Daylight saving time is the practice of advancing clocks so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn.

During his time as an American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, author of the proverb, “Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”, anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. This 1784 satire proposed taxing shutters and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise.

William Willett independently conceived daylight saving time in 1905 during a pre-breakfast ride, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer day. An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk. His solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later. He independently proposed daylight saving time in 1907 and advocated it tirelessly.

The practice is controversial. Adding daylight to afternoons benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours, but causes problems for farming, evening entertainment and other occupations tied to the sun. Although an early goal of daylight saving time was to reduce evening usage of incandescent lighting, modern heating and cooling usage patterns differ greatly and research about how daylight saving time currently affects energy use is limited and often contradictory.

Daylight saving time’s occasional clock shifts present other challenges. They complicate timekeeping and can disrupt meetings, travel, billing, recordkeeping, medical devices, heavy equipment, and sleep patterns. Changing clocks and daylight saving time has a direct economic cost, entailing extra work to support remote meetings, computer applications and corrections to errors.

It has been argued that clock shifts correlate with decreased economic efficiency, and that in 2000 the daylight-saving effect implied an estimated one-day loss of $31 billion on U.S. stock exchanges, althought the results have been disputed. The 2007 North American daylight saving time cost an estimated $500 million to $1 billion.

Semantic memory refers to the memory of meanings, understandings, and other concept-based knowledge unrelated to specific experience. It refers to general facts and meanings we share with others. The conscious recollection of factual information and general knowledge about the world is independent of context and personal relevance.

It includes generalized knowledge that does not involve memory of a specific event. For instance, you can answer a question like “Are wrenches pets or tools?” without remembering any specific event in which you learned that wrenches are tools. What is stored in semantic memory is the “gist” of experience, an abstract structure that applies to a wide variety of experiential objects and which may be said to delineate categorical and functional relationships between them.

Rather than any one brain region playing a dedicated and privileged role in the representation or retrieval of all semantic knowledge, semantic memory is a collection of functionally and anatomically distinct systems where each attribute-specific system is tied to a sensor modality (i.e. vision) and even more specifically to a property within that modality (i.e. color).

Neuroimaging studies suggest a distinction between semantic processing and sensor processing, and reveal a large distributed network of semantic representations that are organized minimally by attribute and additionally by category. These networks include extensive regions of form, color and motion knowledge that collectively interpret stimuli.

Prayer circles have several interpretations across different religions. The most common definition of a prayer circle is where participants simply join hands in a literal circle of prayer, often as part of a vigil. Muslims who make the pilgrimage to Mecca will form concentric circles around the Kaaba in prayer, and these too are commonly referred to as prayer circles.

A more modern definition of the prayer circle has recently been coined, referring to a growing number of online communities where people visit certain websites in order to share their thoughts and prayers with other like minded worshippers, usually within specially designated message board areas.

With the internet’s rapid growth among all sectors of society, many faith-based peoples have found a niche on the internet where they can share their prayers, thoughts and wishes with one another. It’s not known who was the first to set up an online prayer circle, but today there are hundreds.

An online prayer circle is often a vigil set up by a participant in honor of someone close to that participant. Larger online prayer circles are also formed in honor and remembrance of the victims of notable disasters or tragedies. Though religious in tone, online prayer circles are by and large non-denominational.

The Black Oystercatcher is a conspicuous black bird found on the shoreline of western North America. It ranges from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska to the coast of the Baja California peninsula. It is a large, noisy bird with a massive long orange or red bill used for smashing or prying open mollusks.

It is restricted in its range, never straying far from shores, in particular favoring rocky shorelines. It has been suggested that this bird is seen mostly on coastal stretches which have some quieter embayments, such as jetty protected areas. It forages in the intertidal zone, feeding on marine invertebrates, particularly mollusks such as mussels, limpets and chitons. It hunts through the intertidal area, searching for food visually, often so close to the water’s edge it has to fly up to avoid crashing surf.

The diet of oystercatchers varies with location. Species occurring inland feed upon earthworms and insect larvae. The diet of coastal oystercatchers is more varied, although dependent upon coast type; on estuaries bivalves, gastropods and polychaet worms are the most important part of the diet, where rocky shore oystercatchers prey upon limpets, mussels, gastropos and chitons. Other prey items include echinoderms, fish, and crabs.

The Black Oystercatcher is a territorial bird during the nesting season, defending a foraging and nesting area in one territory. Some pairs have been recorded staying together for many years. Nests are small bowls or depressions close to the shore in which small pebbles and shell fragments are tossed in with a sideward or backard flick of the bill.

