"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made."
~ Oscar Wilde
Image of the day:
BODY
~ The "Big Picture" Seminar: Triage, Hierarchies, and Snowballs -- Some good information from Chris Shugart at T-Nation.
~ Who is Pre-Diabetic? -- "You can tell if you are at high risk for diabetes if you store fat primarily in your belly. Pinch your belly; if you can pinch an inch, you are at increased risk and should get a blood test called HBA1C. Having high blood levels of triglycerides and low levels of the good HDL cholesterol that helps prevent heart attacks also increases your risk for diabetes."
~ Focus on Figure With Gina Aliotti: Q & A With One of Figure's Rising Stars! -- "Gina answers questions about mass (without the fat ass), carb cycling, ab training, and triceps development, along with a whole bunch of other curvaceous stuff."
~ New Data On Fructose-sweetened Beverages And Hepatic Metabolism -- "According to figures published by the World Health Organitzation (WHO), in the year 2015 some 2.3 bn adults will be overweight and more than 700 million will suffer from obesity, a pathology which is increasingly being seen in children. In addition, for some time now the high incidence of obesity in developed countries has coincided with an increase in the consumption of beverages sweetened with fructose, a powerful sweetener."
~ Five Step Plan to Perfect Health -- A good foundation for getting healthy.
~ What happens when girls do 300? -- From Josh Hillis. I'll be trying this with a couple of my most fit female clients.
~ Specificity of Bone Strength -- "A study from Wolverhampton University in England shows that exercising to strengthen muscles strengthens the bones on which these same muscles attach."
~ Americans Not Eating Enough Fruit And Vegetables Says CDC Report -- "The report reveals that across America no state is achieving national targets for fruit and vegetable consumption. And across the nation as a whole, the number of people eating the target daily amount of fruit and vegetables is only half what the government is aiming for by the year 2010."
~ Cayenne - Wonder herb -- "Is it possible that one of the most powerful, health inspiring substances in the world could already have a home in your kitchen’s spice rack? It’s true that most folks have a bottle of cayenne right in their own home without even realizing the health benefits they could be receiving if they only utilized it on a daily basis."
PSYCHE
~ Bipolar Disorder: Understudied And Much More Common Than Previously Reported -- "Despite a prevalence of about 5% in the community and 50% in depressed outpatients, the treatment of bipolar II disorder* and related disorders is understudied. Recent advances in this area, which have mainly been related to these conditions, are discussed in a Seminar in The Lancet."
~ Laughter Increases Altruism -- "A new study from psychologists at the universities of Kent and Liverpool has revealed that laughter increases altruism towards strangers, a finding which may have important implications for charities and other fundraising bodies."
~ Evidence For A Two-Stage Model Of Human Perceptual Learning Found Using Brain Scans -- "Using advanced brain imaging techniques, researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center have watched how humans use both lower and higher brain processes to learn novel tasks, an advance they say may help speed up the teaching of new skills as well as offer strategies to retrain people with perceptual deficits due to autism."
~ Pathological Liars -- "The popular stereotype of a pathological liar-- a chronic liar, deceiver, who lies to get out of things, or into things; who tries to con you into something, or control you; who cheats on you and then denies it, makes up stories about where he was-- all this is wrong. It's malingering, but it isn't pathological lying. He's a tool, but he's not psychiatric."
~ Mind, Body, Soul -- "When you feel good your mind, body, and soul are aligned in complete harmony. When all jive, you're in tune with who you're meant to be - and what could be better?"
~ Entheogens -- "The consumption of Psychoactive drugs and Entheogens (from the Greek word 'Entheos' meaning God Within) have been a legitimate path to Consciousness Expansion for aeons."
~ Sigmund Freud and Unconscious Mental Processes -- "With this, the final nomination for the top ten psychology studies, I'm rolling out a big gun: Sigmund Freud. The strange thing about Freud is that, amongst psychologists, his stock is relatively low. One of the main reasons his work is not considered 'scientific' is the apparent difficulty of testing his theories."
~ Potential New Depression Treatment From Study Of Stress And Nerve Cells Survival In Rats -- "A single, socially stressful situation can kill off new nerve cells in the brain region that processes learning, memory, and emotion, and possibly contribute to depression, new animal research shows.Researchers found that in young rats, the stress of encountering aggressive, older rats did not stop the generation of new nerve cells - the first step in the process of neurogenesis."
~ Insights: The Science of Lasting Happiness -- "Sonja Lyubomirsky, a researcher who looks for the triggers of happiness beyond our genes, thinks that lasting happiness is indeed possible."
CULTURE
~ Caring For The Oldest Is The Price Of Affluence -- "With the number of carers for frail elderly people set to fall steeply, researchers in the BMJ propose a way to help plan for the deficit. Many people fear that population ageing will generate a demand for long term care that will outpace the supply of formal care."
~ Bush's Shadow Army -- "Jeremy Scahill describes how Blackwater USA has secured a position of unprecedented power in the US military."
~ Would President Hillary Tap Chelsea? -- "We hear from key Clintonistas that there's an alternative to having Bubba around all the time, stealing the limelight. It's having Chelsea Clinton, the all-grown-up daughter, take over the East Wing. The scenario: Chelsea would move to the White House to handle social functions because the former president would be too busy with his surrogate work for his wife and his ongoing efforts for his foundation, which he'd probably move to Washington. And to keep out of Hillary's hair, he'd step up his already busy travel schedule out of Washington and the country."
