"Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
~ Abraham Lincoln
Image of the day (Tristan Campbell):
BODY
~ Training for Newbies, Part 2 -- "What you've got here, newbies, is something most of us crusty veterans would have killed to have had when we were starting out. Now pay attention to this article so Christian won't have to rap you on your knuckles with an EZ curl bar!"
~ Big Bang-For-Your-Buck Exercises -- "Want to build great abs? Forget sit-ups. Want great biceps? Forget all those curls. Want a great chest? Forget the bench press. According to Chad, isolation movements are a waste of time. He's either nuts or a great visionary."
~ Interval Training to Improve Performance in Sports -- "The faster an athlete moves in training, the faster he or she will be able to move during competition. So athletes use a training technique called interval training in which they run, cycle, skate, ski or swim very fast for a short time. When they become severely short of breath, they slow down until they recover, and then move very fast again."
~ Gauging leg strength -- "One of the best ways to determine how you are progressing on your fitness program and how good of leg strength you have in general is with a wall squat test."
~ 50 Ways to Increase Your Squat -- "How do you increase your Squat? I recently searched the internet for ways to increase my Squat, but couldn’t find one article which had all different ways to increase your Squat."
~ 3 Minutes a Day to Keep Back Pain Away -- "Simple exercises and lifestyle changes go a long way in warding off back pain."
~ Eating Garlic Boosts Hydrogen Sulfide Which Relaxes Arteries -- "Eating garlic is one of the best ways to lower high blood pressure and protect yourself from cardiovascular disease. A new study from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) shows this protective effect is closely linked to how much hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is produced from garlic compounds interacting with red blood cells."
~ Fruit compound can fight some cancers -- "Lupeol, a compound in fruits like mangoes, grapes and strawberries, appears to be effective in killing and curbing the spread of cancer cells in the head and neck, a study in Hong Kong has found." Mmmm . . . mangoes.
PSYCHE/SELF
~ 8 points on emergency preparedness for winter depression -- "for some people, yet another bout of winter depression, or SAD (seasonal affective disorder) is just around the corner." Or you could live in AZ, where the damn sun is always shining.
~ The immortal brain -- "New Scientist has an article and video interviews with several transhumanists who are attempting to make the human brain immortal by reversing neural ageing, implanting stem cells and uploading the mind to a computer." I wouldn't want my mind in a computer -- what fun is life without a body?
~ How schizophrenia develops: Major clues discovered -- "Schizophrenia may occur, in part, because of a problem in an intermittent on/off switch for a gene involved in making a key chemical messenger in the brain, scientists have found in a study of human brain tissue. The researchers found that the gene is turned on at increasingly high rates during normal development of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in higher functions like thinking and decision-making - but that this normal increase may not occur in people with schizophrenia."
~ Attention! How your brain manages its need to heed -- "Two perennial polarities beloved by brain geeks -- networks versus modules and top-down versus bottom-up attention -- get linked in this week's essay, in which UC Berkeley's Mark D'Esposito reviews an imaging study of how monkeys use their brains to direct their attention. The results, suggests D'Esposito, add threads to vital strands of neuroscientific thought."
~ SEROQUEL Exhibits Distinct Mechanism Of Action And Reduces The Risk Of A Mood Event In Bipolar I Disorder -- "New long-term clinical trial data presented recently at the European Congress of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) in Vienna showed that SEROQUEL® (quetiapine fumarate) in combination with lithium or divalproex significantly increases the time to recurrence of any mood event in patients with bipolar I disorder. Further pre-clinical data demonstrated that three neurotransmitter pathways are targeted by SEROQUEL in the brain - this may contribute to its unique clinical profile."
~ Blood May Help Us Think By Actively Modulating How Neurons Process Information - MIT -- "MIT scientists propose that blood may help us think, in addition to its well-known role as the conveyor of fuel and oxygen to brain cells. "We hypothesize that blood actively modulates how neurons process information," explains Christopher Moore, a principle investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, in an invited review in the Journal of Neurophysiology."
~ 13 Strategies for Breaking Bad Habits and Cultivating Good Ones -- "Most of life is habitual. You do the same things you did yesterday, the day before and every day for the last month. It’s estimated that out of every 11,000 signals we receive from our senses, our brain only consciously processes 40."
~ Living a Long, Happy Life -- "Fill life with happy feelings and live to a hundred."
~ Give and Live -- "You live longer when you give."
~ Genetic contributions to human brain morphology and intelligence -- "While showing an impressive growth prenatally, the human brain is not completed at birth. There is considerable brain growth during childhood with dynamic changes taking place in the human brain throughout life, probably for adaptation to our environments."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Drug makers, med school ties common -- "Nearly two-thirds of academic leaders surveyed at U.S. medical schools and teaching hospitals have financial ties to industry, illustrating how pervasive these relationships have become, researchers say."
~ Anne Enright Wins Man Booker Prize for Fiction -- "The Irish writer Anne Enright won the Man Booker fiction prize Tuesday for “The Gathering,” an uncompromising portrait of a troubled family." For those who don't know, the Booker is the UK version of the National Book Award.
~ Karen Kisslinger: Discounted Health Care For Healthier People? -- This is a great post with no single quote that sums it up -- but we should be thinking more about cost/benefits for health and healthy living, especially as far as health care is concerned.
~ Heather Wood: 10 Mistakes White People Make When Talking About Race -- "It's easy to botch an important discussion about race with fear, ignorance, or just plain silliness. Uninformed--or even overly politically correct--white people are the major offenders, sure, but anyone without adequate information can be guilty of sounding like a racist or an idiot (wait, that's redundant). With the help of some favorite (and vocal) celebrities and writers, here are 10 things not to do when trying to have an intellectual discussion about race--which, to be clear, you should do. But first learn from these mistakes."