Strawflower is a warm-weather annual with daisy-like flower heads in yellow, pink, bronze, cream, purple or white. From late spring until fall, strawflower bears flowers on the ends of the branches. What look like ray flowers or petals are actually modified leaves surrounding the central corolla. The bracts are papery with a straw-like crackly texture, hence the common name.

Several species are grown as ornamental plants and for dried flowers. When cut young and dried, the open flowers and stalks preserve their color and shape for years. The genus name Helichrysum is derived from the Greek words helisso (to turn around) and chrysos (gold). Common names include immortelle and everlasting.

Helichrysum augustifolium is steam distilled to produce a yellow-reddish essential oil popular in fragrance for its unique scent, best described as warm, rich and buttery, with green notes of wood, spices and herb. Mentally, the oil is very supportive and comforting. It is believed by some to open the right side of the brain and improve creativity as well as increase dream activity.

The oil is antibacterial, anti-viral and anti-fungal. The literature and aromatherapy lists are full of anecdotal evidence of Helichrysum’s power when used on rashes or skin irritations. It acts by causing the blood to be reabsorbed into the tissue, alleviating the pain caused by pressure on the nerves.

Sahasrara is positioned above the head or at the top of it, and has 1000 petals which are arranged in 20 layers, each of them with 50 petals. It is the seventh primary chakra according to Hindu tradition, and symbolizes detachment from illusion, an essential element in obtaining supramental higher consciousness of the truth that one is all and all is one.

Often referred to as the thousand petaled lotus, it is said to be the most subtle chakra in the system, relating to pure consciousness, and it is from this chakra that all the other chakras emanate. When a yogi is able to raise his or her kundalini or energy of consciousness up to this point, the state of Samadhi, or union with God, is experienced. It is often related to the pineal gland and the violet color.

There are several systems, such as some Tantric and Tibetan ones, that describe chakras in or connected closely above Sahasrara, but that are still part of it as a system. One system commonly described to be in it, sharing some of its petals, is Sri chakra.

In the West, it has been noted by many that Sahasrara expresses a similar archetypal idea to that of Kether or “crown” in the kabbalistic tree of life, which also rests at the head of the tree and represents pure consciousness and union with God.

Essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity. Essence is contrasted with accident, a property that the object or substance has contingently without which the substance can still retain its identity.

Essence has often served as a vehicle for doctrines that tend to individuate different forms of existence as well as different identity conditions for objects and properties. In this eminently logical meaning, the concept has given a strong theoretical and common sense basis to the whole family of logical theories.

In existentialist discourse, essence can refer to physical aspect or attribute, to the ongoing being of a person (the character or internally determined goals), or to the infinite inbound within the human (which can be lost, can atrophy, or can be developed into an equal part with the finite), depending upon the type of existentialist discourse.

In metaphysics, essence is often synonymous with the soul, and some existentialists argue that individuals gain their souls and spirits after they exist, and that they develop their souls and spirits during their lifetimes.

The English word “essence” comes from the Latin essentia, which was coined from the Latin esse, “to be” by ancient Roman scholars in order to translate the Ancient Greek phrase “to ti en einai” (literally, “what it is for a thing to be”), coined by Aristotle to denote a thing’s essence.

A dakini is a tantric deity described as a female embodiment of enlightened energy. In the Tibetan language, dakini means she who traverses the sky or she who moves in space. Sometimes the term is translated poetically as sky dancer or sky walker.

Although dakini figures also appear in Hinduism, they are particularly prevalent in Vajrayana Buddhism where the dakini, usually of volatile or wrathful temperament, act as an inspirational thoughtform for spiritual practice. Dakinis are energetic beings in female form, evocative of the movement of energy in space. In this context, the sky or space indicates the insubstantiality of all phenomena, which is at the same time the pure potentiality for all possible manifestations.

In Hinduism, the dakini Chinnamasta is one of the ten Tantric goddesses and is associated with the concept of self sacrifice as well as the awakening of the kundalini or spiritual energy. She is considered both as a symbol of self control as well as an embodiment of sexual energy. She symbolizes both aspects of the Hindu Divine Mother, as a life giver and a life taker.

Due to her ferocious nature and her reputation of being dangerous to approach and worship, her individual worship is restricted to heroic, Tantric worship by Tantrikas, yogis and world renouncers. Chhinnamasta can be easily identified by her fearsome iconography. The self decapitated goddess is usually depicted standing on a copulating couple. She holds her own severed head in one hand and a scimitar in the other. Three jets of blood spurt out of her bleeding neck and are drunk by her severed head and two attendants.