"A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something."
~ Wilson Mizner
Image of the day:
BODY
~ Weighing the New Diet Books -- "Every December, publishing houses flood bookstore shelves with a plethora of new diet titles, hip to the hordes of repentant holiday bingers who will be desperate to make their New Year's resolutions stick come January. And there are more and more of us in that category every year. This year's crop of diet books run the gamut — from low-carb to vegan, from anti-caffeine to tea-around-the-clock. Some appear based on sound nutritional advice; some decidedly less so."
~ Cranberry juice can prevent flu and stomach ulcers...but only in women -- "Drinking two glasses of cranberry juice a day can ward off flu, stops teeth from rotting and keep away bladder infections and stomach ulcers - but only in women."
~ Fit Tip: Cross Train -- "If you are going gang busters at the gym, as many people do come January, and are just tackling the treadmill I am here to urge you to cross train. Variety is the spice of life and if you are mixing up your workouts the chances of getting bored and stopping significantly decreases. Boredom is one major fitness routine killer."
~ For A More Youthful Heart Either Eat Less Or Exercise More -- "Overweight people who lose a moderate amount of weight get an immediate benefit in the form of better heart health, according to a study conducted at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. And the heart improvements happen whether that weight is shed by eating less or exercising more."
~ Family dietary coach fuels healthy eating: study -- "Having a nutrition coach actively coach families on how to make healthy changes in their diet appears to help parents and their children improve their nutritional intake, researchers found."
~ When Fitness Means Life or Death -- "Are you in good enough shape to flee a burning building?"
~ Chewing Gum Sweetener Can Cause Dangerous Weight Loss -- "Many sugar-free chewing gums contain a sweetener called sorbitol. Sorbitol is a laxative which is poorly absorbed by the small intestine. An article in this week's British Medical Journal (BMJ) warns of the dangers of excess sorbitol intake. The warning comes after doctors came across two patients who had chronic diarrhea, abdominal pain and dangerously excessive weight loss."
~ Fat to fitness coach: Man loses 120 pounds -- "Two years ago, Tim Lenczowski dreaded walking from the parking lot into his office. Weighing 335 pounds, he suffered constantly from pain in his knees and ankles. At the age of 39, he was diagnosed with a heart condition and hypertension. Lenczowski knew it was time to make a change."
~ Atkins Diet Results Are In & Some People Aren’t Going To Like Them -- "At the end of the two-week period, the patients lost an average of 3.6 pounds each and their blood levels normalized. But what about the low-carbohydrate diet caused them to lose weight? Interestingly, though they were not given calorie restrictions, the patients inadvertently cut their caloric intake by a whopping one-third." The reality behind this study is that protein and fats create greater satiety than do carbs, so you eat less and feel more full. The other aspect is that protein foods require 25% of the consumed calories simply for digestion, while carbs and fats are much lower, under 10%.
PSYCHE/SELF
~ Pets: Good for Your Health? -- "Research shows that caring for an animal can improve your mental and physical well-being—with a few caveats."
~ Media Psychologists: Educating The Public; Demystifying Psychotherapy And Modeling Professional Ethics -- "News is often about human behavior, thus there's a natural role for psychologists and other mental health professionals to work with the news media to help people understand behavior and other mental health issues."
~ Men Do Care - British Psychological Society -- "Men worry more about their work-life balance than their female counterparts."
~ Fighting over inner experience -- "Salon has an entertaining review of the new book Describing Inner Experience which is sort of a combination of an argument and a self-consciousness showdown between philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel and psychologist Russell Hurlburt."
~ abstracts related to ageing, mitochondria, neurodegeneration etc -- Lots of cool, geeky links.
~ Is there a moral grammar? -- "One of the most controversial new approaches, promoted by Marc Hauser of Harvard University, is to study moral reasoning by analogy to linguistics. For instance, what are the phonemes of moral reasoning? What is the grammar that determine whether an action is considered moral or not?"
