"War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace."
~ Thomas Mann
Image of the day:
BODY
~ Eat 8, Feel Great -- "Get the goods on the foods you should be eating every day."
~ Muscle on a Budget -- "You didn't hit your football pool this week, and now you gotta buy a new physiology textbook to replace the one your dog ate. How the heck are you going to have any money left over for food?"
~ Inhibiting The Growth Of Tumors With Vitamin C -- "Nearly 30 years after Nobel laureate Linus Pauling famously and controversially suggested that vitamin C supplements can prevent cancer, a team of Johns Hopkins scientists have shown that in mice at least, vitamin C -- and potentially other antioxidants -- can indeed inhibit the growth of some tumors -- just not in the manner suggested by years of investigation."
~ Portion Sizes Do Matter -- "Whether or not you are overweight, portion sizes of food are a major factor in determining how much you eat."
~ Eating dark chocolate can prevent heart disease -- "Two or three squares of dark chocolate a day may keep heart disease at bay. Studies show cocoa-rich dark chocolate boost heart health by keeping blood flowing freely round the body."
~ Being Overweight is Hard on the Heart (HealthDay) -- "A new study involving more than 300,000 people finds that being overweight independently increases a person's risk of coronary disease."
~ Cartilage Grown From Embryonic Stem Cells -- "Rice University biomedical engineers have developed a new technique for growing cartilage from human embryonic stem cells, a method that could be used to grow replacement cartilage for the surgical repair of knee, jaw, hip, and other joints."
~ Straight vs. Curly: Why One Gets More Tangles -- "Physicists find one type of hair gets more knots and untangle the reasons."
PSYCHE/SELF
~ Searching versus Seeking -- "Recently I was talking with an acquaintance of mine who is preparing to leave his job in investment banking to go to an ashram in India to practice mediation and yoga. It was clear that he was excited by the prospect of this new journey, but he was also apprehensive. Having attended business school and lived in the Tal Ben-Sharar notion of the “rat race” (Ben-Sharar, 2007) working on Wall Street, he was unsure of giving it all up to embark on a more spiritual journey."
~ Three Reasons to Mistrust Reports about Ongoing Conscious Experience -- "We'll be talking about our forthcoming book, but for most of our 2 1/2 hours we'll be "beeping" the audience. That is, we'll set a random beeper to sound while we're talking. When the beep occurs, audience members will reflect on their "last undisturbed moment of inner experience" immediately before the beep. Then we'll interview people about their sampled experiences, right there on the spot."
~ The Political Brain [The Frontal Cortex] -- "Just a quick note on the liberal/conservative psychological study that everyone is talking about. (Dave Munger has a thorough write-up here.) Color me dubious."
~ Disaster Needn't Dampen Spirits -- "We all experience unexpected events in our lives - how we cope with them makes all the difference. For some an unexpected disaster such as floods or storms, can cause unending misery, flashbacks and possibly post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Others find ways to learn from setbacks and move forward with their lives. Some people experience amazing gratitude and new-found resilience after disasters."
~ A Field Guide to the Cynic -- "Nothing really matters to these bitter (yet entertaining) pessimists."
~ How to Fail at Practically Anything -- "I say, fail a lot. Push yourself to the limits of your talents, endurance, and common sense, and then go one step further and fall down, spectacularly if possible. Failure is one of life’s great forces; it’s driven far more innovation than talent, creativity, or necessity combined. Plus, its stories are better."
~ How to Fill Leisure Time Intelligently and Some Powerful Reasons You Should -- "When you come home, tired and stressed, the last thing you want to do is think. You want to relax and cut loose. For most people that means zoning out in front of the TV or joining friends at the bar for some chemical stimulation. Is this
really the best way to use free time? Are all intelligent pursuits draining and tedious?"
~ Self-Esteem IS Personal Development By Michael Mcgrath -- "Low self esteem can cripple you emotionally and stop you reaching anything even close to your full potential."
~ Top Tips for Improving Memory -- "Cognitive psychologists have discovered a number of techniques that can significantly improve your memory. Strategies such as elaboration, rehearsal, and mnemonic devices can help you better remember...."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Free-lunch foragers -- "'Freegans' are a growing subculture that has opted out of capitalism by cutting spending habits and living off consumer waste."
~ The Edifice of Pinkerism -- "Among the most prolific and most public of the current generation of inquirers into human understanding is the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. In a veritable bookshelf of recently published volumes, he has argued for what might be called a soft innatism: a theory of mind that holds that certain concepts or ways of thinking are hardwired into our brains at birth."
