"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"
~ Henry Ward Beecher
Image of the day (S.R.):
BODY
~ Exercise of the Week: The Luke Sauder Calf Routine -- "This is probably the most blistering, pain-inducing calf routine you'll ever try. Make sure you first line up some Boy Scouts working on their merit badges to help you walk from your bed to the bathroom."
~ Treadmill vs. Pavement: The Running Debate -- "With the low temperatures and adverse weather, it’s no wonder that many exercisers choose to hibernate and sweat in the gym instead of going out in the elements. But a great debate among all those fit is one of determining which is better: the treadmill or the pavement. When it comes to the winter season, research points positives and negatives in both directions."
~ Strength Training over Christmas & New Year -- "I wrote strength training over Thanksgiving last month. With Christmas Eve next Tuesday & New Year’s Eve the week after, you’ve probably been thinking at how to make your workout & diet fit in the holidays. Here are some tips."
~ Is fat the new normal? -- "Is fat the new normal? A study published in the July issue of Economic Inquiry raises that question. With roughly two-thirds of the American population overweight or obese, have our cultural ideals of what we consider “normal weight” changed?"
~ Diabetes risk is more nurture than nature: study -- "In adults, the development of insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes, is influenced more by current body weight than by birth weight, results of a study in twins suggests."
~ 7 great medical myths revealed -- "Reading in dim light won’t damage your eyes, you don’t need eight glasses of water a day to stay healthy and other medical myths are revealed by U.S. researchers."
~ Science's 'Breakthrough Of The Year' - Human Genetic Variation -- "In 2007, researchers were dazzled by the degree to which genomes differ from one human to another and began to understand the role of these variations in disease and personal traits."
~ Treating Epilepsy With An Atkins-Like Diet: Leptin Attenuates Rodent Seizure Severity -- "Not all individuals who have epilepsy respond to traditional treatments and these individuals are said to have medically refractory epilepsy. Strict use of a ketogenic diet high in fats and extremely low in carbohydrates is sometimes used for treatment of refractory epilepsy, and is effective about half of the time. However, the mechanisms whereby ketogenic diets suppress epileptic symptoms have long been a mystery." This diet works with autism too.
~ Swedish Rhodiola Rosea Extract Effective In Treating Mild To Moderate Depression In New Clinical Trial -- "A new clinical trial has found that an extract of Rhodiola rosea roots and rhizomes demonstrated anti-depressive activity in patients with mild to moderate depression. This is the first double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study of Rhodiola rosea in patients diagnosed with depression. Patients given the Swedish-made Rhodiola rosea extract showed significant improvements in depression compared to those given placebo."
PSYCHE/SELF
~ Mental Health Year in Review: 2007 -- "2007 was a busy year for people reporting on mental health and psychology stories, with a heavy emphasis on pharmaceutical news and research. No significant breakthroughs in our understanding of any particular mental disorder occurred in 2007, although new techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and genetic studies continue to be at the forefront of causative research."
~ Packing Up Your Life -- "While packing and in life, the question "what do I really need?" is such a fruitful one."
~ Scientists Identify Brain Abnormalities Underlying Key Element Of Borderline Personality Disorder -- "Using new approaches, an interdisciplinary team of scientists at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City has gained a view of activity in key brain areas associated with a core difficulty in patients with borderline personality disorder -- shedding new light on this serious psychiatric condition."
~ Jean Piaget Biography -- "Jean Piaget's work had a profound influence on psychology, especially our understanding children's intellectual development. His research contributed to the growth of developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, genetic epistemology, and...."
~ A Sense of Scarcity -- "The connection between value and scarcity is something we all know. Gold is precious because there is not much of it to go around, not because you can use it to build skyscrapers. The psychologists reasoned that this link has become deep-wired into our neurons, so that we unconsciously call on it—and its inverse—for life decisions."
~ Introspective Infallibility, Causation, and Containment -- "In his second Meditation, Descartes gives the impression that he thinks self-knowledge of current conscious experience is indubitably certain, immune to error, infallible. (Whether he consistently espouses this view throughout his corpus is another question.) Ever since, infallibilism about introspection has been a mainstream position in philosophy of mind -- sometimes dominant, sometimes (as now) out of favor but nonetheless with prominent proponents."
