Thursday, December 20, 2007

Speedlinking 12/20/07

Quote of the day:

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."
~ Arthur Shopenhauer

Image of the day:



BODY

~ When Gourmet Meets Nutrition -- "John Berardi's made a living from coming up with great tasting recipes that are incredibly delicious but these latest selections are downright inspired. Throw away the Christmas goodies and try some of these instead."
~ Skiing: The Ultimate Winter Workout -- "There are many benefits in participating in cross-country skiing. Because skiing requires the use of muscles in the upper and lower body at the same time, it builds strength in the entire body and keeps you in shape. It gives you an aerobic workout that allows you to burn up to 950 kilocalories an hour, compared to about 77 kilocalories an hour with running."
~ Understanding Food Labels & Knowing What To Look For! -- "The ability to read and evaluate food labels is not just a matter of choosing to eat healthy. To those of us trying to gain muscle mass choosing the right mix of foods can be critical. Learn how to decipher those labels and more!"
~ Antagonistic Superset Workout: Up For The Challenge? -- "Supersetting is an extremely effective workout style where you perform two exercises back to back with no rest. Discover what the antagonistic superset workout is and how effective it can be." ALL of my clients do supersets in their workouts.
~ Introducing Fit's Downloadable Fitness and Food Journals -- "Have you been looking for a printable fitness journal? Do you want to keep track of all those healthy veggies you are eating? Well, I have some very helpful journals for you. Our fabulous designer has created a fitness journal and food journal, just in time to help you stick to your healthy New Year's Resolutions."
~ 5 of the Best Fitness Gifts for Starting the New Year Right -- "Has someone you know made a New Year's resolution to finally lose weight and get fit? Are you looking for the perfect gift for that special someone (or maybe yourself??) that can help them "get the edge" in their quest for a leaner, tighter, better-looking body? The best fitness gifts are unique, interesting and make working out and getting fit fun."
~ Fitness Tips for Exercise Phobic Shoppers -- "If even the thought of going to the gym makes you break out in hives, fear not. You can get just as good a workout by heading for the nearest shopping mall."
~ Stop Sabotaging Your Diet -- "When you’re getting ready to start a new diet do you already feel doomed to fail? Are you saying to yourself, “Okay, I’ll give this diet a shot, but it probably won’t work either”? There are many reasons that a lot of diets don’t work, or work for awhile and then you start putting the weight back
on. Here are some things you can do about it."
~ Low-Calorie Cocktails -- "A little planning can help keep happy hour from turning into a diet disaster."


PSYCHE/SELF
~ Making Sense Of Speech In The Brain -- "Researchers have identified regions of the brain where speech sounds are perceived as having abstract meaning, rather than as just a stream of sensory input. They said their identification of the regions demonstrates that the understanding of speech does not just emerge from lower-level processing of speech sounds, but involves a specialized perceptual region."
~ Researchers Investigate Teen Risk-Taking -- "Adolescence has come to be associated with risky behavior, and it's not surprising that researchers have long questioned why many problem behaviors, such as drinking, drug use, and unprotected sex, often begin during adolescence. This week, the New York Times looked at some past studies that have investigated the factors involved in teenaged decision making."
~ News: Signaling Neurons Make Neighbor Cells "Want In" -- "A new discovery about the function of neurons could help scientists understand how the brain assembles information during learning and memory formation."
~ Act Now, Regret Later? -- "Many carry out the pretty irrational act of buying Lottery tickets out of "anticipatory regret": those who choose the same set of numbers simply cannot bear the thought of them coming up one day when they hadn't bought a ticket. Anyone out there carrying on doing the best they can in a dysfunctional relationship with a similar mindset?"
~ 12 Tips to Improve the Quality of Your Free Time -- "Are you happier at your job, or during your free time? Unless you’ve followed the research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi you would probably be surprised at the actual answer. He conducted studies which recorded peoples current levels of happiness at random points both during work and off-hours. The surprising conclusion? People felt happier on the job, even though they said they would rather be at home."
~ Why Self Actualization Requires Exercise -- "Abraham Maslow was wise beyond his time. He created a simple hierarchy that categorizes the needs of every human being. The hierarchy indicates that the highest level of achievement is self-actualization. But it also reminds us of the necessity of maintaining our most vital physical needs."
~ Evidence Doesn't Support CYP450 Gene Testing Before Antidepressant Treatment -- "Cytochrome P450 (CYP450) gene testing is currently not recommended to guide treatment with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) drugs for patients with depression, concludes an expert panel report in the December issue of Genetics in Medicine, published by the American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG)...." Interesting -- it seemed that gene testing was going to become standard practice.
~ Judging Others ... Judging Yourself -- "Judging other people for any of the above and many other things, is a curious phenomenon. As we judge others we are actually judging ourselves. What I mean by that is that if we feel we must judge, we automatically place ourselves in a position of "better" in some way than the other person. Examine that for a moment. Better? Better?"
~ The Key To True Happiness -- "It is a sad and true fact that the vast majority of people are not really happy."


CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Peter Travers' Best and Worst Movies of 2007 -- Rolling Stone's film critic offers his best and worst of 2007.
~ It's Time to Legalize Drugs -- " Rhetoric should not be driving drug policy. Legalization would strip addiction down to what it really is: a health issue."
~ A dismal year for books? -- "Publishing has become a high-stakes game amid store closings, declines in sales, profits, book review sections -- even literacy."
~ To advance religious freedom, teach about religion -- "Titled the Toledo Guiding Principles, after the Spanish city where the initial drafting took place, the report urges nations to take religion seriously in education and provides a human rights framework for including fair, accurate study about religions and beliefs in the classroom."
~ Robinson Jeffers: Peace Poet -- " Known for his violent, searing imagery, which was usually the instrument of a merciless insight into the tragedy of the human persona—its narcissism, its narrowness, its primordial viciousness—Jeffers’s gaze, as war approached, was turned on the follies of the “radio parrots,” “the crackpot dreams of Jeanne d’Arc and Hitler,” and “the paralytic Roosevelt”—all phrases cut by the editors of Random House. Delving into Jeffers’s molten rush of imagery, we see the world through the eyes of an intransigent “isolationist” in the midst of the post-war triumphalism."
~
Doctors Without Borders Releases Tenth Annual "Top Ten" Most Underreported Humanitarian Stories Of 2007 -- "People struggling to survive violence, forced displacement, and disease in the Central African Republic (CAR), Somalia, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere often went underreported in the news this year and much of the past decade, according to the 10th annual list of the "Top Ten" Most Underreported Humanitarian Stories of 2007."
~ Parmenides -- "The pre-Socratic philosopher sparked an intellectual revolution that still echoes today. Yet for philosophy and science to continue to progress in the 21st century, we may need to embark on an entirely new cognitive journey."
~ Huckabee's Christmas Cross -- "John Nichols | Mike Huckabee goes all aw-shucks when criticized for his Christmas campaign ad. But that's just the public face of one cynical political player."
~ Howard Dean: Economy to Be a Big Issue -- "The Iraq war will remain a big issue across the country, but the economy will overtake it over the next few months as the voters' top concern, says Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee."
~ Lakota Indians Secede from the U.S. -- "News Bloggers: The Lakota Indians, descendants of Crazy Horse and and Sitting Bull, have officially withdrawn from the treaties they had with the United States, the AFP is reporting, meaning they have declared themselves a new nation formally separate from America...." One sixteenth of me is no longer an American, apparently.


HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Cloning Companies Promise to Track Their Animals -- "The nation's two largest animal cloning companies are teaming up to voluntarily create a system to create a registry of their animals. The system would also require that cloned meat be identified to consumers."
~ Whales' Ancestor May Have Been an Odd-Looking Landlubber -- "Our ocean-going friends may have evolved from the Indohyus, sort of a cross between a long-tailed, antler-less deer and a long-legged rat."
~ Monkeys Can Perform Mental Addition -- "Monkeys have the ability to perform mental addition. In fact, monkeys performed about as well as college students given the same test. The findings shed light on the shared evolutionary origins of arithmetic ability in humans and non-human animals."
~ How Cagey Electrons Keep Hydrated -- "Water, despite its essential role in nature, remains a deeply mysterious substance. A long list of water's unusual properties tantalizes researchers even today, and scientists at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) and around the world are using x-rays to help address these questions. Working with SSRL scientist Anders Nilsson, researcher Dennis Nordlund and colleagues are turning up new clues, and their latest results are published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters."
~ Team develops solar-powered laptop for Tanzanian students -- "For a team of Penn State engineering students, the challenge wasn't getting laptops to Tanzanian students, but how to power those machines."
~ Nanovideo captures motion of RNA molecules in 3-D -- "You may not find it on YouTube, but Hashim Al-Hashimi's video could create quite a stir in scientific circles."
~ Why have a real fire when you can download one? -- "Oh, the trials we face at holiday-time: A merrily burning Yule log is just so festive, but we can't even enjoy the warmth for our guilt over the pollution it causes. Enter iYule, a half-hour-long downloadable video of a crackling hearth. Which kind of makes us happy and sad all at the same time."


INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST BLOGS
~ This blog "blacklisted"... for demanding we respect the professionals... -- David Brin -- "Mea culpa... I have called upon the professionals of the civil service, the intelligence services, the many agencies of law and accountability, the scientific community and the U.S. military officer corps, to remember their oaths -- to protect the people from all enemies, foreign and domestic."
~ Skinheads -- "Interesting, too, that the shaved head should find practitioners at both ends of the social spectrum, the saints and the reprobates, the monks and the skinheads. Which begs the question as to whether its popularity is any way associated with the popularization of Buddhism. Clearly, in both cases, cutting off one's hair is an act of renunciation of material and social values, as well as a powerful visual statement about identity. For a monk, I suppose, it's a positive act of liberation; for skinheads, we tend to read the same statement as angry and aggressive."
~ Ken Wilber on Oprah and Friends XM Radio Show -- "An interview with Ken Wilber has been made available on Oprah and Friends XM Radio Show! Conducted by "America's Doctor" De. Mehmet Oz, this interview represents a real milestone in terms of getting Integral thought out to the mainstream audience, bringing the most depth to the most span.... Check it out!"
~ Red ~C Diary: Why Do I Blog Thee? -- "I was looking at the stats of my Typepad blog this morning to see what's new. I usually do this to check who's linking to my blog posts so I could follow the conversations. I don't get much links. Most of the hits are coming from search engines (Google)--from people searching for random things. A good portion of my traffic comes from a four-year-old blog post about the End of the World. When I looked at the total lifetime page views of my blog, it says 374,224."
~ Stability practice -- "Stability practice (shamata) is a basic and ongoing companion practice to almost any other practice, whether it is prayer, allowing, inquiry, yoga, or something else."


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