlighting the young nature of the technology. In Sept 2009, an Aberdeen Group study found that disciplined companies achieved on average an 18% reduction in their IT budget from cloud computing and a 16% reduction in data center power costs.
THE CLOUD COMPUTING OPPORTUNITY BY THE NUMBERS
May 13th, 2010 by Leelja Baur-DavidsonThe Cloud Computing Opportunity by the Numbers
— How big is the opportunity for cloud computing? A question asked at pretty well every IT conference these days. Whatever the number, it’s a big one. Let’s break down the opportunity by the numbers available today.
By 2011 Merrill Lynch says the cloud computing market will reach $160 billion.
The number of physical servers in the World today: 50 million.
By 2013, approximately 60 percent of server workloads will be virtualized
By 2013 10 percent of the total number of physical servers sold will be virtualized with an average of 10 VM’s per physical server sold.
At 10 VMs per physical host that means about 80-100 million virtual machines are being created per year or 273,972 per day or 11,375 per hour.
50 percent of the 8 million servers sold every year end up in data centers, according to a BusinessWeek report
The data centers of the dot-com era consumed 1 or 2 megawatts. Today data center facilities require 20 megawatts are common, – 10 times as much as a decade ago.
QUANTUM CREATIONS – INTRODUCTION
September 8th, 2009 by Leelja Baur-Davidson
How I came to love
QUANTUM
- - Leap,
- - Hypnosis,
- - Technology,
- - Physics,
- - Leading to MatrixEnergetics and
- - The Journey beyond the Quantum.
Beyond the Cave
Physics and mysticism, physics and mysticism, physics and mysticism . . . In the past decade there have appeared literally dozens of books, by physicists, philosophers, psychologists, and theologians, purporting to describe or explain the extraordinary relationship between modern physics, the hardest of sciences, and mysticism, the tenderest of religions. Physics and mysticism are fast approaching a remarkably common worldview, some say. They are complementary approaches to the same reality, others report. No, they have nothing in common, the skeptics announce; their methods, goals, and results are diametrically opposed. Modern physics, in fact, has been used to both support and refute determinism, free-will, God, Spirit, immortality, causality, predestination, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and Taoism.
The fact is, every generation has tried to use physics to both prove and disprove Spirit—which ought to tell us something right there. Plato announced that the whole of physics was, to use his terms, nothing more than a “likely story,” since it depended ultimately on nothing but the evidence of the fleeting and shadowy senses, whereas truth resided in the transcendental Forms beyond physics (hence “metaphysics”). Democritus, on the other hand, put his faith in “atoms and the void,” since nothing else, he felt, had any existence—a notion so obnoxious to Plato that he expressed the strongest desire that all the works of Democritus be burned on the spot.
