"The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well."
~ Horace Walpole
Image of the day (James Jordan):
BODY
~ (Recipe) Banana Cheerio Protein Breakfast -- "When exercising and/or lifting weights, it’s important to add plenty of protein to your diet in order to develop and maintain muscle. When digested, protein is broken down into amino acids, then turned back into protein to produce and repair our muscles after our training session."
~ Exercise of the Week: The Deadlift From Hell -- "It may just be the biggest of the big compound movements. Find out why this hellacious exercise is a favorite of Charles Poliquin!"
~ The New 300: Craig Ballantyne's Bodyweight 500 Workout -- "This time last year, everyone (especially me) was talking about the now legendary "300 Workout". This year Craig Ballantyne, author of Turbulence Training, has put together a new challenge for 2008." Looks like torture -- I can't wait to try it.
~ Fitness Predictions For 2008 - American Council On Exercise -- "The American Council on Exercise (ACE) has completed its annual survey of its extensive worldwide network of personal trainers, group fitness experts, advanced health and fitness specialists and lifestyle and weight management consultants to identify the leading trends in the fitness industry. 2008 promises to be filled with water aerobics, boxing clubs and spicy Latin dancing."
~ Ways To Reduce Gassiness -- "Gassiness: It's embarrassing, bothersome and -- yes, smelly. Sometimes, changing diet can clear the air. Temporarily avoiding certain foods can help identify causes of gassiness. The January issue of Mayo Clinic Health Letter lists foods that sometimes are the culprit: Dairy products: The sugar lactose in dairy foods is a common cause of gas. Nonprescription products such as Lactaid or Dairy Ease may help."
~ Moderate Exercise Yields Big Benefits -- "What's the key to looking and feeling better and enhancing your health? Exercise. Moderately strenuous exercise, about 30 minutes a day, can lead to enormous benefits in terms of your mood, health, weight and the ability to live an independent and fulfilling life. The exercise doesn't need to be athletic or difficult. Studies have shown that simply walking at a brisk pace for 30 minutes or more on most days can lead to significant health improvements."
~ The Ultimate Good Carb Guide -- "Have you ever had a friend tell you that they were giving up carbs? Are you confused by all the talk of carbohydrates? If so, you are not alone. Read on to check out our good carb guide to help you load up on good carbs and cut back on bad carbs."
~ Living With Arthritis -- "Pain may define my condition, but I won't let it define my life."
~ Does milk really do a body good? -- "Some experts say it's a health hazard. Others say it's the most nutritious food you can find. We investigate all the claims about milk to find out if you should have a glass."
PSYCHE/SELF
~ A C Grayling on the Importance of Autonomy -- "Are individuals capable of overcoming limitations to achieve by will and endeavour what they identify as good?"
~ Blogging on the Brain: 1/04 [Developing Intelligence] -- A good collection of links.
~ Decision making, impulsivity and time perception -- "Time is an important dimension when individuals make decisions. Specifically, the time until a beneficial outcome can be received is viewed as a cost and is weighed against the benefits of the outcome. We propose that impulsive individuals experience time differently, that is with a higher cost."
~ 2007 Review: 21 Topselling Books on Personal Growth -- "I use the term personal growth in its broad sense here. Besides self-help books, I also include personal finance, spiritual, and some business books. Of course, my picks are subjective to what I think are related to personal growth, so you can check the complete list if you want to."
~ Altered emotional response in bipolar mania -- "Compared with healthy subjects, manic patients had a significantly reduced VLPFC regulation of amygdala response during the emotion labeling task. These findings, taken in context with previous fMRI studies of bipolar mania, suggest that reductions in inhibitory frontal activity in these patients may lead to an increased reactivity of the amygdala."
~ The Secret of Feeling Grounded -- "Have you ever wondered why full prostrations are a ritual in many world religions? One of the reasons is that something important happens when we bow down and touch the ground with our body: We pour ourself into the earth and into the sky. And this outpouring makes us feel grounded."
~ The Ageless Brain -- "Forgetful? You may be under too much pressure."
