"To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state."
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Image of the day:
BODY
~ Limiting Factors -- "Here are 5 reasons why you're still a weenie. There are probably a bunch more, but we didn't think your ego could handle that many at once."
~ Salt restriction to lower blood pressure: an ongoing controversy -- "Nowhere in medicine is there more confusion than the issue of salt as a cause of high blood pressure. At a recent meeting of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, Dr. Abdul-Rahman of Newark, Delaware reported that people who lowered blood insulin levels had a significant reduction in high blood pressure even though they also markedly increased their salt intake."
~ Young Women Prefer Individually Tailored Weight Loss Advice -- "The word is out - young women want personally tailored nutrition advice and information when it comes to weight loss. Over 80% of young women are trying to lose weight but are confused about the best way to achieve this a study published by Wiley-Blackwell in the June 2007 issue of Nutrition & Dietetics."
~ Whole Grain, Not "Fiber", Lowers Colorectal Cancer Risk -- "Experts at the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) offered praise for a recently published study which showed that whole grain fiber, and not fiber from other food sources, is associated with lower risk of colorectal cancer. The AICR experts said the study is to be commended because, unlike many earlier investigations, its authors took care to analyze the role of dietary fiber from different food sources."
~ FDA OKs First Fibromyalgia Treatment -- "Lyrica, known generically as pregabalin, previously won FDA approval to treat partial seizures, pain following the rash of shingles and pain associated with diabetes nerve damage."
~ Fish Oil Might Slow Prostate Cancer (HealthDay) -- "A new study with mice suggests that diets high in omega-3 fatty acids from fish might help slow prostate cancer." Yet another reason to use fish oil.
~ Fitness level predicts heart problems -- "Cardiovascular fitness may predict the odds of a future heart attack in men and women with no apparent signs of heart disease, a large study suggests."
~ Omega-3 supplements affect Alzheimer's symptoms -- "Omega-3 supplements can, in certain cases, help combat the depression and agitation symptoms associated with Alzheimer`s disease, according to a clinical study conducted at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet."
PSYCHE
~ Oldest? You might be smartest too -- "Children at the top of the pecking order — either by birth or because their older siblings died — score higher on IQ tests than their younger brothers or sisters."
~ The surprising realities of Absolute Pitch and Tone Deafness -- "Glenn Gould had it -- so did Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Horowitz and Sinatra. On the surface, absolute pitch seems like the province of musical geniuses -- the exotic gift that they have and we don't. But the truth about absolute pitch -- and the opposite phenomenon of tone deafness -- is much more interesting, and helps us understand what "musical talent" really is and isn't."
~ Next step brains: Evolution or optimisation? -- "This week's edition of ABC Radio National's opinion programme Ockham's Razor has Dr Peter Lavelle speculating about a future when computers will match or outstrip the human brain."
~ Labeling Emotions Diminishes Their Influence -- "The common perception that verbalizing one's mental distresses will help a patient diminish and better understand his or her negative emotions is perhaps the central tenet of talk therapy. Brain-scan based research continues to further this belief, indicating that emotions, when considered as linguistic abstracts, engender less severe reactions in outside parties. Perhaps language allows for a greater disconnect between the raw experience of the emotions on display and their conceptual representations."
~ 15 Ways to Create an Hour a Day of Extra Time … for Solitude -- "One problem with our complicated lives these days is that many of us never find time to spend alone, in peace, without being bombarded with noise and information. There’s no time for solitude and quiet contemplation, and as a result, we have stress and anxiety and depression and repression."
~ Depression Treatment Shows Ability to Extend Life -- "A new study by Dr. Joseph Gallo found stronger evidence of depression’s link to life-span. Previous studies may not have found what they were looking for because they focused only on patients hospitalized for specific ailments like heart problems. Dr. Gallo tested a wide range of patients, and found that depression only significantly affected cancer deaths."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Fair and Balanced, My Ass! The Bizarre Reality of Fox News -- "But it's not like the leading lights at Fox actually enjoy turning America into a nation of fatuous morons. If they could accomplish the same goals by not making their viewers morons, they'd probably do so, just as the tobacco companies would probably prefer their products didn't cause cancer, and Ann Coulter probably wishes the sound of her voice didn't make young men's and small animals' testicles shrivel." Nice quote.
