"My theory is that all of Scottish cuisine is based on a dare."
~ Mike Myers
Image of the day (David Lorenz Winston):
BODY
~ Apparently, Hell Just Froze Over -- "Last year, the American Diabetes Association gave me a nice little spanking for an article I wrote criticizing their nutrition guidelines. (You can read my original story HERE, and see their response to it HERE, along with my rebuttal.)" The ADA has seen the light, finally.
~ The Benefits and Pitfalls of Skipping Meals -- "How effective is skipping meals when it comes to your health? We all skip meals sometimes for one reason or another, particularly when we are busy. Some people skip too many meals in order to lose weight. A study published in the medical journal Metabolism takes a first-hand look at how our eating habits affect our health and weight."
~ 25 Physique-Friendly Recipes: Great Food & Great Taste! -- "I sat down with my good friends - all noted recipe maestros - and together we came up with a ton of physique-friendly recipes that BOTH taste great and are great for you. In this article, I'm going to share with you 25 of them."
~ Diet 101: Basics Of A Sound Nutrition Plan! -- "A person's diet is the number one key to achieving the goals they desire in any fitness program they partake in. Use these great suggestions when shopping, dining out, preparing your own, and more right here!"
~ High Schools Try Teamwork to Put Trainers on Site -- "Some high schools around the United States are using novel, and even unorthodox, methods to get trainers at a reduced cost into their sports programs." This is good news -- the coaches at my high school knew nothing about proper training.
~ High-fat, high-carb meals more harmful to obese (Reuters) -- "Eating a high-fat, high-carb fast food meal produces damaging cellular changes that are greater and longer-lasting in obese people than in normal-weight people, a new study shows."
~ Fish oil capsules pack same omega-3 punch as fish -- "Fish oil capsules and fatty fish do an equally good job of enriching the blood and other body tissues with healthy omega-3 fatty acids, new findings suggest."
~ Wealth and Waistlines -- "A new book explains how the obesity epidemic has been shaped by economics, and what we can do to reverse the trend."
PSYCHE/SELF
~ Empathy: Could It Be What You're Missing? -- " You may not realize it, but a great number of people suffer from EDD. No, you're not reading a misprint of ADD or ED. The acronym stands for empathy deficit disorder."
~ Borderline Personality Disorder Linked to Brain Abnormality by Novel Scan -- "Loved ones often despair of ever understanding the inscrutable emotional vortex of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Those with BPD experience rapid shifts in emotion and perspective that lead to rash relationship decisions and impulsive career moves. Their lack of impulse control is particularly apparent in situations with negative emotional significance, sometimes leading to extreme expressions of anger or disappointment over objectively minor setbacks. These outbursts have been difficult to understand and predict, but a study in the most recent edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry uncovered a neurological basis for the problem."
~ Turning the 80/20 Rule on its Head -- "It’s called the Pareto Principle: in its simplest form, it means that 80% of your time is spent doing 20% of your work. It has seemingly become fashionable to apply the Pareto Principle to every conceivable activity and outcome, no matter its suitability. I’ve become convinced that it doesn't work in every situation."
~ Personal Development: How Old Are You Really? -- "I think we’d also benefit from thinking about where we are, emotionally, on a continuum. Some people have decided, as early as 40 or 45, that they are 'old,' and that there is not much they can do to improve their lives simply because they’re 'too old.'"
~ 6 Guilt-Free Steps To Review Your New Year Resolutions -- "The end of the year is always a good time for me to review my resolutions and take stock of what I have done over the past year. However, for some people, reviewing New Year resolutions can be a painful affair. Some of you may have goals unaccomplished. A resolution review is just a stark reminder of how little you have achieved. You may feel guilty and disappointed about your lack of discipline to follow through on your goals. As much as possible, you will want to avoid being reminded of these little failings."
