"Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it."
~ Jane Wagner
Image of the day (Darien Chin):
BODY
~ Advice From the World’s Healthiest Men -- "Want to lead an emotionally and physically healthier lifestyle? MSNBC published a worldwide survey of over 20,000 men in various countries on topics such as fitness, work, vacations, diet, sex lives, and health. Using surveys and statistics from sources such as the World Health Organization, the best and the worst countries in each category were ranked."
~ (Video) Why Soy is Not a Health Food -- "In this video, Dr. Mercola talks about how nonfermented soy is not a health food, and should be avoided because it has been genetically modified. This is a topic that can be of debate to vegetarians, because many of us depend upon soy to get our protein needs met."
~ Monster Whey Protein Shake Recipe! -- "One great thing about low-carb eating is that it is very satiating i.e. you feel satisfied sooner than when on a low-fat diet. This is good for cutting fat but could work against you if it causes you to under-eat." This is good for skinny younger guys, but us older guys would want to cut the cream.
~ 5 Ways to Avoid Lower Back Pain from Deadlifts -- "The prime movers during Deadlifts are your quadriceps, hamstrings & glutes. Your lower back, upper-back, traps & forearms perform isometric contractions: they stay contracted during the whole lift. That’s how Deadlifts strengthen your lower back: you must keep your back rigid against a load. Unfortunately many don’t strengthen but hurt their back doing Deadlifts. Here are 5 ways to avoid lower back pain from Deadlifts."
~ T-Nation Strength and Size Roundtable, Part 1 -- "A cadre of coaches discuss various bodybuilding and powerlifting topics, including the wisdom of trying to build size and strength at the same time, and the relative benefits of isolation movements vs. compound movements."
~ Study Suggests Antibiotics Are Overused -- "A woman dying of Alzheimer's has a fever. Should she be given antibiotics? Many people would say yes. But a provocative new study suggests that antibiotics are overused in people dying of dementia diseases and should be considered more carefully because of the growing problem of drug-resistant superbugs...."
~ Flu may be peaking, but can be avoided -- "In parts of the United States, influenza is peaking, and while this year's vaccine isn't as effective as usual, the flu's misery can be avoided, an expert says."
PSYCHE/SELF
~ Blood test could reveal bipolar disorder - "A blood test could be used to diagnose and assess the severity of certain mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder, according to a new study. But some experts think this raises ethical concerns."
~ Psychosis and the coming glutamate revolution -- "Dopamine has been the big player in understanding schizophrenia since antipsychotic drugs were discovered. All current antipsychotics have their main effect by blocking dopamine function in the mesolimbic pathway and there's now significant evidence that this is the location of one of the major dysfunctions."
~ How to Build Your Self-Esteem -- "Learn how to build confidence and increase your self-image. Vanquish your fears and overcome insecurity with these simple steps."
~ Clinical MDMA Brief (25 Feb 2008) [DrugMonkey] -- "As a brief update on my posts on the clinical use of MDMA (Part 1, Part 2) I'll note that the MAPS folks are trumpeting the initiation of yet another clinical trial with extra oomph because it is at dear auld Haavahd."
~ Coping with Existential Depression - "People and professionals often divide up depression into different types, such as “clinical” depression versus “non-clinical” depression, “biological” depression versus “situational” depression. The diagnostic manual professionals refer to, however, doesn’t make any distinctions about theorizing where or how your depression is caused, and neither does most research in this area. And yet, I believe such distinctions may serve a purpose if they help guide a person’s treatment choices."
~ 10 Ways We Hurt Our Romantic Relationships -- "It’s not easy to have a great relationship with your boy/girlfriend, partner, or spouse. But it’s not impossible, either — it takes some work, of course, but it’s good work, work that’s a joy when everything comes together."
~ Researchers Identify New Receptor Complex In Brain -- "Mount Sinai researchers have identified a new receptor complex in the brain that responds to several types of antipsychotic drugs used to treat schizophrenia and also reacts to hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD."
~ Anticipation Fires the Imagination -- "How horrifying might it be to lose a limb? How exhilarating might it be to find true love? When these things actually happen, reality rarely matches our predictions. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (ScienceNOW's publisher) today, psychologist Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University presented new experimental results that may explain why."
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Hillary Steps Up Attacks on Obama as Judgment Day Approaches -- "Clinton's campaign has increased its attacks on Obama before Ohio and Texas, but is it to blame for circulating a picture of him in Kenyan garb?"
~ Two Views on Nader’s Candidacy -- "Ralph Nader has announced that he will run for the presidency for a third time. In the past months on Truthdig, the case has been made both for and against such a campaign. Here Chris Hedges says why he should run, while Robert Scheer tells Nader himself it would be better if he didn’t."
~ Architecture’s Battle of the Modernisms -- "Modernist architecture almost from the start had two chief strains. The one that produced Manhattan’s greatest icons, the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, as well as Rockefeller Center, flows from Paris: from the classical massing, symmetry, and proportion that Gotham architects learned at the École des Beaux-Arts, and from the astonishing vocabulary of ornament that they learned from the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs that gave us the art deco style. The other current, the International Style, flowing from the Bauhaus art and design school founded in Germany in 1919, gave the world the glass and steel box, which arrived in New York at the start of the 1950s in the relatively refined forms of the UN Secretariat and Lever House on Park Avenue."
