"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead."
~ Charles Bukowski
Image of the day:
BODY
~ Assessing Flexibility -- "One area where many men tend to be weak is with their flexibility. Not only are most males more inflexible simply because of the way they are built in stature, but they also are usually the gender that devotes as little time as possible to developing flexibility, thus further escalating the issue."
~ The HIIT Revolution for Fat Burning Success -- "Effective fat burning is all about EPOC, otherwise known as Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption. In layman's terms, if you bust your butt using these methods, you'll burn fat even while you're sitting on that same butt hours later."
~ Is it worth the splurge? -- "Find out when it's okay to indulge your cravings." For people who are compliant with their diets, I allow one splurge meal a week.
~ Scientists discover that chilli could be the 'holy grail' of anaesthetics -- "The compound which gives the peppers their zing has been used to make the 'holy grail' of anaesthetics - a drug that wipes out pain without numbness and paralysis."
~ Widespread weight loss may reap health benefits -- "If a large swath of the population cut down on calories and took up exercise, the resulting health benefits could be extensive, a new study suggests."
~ Flower Power: A Cure for Cancer? -- "Research shows that a common garden plant might kill leukemia cells."
~ New Healthy And Efficient Diet Suggested -- "A low-fat vegetarian diet is very efficient in terms of how much land is needed to support it. But adding some dairy products and a limited amount of meat may actually increase this efficiency, Cornell researchers suggest."
~ Something Fishy on Food Labels -- "Omega-3 fatty acids are heart savers — but all omega-3s aren't created equal." Good points.
PSYCHE/SELF
~ Results Of Body-Mind Meditation Study -- "A team of researchers from China and the University of Oregon have developed an approach for neuroscientists to study how meditation might provide improvements in a person's attention and response to stress." See also: Meditation 'works in just one week' -- "Those who are put off by meditation by the thought of months of practise can take heart, researchers believe you can reap the benefits in just one week."
~ 10 tricks to boost your memory -- "A little memory loss is perfectly normal once you hit middle age, says Martha Weinman Lear, author of the forthcoming book "Where Did I Leave My Glasses? The What, When, and Why of Normal Memory Loss." But, guess what? You don't have to put up with it. Health.com's 10 memory-boosting tricks will have you remembering where you parked the car in no time."
~ Beautiful Linky Goodness -- "Here are some interesting articles I've been reading lately. Before you skip on to them I want to ask you a quick question. What other sciencey blogs outside of psychology do you read that are easily accessible to the educated?"
~ God is in your mind -- "Not to put too fine a point on it, but so is everything else. Nothing we experience falls outside the mind, and the wonderful wetware behind it we call the brain. So looking into it to find out what's going on when we experience some of the most profound--and ancient--of human experiences is a no brainer." Brief post, but lots of links.
~ With Friends Like These -- "The dark side of companionship."
~ Six Ways to Make a Friend -- "How to bond with fresh faces."
~ Not Listening to the Voice of Anorexia -- "The ideal of perfection, and everything being under the control of the individual, is certainly in harmony with contemporary western culture. This ideal of control over messy emotions, ageing, our own success, has unfortunately become linked to being thin. This gives form to the voice of anorexia, a seemingly safe way to a painless and perfect existence. Just get thin. Just don’t eat. Just don’t feel." The authors may not realize it, but anorexia is a voice -- it is not who the person is. This is important in creating a treatment approach.
~ Empathy: The ‘As If’ Feelings -- "Empathy is not the act of getting lost in the state of the other. Otherwise, when a client is drowning, we would be pulled in and drown ourselves, which would be of little help to anyone. Rogers produced a sensible working definition of empathy when he wrote about sensing the client's private world as if it were your own. Is this essential to therapy?" Excellent post.
~ 5 Misconceptions About Meditation -- "I’m writing this in response to a few questions about the misconceptions about meditation in the hope that I can clarify what meditation can do for people who are looking some straight forward ways to better relaxation, mental focus, and reduced stress!"
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Looking Up From the Gutter: Philosophy and Popular Culture -- "Philosophy has never had a good relationship with popular culture. The two domains seem like different planets, each with an atmosphere toxic to the other. Thales (625?-?547 BC), the first philosopher, is famous for being so out of touch with the mundane world that he once fell down a well because he was distracted by deep thought. Philosophy broods, analyzes, and tends toward the antisocial; pop culture celebrates, wallows, and tends toward the communal. Philosophy is for cynics, and pop culture is for bimbos."
~ Gates Foundation gifts $100 million for grants -- "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will commit $100 million over five years to fund fast-track grants for treatments against health challenges facing poor countries."
~ Making and Meaning -- "Recently I was asked to say a few words about the relationship between the work of the critic and that of the poet, so I began with the observation that we are meaning-making creatures. Aristotle was well aware of this characteristic part of being human when in his Poetics he noted our love of imitation and linked it with our desire to know."
