"Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question."
~ Albert Camus
Image of the day:
BODY
~ Training Disasters -- "Tony shoots apart training myths like they were ducks and he was a starving fat man sitting in a pond with a rifle. Read about the "other side of the core," deadlifting mistakes, and the pencil test. (You gotta' take the pencil test.)"
~ Overhead Press Variations & Which One You Should Do -- "Several readers contacted me with questions on the Overhead Press. There seem to be confusion about the Overhead Press variations: which they are, their technique & what they’re meant for. So here’s a post on topic."
~ Personal Health: My Diet Strategy? Controlled Indulgence -- "Despite my well-known interest in healthful eating, I don’t believe in deprivation."
~ Sweet Dreams Make for Smart Teens -- "Just an hour of sleep loss can have a huge effect on a child.
~ Stevia Instead of Sugar -- "If you've ever tasted stevia, you know it's extremely sweet. In fact, this remarkable noncaloric herb, native to Paraguay, has been used as a sweetener and flavor enhancer for centuries."
~ Stretching may offer extended benefits -- "If stretching ranks below turning down the volume on your iPod on your list of health priorities, a new report may give you extra incentive to reach, bend and twist."
~ Just two hours of TV a day doubles risk of child obesity -- "Children who watch more than two hours of TV a day are twice as likely to be obese and suffer high blood pressure, say researchers. A U.S. study found those glued to the screen for between two and four hours a day were 2.5 times more likely to have hypertension."
~ How can you tell good fats from bad? -- "Every Tuesday, Britain's leading nutritionist, JANE CLARKE, explains how to eat your way to health. This week she explains the differences between fats."
~ Low Buzz May Give Mice Better Bones and Less Fat -- "Dr. Rubin, director of the Center for Biotechnology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is reporting that in mice, a simple treatment that does not involve drugs appears to be directing cells to turn into bone instead of fat."
PSYCHE/SELF
~ Fashion Bullying - You Aren't What You Wear... -- "...But try telling that to a 'tween or teen girl today. A recent Wall Street Journal article, Fashion Bullies Attack - In Middle School, focused on a dimension of adolescent bullying that is becoming more widespread. I have heard of it, but didn't realize how serious and pervasive it is."
~ Using Challenges to Grow, Instead of Fighting Problems to Overcome -- "When you consider a problem in your life, you possibly feel weighted down with the onerous task of solving it. Your shoulders sag under the figurative weight of whatever it is that has gone wrong. You sigh deeply within yourself, square your shoulders, and step manfully up to the plate in order to get on with it."
~ Emotional Abyss; Physical Cause? -- "I wonder whether doctors might routinely explore a physical basis for the sudden, unexplained onset of emotional pain."
~ Getting Rid of Yesterday: How to Start Your Day Fresh -- "Sometimes we start a day with the previous day still in mind. We think about the mistakes we made in the previous day, how things went wrong, and how we felt bad about it. No wonder it becomes difficult to focus on the current day."
~ Savoring Life's Little Indulgences -- "There are so many delicious, comforting, joyous moments in our life every day, but they are lost on us because we are often going too fast to savor them."
~ Social Isolation May Have A Negative Effect On Intellectual Abilities -- "Spending just 10 minutes talking to another person can help improve your memory and your performance on tests, according to a University of Michigan study to be published in the February 2008 issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin."
~ Buddhism and happiness -- "Perhaps more than any other religion, Buddhism is associated with happiness. According to Buddhist thinking, happiness and sorrow are our own responsibility – and completely within our control."
~ How to ‘Let It Be’ When You’re Upset -- "Something has you upset. You can’t get it off your mind. You’re troubled and you struggle with this ball of bad feelings. What’s the advice we frequently hear from others and even from ourselves? “Just let it go.” Well, that’s easier said than done."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ The Great Novel I Never Read -- "Six years ago, Slate asked critics to reveal their "gravest literary omissions": the most important books they'd never read. Norman Podhoretz confessed that he'd tried, and failed, to finish Bleak House. The New Yorker's Alice Truax said she was particularly weak on American novels: Moby-Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, and Sister Carrie." A new group of authors responds.
~ Top 100 living geniuses -- "The top 100 living geniuses was compiled by a panel of six experts in creativity and innovation from Creators Synectics, a global consultants firm.The company emailed 4,000 Britons this summer and asked them to nominate up to 10 living people who they considered geniuses." Strange, and a little disturbing.
~ Study Of Former American Football Players and Homosexuality -- "A study of former high-school American Football players has found that more than a third said they had had sexual relations with other men.In his study of homosexuality among sportsmen in the US, sociologist Dr Eric Anderson found that 19 in a sample of 47 had taken part in acts intended to sexually arouse other men, ranging from kissing to mutual masturbation and oral sex." A much bigger sample is needed to generate useful results, but still interesting.