~ 6 Simple Strategies to Stay Happy -- "It is a fact that if you want something too badly, it is likely to evade you. And this is truer for happiness than anything else. The reason why happiness seems to evade the millions of people searching for it is because they are looking in the wrong place."
~ Using Questions To Control Communication -- "Through reading numerous books on communication and field testing hundreds of techniques, a few fundamental patterns have become very apparent to me. If you’ve ever been on a date, an interview, or a networking event, you may have noticed some of these social patterns as well."
~ The Roots of Fear -- "The evolutionary primacy of the brain's fear circuitry makes it more powerful than reasoning circuits."
~ Deepak Chopra: How Your Story Changes the World (Part 2) -- "The only realistic way to think about the world is to see it as an unfolding process that encompasses billions of smaller processes. Our minds don't like to work that way. We prefer snap judgments and simplistic labels. We defend our story and defend against those that disagree with it."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Junk Food County -- "Why many rural Americans can't get nutritious foods. The unhealthy truth about country living."
~ David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music -- "Wired asked David Byrne — a legendary innovator himself and the man who wrote the Talking Heads song "Radio Head" from which the group takes its name — to talk with Yorke about the In Rainbows distribution strategy and what others can learn from the experience."
~ Christian 'Ex-Gays' Brainwash Thousands -- " Can the anti-gay Christian Right's "sexual reorientation therapy" be stopped?"
~ Rights and Liberties: 'War on Christmas' Nonsense is a War on Secularists -- "Beneath the laughable charge is a poisonous suggestion that 'our way of life' is threatened by foreigners."
~ MediaCulture: Fear, Loathing & the Crisis of Confidence -- "The 'paranoid style' in American politics is grounded in a profound disconnect between ordinary Americans and their political class."
~ White House Faces CIA Tapes Hearing -- "The Bush administration has made its position clear in legal filings and now gets a chance to say it to a judge in open court."
~ Well Built -- "Our critic chooses her favorite buildings that were unveiled in 2007—and one that wasn't."
~ Stunningly Silent -- "Slogans urging us to “keep Christ in Christmas,” or “recall the reason for the season,” sound about as hollow as the Christmas jingles that reverberate in our ears every time we enter a store. Those in search of an antidote might consider watching the newly released DVD Into Great Silence, Philip Groening’s movingly observed study of the daily lives of Carthusian monks at La Grande Chartreuse, founded in the French Alps in 1084."
~ The new church nomenclature -- "The corporate world has gone granola. Business executives prefer the term community to customer base, and companies extol their "holistic" products. In the current commercial zeitgeist, where millions of consumers are flocking to Facebook and paying higher prices at Whole Foods for farm-fresh cheese, buzzwords like organic, communal, relational, and viral are part of the everyday lexicon."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ A Solar Grand Plan -- "By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions."
~ The Year's 10 Craziest Ways to Hack the Earth -- "Scientists have come up with extreme -- some might say crazy -- schemes to counteract global warming. This year saw the most radical geo-engineering ideas yet: man-made volcanoes, orbiting mirror fleets and ocean re-engineering to cool the planet and absorb carbon dioxide."
~ The Majesty and Misery of String Theory -- "Adopting a perhaps excessively critical attitude it is still by no means unfair to say that string theory is a theory en route to nowhere. It is a theory which, at its best, could conceivably capture the essence of material reality at its deepest level; or, at its worst, might be nothing more than an overblown tale with an overly complicated mathematical storyline."
~ Best of 2007: Genes, Exoplanets, and a Cardboard Bridge -- "Each December, many magazines deliver their obligatory summing-up issues of the highs and lows of the past twelve months. Time names its person of the year, Rolling Stone names the best songs of the year, et cetera, et cetera. It's also an occasion that allows science, which often takes a back seat to politics and business, to shine."
~ Odds Good That Asteroid Will Hit Mars Next Month -- "75-1 may be incredibly long odds at the race track, but that's a prohibitive favorite in astronomy. And astronomers say a newly discovered asteroid has one chance in 75 of hitting the red planet at the end of January."
~ Meteorites May Have Fostered Life on Earth -- "While meteorites are often associated with the extinction of dinosaurs, new evidence suggests the impacts may actually engender new life. Commentary by Carl Zimmer."