~ No One Can Control Your Emotions -- "Many of us feel that when our emotions spill over, when we feel very awful (and even when we feel inordinately good), it is due to our interaction with someone, and therefore we believe that our emotions depend on the good or bad state of our relationship with each person. Obviously this is tantamount to saying that others control our emotions, and nothing could be further from the truth."
~ Enhance Healing Through Guided Imagery -- "Aristotle and Hippocrates believed in the power of images in the brain to enliven the heart and body. Today, research shows they were right. Guided imagery is helping patients use the full range of the body's healing capacity, according to the January issue of Mayo Clinic Health Letter. Guided imagery is more than listening to relaxing sounds. It's a learning process to listen to someone's voice, relax the breathing and consciously direct the ability to imagine."
~ Review - The Search for Meaning A Short History by Dennis Ford -- "It is difficult to classify this book. Perhaps one way to give the potential reader some sense of the book is to say what it is not. It is not a philosophy text. It is not a self-help book. It does not present arguments for the way to find meaning. It is not a book about the meaning of meaning."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Paideia in America: Ragged Dick, George Babbitt, and the Problem of a Modern Classical Education -- "ONCE UPON A TIME, every educated boy was made to learn some Greek and Latin. Today none of them learn any Greek and only a bare few learn any Latin. Who can say when this pernicious decline began? Near the end of the nineteenth century, American educators felt a need to offer the rudiments of a classical education to those “bound by their circumstances to the active and laborious employments of farming, of the mechanic arts, of business, of housewifery, and of all the various handicrafts by which material subsistence is procured.” America at this time was bustling; but if these laboring souls could not leave the farm or workshop for a high school or college education, their boys and girls could."
~ The Esthetic, the Sacred, and Originary Modernity -- "The sacred "reproduc[es] the configuration of the originary event in a more or less formalized manner as ritual"; meanwhile, "language, in contrast, is typically a one-on-one phenomenon; as a self-contained gesture that has renounced any role in worldly action, the linguistic sign has no minimal energy requirement." But the qualification, in a part of the passage referring to the sacred I omitted, that "The sacred tends to inhere in stable religious institutions" [emphasis on "tends to" mine], points to the possibility of a form of sacrality that need not inhere in ritual."
~ Dr. Freud, What Do Voters Want? -- "Where is Sigmund Freud when we finally need him? This is the fellow who famously asked: What do women want? He could have put his skills to better use answering a more difficult question: What do American voters want?"
~ State of Emergency -- "When the experts are pressed about the future of media, they all offer the same inexplicable answer: “I don’t know.” Despite all the money, talent and resources available, no one actually knows how to save the media."
~ Authoritarian Temptation -- " Giuliani never disguised himself. While his moderate stances on social issues distinguished him from the Jerry Falwell wing of the 1993 Republican Party, he never pretended to be anything other than what he was. He was not a popular mayor because he softened his prosecutorial zeal or concealed his fixation with imposing order or renounced his faith in centralized power vested in a single, strong, even unchallengeable leader."
~ Iowa Winners Count on Momentum -- "Next week's New Hampshire vote will test the durability of several candidacies."
~ Obama's Historic Victory -- "It's just one win, but Joe Klein says January 3, 2008 may mark the end of the politics of race - and baby boomers."
~ Youth Vote Tripled in Iowa -- "Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee may owe a debt to young people for their victories in last night's Iowa caucuses. Youth voter turnout tripled from 2004, with 65,000 people ages 17 through 29 turning out for the caucuses."
~ Barack delivers, Hillary disappoints -- "Obama's big win in Iowa also highlights the inadequacy of Clinton's campaign strategy -- more caution than inspiration. Now she must change course."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Can We Turn Garbage Into Energy? -- "As proponents of this waste-disposal method always hasten to point out, "plasma incineration" is actually a misnomer—well, at least the "incineration" part. There is no combustion required, and thus no flames or acrid smoke. A more accurate moniker is "plasma gasification," since the end products of the process are syngas and an inorganic solid that can be used to make asphalt or concrete."
~ The Green Upside to $100-a-Barrel Oil -- "Driven by trends both short-term (political instability in Africa and speculation) and long-term (voracious new demand from China and India), oil has quadrupled since 2003, doubled since the beginning of 2007 and now reached triple digits for the first time since it began trading on the exchange began in 1983."
