"You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred."
~ Woody Allen
Image of the day:
~ An average of 81 people die by gun every day in the US. The New York Times has a graphic showing the breakdown of those deaths by age, sex, race, and cause. Link -via Exploding Aardvark (via Neatorama)BODY
~ Coffee Has More Soluble Fiber than Orange Juice -- "Coffee contains more soluble fiber than orange juice, according to a study from the Instituto del Frío in Spain (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, February 2007). Many people start the day with a glass of orange juice because they believe it is a health food, but it contains the same amount of sugar as a glass of Coca Cola." Yup.
~ Plateau Busters! — 5 GUARANTEED Ways to Analyze and Break Through Plateaus -- "If this article doesn't help you diagnose and cure the reason you're currently in weight-lifting limbo, Mike will give you your money back! It's GUARANTEED! Of course, the article's free, but still...."
~ Fitness On A Budget -- "The cost of fitness can be barrier for many households. Gym membership fees, exercise equipment and athletic apparel can easily add up to thousands of dollars year. However, the cost of fitness can also easily be minimized, while still providing most of the same benefits. It just takes a willingness not to have the latest and greatest and the desire to seek out bargains."
~ Fat Loss Wars: 3 Reasons Why Bodyweight is Better Than Cardio -- "You don't need fancy cardio machines to help you lose fat. In fact, a good fat loss program can be done with bodyweight exercises only. You don't even need traditional "cardio" to do this...or an expensive gym membership."
~ Is Your Favourite Red Wine Really That Good For You? -- "Red wine is being widely touted for its health benefits, but not all red wines may act the same according to researchers at the University of Hertfordshire. Dr Richard Hoffman and his Erasmus student, Conny Johansson are using the University's new chemistry laboratories to test a random selection of red wines to determine their levels of resveratrol."
~ Cancer-Fighting Benefit May Be Provided By Nutrients In Certain Vegetables -- "Chemicals in cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, watercress, cabbage and cauliflower, appear to not only stop human prostate cancer cells from growing in mice but also may cut off the formation of blood vessels that "feed" tumors, says a University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute study."
~ Omega-3 Fatty Acid May Help Prevent Alzheimer's Brain Lesions -- "A type of omega-3 fatty acid may slow the growth of two brain lesions that are hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease, UC Irvine scientists have discovered. The finding suggests that diets rich in docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) can help prevent the development of Alzheimer's disease later in life." Fish oil rocks.
~ Breast Cancer Vaccine Stimulates Potent Immune Response To Cancer Cells -- "Mayo Clinic researchers have designed a new strategy in the promising field of cancer vaccine research that's proven to be successful in boosting T cells -- the immune builders akin to a super defense force against cancer cells. Scientists say their strategy may prove to be more successful than methods currently under study and in clinical trials." Seems like this might be good for HIV patients, as well.
PSYCHE
~ Forming Social Memories -- "Does a specific memory exist for events involving humans? French researchers from the Vulnerability, Adaptation and Psychopathology Laboratory (CNRS/Universite Paris VI) and Canadian researchers from Douglas Hospital, McGill University (Montreal) have identified the internal part of the prefrontal cortex as the key structure for the memory formation of social information."
~ Bioluminescence At The Service Of A Novel Cerebral Imaging Technique -- "CNRS scientists in collaboration have developed a new technique for the in vivo imaging of neuronal function using bioluminescence, based on a GFP-aequorin fusion protein. This imaging technique enables the monitoring of neuronal activity (and more specifically, calcium activity), real-time and in-vivo, in either a small group of neurons or in the brain as a whole." Wow, it's taken a long time for science to catch on the value of bioluminescence.
~ Puberty, risky behaviors go hand-in-hand -- "Taking risks may be an integral part of being a teenager, an expert on child development says." Yeah, that's my excuse for all the stupid things I did.
~ Health Report on ADHD and child eating disorders -- "ABC Radio National's Health Report had a recent programme in two halves, one looking at how eating disorders manifest in childhood and adolescence and another on girls diagnosed with ADHD."
~ The Name-Letter Effect, Or Why Chris is a Cognitive Psychologist [Mixing Memory] -- "Wow! Who'd a thunk it? I mean, people write their names and birth dates thousand of times over a lifetime, so it's entirely unsurprising that people would prefer letters and numbers in them over other letters and numbers. But who cares? It's not like that affects anything people do outside of rating letters and numbers in a psychology experiment, right?" Interesting article that goes beyond this little snip.