~ Judy Blume's lessons in love -- "Her explicit novels about the rites of adolescence are loved by teenage girls the world over - and loathed by America's religious right. As she approaches her 70th birthday, Judy Blume talks to Melissa Whitworth about sex, censorship and the trials of being fairy godmother to a generation of women."
~ Is a Liberal Renaissance in the Making? -- " This election should bring some optimism after years of right-wing dominance."
~ The Movement And The Maverick -- "An Obama-McCain race would probably accelerate the process of scrambling the parties' historic class alignment."
~ Take a Stand Against Torture (It’s a Moral Issue) -- "The National Religious Campaign Against Torture is an interfaith effort “committed to ending U.S.-sponsored torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” Its motto: ‘Torture is a moral issue.’"
~ America's Unfaithful Faithful -- "Americans are a religious people, but they switch religious groups with surprising frequency, a major new survey finds."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ South Africa OKs Killing of Elephants -- "South Africa announced Monday that it was reversing a 1995 ban on killing elephants to help control their booming population, drawing instant outrage from animal-rights activists." It's things like this that make me misanthropic on occasion.
~ Low-Level Carbon Monoxide Dangers -- "You might be suffering the toxic effects without even knowing it."
~ SCUBA-2 Camera Will Explore Earliest Phases Of Galaxy Formation -- "A giant camera known as SCUBA-2 is being transported to the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. Rather than detecting visible light, SCUBA-2 will detect submillimeter radiation, which is sensitive to the heat emitted by extremely cold dust in the Universe. This material is associated with the mysterious earliest phases of the formation of galaxies, stars and planets, until now largely undetectable. Typically the dust is at temperatures of about -200 Celsius and so detecting its extremely weak emissions presents a huge technological challenge."
~ Masters Of Disguise: Secrets Of Nature's 'Great Pretenders' Revealed -- "A gene which helps a harmless African butterfly ward off predators by giving it wing patterns like those of toxic species, has been identified. The mocker swallowtail butterfly, Papilio dardanus, is unusual because it emerges from its chrysalis with one of a large number of different possible wing patterns and colors. This is different from most butterfly species which are identified by a common wing pattern and colour. Furthermore, some of the different patterns that the mocker swallowtail exhibits mimic those of poisonous species, which affords this harmless insect a valuable disguise which scares off predators."
~ Dust In West Up 500 Percent In Past Two Centuries -- "The West has become 500 percent dustier in the past two centuries due to westward US expansion and accompanying human activity beginning in the 1800s, according to a new study."
~ Honey bee invaders exploit the genetic resources of their predecessors -- "Like any species that aspires to rule the world, the honey bee, Apis mellifera, invades new territories in repeated assaults. A new study demonstrates that when these honey bees arrive in a place that has already been invaded, the newcomers benefit from the genetic endowment of their predecessors."
~ That's Folding! Cube's Urban Street Concept Bike -- "We love folding bikes. Because they remove one of the arguments about taking up cycling; “I don’t have any room for a bicycle.” Here is a folding bike concept to would give short shrift to that excuse, were it ever to transition into a real world commercial product. Gregor Dauth, a student at the Coburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany has worked with Cube bikes to develop his Urban Street Concept Bike." Beautiful bike!
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST BLOGS
~ Gray Hairs & the Dhamma -- "Reflecting on the aging process over a period of time helps one to accept the fact that one isn’t getting any younger. It’s a natural aspect of life that all phenomena deteriorate with time: even million year old wine won’t be a vintage! And it’s not just living beings that wither with time: looking at the ruins of Angkor Wat, the Coliseum, or the Sphinx, it can be seen how they all are subject to the same forces that whiten our hair over the years. Everything is impermanent (anicca)."
~ Change is certain (replay) -- "Change of URL! I'm about to start a new blog at hokai.info/ws/ where I will post my own articles from time to time. (Therefore, hokai.wordpress.com will only be used privately. Sorry for the confusion.) This place has been renamed to h~log and will feature recommendations, references, or short comments on entertaining, educating, and enlightening material found elsewhere in text or video." Make note of this in your readers.
~ Jonah Goldberg's Narcissistic Take on Global Warming -- "So I was surfing the conservative side of the Web when I encountered Jonah Goldberg's article on National Review Online, Global Cooling Costs Too Much. I would've let his article pass but even to a Climate Change moderate like me Goldberg's closing statement was just too ludicrous not to rip apart."
~ 2008 Blogisattva Award Winners Announced -- "Today's the day that the world has been waiting for, when the winners are announced -- for the Blogisattva Awards! [drumroll, please] "And the winners are ... why, Buddhism blog readers, worldwide."
~ It is so, it is so -- "Much of the life of Shinran, founder of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, is detailed in the letters his wife, Eshinni, and his daughter Kakushinni exchanged. In the final years of Shinran’s life, both he and Kakushinni moved to Kyoto (now that Shinran was pardoned), and so both mother and daughter exchanged letters."
~ The Merits of Melancholia -- "English professor Eric G. Wilson argues that the American pursuit of happiness, fueled by Prozac and "positive psychology," has robbed many lives of the "fertility of pain" or "melancholia" that propelled Keats, Handel, Georgia O'Keefe, and countless others to their greatest works. Joni Mitchell calls her bouts with melancholia the "sand that makes the pearl," and Professor Wilson says...."
~ Become an Integral Peacemaker -- "Watch Fleet Maull on Integral Peacemaker Training."
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