Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Speedlinking 10/17/07

Quote of the day:

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
~ Virginia Woolf

Image of the day:


BODY
~ Avoiding the two most common lifting injuries -- "There are some very common weight lifting injuries that are often seen among those who aren’t fully aware of what they are doing in the gym. It is important you make yourself aware of these and do your best to avoid them at all costs because if you don’t, you likely will find yourself sidelined with an injury."
~ Leg Training Myths Exposed -- "You know that it's better to go below parallel when squatting or that you don't have to stop half-way when you're leg pressing, but do you know why? Arm yourself with knowledge and bitch-slap that dopey personal trainer."
~ How to Avoid Leaning Forward on Squats -- "A common error on the Squat is to lean forward. Check the picture above for an example of a Squat turning into a Goodmorning. Leaning forward is bad. This article will teach you how to avoid leaning forward on the Squat & why."
~ Soreness After Exercise Not Prevented By Stretching Out -- "Studies show that stretching before or after exercise has little or no effect on muscle soreness between half a day and three days later, a team of Cochrane Researchers has found. Many people stretch before starting to exercise, and some stretch again at the end of a period of exertion. The aim may be to prevent injury, to promote higher performance, or to limit the chances of feeling stiff in the days after the exercise." Stretching after weight training may not reduce soreness, but it will increase flexibility.
~ Study: Eating Soy May Slash Sperm Count -- "Men who eat half a serving of soy a day have drastically fewer sperm."
~ Exercise improves older adults' balance -- "Regular exercise may help older adults stay steady on their feet, potentially cutting their risk of falls and fractures, according to a new research review."
~ Facing Fibromyalgia -- "Find out the latest in treatments for fibromyalgia."


PSYCHE/SELF
~ The Ten Videos to Change How You View the World -- "I believe that a sign of good information is that it makes you think. If reading a book, listening to a lecture or watching a video doesn’t change how you think, it probably isn’t that important. But if you encounter something that forces you to change your views, even if you don’t completely agree with it, you’ve found something valuable." These are all TED Talks, some of which have been posted here.
~ One Tip to Decrease Suffering in Your Life -- "One simple yet powerful thing you can do to remove quite a bit of suffering from your life is to be accepting."
~ How to Be a Friend of Yourself -- "We often focus on building relationships with others that we forget the essential first step: being friends of ourselves. That is the crucial first step if we are to have good relationships with others. How can we have good relationships with others if we don’t even have good relationship with ourselves?"
~ Study Of Sexual Offenders -- "While it is commonly thought that men with low IQs sexually offend because of a lack of knowledge or sexual deviance, new research has found the men may sexually offend because of their exposure to "corrective" sex education previously taken."
~ Relax: They Aren’t Thinking About You! -- "It may be comforting to realize that most people, most of the time, are far too self absorbed to notice any of the myriad ways in which many of us convince ourselves that we are doing something wrong (on a long continuum from something foul and inexcusable, to something less than perfect). But in the long run it is hardly a comforting picture, everyone walking around thinking about what everyone else is thinking about them; in fact it looks like a colossal waste of time and energy."
~ Work and Life: 15 Ways to Strike a Balance -- "Finding work-life balance in today’s crazy-paced world is no simple task. Spend more time at work than at home and you miss out on a rewarding personal life. Then again, if you’re facing challenges in your personal life such as caring for an aging parent or coping with matrimonial or financial problems, concentrating on your job can be difficult."
~ Overcoming Addiction and Escapism -- "A couple years ago I stopped believing in addiction. It’s not that I doubt the strength or existence of chemical and psychological dependencies — the bottom line is that everything is a choice. Addiction is somewhat like peer pressure–it hovers around, urging you to do something, but the decision to take action is yours. When people say that they can’t give up an addiction, it usually means that deep down they don’t want to or don’t believe that it’s possible."
~ Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought -- "Steven Pinker is a man stuffed with thoughts and gifted with language, a combination that has won him an unusually wide audience. In 1995, he published The Language Instinct, which was not just a best-selling Pulitzer Prize nominee. It was a best-selling Pulitzer Prize nominee about linguistics that was the first really meaty guide to how language actually works. Three similarly successful books followed. In one more about linguistics and two about human nature, Pinker gradually emerged as a polymath pioneer in the field of evolutionary psychology, which plenty of scientists had dismissed as mere storytelling but has thrived, thanks largely to his efforts."


