"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
~ Flannery O'Connor
Image of the day (Tristan Campbell):
BODY
~ Max Load Training in the Real World -- "Scott Abel says that maximum load isn't the same thing as maximum weight and he wonders why most people don't get this. How much you can lift isn't the deciding factor; the deciding factor is how much stress a muscle endures."
~ StrongLifts.com Christmas Links: 42 Mins Video, Free PDF on Lower Back Health & Hot Females (Again) -- "Like last month, I’m giving you some of the articles & videos I stumbled upon in December, and that I think will interest you."
~ Eat This, Not That for the Holidays -- "Eat 10 dark chocolate kisses instead of a handful of candy canes this holiday—you'll save 290 calories. Binge the right way and save 1,840 more with belly-beating Christmas swaps in our Eat This, Not That tool."
~ Lifting Heavy Things Safely -- "This Holiday season, it’s possible you might be doing some heavy lifting. Whether it’s picking up a heavy present, unloading packages, dragging in a Christmas tree, or moving a new HD-TV you might have received, you need to pay attention to a few things in order to avoid unnecessary back injuries."
~ Built-In Exercise Monitor Predicts Fitness -- "We all hold the secret to getting fit, according to researchers from the University of Exeter. The research team has shown that we each have a built-in ability to judge how hard our bodies are working, often with remarkable precision. A series of studies over the last two years, culminating in three academic papers in the past two months, has shown a consistently close correlation between actual and perceived exertion in people of all levels of fitness."
~ Defend your skin from winter woes -- "Has the winter weather left your skin feeling all dried out? These tips can help you feel oh-so-soft from head to toe."
~ Anti-alcohol drug promising for binge eaters -- "The results of a small study suggest that the muscle-relaxing drug baclofen may help curb binge eating episodes in women with bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder."
PSYCHE/SELF
~ Causes of Depression in Women -- "Depression in women is up to 25%, which means that 1 out of 4 women will struggle with depression in their lives. Here's why women suffer from depression more than men."
~ Have You Learned to Accept Yourself? -- "Keep reading and I’ll share what I know about how you can learn to accept yourself, thereby tapping into one of the great secrets of happy living."
~ Is it possible to be too happy? [Cognitive Daily] -- "Happiness is associated with a lot of good things in life. People who are happier tend to get better job ratings, make more money, be more likely to get married, and be more satisfied with their marriages than people who are less happy, even years after the original happiness assessment."
~ 5 Things to Do If You Aren’t Celebrating Christmas -- "Christmas is a great holiday — you get to spend a day with your family, wallowing in nostalgia and familial love, and you get presents on top of that! But what if you don’t celebrate Christmas? What if you’re not Christian, or your family is too far away, or you have no family, or you just aren’t in the mood?" I'll be doing the movie thing.
~ 10 Questions to Ask Yourself to Regain Your Work-Life Balance -- "Last night my 11-year-old came into my office (9 p.m. to be exact, foreshadow, foreshadow), and said, “Mom, can you please get off the computer and be with me?” I should know better, right? After all, achieving work-life balance is one of the staples of the coaching diet."
~ 2007 Review: Top 10 Recommended Books to Improve Your Life -- "2007 has been a great year for my reading experience. I read a lot of books, more than I did in 2006, and they give me the value I need to improve my life. While I always learn something from each book, there are some books which stand out in their usefulness. These are the books that give me the most value to improve my life."
~ Depressive symptoms appear first in bipolar disorder offspring -- "Identifying reliable early indicators of emerging bipolar disorder among offspring of parents with the condition."
~ Deepak Chopra: The Brain Without Wires -- "We were told that depression, addiction, even obesity were not the result of choice or environment. Rather, these and a host of other behaviors were rooted in the brain and ultimately in a person's DNA. Popular articles continue to appear on how women's brains are wired differently from men's, or the teenage brain from either children's or adult's. This theory was always a half-truth, and now evidence is arising to show that the brain may be much more flexible than was supposed, which is good news for anyone who believes in freedom of choice as well as consciousness itself."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Historians are all about now -- "John Adamson reviews A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century by John Burrow."
~ The trouble with Mary -- "Jordan Peterson has an easy way to prove to most everyone they are a person of faith. It is not faith as one normally thinks of it at this time of year -- that the Son of God was born to a virgin Jewish woman in a stable in a not-so-great part of Bethlehem about 2,000 years ago -- but there is a connection."
~ Art In Politics - W.H. Auden: Poet of the Age of Anxiety -- "Wystan Hugh Auden, whose birth 100 years ago in 1907, is marked this year by two separate groups of poetry readers. Each group celebrates half of his poetic life and rather tries to forget about the other half, seeing one part of his life as the perfect image of the modern poet who lost his way."
~ Prize-Winning Poet Robert Hass On American Poetry, Bob Dylan, Impact of 'The Big Lebowski' -- "This was a particularly sterling year for California poet Robert Hass. In addition to winning the National Book Award for his collection "Time and Materials," Mr. Hass also published "Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000," which brought together three years worth of columns about poetry that he wrote for the Washington Post."
~ RECORD-BREAKING: SENATE CONSERVATIVES -- "New Report Shows How Conservative Minority Rules by Filibuster, Preventing Up or Down Vote on a Record Number of Bills."
