Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Speedlinking 9/18/07

Quote of the day:

"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there."
~ Clare Booth Luce

Image of the day (John Craig):


BODY
~ Amino acids: all about 5-HTP’s -- "The research studies that have been done on 5-HTP show that those who take it notice and elevation in their moods while also experiencing a decrease in appetite levels. Obviously for anyone on a diet, both of these factors are going to be highly beneficial. Often the most noticeable side effect of being on a diet is hunger which then leads to a bad mood, so clearing both of these problems up will make your weight loss journey that much easier."
~ Heavy/Light Q&A: Super-Saturate Your Muscle For Size & Fullness! -- A heavy workout totally depletes the muscle, then a light workout forces more glycogen deposition so the muscle fills… Blast your triceps with this workout and learn more as the Q&A talks about going to failure, adding sets, supplementation, and more." I use this pattern in my training -- a heavy day followed by a light day with higher reps. It works.
~ Injuries: Nutrition and Recovery -- "Rest, ice, and Celebrex aren't the ways to treat strains, tendonitis, or fractures. John Berardi and Ryan Andrews tell you how to win the war against injuries using items from your pantry and fridge."
~ How You Can Avoid Leaning Forward on Front Squats -- "Leaning forward on the Front Squat is common. It’s also bad."
~ Find your perfect workout -- "In the market for a new workout? Want the lowdown on popular activities like kickboxing and spinning? It's all here. Our fitness gurus rate every workout, and tell you how the programs work and what you'll need to get started."
~ How Nutrition Affects The Breakdown Of Fats -- "Scientists report in the October issue of the Journal of Lipid Research that when either lean or obese individuals exercise after eating a high fat meal, their fats are broken down and oxidized in skeletal muscle, making them healthier. These results show for the first time how a high fat diet and exercise stimulate the breakdown of fats and may help design ways to reduce excessive fat in the body."
~ Blueberries - The Powerful Food That Strengthens Your Immune System -- "As you become more aware that you are aging the most powerful step you can take is to eat foods that strengthen your immune system. Blueberries totally protect you with its arsenal of disease fighting antioxidants in the form of flavonoids."
~ FDA warns Hain of stevia use; calls herb unsafe -- "U.S. health regulators warned Hain Celestial Group Inc. about a potentially unsafe herb in some of its teas, saying it might be dangerous to blood sugar, reproductive, cardiovascular and renal systems." A load of shit -- further proof that the FDA is in the pocket of special interests, like the sugar industry.
~ Exercise Has Type 2 Diabetes Benefits -- "Combining aerobic exercise and weight training may improve blood sugar control in people with type 2 diabetes, a Canadian study shows." Old news that bears repeating.


PSYCHE/SELF
~ Intelligence: Do We Get It? -- "Rex Jung says researchers need to understand how the brain is put together to better understand how it unravels."
~ Shorter Fall Days = SAD Symptoms Kick In -- "It doesn't take many days of sunsets at 7:50 p.m. for my own mild SAD to kick in. Even though the daytime temperatures are still hitting the 80s, I'm pulling out the wool throws and thinking about making a vat of mac and cheese. This is a common response as we head into Fall. Most of us occasionally suffer from the "Winter Blues," but SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder is more than that."
~ Racism's Cognitive Toll -- "Psychologists have some theories about how the experience of racism plays out in the brain—and what that means today compared to before. Basically, all human beings are driven by a few core needs, including the need to understand the world around us. When people do things to us, we must know why, and if we are uncertain we will spend whatever cognitive power we have available to diagnose the situation."
~ Diet & brain evolution: another item on the menu -- "According to one theory, increased consumption of meat by our ancestors provided the additional energy needed for brain expansion. (Cooking would have further increased the amount of calories obtained from meat.) Another holds that a switch to a seafood-rich diet would have provided polyunsaturated fatty acids which, when incorporated into nerve cell membranes, would have made the brain function more efficiently."
~ 9 Things You Can Do Tonight to Prepare for Tomorrow -- "But if you take some time tonight to prepare you can make tomorrow at least a little easier, more exciting and smoother to handle."
~ Combat Mental Entropy With These 10 Tips -- "Along with physical entropy I believe we all have mental entropy. This is the amount of chaos present in our minds. Problems, frustrations, tasks and people stack up to produce mental chaos. If you’ve ever felt like you have solved one problem only to have two more pop up in its place, that is the best example of increasing mental entropy."
~ The Dangers of Loneliness -- "Friendship is a lot like food. We need it to survive."
~ Mind Your Body: A Higher Road to Relaxation -- "The most efficient stress-reducer might just be a smile. Engaging socially with others triggers neural circuits that calm the heart, relax the gut, and switch off fear...."
~ The Therapy Marketplace — Finding Simplicity -- "There are so many treatments, methods, drugs, so many experts claiming to have the one true way. In my experience, however, no one got down to the essential matter of what can actually help a person who feels they need help, as simply or elegantly as Carl Rogers."
~ Health and Wellness: The Science Behind Personality -- "While it has always been popular in business and pop psychology, and within academic psychology, personality research has been a poor relation to the parts of the discipline with experiments and hard objective measures. However, this is changing fast. The field of personality is undergoing a renaissance."


CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Philip Booth: Day-to-Day Consciousness -- "During his lifetime, Philip Booth wrote poems illustrating the consciousness and day-to-day life of New Englanders."
~ Brandi Chastain: Why Sports are Critical for Young Girls -- "The pure joy, love, and passion have always been the underlying themes, albeit I didn't know that when I was six. But now I have those same emotions for different reasons, and it is why I KNOW, not believe, sports are CRITICAL for young girls. I call them the 5 C's. Challenge, Communication, Competition, Community and Celebration. All these categories fulfill a life necessity."
~ Naomi Wolf: A Shocking Moment for Society: Tasering at University of Florida -- "This violence against a student is different from violence against protesters in the anti-war movement of 30 years ago because of the power the president has now to imprison innocent U.S. citizens for months in isolation. And because, as I have explained elsewhere, we are not now in a situation in which 'the pendulum' can easily swing back. That taser was directed at the body of a young man, but it is we ourselves, and our Constitution, who received the full force of the shock."
~ Barack Obama unveils his tax plan -- "Sen. Barack Obama's new tax plan promises to provide $80 to $85 billion in tax cuts for the middle class. Also, to simplify tax filings so that "millions of Americans can do their taxes in less than 5 minutes." For anyone who spends the average 15 hours preparing their taxes every April, the prospect of five-minute taxes makes disarming North Korea seem like a low priority. But is it realistic?"
~ Stocks Soar After Rate Cut -- "A jubilant Wall Street barreled higher Tuesday after the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by a larger-than-expected half percentage point."
~ The second coming of electronica -- "Electronica is one of the stranger genres of our time, mostly because nobody is quite sure why it exists."
~ The Puppet Talks Back -- "By banning Blackwater USA, the Iraqi government is claiming powers the Bush Administration, despite its protestations, has never granted."


HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Scientist Warns of Climate Change Impact -- "Climate change could mean higher temperatures, less winter precipitation and less spring runoff for the Southwest, a climatologist says." Great! More damned heat and less rain. Why do I live here?
~ New Bose Speakers Are Even Smaller -- "Bose Corp. introduced new $399 speakers on Tuesday designed to provide top-quality sound from a desktop and capitalize on the emergence of the computer as a home music center."
~ Increase in atmospheric moisture tied to human activities -- "Observations and climate model results confirm that human-induced warming of the planet is having a pronounced effect on the atmosphere`s total moisture content. Those are the findings of a new study appearing in the Sept. 17 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."
~ Turkish court orders YouTube blocked -- "A Turkish court ordered telecom authorities Tuesday to block access to the popular video-sharing website YouTube over videos that allegedly insulted the country's leaders, a report said."
~ Jumping into the quantum whirlpool -- "A University of Queensland quantum physicist is applying a new theory to an old problem."
~ Climate Change, in Action [Chaotic Utopia] -- "What sort effects will temperature change have on our planet? Sure, the melting of the ice caps and the raising coastlines seem like important issues to address, as do hurricanes, droughts, and the management of fossil fuels. But what about the little things?"


INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ Cosmos and History -- "Cosmos and History is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal of natural and social philosophy. It serves those who see philosophy's vocation in questioning and challenging prevailing assumptions about ourselves and our place in the world, developing new ways of thinking about physical existence, life, humanity and society, so helping to create the future insofar as thought affects the issue. Philosophy so conceived is not exclusively identified with the work of professional philosophers, and the journal welcomes contributions from philosophically oriented thinkers from all disciplines." Some cool stuff here.
~ Humanity, Forest Ecology, and the Future in a British Columbia Valley -- "In this article, Stephan suggests the potential that integral mediation and integral ecology hold in addressing this interface. Stephan distinguishes two categories of ecological challenges, removed and local tangible, and indicates that they require adapting methodologies to address them. Using a local tangible challenge—a 35-year old conflict over land use issues in the Slocan Valley, British Columbia, Canada—as an example, Stephan outlines an integral mediation approach."
~ IntegralJournal (September 18, 2007) -- "I'd like to recommend a reading of Richard Heinberg's edited introduction to his about-to-be published book: Peak Everything. The edited introduction can be found here. Richard has been thinking about this for as long as anyone and tends to be ahead of the curve on where the whole thing is headed."
~ Roundup of Recent Whatnot on September 18, 2007 -- "Today, I've posted Whatnot - blogs that are new to me, developments and non-developments. Interesting stuff I'm eager for you all to know about."
~ Leadership Insights -- "I am pleased to introduce Leadership Insights, our complimentary e-newsletter designed to offer you a variety of articles and commentaries on the latest thinking, discoveries and practices in the fields of leadership and business. Leadership Insights will be published by THE POLING GROUP For Integral Leadership on a quarterly basis."
~ Enlightenment is in the Present Moment -- "Humans worry, it's what we do as partakers of the unsatisfying feast of samsara. We worry about our health, our families, our friends, our jobs, our country, our world and our environment. And we even worry whether we are worrying too much!! We also worry about our spirituality."
~ Mountains and Waters Sutra by Dogen -- "These mountains and waters of the present are the expression of the old buddhas. Each, abiding in its own dharma state, fulfills exhaustive virtues. Because they are the circumstances "prior to the kalpa of emptiness", they are this life of the present; because they are the self "before the germination of any subtle sign", they are liberated in their actual occurrence. Since the virtues of the mountain are high and broad, the spiritual power to ride the clouds is always mastered from the mountains, and the marvelous ability to follow the wind is inevitably liberated from the mountains."


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