"I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world."
~ Georges Duhamel
Image of the day:
BODY
~ Seven Principles for Better Program Design -- "Programming is one of those subjects with the potential for almost unlimited complexity, and it’s a subject of endless debate, discussion, and confusion among coaches and athletes alike. That being said, it’s important to recognize that effective programming can be accomplished within realistic timeframes by almost anyone willing to put in the work."
~ Guest Blog - from your Belly Fat! -- "...ok not really - it's from my friend Craig Ballantyne of Turbulence Training- and it's a good one!"
~ Critical Health: Calcium And Fat-Burning! -- "Recent studies have shown that a diet supplemented with low-fat dairy calcium triggers a greater response for fat loss. The study tells why."
~ Caffeine Raises Risk Of Miscarriage, Study -- "US researchers found that pregnant women who have large doses of caffeine every day, for example from coffee, tea, hot chocolate or caffeinated soda or fizzy drinks, have an increased risk of losing their baby through miscarriage. The researchers suggest women stop drinking caffeine while pregnant."
~ Eating a proper breakfast 'fuels decision-making' -- "Business leaders could put their decision-making abilities at risk by failing to eat a proper breakfast, according to a survey out today. A third start work on an empty stomach which can affect their ability to think straight in the office."
~ Cold Toes Can Mean Diabetes -- "However, if your toes feel cold even when it is not cold outside, or if you have loss of feeling or tingling as well, you need a complete work-up for causes of nerve damage. Numb, cold or tingling feet can be one of the first symptoms of diabetes."
~ Walking an hour a week cuts colon cancer risk -- "A large new study confirms that physical activity reduces colon cancer risk."
~ Making Sense of Arthritis Supplements -- "Alternative remedies abound, but which actually work?"
~ Genes Linked To Lupus Identified By International Consortium -- "A landmark genetic study has identified multiple genes linked to systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), or lupus, a debilitating autoimmune disease that affects an estimated 1.4 million Americans.Lupus can affect the joints, kidneys, heart, lungs, brain and blood and occurs in about 31 out of every 100,000 people."
~ Consuming Extra Virgin Olive Oil Helps To Combat Degenerative Diseases Such As Cancer, Study Suggests -- "Researchers have for the first time analyzed the antioxidant properties of olive oil, a product rich in polyphenols (natural antioxidants). They believe these antioxidants improve the lives of people suffering from oxidative stress, and are also highly beneficial for the prevention of cell aging and osteoporosis."
PSYCHE/SELF
~ Humanity, thou art sick -- "Shyness is now ‘social phobia’, and dissent is ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’. How did everyday emotions come to be seen as illnesses?"
~ Teen risk factors for schizophrenia identified -- "Five key factors can help predict whether at-risk young people will go on to develop schizophrenia, researchers have found."
~ Emotional Voters [The Frontal Cortex] -- Jonah Lehrer riffs on and expands on David Brooks' recent article.
~ Three Reasons to Diversify Your Reading and How to Do It -- "Last month I was in vacation mode, so I switched to lighter reading. I read A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson followed by Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising. But, rather than just taking lighter books to read, that is also part of my plan to diversify my reading. Here are three reasons why we should diversify our reading."
~ Test your corpus callosum -- "I've just discovered a wonderfully simple finger touch procedure that can test the function of your corpus callosum, a key brain structure that connects the two cortical hemispheres."
~ Giving Birth To Yourself -- "Giving birth to yourself can happen at any age. You could be in your 70's, you could be a teenager, you might be in your mid-thirties: it makes no difference, you can make this exhilarating change in your life at any time."
~ Do qualia serve to tag the 'here and now'? -- "What follows are some excerpts from a manuscript on the PCC (psychological correlates of consciousness) that I've been working on for a while, which will perhaps never see the light of day. Philosophers, feel free to have a field day with my naive ideas."
~ Brain Connections Strengthen During Waking Hours, Weaken During Sleep -- "Most people know it from experience: After so many hours of being awake, your brain feels unable to absorb any more - and several hours of sleep will refresh it. Now new research from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health clarifies this phenomenon, supporting the idea that sleep plays a critical role in the brain's ability to change in response to its environment. This ability, called plasticity, is at the heart of learning."
~ The inner body -- "NPR's radio show Talk of the Nation has a discussion with Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee, authors of a new book on the neuroscience of the body and movement. If you're interested in the ideas of embodied cognition that we covered the other day, the discussion touches on many of the major findings in cognitive science that are feeding into this important area."