~ Pressure Builds Over Gonzales, Rove -- "The e-mails showed that Kyle Sampson, then a top aide to Attorney General John Ashcroft and later Gonzales's chief of staff, talked about the possible purge of '15-20 percent' of the U.S. attorney corps deemed not to be 'loyal Bushies.' The e-mails also showed that Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, had 'stopped by' to ask a White House lawyer 'how we planned to proceed regarding US Attorneys, whether we are going to allow all to stay, request resignations from all and accept only some of them, or selectively replace them, etc.'"
~ FBI Breaks the Law to Justify Breaking the Law to Spy On Citizens In Warrantless Fishing Expeditions -- "Because intimidating phone company executives is just so much easier than doing a lotta tedious paperwork."
~ The significance of the FBI's law-breaking -- More on the previous topic from Glenn Greenwald.
~ War Film: The Politics and Drama of '300' -- "Marines love it. Iran calls it an act of war. '300' is essentially a Spartan (yet lavish) videogame, but people take it seriously. "
~ Is Shaikh Mohammed Telling the Truth? -- "In a courtroom diatribe, 9/11's mastermind boasts about his exploits. Is he telling the truth?" The Obvious answer? Of course not.
~ National Affairs: Evangelicals in Exile -- "The Christian right is reeling from its biggest electoral defeat in a quarter century - and now they're talking about abandoning the GOP."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Drug firms' funding of advocates often escapes government scrutiny -- "Public Citizen's Peter Lurie , who testifies frequently before FDA panels, noticed a shift as public hearings "were becoming contaminated by people who didn't represent the public in any way. They represented particular moneyed interests." Lurie, deputy director of the consumer advocacy organization's health research group, said, "It's a fair question: Who represents patients and how they come to call themselves" patient representatives?"
~ Have You Been Tricked by Viral Marketing? Join the Crowd -- "Fake graffiti, bogus hype and other mutations are fooling lots of us into believing that marketed products are the hot new thing, when they're only the latest thing off the assembly line."
~ Hands On: The $100 Laptop -- Pretty damn cool -- check it out (with pictures and specs).
~ What's the Cost of Free Music? -- "Economist-turned-music-manager Peter Jenner (of Pink Floyd and Clash fame) says it'll run you 50 bucks a year."
~ BP's Helios House -- "How, you ask, can a fossil fuel fill-up station deign to call itself green? It's well-known by now that BP has an aggressive image makeover in the works that involves building an identity around ecological sensitivity. This is merely their newest physical evidence that there may be a walk to accompany the talk. Helios House incorporates such green building elements as: A roof canopy that doubles as a rainwater harvesting tank, and is made of 100% recyclable, uncoated stainless steel A filtration system in the drains that keeps oil and..."
~ Bison Once Again Roam Eastern Colorado -- "After an absence of more than a century, wild bison were returned to Colorado's Front Range on Saturday in full view of Denver's skyline."
~ Sustainable Developments: Rapid Victories Against Extreme Poverty -- "Focused steps taken now could rapidly put the poorest poor on a self-sustaining course."
~ Study: Businesses Unprepared for Aging Workforce -- "More than a quarter of U.S. businesses have failed to plan for the effects of the aging American workforce, finds a new study."
~ SanDisk Introduces 8GB Camera Flash Card -- "The new card is estimated to hold more than 4,000 high-resolution pictures and as many as 2,000 digital songs or up to 15 hours of MPEG 4 video—twice the capacity of today's best versions." Damn.
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ Buddhadharma 2.0 is Here -- From Buddhist Geeks.
~ How to perform prostrations in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition - Part II -- From Tyson Williams, a video.
~ Stages and lines of development in Kronology and Lines as vertices of the Kronos mandala -- Two good posts from Joe Perez at Until.
~ Refuge -- From Lin Jensen at Tricycle blogs. "A Tibetan scholar once complained to me of Zen’s severe reductionism. The scholar was right. Zen is so reductive by nature that it actually self-destructs. The longer I practice Zen the less I have of anything, including Zen itself. When Zen gets done with its work, what’s left? What’s left is the one place of genuine refuge."
~ Absent of I -- From Per at Mystery of Existence.
~ The Radical Spirituality of Generation X, Part 1: A Fine Young Atheist by Albert Wong -- "This is the first in the series of articles from the book Radical Spirit that we will be posting on a regular basis and is focused exclusively on Generation X spirituality. Albert Wong the author of this article is a past Marshall scholar and has assorted degrees in physics, philosophy, politics, and economics from Princeton, Oxford, and the University of Michigan. He won numerous national awards as a budding young scientist before working for the Esalen Institute for five years. He now works with Jeremy Tarcher in Los Angeles as chief research director at a think tank start-up that studies independent thinking and pioneering individuals."
~ Terribly Obvious! -- Integral Spirituality Center update.
~ Is phenomenology really just the inside of the individual interior? -- From Ed Berge at Open Intergal, a critique of Ken Wilber's "8 indigenous perspectives and methodologies."
~ New book: Digital Dharma -- A book announcement from the P2P Foundation.
~ Misunderstanding Derrida - Gregory Desilet -- "At an Integral Spirituality book signing in Boulder (November, 2006) Ken Wilber and I had a brief exchange about postmodernism and specifically his understanding of Derrida. Based on comments he made during the talk prior to the signing, I was most interested in his response to the question: “Do you believe Derrida errs by offering what amounts to a false critique of absolute transcendence?” Wilber answered “Yes,” without hesitation."
~ Our Life is the Life of a Buddha -- From Mike at Unknowing Mind, the first in a series of posts on the Diamond Sutra.
~ Buddhist Geeks 11: Models of Enlightenment -- "In our final conversation with Daniel Ingram (listen to Part 1 and Part 2) he goes on to explore various “models of enlightenment” and weighs the relative value of these different models, which we carry around with us unconsciously. Daniel also tries to answer the all-important question of, 'How does one practically go about becoming enlightened?'"
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