Monday, January 29, 2007

Speedlinking 1/29/07

Quote of the day:

"People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history."
~ Dan Quayle

Image of the day:

BODY
~ Limiting Your Diet Can Lead To Binges -- Good advice.
~ 5 Foods to Accelerate Weight Loss -- A good list, although I can't do the sardines.
~ Discovery Of The Molecule Which Could Lead To A Diabetes And Obesity Pill -- "Boc5 is the first small molecule activator for Class B GPCRs, which regulate hormones in many human physiological processes and are major targets for pharmaceutical companies." Caution: As we learned with leptin, rat metabolism and human metabolism are very different things.
~ Reducing Caffeine Intake Has No Effect On Birth Weight Or Length Of Pregnancy -- Good news for coffee addicts.
~ Kids At Risk: Assessing Diet And Exercise Behaviors In Adolescents -- "Do adolescents get enough exercise and eat the right foods? Is there too much fat in their diets? In a study published in the February 2007 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers analyzed the behavior of almost 900 11-to-15 year-olds and found that nearly 80% had multiple physical activity and dietary risk behaviors, almost half had at least three risk behaviors, and only 2% met all four of the health guidelines in the study."
~ Metabolic Syndrome Link To Cardiovascular Disease Supported By Existing Research -- "For years cardiologists and other specialists have disagreed over the condition known as metabolic syndrome, a complex confluence of factors such as abdominal obesity, low HDL, or "good" cholesterol and hypertension. Physicians and academics have disputed the syndrome's existence and whether it predicts cardiovascular danger."
~ Study: Children Need More Dietary Fats -- "Children who eat too little fat can end up overweight, a new study has found. Researchers in Sweden discovered that eating the right sort of fat kept the weight of children down."


PSYCHE
~ Williams Syndrome Across Cultures -- "Nobody questions that the color of our eyes is encoded in our genes. When it comes to behavior the concept of "DNA as fate" quickly breaks down - it's been long accepted that both genes and the environment shape human behavior. But just how much sway the environment holds over our genetic destiny has been difficult to untangle."
~ Horrible Sounds -- Vomiting is widely considered the most horrible sound there is. Yep.
~ Free Will from Neurobiology? -- A look at John Searle's argument that defines free will in a way that amounts to “the negation of determinism.”
~ Why Career Planning Is Time Wasted -- "Everything must be planned in advance. Our days, week, years, our entire lives. We have diaries, schedules, checklists, targets, goals, aims, strategies, visions even. Career planning is the most insidious of these cults precisely because it encourages a feeling of control over your reactions to future events."
~ New Review May Ease Worries Of People With Disabling Anxiety Disorder -- "People with generalized anxiety disorder worry about many things at a time to the point that it interferes with their day-to-day living. Now, a newly published review of studies suggests that a specific type of psychotherapy is effective in reducing symptoms."
~ The Time It Takes To Reassemble The World -- "A few glimpses are enough to perceive a seamless and richly detailed visual world. But instead of "photographic snapshots", information about the color, shape and motion of an object is pulled apart and sent through individual nerve cells, or neurons, to the visual center in the brain. How the brain puts the scene back to together has been hotly debated ever since neurons were discovered over a century ago."
~ Complexity of Teardrops Revealed -- "Tears can signal everything from sorrow to joy to bitter frustration, but until recently little was known about the composition of the tear itself."
~ On Addictions from How to Save the World.


CULTURE
~ Yoga Stretches Into Public Schools -- "In Tara Guber's ideal world, American children would meditate in the lotus position and chant in Sanskrit before taking stressful standardized tests...."
~ 12 pit bulls seized in raids put to death -- Ignorant bastards.
Hagel Splits the Republican Ranks -- "There are two Republican parties operating in the nation's capital on the war in Iraq. One is led by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the other by Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska."
~ Will Pro-War Stances Hurt 2008 GOP Hopefuls? -- It should doom McCain.
~ Jasper Johns: Pop Art's Poppa -- "Long before Warhol's soup cans, Jasper Johns revolutionized painting with works that were right on target."
~ On the Scene at DC Peace Rally -- Veterans Speak Out.
~ In Law School, Obama Found Political Voice -- "The peers who elected Barack Obama as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review say he was a natural leader, an impressive student, a nice guy."
~ Critical Outtakes: Norman Mailer on Bush, Iraq and Fascism -- Mailer is often an ass, but this is a pretty good read.
~ Video: Eddie Izzard on Being Multilingual from Jay at The Zero Boss. (Probably NSFW)


HABITATS
~ High DDT Levels Found Off Calif. Coast -- "Fish caught off Los Angeles County's coast still contain high levels of banned DDT decades after a manufacturer dumped tons of the pesticide into sewers, creating a toxic plume on the ocean bottom...."
~ International Study: No Clear Connection Between Mobile Phone Use And Brain Cancer -- "According to a study conducted in five Northern European countries, there is no clear connection between mobile phone use and malignant brain tumors."
~ Congress Should Pass Legislation To Ban Agreements To Delay Market Entry Of Generic Medications, Editorial States -- "Two "excessively lenient" court decisions have allowed agreements in which brand-name pharmaceutical companies pay generic pharmaceutical companies to delay market entry of their products, a "costly legal loophole that needs to be plugged" by Congress, a New York Times editorial states."
~ Intel, IBM Reveal Transistor Overhaul -- "In dueling announcements, Intel Corp. and IBM separately say they have solved a puzzle perplexing the semiconductor industry about how to reduce energy loss in microchip transistors."
~ Gray Wolves to Leave Endangered List -- It's great that they have rebounded enough to be de-listed, but it's bad that they will now be hunted again.


INTEGRAL
~ Pointing Out Instructions: Multidimensional Resourcing and Meditation on "Resourcing" in 6 Dimensions from Julian at Zaadz. Don't always agree with him, but he's always thinking.
~ Perspective-taking and the Second Tier over at the I-I pod at Zaadz.
~ A good post from Dashh: On Education, Work and Passion.
~ Chasing the Shadow from Gary at Integral in Seattle.
~ A question from Ed Berge on why so many people focus on refuting Wilber: The elephant in this room.


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