Quote of the day:
"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight. "
~ Robertson Davies
Image of the day:
BODY~
Playing With Steroids -- "Whenever a steroid story breaks, the first person they call is Dr. Charles Yesalis. Oddly enough, based on the interviews over the years, we've been led to believe that Dr. Yesalis is rabidly anti-steroid. We may have been wrong."
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Cancer Risks For Overweight Women -- "Half of all cases of womb cancer and a type of oesophageal cancer in women are caused by being overweight or obese, according to a new report published online in the British Medical Journal . This study provides the first reliable evidence on the relevance of being overweight or obese for a wide range of cancers in women in the UK today."
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Fish And Omega 3 Linked To Mental Skills -- "A Norwegian study has found a link between eating fish and improved mental skills in older people, a Dutch study found a link between higher omega 3 in the blood and lower mental decline, while a New Zealand study found a link between omega 3 levels in the blood and better physical health, although the link to better mental health was less convincing. All three studies are published in the November issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition."
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Advice To Eat Complex Carbs And Avoid Sugar Supported By New Research -- "Eating too much fructose and glucose can turn off the gene that regulates the levels of active testosterone and estrogen in the body, shows a new study in mice and human cell cultures that's published this month in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. This discovery reinforces public health advice to eat complex carbohydrates and avoid sugar. Table sugar is made of glucose and fructose, while fructose is also commonly used in sweetened beverages, syrups, and low-fat food products."
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Exercise found to ease chronic pain of fibromyalgia -- "Regular walks and stretching exercises can help ease the chronic, depressing pain of fibromyalgia, a mysterious ailment with no obvious cure, researchers said on Monday."
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Beta carotene protects memory in study -- "Beta carotene taken as a dietary supplement for many years may protect against declines in memory, thinking and learning skills that often precede Alzheimer's disease, researchers said on Monday."
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Easy Weight Loss by Dr John Berardi -- "All day long, all across the web, folks are posting questions about why they're not losing weight, why they're not gaining weight, why their body comp isn't changing. They're frustrated, confused, and feeling helpless. However, I believe that for the majority of them, if they just made things simple, progress would follow."
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Beauty of BOSU -- "Half a stability ball has the whole fitness world convinced. A wobbly sphere that was sliced in half, the
BOSU® ball yields results—whether you jump, sit, step, get into plank pose or do pushups on it. Try these tips from
Equinox trainer Kristen Gagne."
PSYCHE/SELF~
Neurobunk: Politics, Phrenics, and Brainscans -- " As you might imagine, determining how the human brain works with fMRI is in the same ball-park of difficulty as determining how our mystery computer works with only a temperature sensor."
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5 Ways to Master Your Emotions -- "Get the top five ways to tweak your emotions and feel great."
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Slower Brain Maturity Seen in ADHD Kids -- "Crucial parts of brains of children with attention deficit disorder develop more slowly than other youngsters' brains, a phenomenon that earlier brain-imaging research missed, a new study says...."
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When Conventional Wisdom is Simply Wrong -- "All too often in psychological research, researchers look at a variable and then draw conclusions about that variable, assuming they’ve held all the other variables equal. But because life is so complex and our environment is filled with so many possible alternative explanations for the results (researchers call these “confounds”), researchers are very often simply wrong in the conclusions they draw from their data."
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Childhood Trauma Contributes to Mental Illness in Adulthood -- "Troubles suffered in childhood can have a significant impact upon adult behavior, as the results of a decade-long study demonstrate. The study examined numerous childhood traumas and
the effects that these early experiences have upon an adult's health and behavior. The results show that adults who experienced multiple traumas during childhood are much more likely to have poor mental and physical health."
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Does the color red really impair performance on tests? [Cognitive Daily] -- "One of the things I was taught in English graduate school was never to grade papers using red ink. Students don't respond well to the color red, I was told -- it's intimidating. I always thought this was a little far-fetched, and my instructors couldn't offer a peer-reviewed journal article that definitively answered the question of whether red ink was harmful."
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The Different Faces of Depression -- "Parsing the blues into subtypes."
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Removing Despair from Depression -- "Overcoming sorrow by separating the emotions."
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Theory and Practice in Therapy -- "'The world is much more than can be formulated by our theories, but when we approach it with a particular theory it responds in a particular way. Our theories can draw out different aspects of the world.' This quote comes from The Focusing-Oriented Counselling Primer, which I have just finished reading."
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Men Talk More Than Women Overall, But Not In All Circumstances -- "A Gallup poll recently confirmed that men and women both believe that it is women who are most likely to possess the gift of gab. Some even believe that women are biologically built for conversation. This widespread belief is challenged by new research. Researchers found a small but statistically reliable tendency for men to be more talkative than women overall."