~ Author Q and A with Alan Lightman -- "From the acclaimed author of the national bestseller Einstein's Dreams comes Ghost, a stunning and disturbing new novel about one man's encounter with the unfathomable that Booklist calls a "brilliantly orchestrated and gripping tale." In this Q&A, Alan Lightman reveals the strangest job he's ever had (in a drive-in theater), discusses how his favorite pair of shoes has survived for thirty-five years, and more."
~ Government-as-ATM -- "We’re delighted at the volume and depth of coverage of government contracting lately, an area too long neglected by the private press army in Washington and the business press almost entirely."
~ Will the Tax Issue Bite Democrats? -- "It may be the only weapon Republicans have."
~ Girardi agrees to 2-year deal with Yanks (AP) -- "Joe Girardi is back in pinstripes, taking over as New York Yankees manager from his mentor. Girardi was hired Tuesday, agreeing to a three-year contract to replace Joe Torre in New York's dugout." Word is that Torre is talking with the Dodgers -- woo hoo!
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Can Google kill PowerPoint? -- "It's cool to hate PowerPoint. The program's critics say it encourages lazy thinking, oversimplifies complex issues, and replaces spontaneous discussion with robotic presentation. Information design poo-bah Edward Tufte believes he has traced the Columbia shuttle disaster to one poorly conceived slide. But the old-school presentation utility gets a bad rap. Blaming PowerPoint for lame presentations is like blaming a screechy, overlong Daily Kos post on the blogging software."
~ Western Canada's Glaciers Hit 7000-Year Low -- "Tree stumps at the feet of Western Canadian glaciers are providing new insights into the accelerated rates at which the rivers of ice have been shrinking due to human-aided global warming."
~ Fossilized Spider, 50 Million Years Old, Clear As Life -- "A 50-million-year-old fossilized spider has been 'brought back to life' in stunning 3D. The male spider is a new species named Cenotextricella simoni. It was found preserved in amber in an area of France known as the Paris Basin."
~ Age of earliest human burial in Britain pinpointed -- "The oldest known buried remains in Britain are 29,000 years old, archaeologists have found - 4,000 years older than previously thought. The findings show that ceremonial burials were taking place in western Europe much earlier than researchers had believed."
~ How did chemical constituents essential to life arise on primitive Earth? -- "Experiments show that simple molecules can combine chemically rather than biologically to form the building blocks of DNA, the key component of all life forms. These processes might have taken place on primitive earth, but how they occur is an unsolved puzzle."
~ Fuel cells gearing up to power auto industry -- "The average price for all types of gasoline is holding steady around $2.95 per gallon nationwide, but the pain at the pump might be short-lived as research from the University of Houston may eliminate one of the biggest hurdles to the wide-scale production of fuel cell-powered vehicles."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ A Witch-War…Against Vampire Power -- "I’m both a Wiccan and a technophile. I have no quibbles with technology (obviously). But technology, like anything else, can be misused. The latest danger to begin seeping into the national consciousness comes from vampire electronics - devices like DVD players, cell phone chargers, and computers on standby that waste seemingly minute amounts of energy when not in use."
~ How to Choose a Spiritual Teacher? -- "This seems like excellent advice. If one selects a venerable teacher from within a time-honored wisdom tradition, one is largely 'guaranteed' a legitimate teacher who can act as a 'source of grace.'"
~ Zentertainment Talk Radio -- "Conscious Radio Discovering Life's Possibilities ~ Host Jo Davidson describes Zentertainment Talk Radio as "a place to discover (or uncover) creativity, healing, peace, and laughter." Jo's soul-full voice, deep compassion and keen intelligence inform her interviews with a variety of fascinating people."
~ Remember the Bamiyan Buddhas -- "There has been speculation that these “twin towers” were destroyed at the behest of Osama bin Laden, in a kind of symbolic rehearsal for those other attacks that followed in September. Be that as it may, this needless, spiteful vandalism on the part of the Taliban stands as one of the great barbaric assaults on the splendors of human culture, conducted in the absurd belief that to destroy the symbols of a religion is to destroy the religion itself."
~ Meditation and Distractions -- "I have found that the stronger I try to force hindering thoughts out of my head while I am meditating the more powerful I make them. They seem to just return even louder and more intrusive then If I just acknowledge them, mindfully watch them and contemplate why they might be appearing."
~ What comes up -- "In this case, it has to do with what I write about here. My thoughts tells me it is all completely obvious. I have already written about it ad nauseum. There are lots of other topics equally or more important. Why not expand? Why not explore something else? Why chose to appear as a monomaniac on this blog, when that is not so much the case in the rest of my life? Why have a blog in the first place?"
~ The Sutras of Abu Ghraib -- " The Sutras of Abu Ghraib is Aidan Delgado’s account of the year that he spent stationed in Iraq, but this is not your standard military memoir. Delgado’s story is made complicated by the fact that, whilst he was engaging in military training, at the same time he was engaging in the practice of Buddhism, and the book charts the growing tension between his military obligations on the one hand and on the other hand his developing moral unease with the circumstances in which he finds himself.
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