"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."
~ Bertrand Russell
Image of the day (Buck Forester):
BODY
~ Pre-Workout Fix: Whole Foods vs. Energy Supplements -- "At the gym and on the track, it’s not uncommon to see runners and other athletes guzzling sports drinks or chewing on power bars before a workout or race. A beginner may look at the example these athletes are setting and think that this is what they should be doing. However, is it better to use these supplements or just eat whole foods?"
~ 10 Reasons You're Still Jacked Up -- "This is going to be the best training year ever, only you're so jacked up you can barely go number two without having a troop of Boy Scouts lower you onto the toilet seat. Lifter, heal thyself!"
~ Build Muscle & Lose Fat in 3 Months: Free eBook -- "Jason from World Fitness Network wrote a post for StrongLifts.com a while ago: Building Inner Strength: a Lesson from Tyler Durden. Some readers called it the best article online here. Guess what. Jason wrote an eBook: 3 Months to a New You. He sent me a copy last week. I just finished reading it, here’s a short review.
~ Wide Grip Cable Rows -- "As with all rowing movements, seated cable rows focus mainly on working the lat muscles, as well as working the biceps, traps, and the deltoids (shoulders). When compared to bent-over barbell rows, it has some advantages and disadvantages."
~ Study Confirms Link Between Fast-Food Consumption And An Increase In Metabolic Risk Factors -- "Otherwise-healthy adults who eat two or more servings of meat a day - the equivalent of two burger patties - increase their risk of developing metabolic syndrome by 25 percent compared with those who eat meat twice a week, according to research published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association."
~ Heart-Healthy Hawthorn Extract -- "Taking hawthorn extract can help control symptoms of chronic heart disease such as low abilities to work and walk, and also improve a range of heart-related measurements. Hawthorn extract is a popular herbal medicine in Europe and the USA. It is made from dried leaves, flowers and fruits of hawthorn bushes. Experiments show that the extract is capable of enabling the heart to beat more powerfully and increasing the amount of blood that flows through the heart's muscles."
~ Critical things to know about your cholesterol -- "How's your cholesterol? Here's a guess: If you're healthy, you probably have no idea. But cholesterol's artery clogging makes heart disease the Number One killer of women late in life. So, are you ready to start paying attention? Here, the things you need to know now."
~ Eating Your Way to Lower Cholesterol -- "It's not as easy as taking a pill, but dietary changes and exercise really can lower your cholesterol."
~ Men's Death Rates Dramatically Lowered By Daily Exercise -- "Increased exercise capacity reduces the risk of death in African-American and Caucasian men, researchers reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.The government-supported Veterans Affairs study included 15,660 participants and is the largest known to assess the link between fitness and mortality."
PSYCHE/SELF
~ Genetic changes key in antidepressant drugs: study -- "Changes in a gene that protects the brain from foreign substances may affect whether commonly used antidepressants work -- and a simple test could help doctors prescribe the right drug, researchers said on Wednesday."
~ SSRI Maintenance Doesn't Prevent Recurring Depression -- "Chronically depressed patients who've recently emerged from a particularly low period but continue taking their antidepressant (AD) medications in order to pre-empt a recurrence are actually just as likely to fall back under the disorder's influence, according to new research."
~ Better Concentration Through Meditation - New Study Shows Promising Findings -- "Science is increasingly researching alternative healing approaches, including that of meditation. Previous studies have shown that meditation has positive effects on everything from blood pressure to immune function. A new study points to improvements in not only stress but also attention capacity."
~ Musings On the Ethnosphere -- "Will we turn around one day and discover that the way of life we have created, with all its individual freedoms, is totally unsustainable? Will we come to agree with most of the societies who have ever lived on Earth that interdependence is the only way to go on a planet as small, and yet incredibly diverse, as ours?"
~ 20 Simple Tips to Defeat Negative Thoughts -- "Negative thoughts are the enemies of victorious life. Since our life is very much determined by our mind, our thoughts can make or break our life. Negative thoughts will distract your focus from the important and drain your energy. At the end, you will no longer have the ingredients necessary for success. Knowing how to overcome negative thoughts may make the difference between victory and defeat."