~ Laptop Project Blames Intel for Breakup -- "The founder of the One Laptop Per Child project claimed Friday that Intel Corp. undermined his group's effort to sell $188 computers for schoolchildren in the developing world even after the chip company got a seat on the nonprofit's board."
~ Science to Government: Evolution Is a Fact, So Teach It -- "A new report by scientific advisers to the U.S. government emphasizes the importance of teaching evolution in schools, while taking a swipe at the "unscientific" theory of intelligent design."
~ A New Attempt to Make S.F. a Truly Wireless Town -- "Google and Earthlink tried, and failed, disappearing in a sea of bureaucratic red tape. Now a startup hopes to persuade San Franciscans to voluntarily put radio repeaters on their rooftops. Good luck with that."
~ Baby Mammoth Could Shed Light on Warming -- "Frozen in much the state it died some 37,500 years ago, a Siberian baby mammoth undergoing tests in Japan could finally explain why the beasts were driven to extinction - and shed light on climate change, scientists said Friday."
~ "Shared Space" Traffic Calming: Counterintuitive, But It Works -- "Imagine my surprise, then, when I read this article about the small (13,000 residents) town of Bohmte, Germany, which decided to deal with its own traffic and safety problems using the opposite approach--eliminating most signals and lane markers altogether. On one section of a major thoroughfare through the city, Bohmte officials have erased lane markers, torn up sidewalks, and bulldozed curbs in a radical effort to force people to use common sense and courtesy when driving rather than relying on lane markers."
~ US judge limits marine military sonar in California -- "A US federal judge on Thursday set limits for the use of marine sonar by the military in California, a practice environmentalists have long accused of putting sealife in danger."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST BLOGS
~ Deepak Chopra: The "Soul Hypothesis" -- "One doesn't have to blindly accept religious dogma to believe in the soul. Like any theory that needs proving, the soul is a hypothesis that can be tested. Such testing doesn't take place in a lab. Each person is a living example of the soul hypothesis, and throughout life we can use our own experience to prove whether the soul is valid and real."
~ Final release -- "The final release is also what allows any and all experiences and any and all ways the world of form happens. The only way this can happen is to see, feel and love as all God. And the only way that can happen is to release identification with the idea/sense/feeling/experience of an I with an Other."
~ Movie Review: No Country for Old Men by Bert Parlee -- "The following is a review of the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men by our own integral movie-buff Bert Parlee. This will, hopefully, be the first of many film reviews to come. Thanks Bert!!"
~ The Living Buddhist Faith -- "Sometimes I am amazed when I read the writings of Jodo Shinshu how organic and living the faith is. As I’ve said a few times before, it is in many ways a very counter-intuitive faith at first glance, but as you delve deeper, it really brings out Buddhism in a whole new light."
~ Mixtape Dharma: Trading Music, Sharing Love -- "I hereby propose the first round of a mixtape (er, mix CD) trading session (assuming this is legal?) to take the edge off all this cold. My group-organization skills are limited, so I’m going make this relatively simple: a straightforward two-way trade. E-mail me at first initial last name at gee mail dot com, tell me you want the mixtape below ASAP, and we’ll trade. I’ll send you the following disk and — here’s where the dharma part comes in — you send me one in return."
~ On Tony Blair's and My Own Roman Catholicism -- "I respect Blair's choice of faith. It's his choice and his alone. Aside from his personal faith and other possible political reasons, Blair converted to Roman Catholicism because of his kinship and love for his wife and kids. I sympathize with that. For the record, I respect the personal faith and for kinship reasons."
~ Ahhhh, Why Not? -- "And I keep thinking how hilarious it is that the one thing I've been trying to keep quiet and under wraps is the one thing that is causing what I do to be something that Is Heard. And I can't help but wonder what else I've been trying to hide that really, truly should be let loose. Do you know what I mean?"
~ Am I a Agnostic Buddhist? -- "Like Sam Harris, I don't like putting labels on my belief and faith. But this is very close to what I subscribe to...." Agreed.
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