Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Speedlinking 4/17/07

Quote of the day:

"The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."
~ Walter Bagehot

Image of the day:


BODY
~ Study Finds Dietary Fat Interacts With Genes -- "Research published in the Journal of Molecular Medicine examines how calories from fat, carbohydrate, and protein might interact with genes to affect body mass index (BMI), or body weight-for-height, and risk of obesity among adults in the Framingham Heart Study."
~ Sicilian Volume Training -- "According to the author, this type of training will make you 'feel like a dozen mobsters have torched your entire body!'"
~ Does less trans fat make food healthier? (AP) -- "A major change in the national diet is under way: Heart-damaging trans fat is rapidly disappearing from grocery aisles and restaurant food, too. But are its replacements really healthier?"
~ Study doubts benefit of chondroitin for arthritis -- "Though many swear by it, the dietary supplement chondroitin is no better than a placebo at easing the hip and knee pain of arthritis and its use should be discouraged, European researchers said on Monday." There are many more studies that show this simply is not true -- chondroitin sulfate in conjunction with glucosamine sulfate eases arthritis symptoms.
~ Fruits, Veggies May Cut Cancer Risks -- "Can chocolate really elevate your mood? Take this quiz. Dr. Mallika Marshall offers facts to debunk some medical myths. Learn about the most common cancers, who gets them and how they are treated."
~ "Memory" herb ginkgo may boost survival -- "A study conducted in France provides preliminary evidence that older people who take Ginkgo biloba may be extending their lives, but are not reducing their risk of dementia."
~ On the road? Don't skip your workout -- "Early morning meetings and late-night business dinners make it almost impossible for Trisha Curtin to fit in a workout on the road. "It's been a huge challenge to do any type of exercising other than walking from building to building," says Curtin, who works in planning and distribution for a department store."
~ Why broccoli, soy fight cancer -- "Eating foods like broccoli and soy has been linked to lower cancer rates, and California researchers said that they may have discovered the biological mechanism behind the protective effect."


PSYCHE
~ Your unadulterated thoughts on adultery -- "In February, MSNBC.com and iVillage asked readers to share their feelings about love and fidelity. Over two weeks 70,288 readers, 54 percent men and 46 percent women, completed the survey. Here's what they said."
~ Lithium Builds Gray Matter In Bipolar Brains, UCLA Study Shows -- "Neuroscientists at UCLA have shown that lithium, long the standard treatment for bipolar disorder, increases the amount of gray matter in the brains of patients with the illness."
~ Architectures of Flexible Control: Incongruence and Change Detection [Developing Intelligence] -- "Among nature's most impressive feats of engineering is the remarkably flexible and self-optimizing quality of human cognition. People seem to dynamically determine whether speed or accuracy is of utmost importance in a certain task, or whether they should continue with a current approach or begin anew with another, or whether they should rely on logic or intuition to solve a certain problem. A topic of intense research in cognitive neuroscience is how cognition can be made so flexible."
~ Fragile X, Down Syndromes Linked To Faulty Brain Communication -- "The two most prevalent forms of genetic mental retardation, Fragile X and Down syndromes, may share a common cause, according to researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine. The problem, a crippled communication network in the brain, may also be associated with autism."
~ Emotional Eating Carnival April 2007 -- "Welcome to the April 2007 edition of carnival of emotional eating."
~ Productivity Boost: Increase and Manage Your Energy -- "Now here’s a better question: how well do you manage your energy? If you answered, “Huh?” to that question, that isn’t a good sign. While there may only be twenty four hours in the day, your capacity for energy isn’t a fixed quantity. Organization and time-management play a role, but it will be your ability to manage energy that makes the difference."
~ Link Karma - 16 April 2007 -- From the Personal Development with The Positivity Blog.
~ Rulers of the world: New book reveals what makes rich and powerful men tick -- "They have been described as 'sacred monsters' by one of their own. Now a new book looks beyond the headlines to reveal that many of the world's most powerful men were shaped by remarkably similar childhood experiences."
~ Chocolate gives people more of a buzz than passionate kisses: study -- "British researchers said Monday they were stunned to discover that people get more of a buzz from eating chocolate than passionately kissing their lovers." Damn the chocolate.