~ Does Swearing Corrode Society? -- "Do young minds and civil society crumble from the F word?"
~ Where Have All the Rock Stars Gone? -- "In popular music, the decline of a genuine mass audience has meant that it is harder and harder for a performer to attain recognition beyond his or her niche. Those whose recordings now top the charts usually seem to be the least culturally significant, often lacking either the musical distinction or the political commentary that one can still find among less popular performers. But the bigger issue is that even this music reaches a small fraction of the total audience."
~ Will Mike Bloomberg run? -- "New York's mayor flirts with an independent bid for the presidency."
~ This Just In: America Tilts Left -- "Contrary to popular belief, the majority of Americans are liberal, writes Rick Perlstein. How long will it take politicians and the media to get that?"
~ Starr: Soccer's Cinderella Team -- "I am a root-root-root-for-the-home-team guy. But every one in while there is a Cinderella team that is hard to resist."
~ A GLBT Center of Their Own -- "It's "not your average GLBT Center" declared the April 24 edition of The Advocate, the national GLBT newsmagazine. Indeed. The Center on Halsted, billed as the nation's most comprehensive GLBT community center, was unveiled last month in a flurry of local and national press."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Probing Question: How do dimples make golf balls travel farther? -- "A golfer's worst enemy may be divots, but his or her best friend may be dimples -- the dimples on a golf ball that send it sailing farther down the fairway."
~ Antarctic icebergs -- Hotspots of ocean life -- "According to a new study in this week`s journal Science these floating islands of ice - some as large as a dozen miles across - are having a major impact on the ecology of the ocean around them, serving as “hotspots” for ocean life, with thriving communities of seabirds above and a web of phytoplankton, krill, and fish below."
~ Nanoethics -- The watchdog of a new technology? -- "The field of nanotechnology is broad and has the potential to be used in a wide range of industries and fields, but the question is whether it is a good investment. Will it solve fundamental social problems that assure a better future?"
~ Expedition Seeks Primordial Life Beneath the Arctic -- "A hydrothermal vent could harbor never-seen-before life."
~ Fruit may be the latest source for biofuel madness -- "Could your kumquat power your Kia? A team of U.S. scientists has made a low-carbon fuel from fructose, the sugar in many fruits. It could be a better bet than ethanol, with 40 percent more energy, less vulnerability to water, and more stability. . . ."
~ 'Blog', 'cookie', 'wiki' top list of hated Internet words: poll -- "Blog", "netiquette", "cookie" and "wiki" have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet, according to the results of a poll published Thursday."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ Bridging Jung and Wilber: towards healing the 'inner ascender' -- "Recently participating as a witness in a complex psychotherapeutic intervention called therapeutic enactment -- which is an updated and refined form of Moreno's pioneering work on psychodrama -- has stimulated some thoughts and feelings about the importance of healing a subpersonality, schema, pattern, voice or archetype that we might term the "inner ascender" -- or, the "inner frustrated ascender"."
~ The so-called retro-romantic transpersonalists -- "For the longest time I refused to read those who might fit the above description provided by Ken, as if they had a hideous and highly communicable disease. But I’ve come to question the accuracy of this prejudice and have begun to investigate these authors. This is largely due to an incipient intuition about states of consciousness as related to the pre-trans fallacy. Those like Washburn and Goddard see that we “return” to these lower states (subconscious and unconscious) after the evolution to the rational ego, but from the vantage point of the latter they are transformed (into subtle and causal)."
~ Working with emotions -- "Any one of these may work well on its own, but the real effects come from using a combination of them over time, exploring emotions, and any particular emotion, from many different levels of the holarchy and from several different angles." Good post.
~ Integral Politics -- "In a recent Integral Naked dialogue, "Escaping Flatland, Part II", Wilber discusses the contours of Integral Politics as he sees it. He gives a good summary of the points he has made in the three chapters published so far of his The Many Faces of Terrorism manuscript. These chapters, unfortunately, lack focus. If this, after all those years, is Wilber's choice of genre for conveying his vision of integral politics, we're really lost."
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