"If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day."
~ John A. Wheeler
Image of the day (Neil Creek):
BODY
~ Crazy Shit That Works -- "Tuck the kiddies into bed and get ready to read some stuff so downright crazy, it's just gotta work. These aren't trendy new techniques you can pick up from the girl that leads your spin class; this stuff works!"
~ Accelerate Your Goals With S.P.E.E.D. -- "Even though the holiday season has begun, fitness enthusiasts aren't covered by sweaters, scarves and jackets all winter long. Effectively and efficiently hit your short term goals with S.P.E.E.D. - 5 steps to getting fit in record speed!"
~ What Is The Best Workout When You Are Short On Time? -- "What is the best workout when you are short on time? Get a quickie right here to boost your training efficiency. The following routines and tips are exactly what you need. These include GPP, HIIT, EDT, and more."
~ Eating Less Red And Processed Meat Likely Reduces Cancer Risk, Study -- "A new study by researchers in the US suggests that people who eat the least red and processed meat are the least likely to develop cancer compared to people who eat the most. The research is published in the journal PLoS Medicine and is the work of Amanda Cross and colleagues at the US National Cancer Institute."
~ Reading List -- "Everyone keeps asking me about which training books you should read … so here's the list of books I recommend my training staff (and in fact - ALL trainers) should have on their bookshelves (in no particular order)."
~ Too Much Fructose Could Leave Dieters Sugar Shocked -- "Here's one tip for how to eat at the holidays: Don't take your cues from Santa. The sugary cookies and fat-laden fruitcakes the mythical North Pole resident eats are a no-no. But you don't have to go no-carb to stay fit at the holidays, either, University of Florida researchers say. In fact, many dieters may actually be cutting out the wrong foods altogether, according to findings from a UF paper published recently in the European Journal of Nutrition."
~ Why use steroids? They work -- "Baseball players and other athletes use steroids for one reason -- they work." As I've argued before, the negative effects only occur with abuse of steroids, which the media seems to believe is the only way they are used.
~ What if bad fat isn’t so bad? -- "For decades, Americans have been told that saturated fat clogs arteries and causes heart disease. But there's just one problem: No one's ever proved it." Certainly, we need some saturated fat in our diets (and skinny guys bulking up can get 1/3 of their fat calories from saturated fat); the problem is that we get way too much of the bad fat and not nearly enough of the good fats.
~ The Good and the Bad of the Atkins Diet -- "Here is a break down of the Atkins diet, via three good points to the Atkins diet and three bad points of the Atkins diet."
~ Get Mountain Ready With Ashtanga Yoga -- "If you take the time to lengthen and strengthen your legs and core before heading to the slopes, you can seriously decrease the delayed onset muscle (DOMS) you experience the day after boarding or skiing. Let me tell you, Ashtanga Yoga can help get you mountain ready, especially the Primary Series."
~ Molecular 'Trip Switch' Shuts Down Inflammatory Response: Important Implications For Lupus -- "Like a circuit breaker that prevents electrical wiring from overheating and bringing down the house, a tiny family of three molecules stops the immune system from mounting an out-of-control, destructive inflammatory response against invading pathogens. This major finding means that new methods can now be pursued to shut down uncontrolled inflammation, restore immune system regulation, and treat chronic autoimmune disorders such as lupus."
PSYCHE/SELF
~ Memories, attention, and intention [Cognitive Daily] -- "The human perceptual system is able to enforce a large array of illusions on our conscious experience. Most importantly, we hold the illusion of a complete and vivid picture of our surroundings, while in fact we selectively ignore nearly everything we see."
~ How The Brain Manages Conflict: Global and Local Conflict Adaptation Effects [Developing Intelligence] -- "If you encounter a difficult situation, you may be extra careful afterwards, even in a different or unrelated situation. This intuitive statement has recently been confirmed in a laboratory task, and extended to show that such carry-over "conflict adaptation" effects may affect the speed with which you approach subsequent tasks very differently from how it affects the probability of making a mistake."
