"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them."
~ Isaac Asimov
Image of the day:
BODY
~ Questions of Strength: December -- "The true Master Blaster discusses planks, high reps for legs, determining your 1-RM without killing yourself, backward rep counting, bad-ass Beta Alanine, building big arms, losing your pump, and the glories of buffalo meat."
~ Strike a Yoga Pose: Lotus -- "Lotus is the next pose in the closing sequence of Ashtanga Yoga after Bound Lotus. This is the pose I'm sure everyone thinks of when they think of yoga. It's a calming pose that many people choose to meditate in, and many yoga classes often begin or end in this pose."
~ Free eBook: StrongLifts 5×5 -- "Several of you asked me for an eBook. So I wrote one. StrongLifts 5×5 eBook: 52 pages big & available for free!"
~ Morning Jolt Of Caffeine Might Mask Serious Sleep Problems -- "With the holiday season's hustle and bustle in full swing, most of us will race to our favorite coffee shop to get that caffeine boost to make it through the day. However, that daily jolt that we crave might be the reason we need the caffeine in the first place."
~ Honey Seems to Calm Children's Coughs -- "A teaspoon of honey before bed seems to calm children's coughs and help them sleep better, according to a new study that relied on parents' reports of their children's symptoms...."
~ Holidays bring the heart attack season (AP) -- "Those lords-a-leeping and ladies dancing may want to consider the downside of the holidays: Heart attack season has arrived. December and January are the deadliest months for heart disease, and many of the things that make the season merry are culprits: Rich meals, more alcohol — and all that extra stress."
~ Natural Compound In Broccoli Could Treat Devastating Genetic Skin Disorder -- "The compound sulforaphane whose natural precursors are found at high levels in broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables has been hailed for its chemopreventive powers against cancer. Now sulforaphane has demonstrated new skills in treating a genetic skin blistering disorder called epidermolysis bullosa simplex (EBS), Pierre Coulombe and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore report at the American Society for Cell Biology 47th Annual Meeting."
~ Finding a Diet that Works -- "How many new diet plans have you tried? Some people can tick off a list of new diet after diet that they have tried. They yo-yo back and forth. Atkins, weight watchers, the grapefruit diet, the soup diet, the salad diet, the low-fat diet some people can't even count every new diet they have tried."
PSYCHE/SELF
~ This is your brain. This is your brain on video games... [Greg Laden's Blog] -- "Sex differences in certain abilities, which have persisted for decades in various psychological tests, are now widely believed to be the result of conditioning that is in turn shaped by cultural factors. This applies to math abilities, spatial skills, and a range of other activities. Neural plasticity is key, and widely misunderstood or ignored."
~ New Study Shows Anorexics Have Different Brain Patterns -- "An article in U.S News & World Report, Brain Activity Points to Origins of Anorexia, cites a study about differences in brain activity between anorexic patients and those who do not have the eating disorder. The study at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine did MRI scans of the brains of 13 "normal" women and 13 recovered anorexic patients while they played a computer game."
~ Synchronized Movement and the Self-Other Boundary -- "I've been reading The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt -- one of those delightful books pitched to the non-specialist, yet accurate and meaty enough to be of interest to the specialist -- and I was struck by Haidt's description of historian William McNeill's work on synchronized movement among soldiers and dancers...."
~ Does IQ Reflect Temporal Acuity? [Developing Intelligence] -- "Your IQ can be reliably predicted by simple reaction time tasks - perhaps even more reliably than with much more complex cognitive tasks. This surprising psychometric fact has led to the belief in human "processing speed." In the same way that a computer with a faster microprocessor might carry out more computations, with potentially less demand on memory, the idea is that brains with better neuronal efficiency also manifest both higher IQ and proportionately faster reaction times even in simple tasks."
~ Silence and Breath: Always There! -- "I remember first learning meditation practice, as a somewhat distracted and giggly student. The leader of the session said that "the great thing about your breathing is that it's always with you, you even take it with you on the bus!" I was sorely challenged in my attempt to keep a straight face. It was funny but it was true, it was funny because it was true."
~ My review of "The Body Has a Mind of Its Own" [Cognitive Daily] -- "I've reviewed Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee's recent book The Body Has a Mind of Its Own over at The Quarterly Conversation. So, is this the science book that should have made the New York Times' Notable Books list? (Several ScienceBloggers have complained that the list includes no science books)."
~ Weighty Bedroom Issues -- "The better he looks, the worse she feels."
~ Scientist Finds Way To Measure Covert Attention -- "The person you're speaking with may be looking at you, but are they really paying attention" Or has the person covertly shifted their attention, without moving their eyes" Dr. Brian Corneil, of the Centre for Brain and Mind at The University of Western Ontario in London, Canada has found a way of actually measuring covert attention."
~ Initial depressive bipolar mood linked to suicide history -- "Assessing the effect of patients’ initial bipolar mood state on their subsequent risk for suicidal behavior."
~ Happiness Comes Cheap -- Even For Millionaires -- "A bar of chocolate, a long soak in the bath, a snooze in the middle of the afternoon, a leisurely stroll in the park. These are the things that make us the most happy, according to new research. Researchers found that it's the simple things in life that impact most positively on our sense of well being."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ The Modern Sorcerer -- "One of the more intriguing accounts of the life of the inimitable Jane Austen emerged in the pages of The Times in 1926 with the publication of a letter which had been carefully guarded and passed on within her family up until then. The document hailed from the time of Austen’s near-fatal illness in the late winter of 1815-16, just after she had finished up Emma and rushed it to the printers."
~ Clinton, Obama Continue to Spar Over Health Care Plans -- "Leading Democratic presidential candidates continued to focus on health care issues and "the question of how 'universal' a coverage plan must be," the Los Angeles Times reports."
