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Sophie playing at Retirement Village
Sophie after 42 Simply Music piano lessons performs at a local Retirement village for an enthusiastic audience.

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Sophie playing at Retirement Village - Video

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Empower Financial: Pay Yourself First, Retirement and Financial Education Series
Do you plan on being financially independent? Empower is a consumer advocacy group that focuses on providing education while finding products and services that help to improve the live #39;s of...

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Empower Financial: Pay Yourself First, Retirement and Financial Education Series - Video

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Dr. Beverly Ulrich retirement presentation
Dr. Beverly Ulrich, professor of Movement Science and former dean of the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology, was honored by colleagues, friends, an...

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Dr. Beverly Ulrich retirement presentation - Video

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D.C. Retirement Income Planning - District Annuity Resource
Video for Washington D.C. Retirement Income Planning by District Annuity Resource. Learn how to plan for stages in Retirement. For more information please see http://districtannuityresource.com...

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Retirement Ceremony of CSAFP and AFP Change of Command (Speech) 7/18/2014
AFP General Headquarters (GHQ) Grandstand Camp Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, Quezon City 18 July 2014 Connect with RTVM Website: http://rtvm.gov.ph Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/PBSRTVM Twitter: @RTVMalaca...

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Retirement Ceremony of CSAFP and AFP Change of Command (Speech) 7/18/2014 - Video

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Eckhart Tolle - From Oneness to Ego to Oneness
From the third Eckhart Tolle and Oprah Winfrey webcast on Tolles book "A New Earth" (2009). Full ten webcasts here: https://archive.org/details/EckhartTolleA...

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"I've failed a lot on the way": Arianna Huffington. Photo: Kim Badawi/Contour By Getty Images

Arianna Huffington, founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post website, is late for our lunch date at an exclusive London hotel, the Chiltern Firehouse.

Huffington, the former spouse of a Ronald Reagan-era Republican, was once a leftish writer, then a right-wing commentator, then a supporter of the Democratic Party. She now propagates "mindfulness", and "the third metric" of success, "well-being, wisdom, wonder and giving". (The first two metrics, if you didn't know, are money and power.)

But nobody would much care if Huffington believed Barack Obama was a drop bear or wombats built the pyramids, if she hadn't figured out how to make money online from something that looks a lot like a newspaper. Huffington founded The Huffington Post in 2005, and in 2011 she sold it for $US315 million to media corporation AOL, although she remains its editor-in-chief. The website is a news aggregator - that is, it includes links to stories from around the internet, assembled under Huffington headlines with a liberal spin. But it's also a source of original journalism, such as its 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning series about the lives of severely disabled war veterans, and a platform for a vast number of non-conservative bloggers.

A move to mindfulness: Huffington in 2009, two years after she collapsed from exhaustion. Photo: Michele Asselin/Contour by Getty

So Arianna Huffington is very rich - actually, she was very rich even before she sold the website - and I'm waiting for her in a fabulously expensive pub where Bill Clinton, David Beckham, David Cameron, Kevin Spacey, Chris Martin and Lindsay Lohan have all been seen, possibly in the very spot where I'm sitting, but probably in another bit.

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I'm receiving texts from John from the London HuffPost (as we insiders call it) saying Huffington's stuck in traffic, and suggesting I order something to eat from the bar. A barman who looks like Ricky Martin tells me there is no bar menu, but I can get food on Huffington's room-service account. I choose a chicken sandwich, excited by the idea it is the most exclusive chicken sandwich in London. I will bite into it and know what it is like to be rich. This is, I admit, a high expectation to pin on a chicken sandwich.

The sandwich arrives before Huffington. It is brought to my table by a waiter who also looks like Ricky Martin. The filling is trapped inside a hopelessly unfashionable focaccia (What's up, rich people?Never heard of sourdough?) and has that faintly fishy hint of reheated poultry. For some reason, this makes me very happy.

Chill seeker: Arianna Huffington. Photo: Jeff Lipsky/CPi-Syndication.com/Headpress

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The slow queen

TIME Entertainment movies Why Movies Rely on Science to Get to Spirituality Top: I Origins, Bottom: Lucy Top: Fox Searchlight; Bottom: Universal Pictures I Origins and Lucy both use science to get to even deeper subjects

In 1985, the famous Afghan Girl photograph appeared on the cover of National Geographic. Her eyes captivated the world, but even the photographer, Steve McCurry, didnt know her name. Nearly two decades later, the magazine announced that they had made a discovery: they knew her name, and they were sure. The womans identity had been confirmed by comparing a scan of the eyes in the photograph to an iris scan of her grown-up self; irises are as unique as fingerprints, and a print can be taken from a high-resolution photograph if the eye in question is not available.

