"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you."
~ Eric Hoffer
Image of the day:
BODY
~ Calorie Counter Database at About.com -- Cool tool for tracking calories and exercise.
~ Exercise of the Week: The Overhead Shrug -- "Still doing ordinary shrugs for trapezius development? Ready to crank it up a notch, build some trap size, strengthen your thoracic erectors, and train your stinkin' core? Then add overhead shrugs to your program!"
~ Overload & Force Your Muscle To Grow! -- "A muscle must be subjected to a stimulus that compels it to adapt and grow. If there is no reason for a muscle to grow, no hypertrophy will occur. Turn up the intensity and stop using light weight if you want your muscle to grow. Read on."
~ How You Can Avoid Knee Injuries From Squatting -- "The Squat is one of the best strength training exercise. It strengthens your whole body including legs & knees. Strong knees are essential for sports & daily activities."
~ Get Lean with Yoga -- "Tone up your body with these yoga moves."
~ Whole grains may lower odds of high blood pressure -- "Women who get plenty of whole grains in their diet may lower their risk of developing high blood pressure, a large study suggests."
~ New nanotoxicology study delivers promising results -- "Findings by a team of researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee bode well for using single-walled carbon nanohorns, a particular form of engineered carbon-based nanoparticles, for drug delivery and other commercial applications."
PSYCHE/SELF
~ Depression is over-diagnosed, psychiatrist claims -- "Too many people are being diagnosed with depression when they are merely unhappy, a senior psychiatrist said today. Normal emotions are sometimes being treated as mental illness because the threshold for clinical depression is too low...."
~ The Beam of Light That Flips a Switch That Turns on the Brain -- "By toggling a light switch, neuroscientists can set fruit flies a-leaping and mice a-twirling and stop worms in their squiggling tracks." This is pretty cool, and it could change the ways we deal with mental illness.
~ Complaining -- "Note that complaining is not the same thing as having a negative emotional reaction. That first-response negative reaction is OK. Complaining is the act of reinforcing what you don’t want and intending even more of it. It’s the act of dwelling on the negative."
~ The Fear of Flying -- "How to calm mile-high anxiety."
~ The Timid Die Young -- "Being overly fearful can hurt your health."
~ Physical Illness And Mental Health: Help Is At Hand In New Booklet -- "'As soon as I was diagnosed, I felt the depression starting.' 46-year-old with breast cancer, Northampton. 'After my heart attack I felt really anxious all the time... I was worried that anything strenuous could trigger another attack.' Man aged 68, Glasgow. Having a physical illness, and treatment for it, can affect the way we think and feel."
~ Folk Meta-Ethics [Mixing Memory] -- "There's a really interesting paper by Geoffrey Goodwin and John Darley in press at the journal Cognition on the subject of lay meta-ethics, and ethical objectivism specifically. That is, the paper explores the question, "How do lay individuals think about the objectivity of their ethical beliefs?" (from the abstract)."
~ Reading Too Much Into a Depression Study -- "I was expecting to read about a study that examined damaged brains, or, at the very least, damaged brain circuits. Instead, what I read about was a study that looked at fMRIs of people who were depressed and not depressed, a study design replicated so often that it’s no longer interesting. It found that brain activity in a certain area of the brain was different during a particular activity in people who were depressed than those who weren’t (whopee!)."
~ New research shows how chronic stress worsens neurodegenerative disease course -- "The evidence is accumulating on how bad stress is for health. Chronic stress can intensify inflammation and increase a person`s risk for developing central nervous system infections, neurodegenerative diseases, like multiple sclerosis (MS), and other inflammatory diseases, say researchers presenting at the 115th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association (APA). These researchers have demonstrated for the first time that stress-related increases in central nervous system inflammation are behind the adverse effects of stress in an animal model of MS."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ The Invasion reviewed -- "If you're going to make a movie about a lone heroine battling a worldwide epidemic of alien body-snatching, Nicole Kidman is an odd choice to play the lead. I admire Kidman, but not even her most ardent fan would call her the warmest of actresses. Her best performances have a chilly, deliberate, slightly detached quality, and her beauty is, precisely, unearthly."
~ SCOTT HORTON—The FISA Court Strikes Again -- "More important evidence of judicial backbone this afternoon. In response to a motion by the ACLU challenging the Bush Administration’s insistence on keeping all dealings surrounding the FISA Court in secret, including its orders, the Court has entered an order directing the Bush Administration to explain its abnormal demands for secrecy. . . ."
