Michelle Williams Vs. Instagram Follower: “I Will Read You Until Jesus Comes”

Twitter and Instagram have always been known to be a hot bed of drama for our favorite celebs, but this week has seen the social networks clock overtime on the shade-front.  Need proof?  Ask Teyana Taylor, Rihanna, and TGJ favorite Michelle Williams.

The songstress, who recently released ‘Fire’ – the second single from her highly anticipated return to gospel ‘Journey To Freedom’, brought “the heat” in a way her Instagram followers had yet seen when she slammed a commenter for suggesting her involvement in the “Illuminati”.

Tuck in below to see the ‘Heard A Word’ wailer deliver a few words of her own:

 We won’t lie…it’s kind of nice to see Michelle check out of “media training 101? sometimes and let some realness shine.  We’re not mad at that one bit…

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Leonardo da Vinci's notebook on flight comes to Washington

Leonardo da Vinci describes the use of flight testing apparatus to understand aerodynamics, in this undated illustration, released on September 12, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Smithsonian Libraries, from the original at the Biblioteca Reale, Turin, Italy/Handout via Reuters

By Deborah Zabarenko

WASHINGTON | Thu Sep 12, 2013 5:03pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than five centuries after he scribbled in the pages of a well-worn pocket notebook, Leonardo da Vinci's seminal document detailing how humans might emulate the flight of birds has landed at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Steps from the Wright Brothers' 1903 Flyer in a shaded corner of the vast museum on Washington's Mall, da Vinci's "Codex on the Flight of Birds" goes on display on Friday for about six weeks.

Created by the Italian Renaissance visionary between 1505 and 1506, at the same time he was painting the "Mona Lisa," the codex contains the essentials of aeronautics, gleaned from da Vinci's observations of kite birds wheeling overhead.

The 18 pages of the notebook are written in the artist's idiosyncratic backwards mirror script and include drawings of the joints in bird wings, along with the ideas of lift and drag, air flow and gravity.

"When the bird beats its wings and waits to gain height, it raises the shoulders and beats the tips of the wings towards itself, thus condensing the air that stands between the tips of his wings and its chest," da Vinci wrote on one page, according to an English translation. "This makes the bird rise upward."

To aeronautical experts, the da Vinci codex on bird flight seems to have almost mystical powers.

Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said his heart started beating a bit faster when he was allowed to turn the pages of the codex during a 2011 visit to its home at Italy's Biblioteca Reale di Torino, or Royal Library of Turin. The codex is on loan from the library.

"I was so hesitant about going through the pages, but it is amazing, the things that Leonardo thought when he was drawing on this thing 500 years ago," Elachi said during a media preview of the Washington exhibit. "And basically that's the foundation of how we do flights."

Elachi wore gloves to avoid damaging the fragile notebook. In its Washington display, the document is in a sealed case and no photographs are permitted. But there are computer screens where visitors can turn the pages of a digital version of the codex, showing da Vinci's script and drawings on one side, facing the English translation on the other.

The 8-by-6-inch (20-by-15-cm) codex has traveled to the United States only once before, in 2008, and rarely leaves Italy, the museum said.

The notebook also includes some philosophical musings on lying, drawings of a leaf and the muscles in a human leg, and even a shopping list.

The codex has traveled to France, Siberia, Britain and back to Italy. A digitally scanned version of it is now on the Mars rover Curiosity, which landed on the red planet in August 2012.

One of da Vinci's ideas from the codex was to have leather bags filled with water to cushion any fall from flight by a human pilot. Elachi pointed out that this system is not far from the air bags that cushioned earlier rovers' landing on the Martian surface.

"Just imagine, 500 years ago, where he had no tools, no mathematical equations that we have now, no wind tunnels," Elachi said. "He basically was able, just by observation, to come up with a lot of the theories of what we do now."

More information and images from the exhibit are available here

(Reporting by Deborah Zabarenko; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Eric Walsh)

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E-commerce comes of age in India

For India's e-commerce industry, the times they are a-changin'. While the e-commerce penetration is low compared to the United States and several European markets, it is growing at a much faster rate with a large number of new entrants.

Most industry analysts agree that the growth is at an inflection point. India's e-commerce market was worth about US$2.5 billion in 2009, US$6.3 billion in 2011, and $14 billion in 2012. The country has close to 10 million online shoppers and this number is growing at an estimated 30 percent.

"With approximately 8 million Indians shopping online in 2012, the online shopping industry in India is growing rapidly and will continue to see exponential growth," said Rajan Anandan, vice president and managing director of Google India. "By looking at the trends in 2012, we expect 2013 to be a strong growth year for players who're focused on growing categories like apparels and accessories, and niche product categories like baby products, home furnishings, and health nutrition. We expect the growth to come from outside of the top eight metros."

While there have been some obvious deterrents of shopping online like the inability to touch and try the goods before purchasing, concerns over receiving faulty products, and security concerns in posting personal and financial details online, there are unique aspects of online shopping in India.

For example, cash-on-delivery is the most preferred payment method. India has a vibrant cash economy and as a result, 80 percent of e-commerce transactions in the country are cash-on-delivery. Also, direct imports constitute a large component of online sales. There is huge demand for international consumer products that either are not available in India or are expensive on retail shelves.

On the other hand, online shoppers have also been positive toward global trends. Online classified sites like eBay and local players--OLX and Quikr--see more consumers buying and selling second-hand goods. Also, major e-commerce players like Infibeam and Tradus, and Flipkart soon, are also adopting the online marketplace model.

"Looking at the online shopping experience holistically, streamlining the entire process is what led to the rise of e-commerce in India," explained Amod Malviya, senior vice president and head of engineering at Flipkart. "For example, factors like cash-on-delivery, and increased automation of supply chain and logistics have gone a long way in addressing concerns like lack of credit card penetration and bottlenecks in last-mile deliveries."

"Increased application of technology in both backend and frontend processes have improved the browsing experience, and provided consumers with greater transparency when it came to the order process and so on," Amod added.

He breaks down a visitor's journey in three phases. "One, find and discover the product of need. Two, decide. And three, transact. Of these three, in our case, the transaction step has the least dropoffs, primarily limited to the payment gateway's success rates. Cash-on-delivery is a great help here.

"Factors that impact the customer during the decision phase are many, and also vary from category to category. Availability and pricing usually play a significant role. Images of the product have a significant role for some categories. Lastly, richness of the information about the product as well as product reviews have a noticeable role to play."

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