Speedlinking 11/1/07

Quote of the day:

"After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one."
~ Cato the Elder

Image of the day:


BODY
~ Making tuna tastier -- "Tuna is one of the classic ‘bodybuilding’ foods that many resort to as an easy source of protein. Not only is it pretty much 100% pure protein but it is also quite cost effective as well, making it a good option for the heavier males out there who need to be consuming between two and three hundred grams of protein per day."
~ Weight Training's Dirty Little Secret -- "Chris wants to tell you a secret, but you gotta promise not to tell any strength coaches. And, after you read the article, bust up your CPU with a hammer and chuck it out the window so no one else can read it."
~ Excess Body Fat Causes Cancer -- "People should aim to be at the lower end of the healthy weight range, according to a landmark report published recently that links body fat and cancer more closely than ever before. The World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) report is the most comprehensive ever published on the link between cancer and diet, physical activity and weight."
~ Tired of Orange Juice? Try Concord Grape Juice -- "Are you tired of facing down a glass of orange juice every morning? How about trying another juice that has more than twice the natural antioxidant power of orange juice?" How about ditching the juice and actually eating fruit?
~ Study Of Complementary Therapies On Patients Recovering From Heart Surgery -- "A new Mayo Clinic study shows that massage therapy decreases pain levels for patients after heart surgery. During a five-month period in 2005, 58 patients undergoing surgery participated in a pilot study to examine the effect of massage on pain after surgery. Of the 30 who received massage, the mean pain scores were less than 1 on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 as the most painful."
~ Health Tip: Protect Your Joints -- "Osteoarthritis, a disease of the joints, can be triggered by injury and overuse, by obesity, and by musculoskeletal problems. Here are ways to help protect your joints, courtesy of the Arthritis Foundation...."


PSYCHE/SELF
~ Husband and wife find joy in living apart -- "My husband and I have been married for 14 years, and we’ve never lived together. Unbeknownst to us, demographers have devised a name for our arrangement: living apart together, which refers to married couples living separately."
~ 10 Effective Ways to Increase Your Energy Levels -- "Here are 10 simple (and unique) exercises you can use to increase productivity and energy levels. If you are in search of a boost, consider implementing a few of these recommendations over the next few weeks and see how you feel."
~ The Neural Substrates of Addiction -- "The social burden of substance abuse and addiction is astounding. In the United States, the economic toll arising from the associated crime, loss of productivity, and medical consequences reaches an estimated half a trillion dollars per year."
~ Effective is Not the Same as Efficient -- "The key to effectiveness is that you’re doing things that lead to results in the realm of your responsibilities. Meanwhile the key to efficiency is getting your things done in a manner that consumes just the appropriate amount of energy and resources."
~ Mind meets body...and animal spirits run wild -- "This weekend's edition of All in the Mind looks at the interactions between the body and mind, and the challenge for scientists in nutting out just how the two 'talk' to each other. Woolly territory if you think the mind is something ethereal and not of the flesh. How do states of the mind - moods, emotions, feelings - influence bits of matter - blood and bone? Ah yes, the old Mind-Body problem strikes again..."
~ Feeling Self Conscious? Relax, No One is Staring -- "If you’re human, you’ve done something embarrassing in a public place. And if you’re like most people, you probably felt like everybody was staring at you and judging you harshly. But were they?"
~ Depression and Mindfulness: Making Contact -- "Depression is the most isolating thing. It seems as though there were an invisible sheet of glass between you and other people. This sheet of glass comes, in fact, between you and the world itself, between you and your own experience. Everything is covered in a kind of fog, everything is wrong, tasteless, dull, not as it should be, an insurmountable task, a deep pointlessness."
~ Are We Happier Facing Death? -- "A new psychological study reports an intriguing finding - that terrifying thoughts trigger unusually positive emotions."


CULTURE/POLITICS
~ “Openness” & “The Closing of the American Mind” -- "Nevertheless, conservatives were right to champion Bloom, just as left-wingers were right to regard him with fear and loathing. Not only was The Closing of the American Mind a powerful indictment of intellectual and moral corruption in the academy, it was also, if incidentally, an indictment that might make the public sit up and take notice. Jobs, tenure, academic institutes, and college curricula might finally be subject to open scrutiny."
~ When Poetry Meets Politics -- "Time and Materials, Robert Hass' fifth collection of poems, is a book about hitting the cold water of late middle age, but the story it tells is not so much of decline as of reinvention. Hass is in the front lines of a baby-boom generation coming to terms with its past."
~ Most OK with birth control at school, poll finds -- "People decisively favor letting their public schools provide birth control to students, but they also voice misgivings that divide them along generational, income and racial lines, a poll showed."
~ Chris Dodd: The Questions I Wish We Were Asked -- "For me, it starts with our Constitution. In November of 2006, the American people overwhelmingly elected Democrats with a mandate to change course. Much attention was focused on Iraq, but make no mistake - Americans were also signaling that they wanted Congress to rein in the abuses to the Constitution under the Bush administration and the Republican Congress. Over the last few weeks, we've seen issues pertaining to the rule of law come up time and again."
~ Anti-Gay Church Must Pay $11 Million -- "Members of a fundamentalist Kansas church who picket military funerals to protest homosexuality were ordered to pay nearly $11 million in damages to a grieving family." The only way to stop these idiots is to take away their resources.
~ Examining the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act -- "The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act passed the House of Representatives on Oct. 23 by a vote of 404-6. The wide margin is indicative of a growing concern among U.S. authorities about the potential for so-called "homegrown terrorism" in the United States."
~ Bush: Questions to Mukasey on torture "unfair" -- "U.S. President George W. Bush defended on Thursday his attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey, who has come under fire from Senate Democrats for refusing to say whether an interrogation technique that simulates drowning is illegal torture."
~ Candidates Pander to Geeks in the Webbiest Campaign Ever -- "Wired checks out the six leading candidates' online efforts. While there's a lot to like, we see plenty to suggest that this geek thing is still pretty new."


HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Hubble Sees Graceful Dance Of Two Interacting Galaxies -- "Two galaxies perform an intricate dance in this new Hubble Space Telescope image. The galaxies, containing a vast number of stars, swing past each other in a graceful performance choreographed by gravity."
~ White Dwarf 'Sibling Rivalry' Explodes into Supernova -- "Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have found that a supernova discovered last year was caused by two colliding white dwarf stars. The white dwarfs were siblings orbiting each other. They slowly spiraled inward until they merged, touching off a titanic explosion. CfA observations show the strongest evidence yet of what was, until now, a purely theoretical mechanism for creating a supernova."
~ Groups Seek Stop to Comcast Net Meddling -- "A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars on Thursday formally asked the Federal Communications Commission to stop Comcast Corp. from interfering with file sharing by its Internet subscribers."
~ Scientists rotate electron spin with electric field -- "Researchers at the Delft University of Technology`s Kavli Institute of Nanoscience and the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) have succeeded in controlling the spin of a single electron merely by using electric fields. This clears the way for a much simpler realization of the building blocks of a (future) super-fast quantum computer."
~ Flying lemurs are the closest relatives of primates -- "While the human species is unquestionably a member of the Primate group, the identity of the next closest group to primates within the entire class of living mammals has been hotly debated. Now, new molecular and genomic data gathered by a team including Webb Miller, a professor of biology and computer science and engineering at the Penn State University, has shown that the colugos -- nicknamed the flying lemurs -- is the closest group to the primates."
~ Supermassive Black Holes Produce Powerful Galaxy-shaping Winds -- "Supermassive black holes can produce powerful winds that shape a galaxy and determine their own growth, confirms a group of scientists. The scientists for the first time, observed the vertical launch of rotating winds from glowing disks of gas, known as accretion disks, surrounding supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies."


INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ Rounding Up the Buddhas - Nov. 1, 2007 -- Renegade Buddha is back with a Buddhist blog roundup.
~ Enightenment Ain't Cheap: How Do We Support Our Partners' Transformation? -- "I have a T-Shirt on the i-Boutique that says "Enlightenment ain't cheap." It's a dual meaning: Yes, we pay a lot of money to attend workshops, etc., but we also pay with our relationships, our jobs, and our blood, sweat, and tears."
~ The Feminine Divine -- "One of the things that came up at this ISC event that I really feel aligned with is the sense that what is really needed right now is a full integration of the feminine. The divine feminine, of course, but also in a practical sense, socially, politically, and personally. Not just more feminine leadership and guidance, but a more full unfolding of the feminine in men as well."
~ Evolutionary Linguistics: A New Look at an Old Landscape -- "This paper by anthropologist Marc D. Hauser, David Barner & Tim O’Donnell explores the evolution of language, focusing on insights derived from observations and experiments in animals, guided by current theoretical problems that were inspired by the generative theory of grammar, and carried forward in substantial ways to the present by psycholinguistics working on child language acquisition."
~ Integral Life is Looking for Music Submissions..... -- "We are looking for some instrumentals to accompany our audio files on the new Integral Life portal, and are accepting submissions from the community. We are looking for positive, upbeat, professional-sounding tracks from pretty much any genre imaginable (although it's somewhat dificult to imagine a positive, upbeat Avant Garde Norwegian Black Ambient Metal track, but who knows....)"
~ Investigating participatory epistemologies: towards inclusional research -- "Alan Rayner, along with an impressive crew of participants, has launched a website devoted to an in-depth investigation of participatory forms of knowing, which he calls inclusionality, and is opposted to the isolationist effect of pure objectivist views, which sees objects as separate from their invisible environments...."
~ Kalmans Kosmos: The U Process -- "This is an article posted by Matthew Kalmann in new Integral Leadership Review. I have introduced Matthew Kalmans newly launched website yesterday, so here are reflections about the latest book written by Otto Scharmer. I have written seveal times about work of Otto Scharmer and I am endorsing his work. When I spoke personally with him in March 2004 it was very clear that he did not have an elaborated and in depth understanding of AQAL."

Tags: Matthew Kalmann, integral, participatory epistemologies, Integral Life, evolutionary linguistics, feminine divine, supporting partners, Buddhism, blogs, black holes, lemurs, electron spin, Comcast, supernova, Hubble images, geek campaigning, Michael Mukasey, torture, terrorism, anti-gay lawsuit, Chris Dodd, school, birth control, Robert Hass, The Closing of the American Mind, terrifying thoughts, depression, self consciousness, mind-body problem, effective or efficient, addiction, increase energy, married, living apart, Osteoarthritis, massage, heart surgery, concord grape juice, body fat, weight training, tuna, speedlinking