"On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time."
~ George Orwell
Image of the day:
BODY
~ Fear Is Stronger Motivator To Get Fit Than Hope For Those Worrying About Their Bodies, Says Study, UK -- "Fear of looking unattractive can be a stronger motivation for keeping people going to the gym than the hope of looking good, a study says. Researchers at the University of Bath, UK, interviewed 281 male and female undergraduates and got half to imagine a physically unattractive version of themselves they feared they might turn into."
~ Survival Of The Fittest: Holiday Training & Nutrition Tips! -- "Giving in is an almost certainty… If you're reading this, you can feel what I'm saying, can't you? Overcome ‘The Holiday Festival’ with these simple tips: keep your routine, maintaining nutrition, and more! Learn more."
~ Drug maker packs red-wine-like compound in pill -- "New compounds that act like the red wine ingredient resveratrol may offer a new formula for type 2 diabetes drugs and other age-related diseases, researchers at U.S. drug maker Sirtris Pharmaceuticals said on Wednesday."
~ Don't Believe It! The 3 Worst Exercise Tips -- "There is no shortage of advice on how to slim down and shape up. Of course, a lot of it -- whether from a book, the Internet or even some trainers -- is just plain bunk."
~ Handwashing beats drugs in fighting viruses -- "Physical barriers, such as regular handwashing and wearing masks, gloves and gowns, may be more effective than drugs to prevent the spread of respiratory viruses such as influenza and SARS, a study has found."
~ Overweight? Standing May Be Solution -- "Scientists say just standing up may be more important than exercise." Evolutionarily, we weren't designed to sit in chairs all day, so this makes sense.
~ The Ultra-Metabolism Diet -- "With the increase in overweight people, everyone is on the search for the best way to boost their metabolism. Learn more about this health & fat loss diet, how it works, benefits, and more." Not a bad idea, except for the soy in phase two -- I'd focus on whey and turkey meat for protein.
PSYCHE/SELF
~ Why can't you stop worrying? -- "Too many women are fretting about the future instead of savoring happiness now. Find out how to stop the cycle—and get back to enjoying every day."
~ 3 Happiness Enhancing Activities With Evidence They Work -- "The 'How to Be Happy' article has become a staple of newspapers, magazines, books and, increasingly, of websites. We should 'accept reality', or 'take a break', or 'be honest with ourselves', or 'surround ourselves with happy people'. These things are unlikely to do us any harm but that doesn't stop them reading like a list of platitudes - the kind that people are always doling out but never follow themselves."
~ You Have To Realize That You Aren’t Normal -- "From a young age, you probably realized that you weren’t cut from the same cloth as most of the people around you. You saw things differently, and different things held value for you than what was important to the people around you. You always felt a bit like an outsider, and even when you did seem to fit in, you still felt like you were on the fringes, waiting for people to find out your secret."
~ The Ethics of Boosting Brainpower -- "Cognitive enhancements are on the scientific horizon -- ways of making our brains function better. But they will only be available to those who are able to pay for them?'
~ Denial Makes the World Go Round -- "'Everyone is in denial about something; just try denying it and watch friends make a list." An article in the New York Times looks at research on denial and comes to the conclusion that far from being a destructive force it is a necessary part of life, which both protects us and actually helps us to form and nourish relationships."
~ Avoiding Mediocrity: Do You Dare to Be Different? -- "I don’t know about you, but one of the things I’m afraid most in life is mediocrity. For me, life is too precious to be lived in mediocrity. Life is a golden opportunity, and we should use it as good as we can. Living in mediocrity means we do not use the opportunity as well as we should."
~ Therapy: Man's Last Stand -- "Men don't seek out much-needed therapy." I know lots of men in therapy, so I hope this is changing -- but then, my friends aren't the traditional males.
~ How to Achieve the Creative State of Flow -- "Have you ever been so engaged in an activity that you lost track of time or even your surroundings? A bomb could of gone off (figuratively) and you wouldn’t have noticed?"
~ Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic -- "Could more distance be the key to keeping the passion in long-term relationships?"
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Cyber Monday online sales jump 21 percent -- "American consumers jammed online shopping sites on Monday, the official start of the holiday season for e-tailers, resulting in robust sales, according to an Internet research company."
~ Science Of Behavioral Economics To Steer People Toward Wiser Health Choices -- "Policy makers, employers and others can use the science of behavioral economics to steer people toward wiser choices - and dramatically improve their health - without limiting their freedom to do as they please, according to an article published in the Nov. 28 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)."
~ The 10 Best Books of 2007 -- NYT -- "The Book Review picks the best works from the previous year."
~ The epic failure of American foreign policy in recent years should have yielded a new world vision among candidates seeking to replace U.S. President George W. Bush. But it hasn't, and perhaps it won't."