CULTURE
~ Parents bribing kids for good behavior -- "Call it a reward, or just “bribery.” Whichever it is, many parents today readily admit to buying off their children, who get goodies for anything from behaving in a restaurant to sleeping all night in their own beds."
~ School Shootings As Social Meme? -- "In response to the horrific school shooting in Virginia Tech, a commenter in this post left a link to a fascinating story from the latter part of 2006. Its a Boing Boing article, which quotes Loren Coleman, entitled School shootings: malignant, contagious social meme? and its really worth a read in light of today's scary events."
~ Does the press pick presidents? -- "Scholar Leon V. Sigal observed three decades ago that one measure of a presidential campaign's vitality prior to the nominating conventions was the number of full-time reporters assigned to it by the top-tier news organizations: the elite dailies especially (New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal), the TV networks, the wires, and the newsweeklies."
~ Gonzales vs Gonzales -- "Jan Crawford Greenburg and Ariane de Vogue for ABC News report: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' assertion that he was not involved in identifying the eight U.S. attorneys who were asked to resign last year is at odds with a recently released internal Department of Justice e-mail, ABC News has learned."
~ McCain's appalling Times interview about the Iraq war -- "Sen. John McCain has been careening his Straight-Talk Express all over the highway in recent months, but late last week, he finally slammed it into the guardrail, plunged over the cliff, and went splat in the big muddy."
~ Hillary Clinton: Liberaltarian? -- "It hurt just typing that. And it's really just a shameful ploy to get you to read this post."
~ And the Pulitzers Go To.... -- See who won (hint: McCarthy is riding high these days).


HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Gyms lacking in equipment for disabled -- "The basics of good health — diet and exercise — often present challenges for people with disabilities, a situation made more difficult by a common assumption that disability and poor health go hand in hand."
~ Note to Everyone: MySpace Is Not the Web. Get Ready to Move On -- "MySpace, once the fresh frontier of the internet, found itself a new sheriff by the name of Rupert Murdoch back in 2005. Until recently, he'd been content to let the place be, but those days are over."
~ Still Waiting: Gravity Experiment Reports Partial Success -- "Gravity Probe-B sees 'glimpses' of twisted spacetime."
~ Chimps More Evolved Than Humans? -- "Chimps have undergone more recent evolutionary change than people, a study shows." The question would seem to be how they define that.
~ Tiny Creatures Rediscover the Joy of Sex -- "Tiny relatives of the spider were long ago stripped by evolution for the need to have sex. Now they're doing it again anyway."
~ Climate change could trigger 'boom and bust' population cycles leading to extinction -- "Climate change could trigger "boom and bust" population cycles that make animal species more vulnerable to extinction. , according to Christopher C. Wilmers...."
~ Yangtze River Irreversibly Polluted? -- "China's largest waterway is damaged beyond repair, officials say."


INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ The new issue of Holons is up. IOC got two mentions -- a big THANK YOU to the folks at Holons for linking to my humble blog.
~ Holons Critique: Are Pavlina and Schwyzer Integral?
~ The Radical Spirituality of Generation X, Part 2: The Stronger Pull -- "By Sola Williams with Terra Williams (from the book Radical Spirit, edited by Stephen Dinan)."
~ Deepening into who and what we are (clarified) -- "When I refer to deepening into who and what we are, what does that really mean?"
~ Groundlessness, not Relativism -- "There is, however, a middle way between relativism on the one hand and the recourse to absolutes on the other hand, a position in between the two that could be referred to as groundlessness."
~ Buddhist Geeks 15: Is Zen Enough? -- The Geeks interview Genpo Roshi.
~ Shadows of groups -- "The only (?) thing that really has a shadow is a belief, but it comes in many flavors. Beliefs create identities, so identities have shadows. And beliefs create group norms, so groups have shadows."


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