~ A Conversation with Doris Kearns Goodwin -- "Great presidents build support for transformative change. What can the next president do to revive a sense of common purpose?"
~ If Tobacco Regulation Works, Why Not Regulate Marijuana? -- "If we really want to control marijuana and keep it away from kids, why not try a method that actually works?"
~ How Paul Thomas Anderson sets himself apart from Hollywood's other wunderkinds -- "It's only fitting that Paul Thomas Anderson's breakthrough film, Boogie Nights, was the story of a triple-X superstar with a python in his pants. This is one director you could safely call a size freak—or, to put it more politely, a maximalist. The gushers of oil in his new film, There Will Be Blood, are an apt visualization of how all his films function: They're designed to erupt and spill over. The larger the canvas, the grander the theme, the higher the volume, the wilder the emotion, the more inspired the filmmaking."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Polycarbonate Bottles Raise Questions -- "Catching his breath at a fitness club, Matt McHugh took a gulp of water from his trusty, hard-plastic Nalgene bottle and pondered the idea of switching to an alternative made of glass, stainless steel or another kind of plastic...."
~ Towards Cloaking Visible Light: Three-dimensional Metamaterials For The Optical Wavelength Range -- "Last year researchers from Duke University stunned the world when they announced a cloaking device for the microwave range. This device made use of metamaterials that had a negative refractive index for electromagnetic radiation. The metamaterials were carefully designed split-ring resonators with a structure size much smaller than the wavelength. Only 10 stacked layers of metamaterials were necessary to achieve the desired invisibility effect. Now researchers have succeeded in manufacturing a stacked split-ring metamaterial for the optical wavelength range."
~ Planet Earth 2007: Top 10 Science Revelations -- "From the damning climate report by the IPCC to projections of an impending peak in global oil production, 2007 was full of startling findings and prognostications about the blue marble we call home. Here are the stories we think could reverberate most significantly for years to come."
~ New method enables scientists to see smells -- "Animals and insects communicate through an invisible world of scents. By exploiting infrared technology, researchers at Rockefeller University just made that world visible. With the ability to see smells, these scientists now show that when fly larvae detect smells with both olfactory organs they find their way toward a scented target more accurately than when they detect them with one."
~ To Curious Aliens, Earth Would Stand Out As Living Planet -- "With powerful instruments scouring the heavens, astronomers have found more than 240 planets in the past two decades, none likely to support Earth-like life. But what if aliens were hunting life outside their own planet? Armed with telescopes only a bit bigger and more powerful than our own, could they peer through the vastness of space and lock in onto Earth as a likely home to life?"
~ Study Shows Urban Sprawl Continues To Gobble Up Land -- "Despite reports to the contrary, urban sprawl has continued to grow significantly for the past several decades, new research suggests. A study of changing land use patterns in the state of Maryland found substantial and significant increases in sprawl between 1973 and 2000." Tucson is sprawl central, as if the desert isn't a living thing worthy of protection.
~ Laptop Project Enlivens Peruvian Hamlet -- "Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST BLOGS
~ Peter Clothier: The Buddha: A Disturbing Image -- "It's a good thing that Buddhists aren't Muslims, at least not those of the fundamentalist variety. Otherwise the giant Buddha images by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami in his current exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles would provoke a world-wide conflagration of outrage."
~ Happy Holidays from the 4,700 members of Integrative Spirituality! -- "May your holiday season be blessed with love, health and success. We invite you to join our members and others all over the world for the holiday celebration of World Spirituality Day On December 31st. For more information about the celebration of World Spirituality Day."
~ The Maha-Santa-Claus Sutra -- "Just in time for that one holiday…you know, the one with all the food, family and gifts. This is very corny, so think of it as a “Christmas Special” for your favorite TV show."
~ The Butterfly -- "Thanks to my wife, Ellie, who put this book into my hands--with the words "Accidental Dharma." It's very short, for reasons that will become obvious. I read it in a couple of hours... and she's right, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the archetype of the "gift wrapped in shit." Jean-Dominique Bauby, its author, was at the prime of his creative and, yes, rather glamorous life as the editor of the French magazine Ellewhen he was struck, at the age of 43, by a massive stroke."
~ Manifesting God -- " Manifesting God is the name of a very short, direct, and affective (that's not a typo) book written by Thomas Keating. I have promoted interspiritual, interreligious, or interfaith issues before and I was particularly moved by the writings of the late Brother Wayne Teasdale, who saw the contemplative dimension that is common to all religious traditions and spiritual paths as essential for one's personal fulfilment as well as the transformation of the human community to a more compassionate and mature state. Keating and his revival of Centering Prayer are frequently featured of such interspiritual dialogue."
~ Worldly Transcendence -- "Next term, I am following up my ten week course on consciousness with a course on happiness, and I’m looking forward to the experience. As a result, I’ve been reading a fair amount on the subject of happiness, the most recent book being Richard Layard’s Happiness: Lessons from a New Science
. Layard is an economist who takes happiness more seriously than wealth – or who takes wealth seriously only insofar as it supports happiness – and that makes him a somewhat rare beast (see his articles here), and his book is an easy read, but an insightful one."Tags:
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