I thought this was a really beautiful story, says filmmaker Mike Cahill, best known for Another Earth. It felt like a great place to have the conversation between science and spirituality.

He liked the story so much that it became the inspiration behind his new movie, I Origins, in theaters today. Its a trippy tale of iris scans, love, genetics and though Cahill was extremely careful never to say the word during the movie, so that viewers could draw their own conclusions the possibility of reincarnation. In that, its an example of the way that movies can use science to get at the questions their creators care about.

And its not alone: Lucy, arriving in theaters next week, on July 25, takes a similar tack. Lucy, from writer/director Luc Besson, is an action-packed fable about a woman, played by Scarlett Johansson, who is, due to a series of unfortunate circumstances and a mysterious drug, able to harness the full power of her brain. Bessons film was also born of a real-life interaction, a conversation with a young scientist he happened to sit next to at a dinner party. Besson says that he had always wanted to do a film about the concept of intelligence and that this was his chance; he could use some of the ideas from the conversation about the way cells work to say what he wanted to say about how knowledge is power.

I like this combination, when the science leads to beauty or art or philosophy, Besson tells TIME. Its something very unique and very beautiful.

But where Cahill and Besson differ is in just how much actual science has to be in the scientific part.

Cahill stresses that the science of I Origins is all fact-based, from the particular genes mentioned to the international uses of iris biometrics to, he says, the theoretical possibility that we may have senses not yet detectable. He also wanted his scientist characters to be accurate representations, so he consulted with his brother, a molecular biologist, and brought the cast down to his brothers lab at Johns Hopkins to do character research. Bessons starting point, meanwhile, is famously nonfactual: the idea that humans walk around with 90% of their brains going unused so infuriates some neuroscience fans that theyve sworn off the movie preemptively. But, though Besson says he did a lot of research before starting, hes less concerned about those details. For him, the scientific part is less about facts than it is about a grounding in reality. For example, he objects to the characterization of Lucy, his heroine, as having super-strength or super powers; instead, he sees the film as a meditation on what might be possible if a person could make her mind and body do exactly what she wished. Staying away from a superhero-esque way of seeing it helps the movie make a point about something real, says Besson, who adds that at this point in his life hes too old to make an action movie that doesnt have a deeper meaning.

Half of the things in the film are true. The other half is not true. But if you mix everything together, everything looks real, he says. Its funny because today everybody knows that movies are fake, but in a way were in such a crisis that everyone is looking for a little piece of truth in it. Politicians are supposed to tell the truth and theyre lying all day long. Films are supposed to be fake and sometimes you get some truth.

That relationship between fact and fiction explains why, even though Besson and Cahill dont feel the same way about how factual their facts have to be, they both use science-y concepts to get at something that couldnt be examined in a lab. For Cahill, it was that mysteriously romantic feeling of looking in someones eyes and feeling like youve known her forever. For Besson, it was the more theoretical question of what a person who can know everything should do with that power. For both, it was the idea that human beings may be capable of more than we know. Thats an end goal that may easier for audiences to swallow if it comes from a world that feels like it might be real but, for Cahill and Besson, that doesnt make it any less fantastic.

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Why Movies Rely on Science to Get to Spirituality

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Deepak Chopra

Leading alternative medicine advocate and physician, Deepak Chopra is offering $1 million to atheists who can define how human beings form ideas.

Chopra said the offer is not a joke, and he is looking for a scientific explanation of how an independent thought is formed.

"I'm revisiting my million dollar challenge to the 'Non-Amazing Randi' and his tribe of militant, new atheists," Chopra said in a YouTubevideo posted on Monday. Atheist and scientific skeptic James Randi is also known as "The Amazing Randi."

"Apparently my last offer my last million dollar challenge was a little intellectually challenging to the Non-Amazing Randi, and also to [famed evolutionary biologist and atheist] Richard Dawkins, and many others," Chopra continued. "So I'm revisiting it, and making it simpler."

His firstmillion dollar challenge, issued last month, offered the bounty to "any skeptic who could prove how electrochemical activity in the brain produces the appearance of a three-dimensional world," and was in response to the James Randi Educational Foundation's "One Million Dollar Paranomal Challenge."

Randi's challenge offers one million dollars to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal ability, such as being psychic. Over 1,000 people have accepted the challenge since it was first issued in 1964, but none have succeeded.

Chopra's new challengespecifically names Randi, Dawkins, and atheist scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett as proposed challengers. The contest is to find "the biological basis of first-person experience."