~ Everybody needs writers -- "Without expert wordsmiths, our whole culture would be put in jeopardy."
~ The Battle of the Book -- "At last, American society is getting around to the real villain in American culture, the one whose deleterious influence has so far escaped the magical transformation that technology, and its religion of velocity, is visiting upon all of American life: the printed book. Damn the printed book!"
~ A Usable Past for the Spiritual Left -- "The latest book from Princeton University's Leigh Eric Schmidt, newly released in paperback, appeared at a propitious moment in the national conversation about religion and public life in the United States. In Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah, Schmidt writes about--and indeed champions--the Spiritual Left as a counterpoint to the Religious Right, and his book, first published in August 2005, emerged just as the connections between faith and political liberalism enjoyed a period of renewed media interest--interest that has continued into the present."
~ What does a free society require of believers and non-believers alike? -- "Religious diversity won't work without reasserting the liberal essentials. But let's not confuse secularism with atheism."
~ The Golden Compass: The Making of a Fantasy -- "Check out the making of Chris Weitz's film adaptation of The Golden Compass, the first book in Philip Pullman's incredibly popular His Dark Materials trilogy."
~ Why the GOP Won't Get Behind Huckabee -- "Why hasn't this charmer with a perfect record on the right's core social litmus tests not already wrapped up the Republican nomination? Look no further than the uber-conservatives who are spitting mad that he's too nice to poor people and foreigners."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Is the Environmental Movement on the Wrong Track? -- "The new book Breakthrough believes we need hope to counteract environmentalists' dreary pessimism. But is this new "politics of hope" actually hopeful?"
~ "Doomsday Seed Vault" in the Arctic -- "No project is more interesting at the moment than a curious project in one of the world’s most remote spots, Svalbard. Bill Gates is investing millions in a seed bank on the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean, some 1,100 kilometers from the North Pole. Svalbard is a barren piece of rock claimed by Norway and ceded in 1925 by international treaty (see map)."
~ Climate Change Predicted To Drive Trees Northward -- "A study based on an extensive data-gathering effort concludes that expected climate change this century could shift the ranges of 130 North American tree species northward by hundreds of kilometers and shrink the ranges by more than half. Ranges may decrease sharply if trees cannot disperse in altered conditions."
~ Toll of climate change on world food supply could be worse than thought -- "Global agriculture, already predicted to be stressed by climate change in coming decades, could go into steep, unanticipated declines in some regions due to complications that scientists have so far inadequately considered, say three new scientific reports."
~ Fossils excavated from Bahamian blue hole may give clues of early life -- "Long before tourists arrived in the Bahamas, ancient visitors took up residence in this archipelago off Florida's coast and left remains offering stark evidence that the arrival of humans can permanently change -- and eliminate -- life on what had been isolated islands, says a University of Florida researcher."
~ Radiation flashes may help crack cosmic mystery -- "Faint, fleeting blue flashes of radiation emitted by particles that travel faster than the speed of light through the atmosphere may help scientists solve one of the oldest mysteries in astrophysics."
~ Whiz Chimps Outsmart College Students -- "Five-year-old chimps consistently beat adult humans in a memory number game."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST BLOGS
~ NEW INTEGRAL BLOG -- Shaman Sun -- "What would integral blogging look like? It would include a little of this, a little of that. Creative expression, journalism, spirituality, psychology, shadow; with these I hope to pioneer the daring meaning of integral, and transform a little in the process."
~ Deepak Chopra: The Future of the Body (Part 4) -- "Western medicine has proceeded on the assumption that the mind is intelligent but that the body isn't. In effect the body is a machine made of meat. This machine needs fixing at times, and being deviously complicated, with billions of interconnected parts, it has innumerable ways to break down. Medical research doesn't so much deny the body's intelligence as ignore it."
~ Nameless Dread at the Brink of the Transpersonal... -- "Here is a transcript of a conversation I had with Ken Wilber organized through Integral Spiritual Center to talk about his book Integral Spirituality. This is a transcript of Chapter Six, part 5 (parts 6 and 7 are continuations of our converation; I may write transcripts for those parts eventually as well). I highly recommend joining ISC to enjoy the great material offered there - here is a page of free offerings from ISC to whet your appetite."
~ The Radical Spirituality of Generation X, Part 20: Meditating in Sensurround -- "It would be nice to begin the journey with who we are. But "who we are" is a house of mirrors, a tangled knot, a great and terrible Oz that in the final analysis may consist of nothing more than, well, nothing. The self, I am afraid, may be more of an onion than a fruit, and "who we are" is the skin we shed."
~ Is the ILP Kit too simple? -- "I'd like to respond to the perspective that the Kit is basic or just for beginners. At one level that's certainly true. In fact, we intentionally created the Kit so that anyone can make use of it; even if they don't have any previous experience with integral. (We even call it the Starter Kit for that reason.)"
~ Monasteries as the Conscience of Society - "Buddhist Geeks continue their podcast series with Ven. Thubten Chodron. Interview by Ryan Oelke."
~ D'Souza vs. Dennett: The Aftermath -- "I just finished watching the 15-part video of the D'Souza vs. Dennett debate held at Tufts University. All in all it was a good and entertaining debate. Nothing new with the arguments. But I still recommend watching it from beginning to end. Now here's my take…"
~ Emotions as beauty itself -- "For this post, I’ll include more of my personal journey: that of dealing with emotions. I’ve always been someone who has had had very intense emotions to deal with, especially those related to my past sexual abuse. Because of this, many emotions have come at any and all times, without apparent “reason”: at work, in relationships, light social times, and with family. Without any visible reason or sense, at least in the immediate context, it’s easy to hold judgment about strong emotions in our culture. It can appear to make others uncomfortable."
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