~ 7 Common Sense Love Lessons that Could Save Your Life -- "I’ve learned a lot about love over the past 20 years. Most of what I’ve learned is common sense, but I’m going to repeat these common-sense love lessons here because it’s pretty clear that the world needs them, common-sense or no."
~ Best of Zen Habits in 2007 -- "It’s been an amazing year here at Zen Habits. From starting out with only two readers (my wife and my mom) in January 2007 to today, when Zen Habits has more thank 26K subscribers and is one of the Top 100 blogs. As it is impossible to avoid reading “Best of” posts this time of year, I figured that there’s no sense in resisting … and so, for my new readers and as a review for older readers, I present the Best of Zen Habits, 2007 edition."
~ Brain Evolution and Why it is Meaningful Today to Improve Our Brain Health -- "Now we are launching a new Author Speaks Series to provide a platform for leading scientists and experts writing high-quality brain-related books to reach a wide audience. We are honored to start the series with an article by Larry McCleary, M.D, former acting Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Denver Children's Hospital, and author of The Brain Trust Program: A Scientifically Based Three-Part Plan to Improve Memory, Elevate Mood, Enhance Attention, Alleviate Migraine and Menopausal Symptoms, and Boost Mental Energy
(Perigee Trade, 2007)."~ Keeping Resolutions - The Stages of Change Approach -- "If you have ever made (and broken) a New Year's Resolution, you understand how difficult it can be to change a behavior."
~ Your Baby is Watching (and Judging) You -- "Next time the baby shoots you a dirty look, it might not be gas."
~ Scientific American Mind: Psychedelic Healing? -- "Mind-altering psychedelics are back--but this time they are being explored in labs for their therapeutic applications rather than being used illegally. Studies are looking at these hallucinogens to treat a number of otherwise intractable psychiatric disorders, including chronic depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and drug or alcohol dependency." It's about freaking time.
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ The Painful Elaboration of the Fatuous -- "Norman Levitt Deconstructs Steve Fuller’s Postmodernist Critique of Evolution."
~ A Call to National Service -- "Voluntary service on a national scale would make America a stronger, more participatory democracy; unite citizens of all backgrounds in common cause; and help address many unmet social needs. Service and shared sacrifice have always been at the core of America’s success, and this program—which we will lay out in detail—taps into that great truth to imagine a better future."
~ Facing diversity -- "The national discussion has reached such a pitch that in a radio debate among the Democratic candidates this month one of the most incendiary issues was whether it was the duty of American citizens to turn in people they knew to be illegal immigrants."
~ American dreamer -- "Richard Ford is the dazzling chronicler of the real America. He talks to Anthony Byrt about suburban beauty, literary "product" - and why the country is in danger."
~ The moral agent -- "What he wants us to see is: the lot. Not one side or another, but the whole shooting match A Polish immigrant, cabin boy and gunrunner, Joseph Conrad wrote action-packed adventure stories, which were also modernist classics. Giles Foden celebrates an enduring master on the 150th anniversary of his birth." Conrad is one of my favorite fiction writers, mostly due to the psychological depth in his best work.
~ The Five Levels of Political Awareness -- "How many times have you tried to have an intelligent political conversation with a friend, fellow worker or family member only to discover that two of you are talking on completely different levels? What starts off as a well intended interaction quickly devolves into a struggle to avoid insult or seriously offend. As a way to calculate where you and yours stand, the following are general definitions for the five levels of political awareness."
~ Daughter of Destiny -- Christopher Hitchens -- "Her tenure ended—as did her subsequent "comeback" tenure—in a sorry welter of corruption charges and political intrigue, and in a gilded exile in Dubai. But clearly she understood that exile would be its own form of political death. (She speaks well on this point in an excellent recent profile by Amy Wilentz in More magazine.) Like two other leading Asian politicians, Benigno Aquino of the Philippines and Kim Dae-jung of South Korea, she seems to have decided that it was essential to run the risk of returning home. And now she has gone, as she must have known she might, the way of Aquino."