"I'll even make it more simple," Chopra said. "Can you offer a scientific understanding for the biological basis of an idea? A thought?

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Deepak Chopra offers $1 million to atheists who can explain how a thought is formed

Michael Pitt is the rare actor who, after 15 years in the business (including a stint on Dawson's Creek), remains idiosyncratic and whole. Clocking most of his time with independent filmmakers and esteemed names like Gus Van Sant, Michael Haneke, and Bernardo Bertolucci, Pitt remains a stranger to the throes of studio movies Murder by Numbers and The Village being rare exceptions. He has never been forced to fit a star mold. His collaborators wouldn't have it any other way. One hundred percent undistilled Pitt ranges from brooding intensity to lunacy of every color. He does what he does, and he does it well. The maturation of television worked in his favor; Boardwalk Empire and NBC's Hannibal have Hollywood sheen and artistic souls. One might describe Pitt the same way.

In I Origins, Pitt skews closer to "leading man" territory than ever before. His character, Ian Gray, is a dapper molecular biologist hoping to dispel Intelligent Design by pinpointing the milestones of optical evolution. As he and his lab partner (Brit Marling) make waves in eye science, Ian finds equal success in his love life, striking up a steamy romance with Sofi (Astrid Bergs-Frisbey). His new girlfriend turns out to be the key to his research or the complete undoing. Ian is obsessed with answers. Pitt can relate. He told Vulture about his research-heavy approach, remaining on the outskirts of Hollywood, and his own interests that keep him until five in the morning.

Your I Origins character, Ian, is a brilliant scientist, hungry for the truth, but he's grounded in a way that separates him from your more eccentric roles. What's your in to a character like that? Character work, for me, is the same but it's different? [Laughs.] I get really into research. I know people say that, but I'm really into research.

Like pore-over-books-at-the-library research or falling-down-a-Wikipedia-rabbit-hole research? I don't believe Wikipedia about anything. I don't go there for anything but keywords. But how did I research for this film? I watched every Richard Dawkins lecture that I could. I've read a little bit of his books. And I spent a little bit of time in a lab with Brit [Marling] and Mike [Cahill, the film's director] at John Hopkins Medical Research Lab in Baltimore. There, I was able to hang with scientists.

Are real scientists anything like movie scientists? Scientists have this stigma of being guys or women in white lab coats with no sense of humor, no passion, devoid of all emotion, and that has been the complete opposite of the scientists I've met. They're usually very brilliant, very enthusiastic, very creative people. I met with one scientists who was 24. They're grooming him for the Nobel Prize. He's trying to cure this particular cancer of the eye

Apt. It was perfect. He's super close to it. But he was like, Do you want to see some of my photos? I'm a photographer. So he showed me a collection of his photos. He takes pictures of cells super, super close. Microscopic. They were amazing, abstract pop-art.

Do you have similar hobbies that act as tangents to your professional life? I don't really have hobbies. I paint. I write. I direct videos. I take photos. I'm a creative person. A normal day for me is doing all of those things. Sometimes I stay up until 5 a.m. writing a song, because I make music. It's the same with writing. I don't have necessarily have the inspiration on tap. So when it comes, it's like a gift and the best thing you can do at that moment is drop everything you're doing and see it through to the end.

I Origins concretely founds itself in science, but it isn't afraid of using faith and spirituality to poke holes in the logic. Not that starring in a movie is an endorsement, but could you have made this film if you didn't align with it on some level? I certainly endorse this movie, I'm contractually bound to say that [laughs]. No, I'm kidding. What's interesting about this movie is that when you get into that conversation, that debate about science over spirituality, if you do some research, things get tense. It can get very taboo. It's almost a war. What I like about this film is that when you watch this film, I think you'd say, This is a spiritual film. And I think when you watch this film you say, It's a very scientific film. But it doesn't seem like they're at war.

After diving into your research, do you feel like you or anyone can bridge the two sides of that debate? I don't see myself on either side. I think they do different things. I think science should be encouraged, way more than we encourage it right now. I want it to move forward, always. But I think it's important that there's a moral code that's followed. While pushing science forward, I think it's important that there are things that are unexplainable and there's no data that would insinuate that we're close to explaining those things. One is love. These are things that are very difficult. I value both highly.

I'm amazed by your ability to remain on the fringes of Hollywood, starring in and championing offbeat films without taking the occasional blockbuster. It hasn't been easy.

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Michael Pitt on I Origins, Rejecting Superhero Tights, and the Lasting Impact of Doing Dawsons Creek