~ Scanning psychopaths -- "Today's Nature has a great article [pdf] on the neuroscience of psychopaths, as investigated by an ingenious study being run by a group of Dutch researchers. Although there is a higher number of psychopaths among violent criminals, a psychopath is not necessarily someone who is violent.
~ The Trail of Your Life -- "Everything that has happened in a person's life, all the events, all the emotions, all the joys and sorrows, all the highs and low, expectations, disappointments, and all the people with whom the individual interacts, could be called the trail of a lifetime. It makes no difference what age the person is; it is simply the trail that is discernible behind the current now moment."
~ How to Fail Intelligently -- "Failure is certain on the way to success. There is no way we can succeed without experiencing failure here and there. But failure could have either one of these two roles: either it becomes an obstacle that hinders you from success or it becomes a stepping stone which brings you closer to success. What makes the difference is whether or not you fail intelligently."
~ Rekindling an Old Flame--or Not -- "Are you still pining for your ex?"
~ From Breakup to Wakeup -- "Mapping the time course of recovery."
~ Does Time Slow In Crisis? -- "In The Matrix, hero Neo wins his battles when time slows in the simulated world. In the real world, accident victims often report a similar slowing as they slide unavoidably into disaster. But can humans really experience events in slow motion?Apparently not, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who studied how volunteers experience time when they free-fall 100 feet into a net below."
~ 7 Ways to Deal with Holiday Grief -- "Holidays tend to be family-oriented and if you’ve lost a loved one, the season can be an especially painful reminder of the death. Here are some ways to cope."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ 'Classics' raise more questions than answers -- "The "importance" of poetry is often invoked, sentimentally, by those whose interest in it begins and ends with the poetry they themselves were taught at school. To harrumph about Children Not Being Taught Classic Poetry is to preserve a thoughtless automatism about what's "classic" - to make of poetry a heritage artefact, rather than a form of communication or an instrument of pleasure. If studying poetry has any worth, it is surely that it should involve an inquiry into value, not an a priori assertion of it." Yes, and No.
~ The Year in Books -- Slate authors pick their favorite books of the year.
~ Steroid Report Implicates Top Players -- "Clemens was the most prominent name in the report, along with the Most Valuable Player award-winners Barry Bonds, Ken Caminiti, Jose Canseco, Jason Giambi, Juan Gonzalez, Mo Vaughn and Miguel Tejada. The report also includes the names of three of the top 10 home-run leaders of all time: Bonds, Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmiero." It seems Sosa wasn't named, but if you look at his career, it's obvious he was juicing too.
~ An American Humanist Political Party? -- "To our credit, we have many of the answers but one nagging question seems to continue to puzzle us. Why is it that we, who have so much to offer the world in terms of reasoned intelligence, thoughtful ideas, and personal passion, why is that we are so... well, alone? Why is it that we have been unable to attract numbers into our well-reasoned world? Why is it we are effectively perennial pariahs to much of the culture? In short, why is it we are, in essence, a "cult"?"
~ Believe it or not -- "And yet those with no religious beliefs are shut out from political power. Earlier this year, a secularist group offered $1,000 to the highest-ranking politician in the land who would publicly proclaim no belief in God. This turned out to be Peter Stark, a Democratic congressman from the San Francisco area. He is the only congressman, of 535, who professes no belief in the Almighty."
~ Rights and Liberties: The USA's Human Rights Daze -- "Human rights day passed by with barely any notice -- but we would all do well to understand the meaning of human rights."
~ I Am Legend, reviewed -- "Note to human race: Never try to cure cancer. You'll only end up with a faux-humble doctor (an uncredited Emma Thompson) bragging on cable news that a supervaccine is well on its way to eradicating the disease worldwide. Three years later, in 2012, that vaccine will have morphed into a population-destroying superbug, and you'll be alone on the planet with Will Smith and a German shepherd."