~ WorkPlace: Housing Bubble Pops; It's Recession Time -- "The growth of the housing bubble made this sort of collapse inevitable, just as the crash of the stock bubble was inevitable."
~ 5 Tech Stocks for Tough Economic Times -- "Solid balance sheets, cool products, and an alternative energy kicker are common themes."
~ The Petraeus and Crocker Testimony -- "General and ambassador make a strong case for a continued American presence in Iraq."
~ Bolton Wants Iran Regime Change -- "John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, says in an interview with U.S. News that despite the Bush administration's continued attachment to a diplomatic solution on nuclear programs in Iran, he favors seeking a change of regimes there." Bolton is nuts.
~ Life expectancy in U.S. rises to all-time high of 78 -- "Life expectancy in the United States has increased to almost 78 years, the country's highest on record, amid a downturn in deaths from heart disease, cancer and stroke, according to new federal estimates published on Wednesday."
~ America's Absurd Farm Subsidies -- "The farm legislation proceeding through Congress symbolizes much of what's wrong with Washington. It's government by inertia."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Study: Pollution Raises Exercise Risks -- "People with heart disease may want to steer clear of heavy traffic when exercising or simply take their workout indoors to avoid breathing polluted air...."
~ What’s That Have to Do With the Price of Corn? -- "The rising price of corn due to ethanol demand will have a variety of unintended consequences. As noted earlier on this blog, it might even make Americans skinnier, since food manufacturers may start using a cheaper (and less fattening) substitute for corn syrup."
~ Environment: As We Stand on the Brink of Catastrophe, Bio-Fuels are no Magic Bullet -- "Having made ethanol into this magic elixir, politicians, financial investors, and the occasional environmental organization are masking the need for far deeper investigation and solutions."
~ Shrinking Kilogram Bewilders Physicists -- "A kilogram just isn't what it used to be. The 118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is mysteriously losing weight - if ever so slightly."
~ Don't Just Be the Change, Mass-Produce It -- "Be the change. This motto -- shorthand for Gandhi's instruction that "We must be the change we wish to see in the world" -- has become ubiquitous. And while a sensible person will appreciate the essential wisdom behind Gandhi's words, in the context of sustainability, this shorthand has become associated as well with another idea: that the being the change is a lifestyle choice. In this context, Be the change in fact usually means Buy the change."
~ Wild male chimps steal to impress females -- "Scottish researchers studying wild chimpanzees in West Africa have discovered male chimps steal fruits from local farms to attract female mates."
~ Astronomers find bizarre planet-mass object orbiting neutron star -- "Using NASA`s Swift and Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellites, astronomers have discovered one of the most bizarre planet-mass objects ever found."
~ To maximize biofuel potential, researchers look for sorghum's 'sweet spot' -- "Picture this - IV (intravenous) lines in a sorghum field. It's not as far-fetched as it sounds. It's one way that scientists at the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station are researching crops that may contribute to the biofuel revolution."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ Genpo Roshi's long awaited book, Big Mind/Big Heart, is here! -- "As many of you already know Genpo Roshi has just published his new book, Big Mind / Big Heart: Finding Your Way, which makes his Big Mind teachingsavailable to the general public for the first time in book form. The book will not be in bookstores until late September, but you can obtain it today directly from Big Mind Publishing."
~ Wayne Dyer's Real 'Secret' -- "With his new book a best-seller, the spiritual teacher talks to Beliefnet about embracing the Tao and how he creates abundance by giving instead of asking--and how you can too."
~ Did “Big Bang” Ever Happen? Understanding the Universe from Human Perspective: Part 2 -- "In the previous segment of this post, scientific arguments were presented to point out the absence of an absolute time and a unique clock in the universe that refutes the Big Bang theory and any beginning of time. This segment describes many other significant irresolvable paradoxes and inconsistencies between the Big Bang theory and the widely accepted theories and principles of science."
~ Every sense perception is an act of division within prior wholeness -- "In the absence of revelation -- either “given” or “intuited” -- there is no way to know about either the cosmos or its "parent," or source. Reduced to natural reason, human beings are like spiders spinning concepts out of their own substance and then living in and crawling about on them, catching the occasional meal. In fact, if the secular black window spider is going to be honest, he will have to admit that all he can ever know is his own web, which was Kant’s point. Kant took profane philosophy as far as it could go, which is why most philosophy since has merely been a footnote on Kant."
~ Principles of Morality - a fascinating new theory and model -- "So, there's this fellow named Jonathan Haidt who has been writing about the psychology of morality for a while, and he's just come out with some new papers and presentations on how morality works, and how it's affecting us as individuals and societies in the modern world. This is fascinating stuff."
Tags:
No comments:
Post a Comment