~ Benazir Bhutto: An Age of Hope Is Over -- " Young Gandhi and Bhutto, both killed in suicide attacks, ultimately became the victims of inherited policies. Rajiv Gandhi had tried to put an end to Indian meddling in Sri Lanka and its support for a vicious Tamil Tiger rebellion. He was killed by a Sri Lankan Tamil suicide bomber, a woman who moved toward him to touch his feet in an age-old gesture, then triggered an explosion that blew them both apart. While it is too early to know who killed Benazir, Pakistan's policies on Afghanistan are the backdrop to this tense and dangerous moment."
~ Editors: State of Doubt -- "Benazir Bhuttos assassination is a national as well as a personal tragedy. For the moment it has fomented chaos in Pakistan."
~ Cronenberg Drifts From Tech Horror, but Shocks Remain -- "In an age of readily available "snuff porn," director David Cronenberg trades his sci-fi-tinged terrors for more everyday, earthly nightmares."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ The Software That Will Take Digital F/X to the Next Level of Awesome -- "Explosions. Storms. Waves. CGI ace Jos Stam is creating a physics machine that can make special effects look absolutely, completely real."
~ Privacy Delays Ad Targeting on Phones -- "Your cell phone is a potential gold mine for marketers: It can reveal where you are, whom you call and even what music you like. Considering the phone is usually no more than a few feet away, these are powerful clues for figuring out just the right moment to deliver the right coupon for the store just around the corner."
~ The Craziest Science Stories of 2007 -- "Vote for the strangest revelation of the year."
~ 2007: How Science Came Full Circle -- "The top science stories of 2007 weaved together."
~ New Zealanders seek to save endangered kiwi bird -- "Since humans began populating New Zealand, some 75 percent of the islands' indigenous bird species have gone extinct. Due to habitat loss and nonnative predators, it looks as though the same fate may befall the kiwi, New Zealand's iconic flightless bird."
~ Deep-sea Species' Loss Could Lead To Oceans' Collapse, Study Suggests -- "The loss of deep-sea species poses a severe threat to the future of the oceans, suggests a new report in Current Biology. In a global-scale study, the researchers found some of the first evidence that the health of the deep sea, as measured by the rate of critical ecosystem processes, increases exponentially with the diversity of species living there."
~ Polynesian Chickens in Chile -- "The team found that the chicken's DNA sequence was related to that of chickens whose remains were unearthed from archaeological sites on the Polynesian islands of Tonga and American Samoa. Radiocarbon dating shows the El Arenal chicken lived sometime between a.d. 1321 and 1407, well after Polynesians first settled Easter Island and the other easternmost islands of the Pacific."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST BLOGS
~ 5 Favourite Dharma Books -- "Thanks to The Worst Horse for reminding me that I have yet to answer my own question on what are the top 5 dharma books on my reading list. Here goes (in no particular order)..." And so the meme begins.
~ Five favourite Dharma books... -- From Simra.net.
~ The Five Favorite Dharma Books Meme -- From Blogmandu.
~ Five Favorite Dharma Books -- From Hokai.
~ More Dharma Books -- "These are some books that didn't make it into my Top5 choice, but which definitely have been read and re-read, providing crucial study."
~ In Memory of Benazir Bhutto: Presence, Freedom and Fullness -- "I spend a lot of time thinking about the role of integral theory and practice in this world. Integral is daunting because of its simultaneous depth and breadth, and yet tragedy cuts through the clutter of our Starbuck's-fed lives like a hit from the Zen master's stick: the world is literally crying out in anguish for greater understanding that can reduce the hatred that stems from fear and faulty action, and integral can provide that understanding."
~ Habermas on World Order -- "Rummaging around the “internets” I found this fascinating article by Jurgen Habermas, written just after the US invasion of Iraq. While not wanting to endorse (necessarily) his defense of the UN over against the “coalition of the willing”, there is a great deal of truth in what he says."
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