~ Ancient Egyptian Glassmaking Recreated -- "Archaeologist have reconstructed a 3,000-year-old glassmaking furnace, suggesting that Ancient Egyptian technology was more advanced than previously thought. It was previously thought that the Ancient Egyptians may have imported their glass from the Near East at around this time. However, the excavation team believes the evidence from Amarna shows they were making it themselves, possibly in a single stage operation."
~ Mars rovers find new evidence of 'habitable niche' -- "Inch by power-conserving inch, drivers on Earth have moved the Mars rover Spirit to a spot where it has its best chance at surviving a third Martian winter -- and where it will celebrate its fourth anniversary (in Earth years) since bouncing down on Mars for a projected 90-day mission in January 2004."
~ Japan to Drop Humpback Hunt -- "Japan is dropping its plan to kill humpback whales in the seas off Antarctica, the country's top government spokesman said Friday." It's about time.
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST BLOGS
~ Best of 07 -- "Not all are lists of ten, but here are my entirely biased votes for 2007's best."
~ Holiday wishes - light, peace, and love -- "The history of the intertwining, culling, and refitting religious and cultural traditions is a fascinating and complex topic which is often reduced around this time of year to something like "Christian rulers co-opted Pagan festivals and symbols and affiliated them with Christian holy days." But symbols represent a lived, shared meaning as much as cultural history, so what symbols and what meaning do we wish to share this year as Bodhi Day has passed, Chanukah is complete, Eid-ul-Adha is over and Christmas and Kwanzaa are approaching?"
~ A little more on sitting as surrender -- "Seated meditation is very prominent in Western Buddhism as a practice and as an iconic image. The prominence of (seated) meditation has been discussed and debated recently on Jeff Wilson’s blog as referenced in my last writing on this topic, which also included the perspective of sitting as surrender. The description of how and why it makes sense to see sitting this way, and what is meant by surrender, was also covered. Why this attitude may be helpful or even interesting, however, was not addressed. Because I spent so much time on the “set up” and background material, I felt more should be said about other views of seated meditation and how seeing seated meditation as surrender is significant."
~ Meaning -- "I watched a conversation on meaning on a talk show on Swedish TV last night, including philosophers and others. (Which in itself says something about why it is more meaningful for me to be here in Scandinavia than in the US, at least in terms of the general culture!) The conversation mostly stayed at the conventional level, but it made me curios about meaning. Specifically, what is meaning? (Strangely, not addressed in the program.)"
~ Form is Emptiness; Emptiness is Form -- "This little gem comes to us from the famous Heart Sutra, and in many ways, I feel it’s one of the most important statements in Buddhism. This post is partly inspired by comments from my good friend Kyoushin, as well as a continuation of my last post."
~ Integral Theory into Integral Action: Mark Edwards & Russ Volckmann in Dialogue -- "In a series of ongoing, in-depth dialogues Mark Edwards and Russ Volckmann attempt to rethink the potential of integral theories, maps, models and their applications. Their dialogues are guided by the hope of making two important contributions: first, to increase the clarity and level of critical analysis of integral theory - particularly as it applies to the subject of leadership; and second, in comprehending how to use integral theory as an integrating device for the many innovative concepts and ideas coming from a variety of mainstream disciplines."
~ Too many parties (and a freaked out brain) -- "This is a story about obsessional thought. Papancha. Differentiated from skillful thinking, contemplation, or miscellaneous monkey mind by the presence of suffering. Papancha sucks."
~ Spread the Love NOW! Group Writing Project -- "All you have to do is to write something on compassion. It could be anything you want,for example your definition of compassion. Still, in the spirit of Christmas, extra points will be awarded if there is a personal touch – because we want to connect in compassion."
~ The Buddha Within -- "I’ve been reading Hakeda’s excellent book on Shingon Buddhism, “Kūkai: Major Works“, which is the only book I have found so far that can give an excellent explanation into Kūkai’s theories behind Shingon Buddhism. Interestingly, I found that a lot of what’s discussed here also helps clarify some of the deeper truths behind Jodo Shinshu as well, particularly the nature of Amida Buddha."
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