~ Are We Failing Our Geniuses? -- "In U.S. schools, the highest achievers are too often challenged the least. Why that's hurting America - and how to fix it."
~ Clinton Leaving Obama in the Dust: New Poll Results -- "Wow, the gap is worse than Obama's people might have feared."
~ Sun-Times Says Boycott BP -- "The Chicago Sun-Times called for a boycott of BP today in response to a permit the oil giant received in late June to significantly increase the amount of toxic waste it dumps into Lake Michigan every year."
~ The Battle for Eyeballs -- "According to a new report out this week from the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, traffic numbers on the Interweb look robust for newspapers--as long as you're The New York Times."
~ Surviving Immortality -- "I've been thinking about the Technological Singularity, which to proper geeks is that point where computers become smarter than humans and supposedly all bets are off as technological development races forward faster than we can catch it and you and I are either left eating bonbons or are put to death by computers no longer amused by serving us. Life post-Singularity will, of course, be somewhere in between those two eventualities."
~ Credit Democrats Who Visit Iraq, They're Calling It As They See It -- "Day by day, I am more surprised at the turn in the Iraq debate. I know this is going to sound like pie-in-the-sky optimism, but I wonder if by the time General Petraeus makes his report, there will be something of a consensus on Capitol Hill."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Warmer Ocean Fuels Hurricane Dean -- "An animation shows the rise in sea temperatures that helped to spawn Dean and Erin."
~ Be a green fashion week groupie -- "There's a rash of "greener" fashion weeks popping up everywhere for the spring 2008 fashion season. And there must be an alignment of the stars or the higher workings of an omnipotent green god, because there is barely any overlap in dates. If you were so inclined, it would be possible for you to attend every single one of the shows listed below -- though the jet lag and carbon emissions from such an excursion might leave you feeling a bit ... restless."
~ Denmark proposes climate university -- "Denmark wants to create a climate university on Greenland that would specialize in research of the region."
~ Arctic ice shrinks to record low -- "'It is very strong evidence that we are starting to see an effect of greenhouse warming,' researcher says. There was less sea ice in the Arctic today than ever before on record, and the melting is continuing, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported."
~ A star with a tail -- and a tale to tell -- "Scientists are surprised to find a 'humongous' trail of material behind the well-known object Mira. It contains the stuff of planets -- and stellar history."
~ How to Build a Modern City: Think Green -- "Urban planning should get a rethink in light of global warming, say experts."
~ Today's white rice is mutation spread by early farmers -- "Some 10,000 years ago white rice evolved from wild red rice and began spreading around the globe. But how did this happen?"
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ In Tibet, the realm of the Lama -- "At sunrise and sunset, the air is cool, the scent of burning juniper incense is strong, and a river of pilgrims flows in a sacred circle around Jokhang Temple. Every day, they walk the perimeter of Lhasa's holiest shrine to accrue blessings in the next life because, the precepts of Tibetan Buddhism say, their lot in this one is preordained when they come into it."
~ Hope: the Utah Mining Disaster. Earthquake in Peru -- "Ken McLeod's teaching reflects a rigorous Tibetan training, and his book is in itself an eminently practical, no-holds-barred training manual for Western readers. It puts the attentive and conscientious reader--one who is prepared to follow the author along the demanding path of meditation exercises that form the core of the book--through the paces, learning how to dismantle those reactive patterns of the mind that control our lives without our knowing it, and create barriers between us and our happiness."
~ Love conquers all -- "His explanation is that the intrinsic self is full of pure kindness while the habitual self is the product of contamination based on information acquired later in life. Simply put, it is a conflict between altruism and selfishness."
~ Staying power (2) -- "You've perhaps heard of dhyana (pali: jhana) or meditative absorption, traditionally divided into subtle form and formless, each in a set of four stages. The higher stages of absorption are not necessary for insight practice. However, a firm foundation in shamatha IS necessary to effectively practice insight."
~ The Lure of the Cloister? -- "Bachkovo is a busy monastery. It is neither particularly isolated nor particularly peaceful (although there are some beautiful walks through meadows and hills in the surrounding nature reserve), but the afternoon I spent sitting in the cloister was a contented one. There is something that I love about cloisters: the sense of seclusion, the feeling of being apart from the world (there are walls, after all), but also being a part of the world (it is open to the sky and to the elements)."
~ BLOG: Guest Blog: Integral Blair? (by Jose Vergara) -- "After 10 years as Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair is no longer in power. We know that he has read Ken Wilber and is a pretty bright guy. But the question is: Does he qualify as an Integral Leader? That's what we want to find out."
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