~ A Final Thought On Cho's Mental Illness -- "You want counterexamples to Cho's example. But that's a defensive posture, unnecessary because... Cho wasn't mentally ill. He was a sad, bad man who killed people because his life wasn't validated. There was no psychosis, there was no cognitive impairment, there was no psychiatric impairment in insight in judgment. There was a lack of sex, but that's not yet in the DSM." Not sure I agree with that assessment.
~ SMiLE Study To Examine Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction And Progressive Muscle Relaxation -- "Summa Health System and Kent State University have received a $545,000 grant from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction and progressive muscle relaxation on people with prehypertension."
~ SciAmMind on body image and coma-like states -- "A new edition of Scientific American Mind has arrived with two freely available articles online: one on the distortion of body image in eating disorders and the other on whether brain scans could be a communication channel for people in coma-like vegetative states."
~ Was Timothy Leary Right? -- "No, but new research on psychedelic drugs shows promise for their therapeutic use." It's about time the research ban was lifted.
~ Linguists doubt exception to universal grammar -- "Controversies in the field of linguistics seldom make headlines, which is why the current imbroglio over an alleged counterexample to Universal Grammar (UG), made famous in the 1960s by Noam Chomsky, MIT professor of linguistics, is so unusual."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Broken mental-health system puts us at risk -- "A week’s worth of intense media coverage of the heinous murders of students and faculty at Virginia Tech and analysis focusing on guns by innumerable experts has left me furious. It's not just guns. We need to fix a broken, abandoned and pathetic system of mental-health care."
~ Blogger & Podcaster Magazine: Read the first issue online -- "Blogger & Podcaster is a new magazine founded and published by Larry Genkin, president of Larstan Business Reports. Genkin was recently interviewed by Joe Wikert, an executive at Wiley, about his new publication. He says Blogger & Podaster is the first magazine to be published simultaneously in print, digital and podcast formats."
~ Boris Yeltsin, a genuine man of transition -- "It was October 1987, three weeks before the 70th anniversary of the Russian revolution. The Soviet elite had gathered in Moscow to mark the occasion. Following the customarily lengthy speech by the Communist Party general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, the chairman asked if anyone wanted to respond." See also: Yeltsin's Promise and Failure.
~ My Turn: I Had That Now-Banned Abortion -- "I needed that now-banned procedure known as 'partial-birth' abortion. Why the Supreme Court's decision to outlaw it was a dark day for American women."
~ Third-Party Challenge: Don't Even Bother -- "The political commentators and crystal-ball gazers are already predicting there will most likely be a third-party candidate for president next year. They may be right."
~ Effort to Draft Condi Rice Picks Up Steam -- "An effort to get Secretary of State Condi Rice's name on key GOP primary ballots is picking up steam now that she has emerged as a top-three pick on several state and county straw polls."
~ From Imus Onward -- "The downfall of radio shock jock Don Imus began with a racial and sexual remark no more extreme than much talk radio fare. Now Newsweek is describing it as one of the "chapters in the story of race in America." But what exactly does this chapter say? That bigotry is still rampant in our culture? That bigotry is, commendably, no longer tolerated? That political correctness has run amok?"
~ What makes poetry difficult, anyway? -- "In previous years, Slate has paid ambivalent heed to National Poetry Month by publishing poems against poetry, or poems in which the poet disparages other people (and their poems), or poems expressing unpleasant sentiments. This time, let's take up a serious issue: the stupid and defeatist idea that poetry, especially modern or contemporary poetry, ought to be less 'difficult.'"
~ American psycho -- Longer quote on this, because I think she is partly right:
Camille Paglia, professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and author of Sexual Personae, believes Cho is emblematic of the crisis of masculinity in America. “Women have difficulty understanding the mix of male sexual aggression with egotism and the ecstasy of self-immolation,” she says. Or to quote Martin Amis on that other killer, Fred West: he became “addicted to the moment where impotence becomes prepotence”.
...
Paglia believes the school Cho attended would have been no better equipped to deal with frustrated young males. “There is nothing happening educationally in these boring prisons that are fondly called suburban high schools. They are saturated with a false humanitarianism, which is especially damaging for boys.