~ Rove, Bolten Cited for Contempt -- "The Senate Judiciary Committee voted for a contempt citation against Karl Rove and Josh Bolten on Thursday."
~ Politics: Playing the God Card -- "John Nichols | It's not Romney's Mormon faith that threatens the core values of a secular nation. It's Huckabee's messianic candidacy."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Scientists Clone Glow-in-the-Dark Cats -- "The feat involves a procedure that may help develop disease treatments."
~ In a parallel universe, this theory would make sense -- "If only we could prove that the multiverse was real, we could explain the contradictions of quantum mechanics."
~ Beyond the point of no return -- "As the pace of global warming kicks into overdrive, the hollow optimism of climate activists, along with the desperate responses of some of the world's most prominent climate scientists, is preventing us from focusing on the survival requirements of the human enterprise."
~ Top 11 Warmest Years On Record Have All Been In Last 13 Years -- "Preliminary global temperature figures show that the top 11 warmest years have all occurred in the last 13 years. The provisional data currently places 2007 as the seventh warmest on records back to 1850."
~ Light Sheds On New Fiber's Potential To Change Technology -- "Photonic crystal fiber's ability to create broad spectra of light, which will be the basis for important developments in technology, has been explained for the first time. The fiber can change a pulse of light with a narrow range of wavelengths into a spectrum hundreds of times broader and ranging from visible light to the infra-red. This is called a supercontinuum."
~ Moss is a super model for feeding the hungry -- "One of the simplest plants on the planet could help scientists create crops to survive the ravages of drought."
~ Reversible data transfers from light to sound -- "As a step towards designing tomorrow's super-fast optical communications networks, a Duke University-led research team has demonstrated a way to transfer encoded information from a laser beam to sound waves and then back to light waves again."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST BLOGS
~ Sitting as surrender -- "Just because the story of Siddhartha Guatama says he realized enlightenment while sitting under a pipal tree, does that mean that we must also literally sit if we want to do the same? As far as I can tell, his teachings do not suggest this. Yes, seated meditation is one form of practice in which many Buddhist engage, but what else is there to it?"
~ How To Meditate, Google Frame as a Global Issue -- "How to Meditate is a big question. One that's no longer just effecting a few people in private according to Google. It appears to be one of the hottest issues of our time, up there with who is god, and what is love. These are the big issues found by Google in the 2007 Zeitgeist, capturing what they call our 'collective consciousness.'"
~ Better Late than Never... -- "So I know it's a bit late, but finals week had me a bit busier than I thought I would be, so I didn't have the time to put up the results of my Eastern Religions and Philosophies project."
~ Daniel Dennett Doesn't Want to Exterminate Religions -- "As I've been ranting lately on my blog, there's a spectrum of the New Atheists. Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett may have been labeled under the same banner but their views and approaches to religion vary. So to say that the New Atheists are fundamentalists, reductionists and are only talking about the mythic God are naive sweeping generalizations."
~ Astrosociobiology article on Wikipedia deleted -- "The astrosociobiology page on Wikipedia has been deleted. For the sake of posterity, I present its final incarnation here."
~ Guns: A Loud Noise -- "Well, when I said yesterday that I was "sticking my neck out" with my remarks about guns, I did so advisedly. The piece came out in a slightly different version on the Huffington Post and immediately attracted a number of angry and indignant comments--20 as of this writing--several of them starting out with a derisive "Well, Pete..." Ouch!"
~ Misc Fun With Science... While there's still an Enlightenment... -- Some cool links from David Brin's blog.
~ The definition of compassion and loving-kindness -- "What makes you happy? What defines a good, meaningful life?"
~ Are Science & Spirituality Two Mutually Exclusive Pursuits? Part 2 -- "Whatever, whether scientific facts or spiritual faith, is not universally true is only a relative reality (bounded in space and time) and not the universal reality or the ONE TRUTH (commonly known as God). That is why it is important to understand the universe to know the ONE TRUTH since it helps a universal validation of the perceived intuitions, hypothesis, observations or experiences."
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