Speedlinking 5/31/07

Quote of the day:

"Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway."
~ Elbert Hubbard

Image of the day:


BODY
~ How long is a training session? -- "An hour is just a measure of time. What you are really doing within that hour is X number of sets of Y number of reps right? Let's say you do 8 exercises, 3 sets of 10 reps each for 24 total sets and 240 total reps. Then someone else hires you -- and when designing their program you come up with 7 exercises, and 3 sets of 8 reps each. 21 total sets and 168 total reps. Does the second client get a discount because they did "less"? Of course not."
~ Big Seminar in Little Rock -- "You get to sit in on a seminar featuring Alwyn Cosgrove, Dos Remedios, Chad Waterbury, Charles Staley, Mike Roussell, Lou Schuler, and others, all for free. We've got just one question for you: Just how much do you love us now?"
~ Exercising in hot weather and the body’s need for salt -- "Fatigue during hot-weather exercise is caused by lack of water, salt, sugar or calories. Of the four, exercisers are most ignorant of their sodium needs. A study from The University of Otago in New Zealand shows that taking a salty drink prior to competition can help an athlete to exercise longer and harder." Other than sugar and calories being the same thing, good article.
~ Alcohol Craving For Some Alcoholics Influenced By The Appetite-Regulating Peptide Leptin -- "Craving is an important contributor to the development and maintenance of alcoholism. New findings show that appetite-regulating peptides leptin and ghrelin influence alcohol craving."
~ Starbucks Switches to 2 Percent Milk -- "Starbucks Corp. said Thursday it will replace whole milk with 2 percent for espresso drinks in all of its U.S. and Canadian stores by the end of the year...."
~ Fatty acid supplement may aid body fat loss -- "Supplements containing the fatty acid conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) may help the body shed excess fat, according to a new study."
~ How Curcumin Helps Fight Cancer -- "Scientists showed that curcumin, the main ingredient of the Indian herb turmeric, restores key immune cells that fight off cancer.The immune system of patients with advanced cancer is significantly weakened, mostly because the main cells that fight off tumors either cannot proliferate anymore or have died off." Mmmm . . . . curry.
~ Exercise May Boost 'Good' Cholesterol Levels -- "Regular exercise seems to help boost levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL), the "good" cholesterol, say Japanese researchers. A low level of HDL cholesterol is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease."


PSYCHE
~ Depression More Common in Women than Men -- A good, though simple, look at the role of hormones in female depression.
~ Can Stress Addiction Be a Good Thing? -- "While the larger population spends millions of dollars and countless hours each year searching for the ultimate stress-relief formula through exercise, structured relaxation and chemical cocktails both prescribed and recreational, many people (including a large number in that very group) actually seem to thrive on high-anxiety situations and lifestyles, seeking out or creating dramatic circumstances and relying on the adrenaline rushes they provide."
~ Selling disgust -- "An article in Time magazine discusses how an understanding of the psychology of disgust is being applied to selling products and the arrangement of items in supermarkets."
~ The Neuroscience of Imagination [Developing Intelligence] -- "Imagination allows us to escape our current time, place, or perspective in favor of an alternative context, whether that may be fanciful or mundane. So imagination is a mechanism for specifying and maintaining a context that differs from our more immediate and stimulus-driven environment (at least, that is what I mean by "imagination")."
~ In A Relationship, Sacrifices Mean More If Made For The Right Reason -- "If you do something positive for your mate, does it matter why? The answer is yes, according to new research from University of Rochester research assistant professor Heather Patrick. She unveiled a study at a Toronto conference this month that shows both small sacrifices, like doing the dishes for your partner, and big ones, like moving across the country for a new job he or she really wants, mean more if you do them because you genuinely want to."
~ Choice And Motivation Means Success For Smokers Who Want To Quit -- "Smokers who have a say in how they quit are more likely to try kicking the habit and are more successful, according to new research at the University of Rochester."
~ Gratitude and Giving Will Lead to Your Success -- "Gratitude researcher Robert Emmons recently reviewed the growing evidence that feelings of gratitude improve the quality of our lives. In one study he found that people who “wrote up to five things for which they were grateful or thankful” on a weekly basis “exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the upcoming week.” Positive Psychology co-founder Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, and his colleagues also discovered that when people took a few minutes each evening to write down “three good things” that happened to them during the day, their happiness increased and their depressive symptoms decreased."
~ People Think They Reap What They Sow -- "People gauge how responsive their partners are primarily by how they themselves respond to their partners— not the other way around, according to a series of Yale studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology."


CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Harry Potter theme park swoops to Fla. -- "Universal Studios is opening up a Harry Potter theme park in Florida complete with the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, ..." Isn't this one of the signs of the end of the world?
~ Shock and gore -- "Salvador Dalí was the greatest painter of the 20th century - but his disturbing films belong to the 21st, writes JG Ballard."
~ Wages Through the Ages: Men Earn Less Than Fathers at Same Age -- "Why Are Men Today Earning Less Money Than Their Fathers Did 30 Years Ago?"
~ Repudiation, Not Impeachment -- "The former weapons inspector and author of “Waging Peace” argues that the mere impeachment of President Bush would fail to repair the damage caused by an executive branch run amok and an uninformed and uninvolved citizenry."
~ Yeats meets The Sopranos -- "It is not often that a poem functions as a major plot point on a TV show. But on the most recent episode of The Sopranos, a morbid A.J. Soprano—suffering from depression after a breakup—is roused from his torpor when a professor teaches W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming" to his class. The poem's prophetic intensities move A.J. to contemplate the violence of conflict in the Middle East and the general horror of a world in which the old orders are collapsing around him at every turn. He even reads the poem aloud in bed; shortly afterward, he tries to commit suicide."
~ Backstory: Civil Unions in New Hampshire -- "The governor of New Hampshire signed legislation today legalizing civil unions for same-sex couples starting in January, joining seven states that already allow civil unions or domestic partnerships, including Massachusetts, the only state to allow gay marriage. Oregon also will join those ranks in January."
~ Fineman: Is U.S. Political System Collapsing? -- "Al Gore believes a steady diet of fact-free media is dumbing down America and threatening the political system."


HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Man Claims to Have Loch Ness Video -- "Some say the video is among the finest ever taken of the mythical creature."
~ Corals reveal impact of land use -- "Using the corals on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) as a history book, researchers have linked land use along the coast to decades of declining water quality and poor coral health."
~ More of what bike-friendly looks like -- "Separate bikeways are the lead actors in bike-friendly cities, but many supporting actors complete the cast: bikes on transit facilities, good traffic law enforcement, even bike "lifts" on steep hills. Three more worth mentioning are blue lanes, parking cages, and cyclibraries."
~ Lessons from the orangutans: Upright walking may have begun in the trees -- "By observing wild orangutans, a research team has found that walking on two legs may have arisen in relatively ancient, tree-dwelling apes, rather than in more recent human ancestors that had already descended to the savannah, as current theory suggests."
~ Revised Global Warming Forecast: Even More Rain -- "As world warms, rainfall could become more intense than previously predicted." Unless you live in AZ, USA.
~ Small-scale agricultural changes may help eradicate widespread disease -- "Small changes in agricultural and sanitation practices may eliminate the spread of a disease that affects some 200 million people living in developing nations around the world."


INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ What Does It Take For Us to Wake Up? -- "In short, Bush may now declare himself absolute ruler at any moment and Congress can like it or lump it. Naturally, this act of betrayal is of so little importance and consequence, the corporate media believes you are better served knowing Justin Timberlake is in love."
~ Dark nights and patterns -- "I am still reading Bernadette Robert’s Path to No Self. She writes about the path better than almost anyone I can think of, especially in a Christian context."
~ BLOG: Meta-Genius: A Celebration of Ken's Writings (Part 3) -- "A Celebration of Ken is dysfunctional green, or extreme and absolutistic pluralism. This extreme pluralism--which maintains all views are absolutely the same--is open to infection by narcissism, since all views are allowed. Thus, under the extreme-green post-modern banner, every pre-modern, pre-rational, preconventional, prepersonal, egocentric impulse can parade."
~ Re-Framing Meditation for the Scientifically Minded -- "What I suggested to Mike is that meditation can be framed very much in scientific terms. Pulling on the perspective of urchinTracker ('/outbound/article/www.alanwallace.org');">Alan Wallace and urchinTracker ('/outbound/article/www.kenwilber.com');">Ken Wilber I shared my own reflections on the scientific method and meditation."
~ Aspects of People I Find Interesting -- "Buddhists and Integralists, like me, tend to be people watchers -- interested in others‘ thinking and behavior. Now, there are a large number of Buddhists who specifically are not interested in all of this amateur psychoanalysis crap; they think that study of all this hoo-hah is very much the ilk of confusion and calamity we should step away from."

Tags: Buddhists, integralists, meditation, scientific method, Ken Wilber, dark nights, George Bush, agriculture, global warming, upright walking began in trees, bike-friendly, coral, Loch Ness video, Al Gore, civil unions, Yeats, the Sopranos, impeachment, wages, Salvador Dali, JG Ballard, Harry Potter, reaping what we sow, gratitude, quiting smoking, sacrifice in relationships, imagination, selling disgust, stress addiction, depression in women, exercise and cholesterol, curcumin fights cancer, fatty acids and fat loss, Starbucks, alcohol cravings, exercise in hot weather, fitness information, training sessions, speedlinking