“Young men have enormous energy. There was a time when they could run away, hop on a freighter, go to a factory and earn money, do something with their hands. Now there is this snobbery of the upper-middle-class professional. Everyone has to be a lawyer or paper pusher.”
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ How Netvibes helped me cram the whole Internet onto a single screen -- "If Apple, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Facebook, and Satan were forming a mega-portal that would satisfy all my Web needs (and in return I'd have to sell my soul and get a Bluetooth-enabled "slave chip" embedded in my eyeball) I'd be like, 'What's the catch?'"
~ Jumping 'Junk' DNA May Fuel Mammalian Evolution -- "Thousands of newly identified junk DNA fragments may play a role in embryonic development." I always thought the idea that there would be "junk DNA" was kind of silly. See also: 'Junk' DNA now looks like powerful regulator, researcher finds .
~ Nuclear power not the solution for China: official -- "Nuclear power is not the long-term answer to China's energy needs due to limited global uranium supplies and problems with nuclear waste disposal, state media on Monday quoted a top official as saying."
~ Activist Groups Drop Suit Against Viacom -- "Activist groups dropped a federal lawsuit against Viacom Inc. on Monday after the parent of Comedy Central acknowledged it made a mistake by asking YouTube to yank a parody of the cable network's 'The Colbert Report.'"
~ Eating Crow -- "Just as the whole Karl Rove v. Sheryl Crow thing was blowing up in the news, I was arriving in Washington, D.C. to cover ... Sheryl Crow. Taking on climate change. You can read about Crow's big arrival over on my blog, but a few quick thoughts on the Rove encounter before I head for the airport to come home." I think this reveals a little of why Crow and Bush-buddy Lance Armstrong didn't work out.
~ Ravens' X-Games [commonground] -- "The complex rituals and social behavior ravens has fascinated naturalists for decades. At the Konrad Lorenz Research Center, winter is an opportunity for extreme sports, tobbaggen slides and riding on the backs of wild boars like rodeo bull riders. ( Speigel Online)"
~ Lessons to be learned from society of robots -- "An Exeter political philosopher is embarking on an exciting project researching an artificial society of robots. As part of a team of academics from six universities, Robin Durie will be looking at how ‘artificial culture emerges within a group of robots."
~ Nanoscale 'Coaxial Cables' for Solar Energy Harvesting -- "Scientists have designed a new type of nanowire - a tiny coaxial cable - that could vastly improve a few key renewable energy technologies, particularly solar cells, and could even impact other cutting-edge, developing technologies, such as quantum computing and nanoelectronics."
~ A quick partial overview of green building techniques -- "What follows is a table with a (very) incomplete list of means of reducing material intensity in building. These means alone could reduce the impact of constructing buildings by about 75% or more, and thus greenhouse-gas emissions from construction and destruction of buildings by about half. "
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ Green Grapes Not Sour Ones -- Victoria Lansford on the Atlanta Integral Salon.
~ Buddhist Geeks 16: Vince Horn on Taking the Two Month Plunge -- "In this episode Ryan Oelke interviews fellow resident geek, Vince Horn, who shares his reflections and experiences of a two-month mediation retreat he recently completed."
~ Tibetan Buddhism: How it all began -- "TIBETAN Buddhism began in the mid-7th century AD, when the powerful Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo (617-650AD) became a devout Buddhist under the influence of his two queens, Nepal’s Princess Birkurti and Princess Wencheng of China."
~ The Buddhist perspective of globalisation -- "The Buddhist view of globalisation is embedded in its cardinal doctrine of interdependence or dependent co-arising (paticca samuppada in Pali), also translated as dependent co-origination, conditioned genesis, or conditioned co-production."
~ The state of Shakespeare in top American universities -- From MD at The Daily Goose -- I agree with him mostly. Shakespeare was required only of English majors at my college, and most people didn't even want to take the class -- this in a town with the world-famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I used to go down to the theater grounds on weekends to take advantage of people selling tickets they decided not to use -- for cheap. I saw A LOT of cool plays.
~ What do you know about your Shadow? -- An interesting thread at the Zaadz I-I pod.
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1 comment:
Another STUPENDOUS linkfest, Bill.
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