~ Loneliness May Be Alleviated By Animals, Gadgets, Spiritual Beliefs, Not Just People -- "New research at the University of Chicago finds evidence for a clever way that people manage to alleviate the pain of loneliness: They create people in their surroundings to keep them company."Biological reproduction is not a very efficient way to alleviate one's loneliness, but you can make up people when you're motivated to do so," said Nicholas Epley, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ The Closed Minds of Today's Intellectuals -- "The components of political correctness -- radical feminism, the gay agenda, multiculturalism and collective rights, extreme environmentalism, health fascism, Darwinist scientism and materialism, and lately and most incongruously, Islamism -- do not constitute a coherent worldview. Each agenda contradicts each other." Just want to present the occasional alternate point of view.
~ Alpha Poet -- "Louis Zukofsky (1904-78) is the author of an enormous poem called simply “A,” an 800-plus-page work written over the course of more than 50 years in a mélange of styles and forms, from Poundian free verse to Italian canzoni. “A”-21 — the poem was composed of 24 parts, mirroring the hours of the day — translates an entire play by Plautus. “A”-24, the final section, is the score of a masque composed by Zukofsky’s wife, Celia. “The most hermetic poem in English,” a “long intent eccentric unread game,” was the critic Hugh Kenner’s judgment of “A,” and Kenner liked it."
~ The Truth of Scientific Knowledge Grounded in Faith -- "Beginning with the Cartesian rationalistic, dualistic paradigm of perceiving reality there is within Western Civilization an unfortunate tendency to see science and religion in an adversary relationship to each other, but that is a false dichotomy. It is basically false because the two phenomena have a common origin. I would submit that the inability to discern a common origin has done irreparable intellectual damage to Western culture and, in as much as its thinking and praxis have spread globally, to mankind in general."
~ The Democrats Could Blow It Again -- "After the first rounds of caucuses and primaries, the prospects don't look so rosy for the Democrats or so bleak for the Republicans. The presidential race now looks like a toss-up -- perhaps even with a Republican edge."
~ The Great Need of the Hour -- Barack Obama's speech from Sunday that is getting a lot of press. For an analysis, see this from The Nation.
~ Creative Class, Dismissed -- "To my students, Rousseau's astonishing position collides head-on with the TV-drenched, movie-dependent, iPodified, grind-dancing world in which many of them spend a good part of their lives. The idea that their world of stories and entertainment — even in its more respectable precincts such as Masterpiece Theatre and U2 benefit concerts — could possibly be harmful to them is the furthest thing from their minds."
~ Reclaiming King: Beyond "I Have a Dream" -- "People usually focus on the historic "I Have a Dream" speech, but it's the work King was doing at the end of his life that deserves more attention."
~ Patriots, Giants Head to Super Bowl -- "The New England Patriots' path to perfection has one last hurdle: a New York team of road warriors hoping for a Giant upset."
~ Why campaign coverage sucks -- "Horse-race journalism works for journalists and fails the public."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ The Future of Physics -- "Physicists are also drawing up plans for a machine intended to succeed and complement the LHC more than a decade hence, adding precision to the rough maps that will be deciphered from the LHC’s data. At the end of this “journey” to the terascale and beyond, we will for the first time know what we are made of and how the place where we briefly live operates at bottom. Like the completed LHC itself, we will have come full circle."
~ Geotagging Expands Uses of Digital Images -- "Geotagging, which allows photographers to embed GPS locations into their photos, is opening up a whole new way of using digital images. As GPS devices become more commonplace, the practice of geotagging is expanding and being used by a variety of people from naturalists to trip planners to archaeologists."
~ More states crafting greenhouse gas curbs -- "Rules capping U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are gaining traction at the state level as federal proposals to do the same bog down in Washington."
~ LED Cell Phone Has No Screen -- "Designer Tao Ma has recently unveiled an LED cell phone concept, where hundreds of LEDs replace the conventional screen. Besides boasting a stylish modern appearance, the LED phone will likely have reduced power consumption, and be quite affordable."
~ Sweden to Study Belching Cows -- "A Swedish university has received 3.8 million kronor ($590,000) in research funds to measure the greenhouse gases released when cows belch."