~ John W. Whitehead: Our Schools Are Graveyards For Freedom -- "Modern technology now makes it possible for roaming digital eyes to watch every move students make. Using surveillance cameras, young people are under observation from the moment they step foot on a bus until they arrive home. In fact, schools both small and large are beginning to litter their hallways, classrooms and even buses with surveillance cameras." Man, I would have been up shit creek if they were doing this when I was a kid.
~ US 4th Graders Falter in Reading -- "U.S. fourth-graders have lost ground in reading ability compared with kids around the world, despite an emphasis on the subject under the No Child Left Behind law."
~ Torture and America's Crisis of Faith -- "The Senate's retreat from its initial demand that now-Attorney General Michael Mukasey denounce waterboarding is detrimental to the country's moral fabric. For the first time, torture bears an imprimatur of democratic approval."
~ Covering up the trail of dead Iraqis -- "How the Pentagon has used "tactical perception management" to obscure the killing of Iraqi civilians by U.S. forces."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Discovering Teenage Galaxies Billions Of Light Years Away -- "Staring for the equivalent of every night for two weeks at the same little patch of sky with ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have found the extremely faint light from teenage galaxies billions of light years away. These galaxies, which the research team believes are the building blocks of normal galaxies like our Milky Way, had eluded detection for three decades, despite intensive searches."
~ Researchers Examine Einstein's Theories On The Universe -- "Einstein's self-proclaimed "biggest blunder" -- his postulation of a cosmological constant (a force that opposes gravity and keeps the universe from collapsing) -- may not be such a blunder after all, according to the research of an international team of scientists."
~ Scientists report first findings on key astrophysics problem -- "In a paper published recently in the journal Nature Physics, an international team of space scientists led by researchers from the University of New Hampshire present findings on the first experimental evidence that points in a new direction toward the solution of a longstanding, central problem of plasma astrophysics and space physics."
~ Chandra discovers cosmic cannonball -- "One of the fastest moving stars ever seen has been discovered with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This cosmic cannonball is challenging theories to explain its blistering speed."
~ You know what they say about a guy with a big footprint? -- "The GAO has reported on subsidies to our electric sector, proving what Grist readers already (sadly) know, namely that subsidies to the dirty folks vastly exceed existing or proposed subsidies to cleaner generation."
~ High Resolution Antarctica Map Lays Ground For New Discoveries -- "Scientists have completed a map of Antarctica that is expected to revolutionize research of the continent's frozen landscape. The map is a realistic, nearly cloudless satellite view of the continent at a resolution 10 times greater than ever before. With the unprecedented ability to see features half the size of a basketball court, the mosaic offers the most geographically accurate, true-color, high-resolution views of Antarctica possible."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ Morality, Religion & Human Nature: Towards an Integrative Ethics -- "When Dr. Jonathan Haidt started graduate school in 1987, he surmised that developmental psychology owned the rights to study 'morality' within psychology. Everyone was either using or critiquing Lawrence Kohlberg's ideas, using his general method of interviewing kids about dilemmas (such as: should Heinz steal a drug to save his wife's life?)."
~ A Glimpse at the Portal - Part II - Community Features -- "We believe that one of our primary tasks at Integral Life is to enable the space in which these perspectives can arise, giving our members a platform for publishing novel integral content, art, video, presentations, music – in effect, to contribute to the world around a shared intention of living with more awareness."
~ Gifts -- "I am responsible for my everyday activities, including the ways I work on improving myself and my position in the world, but not responsible for what life hands me such as opportunities, accidents, illness and so on. Of course, there are times when the boundary gets fuzzy and we then see our task as sorting out what goes where."
~ Black Tuesday: One Year Later -- "It was exactly one year ago today that I and nine others resigned from Integral Institute in a blaze of glory which would come to be known as “Black Tuesday”. I had been working up until then as a graphic designer for the non-profit organization, which was founded by philosopher Ken Wilber in the late 90s to develop an inclusive, post-postmodern approach to the problems of the world. I had been reading his books since 1999, and was hired to work full-time in November 2003."
~ Western proto-Buddhism -- "A conversation between Rev. Jiun Foster and a practitioner on the topic of Western Buddhism. Some of it refers specifically to the American situation, but many remarks apply equally well, at least as one view, on the general Western development in various streams of Buddhadharma, institutionally and in individual practice." Links to audio download.
~ Love, Conversation, Community: Three Magic Words -- "This article is an attempt to explain how these masculine and feminine 'Natural' social worldviews are consistent. I originally wanted to synthesize them into one, but they seem to be as irreducibly binary as yin and yang."
~ Reflections on Meat by a Buddhist Vegetarian -- "The main reason that I decided to become vegetarian was from an immense love of animals and compassion for their suffering. I feel a very deep connection and bond to all sentient beings and feel that eating them is no different then eating my mother."
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