"Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors."
~ Thomas Huxley
Image of the day:
BODY
~ Keeping metabolism high -- "Any time you are eating fewer calories than the body needs to sustain itself your metabolic processes will somewhat slow. On a regular diet, say about 10-20% below your maintenance level intake, this slow-down really won’t be anything too drastic."
~ The importance of lower body workouts -- "The thing you must remember is that your lower body is composed of a vast number of muscle fibres - far more than that of your upper body. When you work the lower body you are going to see a much greater corresponding release of a variety of hormones that are associated with gaining lean muscle tissue. Such examples would be growth hormone and testosterone."
~ 3 Ways to Grow More Muscle -- "Some guys say the way to get big is heavy lifting. Some say constant tension, while still others say volume. Who's right? Well, they all are. But here's the rub: how do you combine all three elements into one program?"
~ What's your ideal weight? -- "The ideal weight calculator uses your height, gender and frame size to help determine a healthy weight range for you."
~ Muscle Patterns In Women Increase Risk Of ACL Tears -- "Research suggests that training programs for females to restore balance between hamstring and quadriceps muscles to better support knee joints could help reduce the disproportionately high number of ACL tears in female athletes."
~ Study: Soccer beats jogging for fitness -- "A friendly game of soccer works off more fat and builds up more muscle than jogging, new research shows." This study is old news, but it bears repeating because I love soccer.
~ Pill may help turn on anti-aging defenses -- "Researchers said on Thursday they had found more ways to activate the body’s own anti-aging defenses — perhaps with a pill that could fight multiple diseases at once."
~ More men busting out with 'man boobs' -- "The number of men with breasts is increasing along with the incidence of obesity, according to the author of an article in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine." Fat makes estrogen, and estrogen makes breasts. Bottom line. The other causes are mostly secondary.
PSYCHE/SELF
~ The Answer to Your Future May Not Lie in Your Past -- "Whatever happened, has already happened. Whatever you thought, said, or did, already took place, and no matter how much you analyze it, do regressions to it, transform it, and work with it, it will always be the past and it will always be in the past. So logically, the place to look in order to make things change for the future, is in the now. Understand that your thoughts from the past and how you dealt with life in the past is what brought you your then future...which is your now, or your present circumstances. In order to change your future as seen from the perspective of now, it is your thoughts and actions in the now that need changing."
~ Strange but True: Less Sleep Means More Dreams -- "About three years ago Eva Salem got into some trouble with a crocodile. It snapped her hand in its jaws. In a panic, she managed to knock out the crocodile and free herself. Then, she woke up." I've found this to be true -- I lived for a long time on 6 hours or less sleep per night. I started dreaming each night almost immediately after falling asleep.
~ Can We Predict Response to Antidepressants? -- "In this article, we use the example of major depressive disorder (MDD) to review research efforts to identify predictors of treatment response, both to antidepressant medications and to psychotherapy. We describe the promises and limitations of this research, with some emphasis on brain imaging studies, and then discuss how this work may be integrated into clinical practice in the future."
~ The Substance Abuse Handbook -- "The Substance Abuse Handbook offers a comprehensive, clinically oriented approach to the treatment of addictive disorders. It contains a wealth of useful information, ranging from causes of addiction to different modes of treatment."
~ Seven LEGAL ways to steal…and they’re good for you -- "It’s good to steal. Well, let me rephrase that. It’s good to steal when you’re not breaking any laws. OK, I admit that ‘legal stealing’ is as much of an oxymoron as ‘pretty disgusting’ but as you’ll soon see, it’s possible. In fact, not only is it possible, it can actually help you in your life at home and at work. Let’s call this a legal stealing 101, or perhaps the opposite of the seven deadly sins."
~ Why We Procrastinate -- "When we choose sabotage over self-regulation." This is one of my issues.
~ 10 All Natural Ways to Stop Feeling Depressed -- "The occasional case of the blues is perfectly normal, but that doesn’t make dealing with it any easier. If you allow them to, negative thoughts can fester and lead to serious depression. That’s why it’s important to take action early to bust yourself out of a slump."
~ Never-Ending Winter: Chronic Depression -- "Mood disorders are among the most prevalent forms of mental illness. Serious depression is especially common; based on a face-to-face survey conducted from December 2001 to December 2002, the past-year prevalence rate of clinically significant major depressive disorder (MDD) was estimated to be 6.6%, affecting at least 13.1 to 14.2 million Americans."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Dominant Hillary Scares Enemies -- "Hillary Clinton's skillful introduction of her new health care plan demonstrated why she is the most formidable Democrat running for president. It also suggested that if victorious, she will not be defeated so easily by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries as she and her husband were the last time they tried to reform the dysfunctional American medical system."
~ Re-Opening the American Mind -- "An emphasis on reading and math, however laudable, has had the unintended consequence of converting the humanities into a second-class muse. This pervades higher education, too. On many college campuses, there's a solemn dirge sung softly over the decline of the humanities as multiculturalism and political correctness continue to poison the wellsprings of critical thinking."
~ U.S. Dollar to Canadian Dollar Exchange Rate -- It's now 1 : 1, who would have thought that the US dollar would sink this low?