~ Conservation Easements, Climate Foresight and Resilience -- "In a story that many native Westerners will recognize, that land became her family's anchor place, and a place they came to care enough to fight for. It's one of the great untold stories of the American West, that for thousands and thousands of regular families who wanted a place in the beauty that surrounded them, owning land came to mean being in some fundamental sense owned by it. A great number of the staunchest, brightest and most visionary rural sustainability advocates in the West are these folks."
~ Whole Foods CEO lays out the 'Future of Food' -- "John Mackey, co-founder and chief executive officer of Whole Foods Market Inc., has a good idea as to what the future of global organic and alternative food production should look like. Despite consumers’ “willful ignorance” toward how their food is made and the “lies” fed to consumers by the industrial agriculture industry, a new era of food production is on the horizon, Mackey declared Thursday evening during a presentation at the American Grassfed Association’s Grazing America ’07 Conference in Austin, Texas, hometown of the $5.6 billion natural and organic retail giant."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST BLOGS
~ a buddhist carnival - 3rd edition, part 2 -- "here is part 2 of the january buddhist carnival. you can find part one here."
~ Why Political Optimism and Spiritual Optimism Are the Same -- Deepak Chopra -- "There was a collective moment of euphoria for many people when Barack Obama gave his victory speech in Iowa, followed by two weeks of steady deflation. New Hampshire and Nevada didn't ride the wave of hope and optimism being generated that night. It's easy to become disillusioned by this, because experience teaches us that euphoria is temporary. The same pundits who wanted to anoint Obama on the spot now prudently observe that he has to fight if he wants to win the nomination of his party."
~ The Meat Issue -- "But having to make separate, meatless meals for me puts a strain on her. While she doesn't mind the occasional vegetarian meal, she likes eating meat and really has no desire to change. And it is not my place to force or even encourage her to change. It's not my job to manage her journey."
~ Love -- Stuart Davis -- "Over the course of my career, I've had conflicted feelings about the entertainment industry. More accurately, I've sometimes been conflicted about my role in it. There has been a part of me that wants to indulge. Binge. Submerge myself in Saturnalia. That part spent a decade sewing wild oats. But then more oats showed up. I still like to fuck, frolic, and fight my way through a night of naughtiness now and then. I guess even 15 years of meditation can't erase our 1st and 2nd chakras."
~ Honoring Malcolm X -- "Today in US we observe Martin Luther King’s birthday, as we do every year. Many blogs will cover the subject, offer their interpretation of King’s message of peace and so on, often comparing him with Mahatma Gandhi*, but I decided to do something a little different. I wanted to use this day to honor another civil rights leader who doesn’t get a national holiday: Malcolm X. I am not a minority in this country, but nevertheless I’ve always considered the Malcolm X one of my heroes. Allow me to explain why."
~ A Secular Age -- "At the beginning of his enormously erudite book, A Secular Age
, Charles Taylor poses the question of why it was virtually impossible not to believe in God in 1500, whilst five hundred years later for many of us, myself included, this disbelief appears “not only easy, but even inescapable.” To answer this question, Taylor undertakes an exhausting, if not exactly exhaustive, survey of the last five hundred years, attempting to lay bare the historical and cultural roots of secularism."~ Prison Dharma -- "In many ways, Buddhism seems to be a natural path for institutionalized prisoners who make the decision to grow spiritually while incarcerated. With training and some instruction on a regular basis, most inmates should have the time and space for a meditation practice (or other forms of contemplation)."
~ Big Think -- "I’ve really been digging the website Big Think lately. It just launched recently, I think. Lots of great videos of interesting people talking about interesting things. Here’s a vid of Dana Gioia talking about the challenges the arts face today."
~ The Diversity of Being - Wade Davis on Vanishing Cultures -- "With stunning photos and stories, Anthropologist Wade Davis celebrates the diversity of the world's indigenous cultures, now disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate. He argues passionately that we should be concerned not only for preserving the biosphere, but also the 'ethnosphere' -- 'the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination.'"
~ Five new articles at Integral World: RETHINKING AQAL - Zakariyya Ishaq, INTEGRAL TIME AND CAUSALITY - Michael Garfield, FURTHER THOUGHTS ON THE ORGANIC-INTEGRATIVE MODEL - Jim O'Connor, ON REDUCTIONISM - David Lane, and SECOND-TIER COMMUNITY - Christoph Schaub.
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