~ What's in the Vatican Secret Archives? -- "A publishing house associated with the Vatican announced on Friday that it will publish copies of the Parchment of Chinon, a 700-year-old document about the Knights Templar that was uncovered in the Vatican Secret Archives in 2001. What other goodies do the secret archives hold?"
~ Cat Championships -- "Cat fanciers descend on New York's Madison Square Garden for the fifth annual CFA-IAMS Cat Championships."
~ The Fall of Marion Jones, Inc. -- "The sports establishment was shocked, shocked by her steroid-fueled Olympic victories. But they played a role in her downfall."
~ Bush Meets With Dalai Lama, Despite China's Warnings -- " President Bush met privately with the Dalai Lama today, despite earlier warnings from China that the honors being accorded the long-exiled Buddhist leader this week by Congress and the White House would harm U.S.-Chinese relations." Bush gets one right, even if it was for the wrong reasons.
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Staph fatalities may exceed AIDS deaths (AP) -- "More than 90,000 Americans get potentially deadly infections each year from a drug-resistant staph "superbug," the government reported Tuesday in its first overall estimate of invasive disease caused by the germ."
~ Facebook OKs Safeguards To Fight Obscenity -- "New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced an agreement with social networking Web site Facebook to enforce safeguards against obscene content and sexual predators using the site."
~ Upper Midwest forests are losing diversity, complexity -- "Forests in the nation's Upper Midwest have changed greatly since the time of the early settlers. And more changes may be coming."
~ China Eyes Joining Space Station Project -- "China hopes to join an international space station project that already counts leading space powers like the United States and Russia as its members, a government official said Tuesday."
~ Oriental Beetle Discovered in Indiana -- "An invasive beetle that's native to Japan has been discovered in Indiana for the first time as the plant-munching insect edges further into the Midwest."
~ Microsoft Links Phone, Video to Office -- "Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday launched two new programs that allow people to place calls right from the Outlook e-mail program, but analysts say businesses won't throw away their reliable office phone systems until the software maker's tools are just as good."
~ Sea Basin Expedition Nets Rare Species -- "Scientists exploring a deep ocean basin in search of species isolated for millions of years found marine life believed to be previously undiscovered, including a tentacled orange worm and an unusual black jellyfish."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ Hell -- "My thoughts of hell, this morning, are inspired by watching only a few minutes (sadly, I would have liked to watch more, but my weary head dictated otherwise) of a program about hell on the History Channel."
~ A LETTER TO ALL MY FRIENDS AND CRITICS (also my friends) ON INTENTBLOG -- "Please rest assured that I will personally correspond with Skeptisch through Mallika and make arrangements to meet him in New York. We will meet at a mutually convenient time. He is free to bring any neutral observers with him as will I. (Skeptisch will pay for his own travel and accommodations and for any colleagues he wishes to bring, as will I.) We will all observe the same phenomena and then come up with our own interpretations." Looks like a paranormal smackdown is brewing.
~ Integral Life Practice Conference calls – Free with your ILP Kit! -- "Do you already own an Integral Life Practice Kit and are looking for something more to inspire your practice? Or maybe you have some questions you'd like to ask the teachers. Now you'll have the opportunity to find that inspiration and get your questions answered in our upcoming ILP conference calls."
~ Teaching (Part II); and a Challenge -- "I can count on one hand the number of teachers who truly reached me in the course of my education, all the way from kindergarten through doctorate. Those were the people who inspired me not with how much they knew (although this may have been impressive, too) but with their peculiar passion, their inner sense of self, their uncompromising readiness to show the inside out."
~ What Can You Expect to Receive from the Practice of a (R)evolutionary Integral Spirituality? -- "The integral spiritual perspectives of (R)evolutionary Spirituality are great news for anyone who is open to a more inclusive, transcendent, embodied and non-authoritarian spiritual message. At its heart, (r)evolutionary spirituality is an open source, evolutionary process integrating and connecting the core spiritual wisdom of humanity’s western and eastern spiritual traditions while at the same time striving to transcend the ineffective, inapplicable or pathological elements of those same spiritual traditions."
~ Ken Wilber's House For Sale! -- "Ken Wilber is selling his Boulder, CO home after living there for over ten years (he now lives in Denver). In this house, Ken wrote Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, A Brief History of Everything, The Eye of Spirit, The Marriage of Sense and Soul, One Taste, Integral Psychology, A Theory of Everything, Boomeritis, and edited The Collected Works volumes 1-8. It was also here that Integral Institute was born, with over 450 of the world’s most gifted individuals gathering in this remarkable space to create an institution capable of bringing the Integral Approach into the world." Nice house.
~ Mahamudra by Patrick Sweeney -- "Patrick Sweeney leading a Mahamudra meditation at the 2nd annual Integral Spiritual Center gathering. Time 18 minutes. Enjoy!"
~ Evolutionary Consciousness; Is There Such a Thing? -- "Does consciousness evolve? Was the consciousness of the Buddha or Einstein a product of evolution? If yes, why did the overall consciousness of the human species not evolve to the same level?"
~ Essay published, and Kosmos -- "Phew, finally finished a few days ago my latest essay, Redefining Integral, which has just appeared on Frank Visser's Integral World website (based on my earlier blog post to Integral Praxis of basically the same name, but with heaps more stuff). It should be a seminal essay in the field, and I feel it is my best essay on the Integral Movement so far."
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thanks for the shout-out and for an interesting line-up of articles.
ReplyDeletebtw, i hope you will be submitting to the buddhist carnival ...?