~ Barbara Ehrenreich: The Right's Academic Universe -- "So the real question may be, "What is the purpose of the Templeton Foundation?" Founded by John Templeton Jr.'s father, Sir John Templeton, the investor, the foundation set out to bridge science and spirituality while - on a not obviously related track-- promoting free enterprise. In just the last ten years, it has become a serious force in the academic world, generally funding anything too soft and fuzzy for the governmental grant-makers - studies, for example, on optimism, happiness, character, forgiveness and faith."
~ Is this the end of the Yankees' dynasty? -- "Don't cry for the New York Yankees, not that you were considering it. Yes, the team lost last night, making this the seventh consecutive season they've been dumped from baseball's playoffs without a World Series crown. Yes, owner George Steinbrenner is squawking in the papers. We may well have seen the last of Joe Torre, the team's deservedly sainted manager. But don't think you've seen the last of the Bronx Bombers."
~ Clinton Urges 401(k)s, Matching Funds -- "Families could get 401(k) retirement accounts and up to $1,000 in annual matching funds from the government under a plan offered Tuesday by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton." I wonder how she wants to pay for this?
~ Has the U.S. Ceded Southern Iraq? -- "As the British plan a drawdown in Basra, the U.S. has abandoned southern Iraq to warring factions."
~ Supreme Court Dismisses Lawsuit Against CIA -- "The US Supreme Court has refused to review a lawsuit brought by a German man who says he was kidnapped and tortured by agents of the Central Intelligence Agency." Nice -- the CIA can abduct you for no reason, transport you to a country where torture is OK, torture the hell out of you, and there's nothing you can do about it. Nice.
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Lawsuit charges Apple with unlawful iPhone monopoly -- "A civil suit filed in California accuses Apple of creating an unlawful iPhone monopoly, criticizing the computer giant for a software update that disables any iPhones altered to allow the use phone carriers other than AT&T."
~ NASA: major step toward knowing origin of cosmic rays -- "Recent observations from NASA and Japanese X-ray observatories have helped clarify one of the long-standing mysteries in astronomy - the origin of cosmic rays."
~ Astronomers Find Dust in the Wind of Black Holes -- "The hit song that proclaimed, "All we are is dust in the wind," may have some cosmic truth to it. New findings from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that space dust - the same stuff that makes up living creatures and planets - was manufactured in large quantities in the winds of black holes that populated our early universe."
~ Mysteries of ancient Rheic Ocean beginning to unravel -- "A wealth of information on one of Earth's ancient oceans is now available in a single volume published by the Geological Society of America. The Evolution of Rheic Ocean: From Avalonian-Cadomian Active Margin to Alleghenian-Variscan Collision addresses long-standing controversies surrounding the ocean's origin, paleogeography, and ultimate closure."
~ Lightning Strikes on Jupiter's Poles -- "The phenomenon is not unique to Earth, a NASA probe reveals."
~ Warm Winter, Dry Conditions Ahead -- "The expected mild temperatures should help off-set higher heating bills."
~ Hard disk pioneers win physics Nobel -- "France's Albert Fert and Germany's Peter Gruenberg won the 2007 Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for a breakthrough in nanotechnology that lets huge amounts of data be squeezed into ever-smaller spaces."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ A "pinch of this, pinch of that" generation -- "A survey released last month has gotten a fair share of attention in the blogosphere: The Venture, California-based Barna Group released a report, "A New Generation Expresses its Skepticism and Frustration with Christianity" which claims both that the numbers of self-identified non-Christians is rising in America and that attitudes of other groups towards Christianity are growing more hostile."
~ A few brief thoughts on reductionism -- "My argument in the earlier post was that one could conceivably account for the origins of all the clever stuff human minds do by looking at the evolution of simpler, more basic processes (processes which I dubbed “Dumskulls”), and that if we allow enough of them, it seems not unreasonable to suppose that we don’t necessarily need intelligent agents to build intelligence. This was not a reductionist argument in any strong (ontological) sense: that is, it was not saying that there isn’t any of this clever stuff."
~ Self-Transformation & Praxis - Part 1 -- "An Interview with Michael Murphy. This is the first in a series of posts that will examine the history & evolution of contemporary integrative transformative practices. In this interview Michael Murphy reviews how he came to promote integral practices as the best way of transforming self - and as a result, the world."
~ Entering into the source of Negative Emotions -- "Entering into the source of a Negative Emotion, is to accept it. By entering into the emotion fully, we gain access to shift and change it's direction."
~ Review: The End of Faith -- "If you think this book is only about the boring and tired science vs. God/religion debate, then you probably have a shallow reading of it or that you're too defensive of your own beliefs, religious or otherwise. If you think Sam Harris is an ultra-rationalist who reduces consciousness and spirituality to its neurological correlates, or that Harris is evangelizing his own flavor of Buddhist spirituality then you probably didn't take the time to digest the End Notes."
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