~ Why You Should Never Be Afraid of Failure -- "If you’ve ever tried something new and had it fail, I know I’ll find you more interesting to talk to than the guy who has had everything work out. That guy is never trying anything new. You have courage. You are amassing life experience. You are learning where the strength to get back up comes from. You’re headed somewhere good."
~ Unwanted Thoughts -- "Things we sweep under the rug fill our night dreams."
~ What Would You Risk For A Better Life? -- "What is the ultimate risk? In my opinion, the ultimate risk is living your life in such a way that when you when you come to lie on your deathbed you will have cause for regret. It is therefore important to understand that there is great risk attached to inaction and safety. By playing things safe - for example by staying in a high paying but unsatisfying career - you are actually risking the pain of regret later in life."
~ Why we love (and flirt) -- "Time magazine has a couple of articles on the psychology of love, sex and attraction. The first looks at the science of love, from thoughts to hormones, and the second at what we know about flirting."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Schooled in cool -- "A new class of smart, literate British bands is challenging the lumbering louts of indie rock. Sarah Boden meets the groups in the vanguard of the New Eccentric movement."
~ Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion -- "In this book, Marlene K. Sokolon explores the political character of emotions in Aristotle's account by considering the emotions in the Rhetoric (book 2: chapters 2-11) as bases for the virtues and conduct examined in the ethical and political works. Fourteen emotions are considered, generally presented as paired contrasts, under two headings: emotions concerning the subject and household (anger-gentleness, love-hate, and fear-confidence) and those concerning the community and justice (shame-shamelessness, benevolence-selfishness, pity, indignation, envy, and emulation). In each case, Sokolon outlines Aristotle's account of the emotion and then comments on its political character, frequently with illustrations from famous political speeches."
~ Peter Clothier: The Politics of Greed -- "Sorry, Gordon Gekko notwithstanding, greed is not good. Call it karma. Good old American greed -- the greed that the oft-invoked "Reagan Revolution" thrived on -- is coming back at us, and it's not good. I'm no economist. Just a humanist and a bit of a Buddhist, and I look about me in the world today and I see the human cost of greed."
~ War on Iraq: Desperate Iraqis Lack Fuel, Electricity -- "Blackouts and long lines at gas stations, as subsidized, state-controlled supplies run dry."
~ One Step Closer to a Cheney Impeachment -- "More than a third of the House Judiciary Committee's Democratic members want to see Cheney ousted."
~ Fred Thompson Quits Presidential Race -- "Republican Fred Thompson, the actor-politician who attracted more attention as a potential presidential candidate than as a real one, quit the race for the White House on Tuesday after a string of poor finishes in early primary and caucus states."
~ Remembering Heath Ledger -- "Obituaries—especially obituaries for the young, beautiful, and unexpectedly dead—are a hopeless genre to write. The deadline is, by definition, past, and you know you've already been scooped countless times. So rather than research a tribute to Heath Ledger by watching the ghoulish three-minute-long video of Ledger's body being wheeled out on a gurney, or clicking through photos of his 2-year-old daughter (just three months older than mine), I stayed up most of the night watching and re-watching a few of his movies."
~ The Clintons Double-Team Obama -- "Hillary opts to look toward Super Tuesday while Bill stays behind to focus on South Carolina. Is this a fair fight?"
~ Seven Questions: Martin Feldstein on the “R” Word -- "Is the global economy headed for a rough patch? With the world’s stock markets in turmoil, FP spoke with distinguished Harvard economist Martin Feldstein on what a U.S. recession would mean for America and the world."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi -- "Tests on sushi bought in Manhattan revealed mercury levels that exceed accepted safety standards."
~ Should the government start handing out prizes for science breakthroughs? -- "Right now, senators, inventors, and tech companies are squabbling about how to reform the patent system to encourage more innovation. Some version of the embattled patent-reform legislation is expected to pass next month, and stakeholders are preparing for a gory fight over all sorts of itty-bitty nitty-gritties, such as how to calculate damages for patent infringement."