~ Kandinsky: Compositions -- "Wassily Kandinsky was one of the most original and influential artists of the twentieth-century. His "inner necessity" to express his emotional perceptions led to the development of an abstract style of painting that was based on the non-representational properties of color and form. Kandinsky's compositions were the culmination of his efforts to create a "pure painting" that would provide the same emotional power as a musical composition."
~ David Schirmer Exposed -- "David Schirmer is one of the experts featured in The Secret. Within the past hour, I watched a rather disturbing YouTube video clip about him after a forum member posted a link to it. Some of David’s seminar customers accused him of taking money he was supposed to be investing on their behalf (to the tune of $5,000 per person) and never paying it back or giving them any of the promised returns. So A Current Affair set him up and confronted him about this in a TV interview. I’ve never seen anyone squirm under the lights like that before." Includes video links.
~ Barbara Ehrenreich: We Have Seen the Enemy -- And Surrendered -- "Bow your heads and raise the white flags. After facing down the Third Reich, the Japanese Empire, the U.S.S.R., Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, the United States has met an enemy it dares not confront - the American private health insurance industry."
~ The Online Beat: Bush Loses It With MoveOn -- "What was the president thinking when he decided to pick a fight with his loudest critics?"
~ Dems: Tell MoveOn to Do Just That -- "Party is too timid to speak out against abominable newspaper ad that blasted Petraeus." Give them credit for one thing -- the conservatives have made MoveOn.org a household name. I'll bet only one in ten people had the slightest idea who they were before this shameful ad.
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Scientists launch deep-sea scientific drilling program to study volatile earthquake zone -- "Today, the Nankai Trough Seismogenic Zone Experiment (NanTroSEIZE) gets underway, with the Japanese drilling vessel Chikyu departing from Shingu Port with scientists aboard, all ready to log, drill, sample, and install monitoring instrumentation in one of the most active earthquake zones on Earth. The vessel's launch starts the first of a series of scientific drilling expeditions that will retrieve geological samples and provide scientific data from the Nankai Trough fault zone for the first time."
~ Arctic sea ice minimum shatters all-time record low, report University of Colorado scientists -- "Scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center said today that the extent of Arctic sea ice appears to have reached its minimum for 2007 on Sept. 16, shattering all previous lows since satellite record-keeping began nearly 30 years ago."
~ Astronomers Pinpoint Origin of Nature's Most Powerful Magnetic Bursts -- "University of Arizona astronomers have pinpointed the origin of powerful bursts from nature's most magnetic objects. The bursts are from "magnetars," some of the most enigmatic objects in the universe."
~ A Hole In The Ocean To Store Energy -- "Imagine you’re looking for treasure on a small island in the middle of an ocean. The highest elevation on the island is just above sea level, which is rising because of global warming. (You’d rather not see that happen.) The hole you’ve dug is deeper than the surface of the ocean around your little island. Should the skies turn cloudy and a storm come in, the ocean could come pouring into your hole. You’d be in deep trouble in your hole in the middle of the ocean. But you have a second revelation, you’ve invented an energy storage device."
~ Hewlett Packard Helps Fight Africa's E-waste Battle -- "Computer company Hewlett-Packard (HP) has launched a project to help local African enterprises perform safer and more effective electronic waste recycling."
~ Experiments challenge models about the deep Earth -- "In the first experiments able to mimic the crushing, searing conditions found in Earth`s lower mantle, and simultaneously probe tell-tale properties of iron, scientists have discovered that material there behaves very differently than predicted by models. The research also points to the likelihood of a new zone deep in the Earth. The work is published in the September 21, 2007, issue of Science."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ Discussing Marshall McLuhan -- "Marshall McLuhan is a genius. His deeply suggestive, provocative, and penetrating assertions and insights about the workings of media upon culture, society, and the individual psyche are singular and without peer."
~ I Don't Have to Like It -- "I'm revisiting an irritating thing about mindfulness these days, something I tend to want to forget. I'm relearning that practicing mindfulness does not make things "all better." Meditation, staying present, and all those rosy practices do not spirit away the icky stuff of life. In fact, they bring it closer."
~ BLOG: Guest Blog: Integral Sees Strange Bedfellows: Turkish Politics by Emine Kiray -- "The recent political crisis in Turkey broke out in April just as I was getting ready to read Chapter 15 of the Terrorism Trilogy/Integral Politics. They were (and still are) tense days: Prime Minister Erdogan and his ruling Islamist AK Party nominated Foreign Minister Gul for the presidency."
~ Seeking tranquility in a stressful world -- "With the hectic lifestyle and chaos in the present world many of us are caught in a dilemma, being unable to identify priorities in life. Certain people fail to reconcile the unrest surrounding them thus falling into the abyss of frustration and disappointment."
~ Wilber Assessment vs. Advertising -- "The Integral Vision, the latest product of the Integral marketing machine, is a rehash of material from Integral Spirituality, most notably its Introduction. It would have been fine to warn readers that they bought nothing new, except a lot of flashy techno-erotic illustrations, and a couple of "1-minute excercises" included in Integral Life Practice. The overall tone is: we are an organization that has truth on its side, has a method that is the most effective, and above all: you can join us. Not a shadow of doubt falls over these pages."
~ The Wisdom of Insecurity (Alan Watts) -- "If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass."
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