CULTURE/POLITICS
~ The Real Carver: Expansive or Minimal? -- "Tess Gallagher, the widow of Raymond Carver, one of the most celebrated American short-story writers of the 20th century, is spearheading an effort to publish a volume of 17 original Carver stories whose highly edited versions were published in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” his breakout 1981 book."
~ Crack Users Do More Time Than People Convicted of Manslaughter -- "When crack cocaine possession means 24 years in prison and manslaughter means only 3, you know something is seriously wrong with the U.S. criminal justice system."
~ The Dalai Lama -- "Tenzin Gyatso is awarded the Congressional Gold Medal."
~ Burma: 3,000 Detained in Protest -- "Burma's military junta acknowledged Wednesday that it detained nearly 3,000 people during a crackdown on recent pro-democracy protests, with hundreds still remaining in custody."
~ The Notion: An Epitaph for the Bush Era -- "As a recently released document shows, the President remains "at peace with himself" no matter what."
~ Countdown to Internet Taxes -- "See how soon it will be before the Internet becomes taxed."
~ Social Security Rising 2.3% -- "Benefits for nearly 50 million Americans will increase by smallest rate in four years."
~ Fineman: The Gore effect on Hillary Clinton -- "Al Gore won't run. But he will affect the campaign."


HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Researchers examine world's potential to produce biodiesel -- "What do the countries of Thailand, Uruguay and Ghana have in common? They all could become leading producers of the emerging renewable fuel known as biodiesel, says a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies."
~ Is Mars dead, or is it only sleeping? -- "The surface of Mars is completely hostile to life as we know it. Martian deserts are blasted by radiation from the sun and space. The air is so thin, cold, and dry, if liquid water were present on the surface, it would freeze and boil at the same time. But there is evidence, like vast, dried up riverbeds, that Mars once was a warm and wet world that could have supported life. Are the best times over, at least for life, on Mars?"
~ Earliest evidence for reptiles -- "Newly discovered fossilised footprints provide the earliest evidence yet for the evolution of reptiles - a major event in the history of life. They are 315 million years old, making reptiles up to 3 million years older than previously thought."
~ Physicists Build Unparticle Models Guided by Big Bang and Supernovae -- "Cosmology and astrophysics may help guide physicists in building a model of “unparticles,” a newly proposed sector of physics. Recently, Hooman Davoudiasl of Brookhaven National Laboratory has investigated some basic requirements that unparticles must fulfill to ensure that our standard picture of the universe remains intact."
~ Massive black hole enters the record books -- "Astronomers have found the biggest stellar black hole so far, a monster with a mass 15.65 times that of our Sun, lurking in a nearby spiral-shaped galaxy."
~ The enGorsement -- "Some commentators are taking the unique approach of discussing Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize not in terms of whether he'll run for president, but in terms of the dangers of climate change who he'll endorse for president."
~ Early Humans Wore Makeup, Ate Mussels -- "A South African cave yields clues to an ancient beach party some 164,000 years ago."


INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ Dalai Lama to Receive Honor in America Today -- "His Holiness the Dalai Lama will receive the Congressional Gold Medal--America's highest civilian honor--in a ceremony today. It is to be awarded to him in recognition of his contributions to peace, non-violence, human rights and religious understanding. Predictably China is angry over the award to which the Tibetan Buddhist monk replied with a laugh, 'That always happens.'"
~ Integral Perspectives: More Than One Path -- "Recently, I've been thinking, doing, living, and exploring the many, many different paths to living an Embodied Integral Life. Ken Wilber, who continues to popularize this movement that is both a philosophy and a stage of consciousness, has masterfully built upon on those integral souls who came before and created a framework (the philosophy) that allows the expansion and explosion into Integral Consciousness (the stage)."
~ The Techsattva: The Subjectivity of Neuroscience -- "Episode #4 of urchinTracker ('/outbound/article/www.techsattva.com');">The Techsattva was just released: In this episode I speak with Neuroscientist and meditator Daniel Rizzuto. We discuss the intersection between contemplation, science, and technology, including the leading-edge of Neural feedback and it’s relationship to state awareness and state management."
~ Hell (Part II): In Iraq -- "Speaking of hell, I have been promising to write about Aidan Delgado’s book, “The Sutras of Abu Ghraib: Notes from a Conscientious Objector in Iraq.” As the title suggests, it’s the personal—very personal—memoir of a young Buddhist man who had the extreme misfortune to be in the process of enlisting in the US Army on the very day those Muslim miscreants chose to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He had, in fact, signed his enlistment papers only minutes before hearing the news."
~ AQAL Journal call - Integral Healthcare and Medicine - 11.03.07 -- "It's a pleasure to remind you about one of the greatest opportunities available to members of Integral Institute to personally connect with Ken Wilber. Please join us next weekend for Ken's bi-weekly conference call! Ken will once again be responding to your questions from AQAL: Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. The topic of next week's discussion will be Integral Healthcare and Medicine."
~ Marvin Minsky's Dreams of Immortality -- "My consciousness course rolls on, and this week we are talking about the question of AI and machine consciousness. So when I was looking through the New Scientist a few days ago, I noticed the name of Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of the AI labs at MIT over in the States. The article, on closer inspection, was a damned curious one."
~ The Opinion of the New President of Dogen Sangha International -- "Recently I have received an email letter from the new president of Dogen Sangha International, Ven Brad Warner. And reading it I have felt that there is a new tendency in Buddhist organizations, which is sincerely thinking of the future situations of Buddhist organizations."


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