~ Israel Eyes Thinking Machines to Fight 'Doomsday' Missile Strikes -- "Israel is worried about Iran launching an all-out, "doomsday" barrage of rockets and missiles. So military leaders have begun early planning for a new, robotic defense system, armed with enough artificial intelligence that it "could take over completely" from flesh-and-blood operators. "It will be designed for ... autonomous operations," the commander of Israel's air defense forces insists."
~ Rich Nations' Environmental Footprints Tread Heavily On Poor Countries -- "Researchers have assessed the financial costs of environmental damage caused by human activities in high-, middle- and low-income nations, and where those costs fall. As expected, the rich nations disproportionately impact poor nations, but the results allows the researchers to estimate the total cost. Altogether, poor nations are burdened by a cost that exceeds what they owe the rich nations."
~ Economists Help Climate Scientists To Improve Global Warming Forecasts -- "Climate scientists are collaborating with experts in economic theory to improve their forecasting models and assess more accurately the impact of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Although there is broad consensus that there will be a significant rise in average global temperature, there is great uncertainty over the extent of the change, and the implications for different regions."
~ All in a flap: New evidence of how birds took to flight -- "Biologists have fought long and sometimes bitterly about how birds evolved -- but a new study published on Thursday suggests that their intellectual battle may have been all in vain."
~ Seeds of wisdom -- "A scrappy coalition of seed-diversity activists, organic seed providers, and green groups are suing the USDA, urging it to revoke the "unregulated" status it awarded Monsanto's latest strain of GM beets."
~ Researchers study agricultural impact on Mississippi River -- "According to a study published in Nature by researchers at LSU and Yale University, farming has significantly changed the hydrology and chemistry of the Mississippi River, injecting more carbon dioxide into the river and raising river discharge during the past 50 years."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST BLOGS
~ Notes on "Holy Madness": More on Relating to a Spiritual Teacher -- "One thing to remember about a teacher is that they are human. One should not expect a teacher to be perfect. It is difficult to look beyond flaws or mistakes, but given that the teacher is a real true teacher, that is exactly what must be done. It is the teaching, after all, that is important."
~ Anatomy of voices -- "We shift into different voices (subpersonalities) throughout the day, taking on their perspective, seeing and feeling the world from their viewpoint, relating to the world from their place."
~ Why We Plan -- "Why do we plan? That was the question in my planning theory class last night. The answer which leapt to my mind was not what our professor was looking for, so I kept my teeth tightly closed, though today I continue to ponder it. We plan because we are intrinsically afraid of the unknown."
~ Buddhism is Not All That! -- "I was surfing the web this afternoon when I serendipitously found this old article by John Horgan, Why I Ditched Buddhism. Below are some relevant quotes and my corresponding commentaries."
~ Taboo of Psychic Phenomena -- "I recommend the video of a lecture by Dean Radin "Science and the Taboo of Psi". Please go to youtube (link here), since the embed function was disabled for this one. Time 95 minutes. Here's another video with Radin, on the general prejudice and taboo concerning psychic phenomena, and the need to separate at least some of these from uneducated superstitions."
~ Sunrise in Seattle -- "Light is an important metaphor in Buddhism. Lately, I have been reading the Golden Light Sutra*, which is a sutra not as well-known in the West as say, the Heart Sutra or Lotus Sutra, but it’s really a very beautiful text."
~ We're Electing a President, Not A Holy Fool -- "One of the few good things to be said for the inordinate length of the primary process is that in due course, a man who has received a huge amount of press coverage--a right-wing fundamentalist Christian who seems both humorous and "authentic"--reveals himself to be a humorous and authentic ignoramus. That is precisely what happened when Mike Huckabee suggested that we "amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view." (Huckabee also revealed himself to be as ignorant about lucid sentence structure as he is about constitutional history.)"
~ East Meets West; Psychology for A New Paradigm -- "The body and brain, in this sense, is the seat of the soul, or the self which is the hidden observer within us all. Without this, we are merely empty bio bags without a self. In the medical world, such a description would be called brain-dead. What is trying to be emphasized here is the need for an integrated view of our inners and outers."
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