~ What Everyone Should Know About Their Own Minds: 6 Introspective Insights From Psychology -- "Ever wondered where your opinions come from, how you manage to be creative, or how you solve problems? Well, don't bother. Psychology studies examining these areas and more have found that while we're good at inventing plausible explanations, these explanations are frequently completely made-up."
~ Medicating People Because It’s Easier than Talking to Them -- "Sadly, antipsychotics are not the first medications ever to be used to basically sedate people, so they would be more manageable to the individuals and organizations charged with their care. The use of psychiatric and other medications for control of behaviors, rather than treatment of diseases or disorders, has a long history. Time and time again, research shows that it’s the human relationship we share with one another that have a significant, perhaps the most significant impact, in how we feel. And how we feel has an impact on our treatment and feeling better."
~ What is Happiness? -- "Because happiness is something most of us aim for, how we define it has important implications for how we conduct our lives. To see why, compare these two competing definitions of happiness...."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Middle-Class Capitalists -- "Supply-side economics had a good run, but continual tax cuts can no longer be the centerpiece of Republican economic policy. The demographics have changed. The U.S. is an aging society. We have made expensive promises to our seniors. We can’t keep those promises at the current tax levels, let alone at reduced ones." Wow, David Brooks is sounding like a centrist.
~ "We're all fascists now" -- "An interview with conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg, who argues that fascism is left-wing, not right-wing, and that contemporary liberals are fascism's intellectual offspring." Some partial truths turned into broad generalizations, as well as some bad reading of history -- still, interesting.
~ Exchanges in Latest Debate Highlight a New Dynamic in the Republican Field -- "The performance by Mr. Thompson, which including several pointed one-liners, capped a debate that showed the altered terrain of the Republican field as it moved beyond contests in Iowa and New Hampshire."
~ Review: To the Edge of the Precipice -- "Shelby Steele, who was a black radical in the 1960s, has since acquired a view of both blacks and whites that is almost completely unclouded by dogma. Dr. Steele, who has been a fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1994, is perhaps the first mainstream author to analyze white guilt and describe the tremendous damage it does. Dr. Steele does not get everything right, but his elegant dissection of white self-absorption and black opportunism is one of the best antidotes now available to the shelves of nonsense that pass for wisdom on race."
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~ Faith Without Borders -- "On the one hand, Perennialism rejects a modern world that has slipped off the rails. Yet it also embraces all variations of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish faith, as well as Asian religions and indigenous schools of thought. Perennialists believe that all religions are part of one great religion; that all wisdom makes up a great river of truth that all modern people should return to for what the Gospels call 'living water.'"
~ Tony Sachs: Roll Over Radiohead And Tell Trent Reznor The News -- "Music is a thing. It's always been more than the beats and melodies coming out of your speakers or headphones. It's being able to hold a physical object in your hand and say "This is mine - I own it." For all the Utopian talk of file sharing and subscriber services that will render music ownership as we know it obsolete, the needs and preferences of the record collector, the force that's kept the music biz going since there were records to collect, are being ignored."
~ Supporting Hillary or Barack? Stop Apologizing for It -- "It's time to stop ignoring gender and race as reasons to support a candidate."
~ The New Hillary -- "Clinton has abandoned a controlled and cautious persona for a more passionate fighting version of herself. Will post-N.H. voters buy it?"
~ Paul on CNN -- "I haven't been in the libertarian movement long (I'm 32, and I really only became a full-fledged movement libertarian at 25, when I started working for Cato). But reading the long-time activist's descriptions of those newsletters and how they were written, edited, and distributed, when Paul says he had no idea who wrote them, and that he rarely read them—well, I simply don't believe him. Nor do I think that would be a viable excuse even if it were true."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ New Mode of Cell Communication Discovered -- "Like teenagers, cells in our bodies constantly chatter back and forth. But instead of zapping text messages, they relay signals with molecules. Now, researchers have discovered a surprisingly tiny new messenger in worms: protons. The find raises the possibility that the subatomic particle plays the same role in humans, the researchers say." Biophotons aren't new, but American researchers have been slow to examine this field of research.
~ Do Monkeys Pay for Sex? -- "It turns out that one of humanity's oldest professions may be even older than we thought: In a recent study of macaque monkeys in Indonesia, researchers found that male primates "paid" for sexual access to females — and that the going rate for such access dwindled as the number of available females went up."
~ CES 2008: Wrapping Up Another Year of Gadget Glut -- "From a humongous HDTV to Bill Gates' date with Slash, the annual orgy of consumer electronics delivers plenty of surprises. Enjoy a roundup of the biggest hits and misses."
~ Astronomers on the Universe: Hey, It's a Jungle Out There -- "The things astronomers discover as they probe deeper into the universe -- orphaned baby stars, planet-devouring black holes -- paint a bleak picture of "out there." Heck, we might as well stay home."
~ Gasoline Is Here to Stay, But It's Greener Than Ever -- "For all the hydrogen, electric and hybrids we'll see at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, the green stars of the show may be the next generation of gasoline and diesel internal combustion engines."
~ Warming Climate Can Support Glacial Ice: It Did In Much Warmer Times -- "New research challenges the generally accepted belief that substantial ice sheets could not have existed on Earth during past super-warm climate events. The study provides strong evidence that a glacial ice cap, about half the size of the modern day glacial ice sheet, existed 91 million years ago during a period of intense global warming."
~ Why Chimps Eat Dirt -- "It turns out our closest animal relations have a good reason for feasting on soil."
~ Bond between ants, trees breaks without large animals -- "For thousands of years, thorny African acacia trees have provided food and shelter to aggressive biting ants, which protect the trees by attacking animals that try and eat the acacia leaves."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST BLOGS
~ Deepak Chopra: "I Know I'm Right, So Why Be Fair?" -- "Below is an article forwarded to me by its author, the noted biologist and evolutionary thinker, Rupert Sheldrake. It's about an encounter with the equally noted biologist and evolutionary thinker, Richard Dawkins. The subject isn't atheism, Dawkins' last hobby horse, but reason and science."
~ “Universal Man” -- "An illumination of Hildegard von Bingen — 12th century Christian nun, composer, and more." Very cool picture.
~ Gerald Ford’s Buddhism: Then and Now -- "Here of course, I am talking about me, Gerald Ford, which is my online screen name,* not the ex-president. While on my recent break, I’ve been spending a lot of time reading and writing outside the blog. Among the things I am reading (in no particular order)...."
~ The Sensual Approach to Self-Enquiry -- "When I talk about attention, I'm not talking about an abstraction, I'm talking about the very real and obvious phenomena of noticing that we are aware of one another, of ourselves, of these bodies, of these hands and eyes and feet, of the whole gamut of sensual experience, including the sensuality of thought, of emotion, of observing ourselves in this moment from head to foot, and everything in between. What are we observing that is not attention?"
~ Talking about art -- "With regard to conversations about the fine arts, I think the traditional means of learning to do so remains the best: poetry analysis. Namely, in the course of learning how to close-read poetry, and talk about the close-reading bursts of recognition that one glimpses during that, you learn how to talk about all the fine arts." Yep.
~ Sweet Seattle Rituals -- "When we're not adorned with our clunky metal armor, I often don't find people exhibiting the same willingness to extend oneself into another person's personal space in kind and friendly ways. hmmm... how can I start living this more fully?" As a former Seattle resident, this post made me homesick.
~ I-Thou: Twenty-four Hour Lament -- " The following account of a day in the life of a social worker is excerpted with the author's permission from Reviving Our Interiors: Serving the Mentally Ill Living On Our Streets, by Annie McQuade."
~ What's Next for Integral Buddhism? -- "Perhaps the future of Buddhism is integral. ISC Teacher Patrick Sweeney sees his purpose as creating mandalas or practice environments that faithfully embody Buddhism, in its most integral form. But what is Integral Buddhism?"
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