CULTURE/POLITICS~
On the Overlooked Utility of Poetry -- "Forget Mystery's "method" or other forms of pick-'er-up gamesmanship. William Butler Yeats can get you laid."
Maybe this is satire, if not, well, uh, yeah.
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Deepak Chopra: The Second Injection -- "This seems to be an opportune moment to reconsider the death penalty. By giving last-minute stays to executions in Mississippi and Texas, the Supreme Court has effectively brought about a moratorium on all executions until next spring. At question is the accepted method of administering lethal injections, a method adopted by 37 of the 38 states that allow the death penalty."
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WorkPlace: Gay? U.S. House Says That's Okay -- "It has taken more than 30 years for the House to pass the bill now known as the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation."
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Can Obama Rock the Nomination? -- "The Senator from Illinois was the star performer at a Democratic candidates' dinner in Iowa, in a performance that suggests he has found his voice."
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Hanson: Freedom, Even from Fear -- "We should remember on this Veterans Day that some very young people — with long futures, in the prime of health, and at the center of their families — died for the rest of us. They lost their lives not just for us to watch an OJ outburst in Vegas or
American Idol, but for the idea that we — most often not so young, not so hale, and not with such bright futures as our soldiers — could be free at their expense; free, not merely from being conquered or enslaved, but free from the very thought of it."
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E-Trade Loses More Than Half Its Value -- "Shares of online brokerage E-Trade Financial Corp. lost more than half their value Monday, with a Citigroup analyst saying customers were poised to flee and the company was at risk of bankruptcy."
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Justices May Hear Second Amendment Case -- "The Supreme Court may take up a gun-control law that would interpret the right to 'keep and bear arms.'"
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY~
Charges Considered in Bay Oil Spill -- "Federal investigators were considering Monday whether to file criminal charges in San Francisco Bay's worst oil spill in nearly two decades."
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The Dinosaur Conspiracy Theory -- "A study suggests that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs did not act alone."
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How Poisonous Plants Protect Themselves From Their Own Weapons -- "It is a known fact that plants are firmly planted in the soil -- they cannot flee from enemies which want to eat them. They are not helpless, however; they oppose their enemies with a large number of sometimes highly poisonous substances. But the plant itself -- how can it protect itself from these poisons?"
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Warp Speed Improves Calculations a Million Times -- "Thanks to Einstein, physicists know that the world looks different depending on how fast you're moving. A new analysis shows that it a lot prettier (mathematically speaking) if you're moving at just the right speed, leading to an improvement in calculations describing colliding particle beams and lasers by factors of a million or so."
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Rare great ape fossil challenges evolutionary theory: study -- "Archaeologists have discovered the ancient jawbone of what appears to be a new species of ape that was very close to the last common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees and humans, a study released Monday said."
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Clean, carbon-neutral hydrogen on the horizon -- "Hydrogen as an everyday, environmentally friendly fuel source may be closer than we think, according to Penn State researchers."
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Probing Question: Are Asteroids a Threat to Earth? -- "Hollywood thrillers such as Deep Impact helped to jump-start America's interest in knowing what our "deflection strategy" would be if a giant asteroid was on a potentially catastrophic collision course with Earth."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST~
The progymnasmata -- "Wonder why the quality of writing today is so across-the-board poor? Well, perhaps there is a solid reason why. I’ve recently become aware of the progynmasmata. That is the name — literally, “preparatory exercises” — that were developed by ancient Greek educators, to teach people how to learn how to write."
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Forms of identification and disidentification -- "A quick overview of some forms of identification and disidentification...."
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What I've Learned About Love, and About Myself -- "
I have learned an enormous amount over the last month from people I have come to love. I always get a kind of 'high' when I am learning a lot, and these days I've been walking around with a goofy smile all the time, and crying, both joyfully and empathetically, more than usual."
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Dhamma-nating the conversation, part II: The Core Concepts and the Contoversy -- "This is the second installment of my brief amateure overview of Nichiren Buddhism. If you missed the first one you can
read it here."
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Self-Transformation & Praxis - Part 2 -- "In part two of our
series examining the history & evolution of contemporary integrative transformative practices, we feature an essay by Jorge N Ferrer, Ph.D. Jorge is Associate Professor in the East-West Psychology Program at the
California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, where he teaches courses on transpersonal studies, comparative mysticism, embodied spiritual inquiry, and spiritual perspectives on sexuality and relationships."
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Joe Perez on Integral Naked - The Power of Integral Reconciliation -- "The author of one of the most searing, courageous personal memoirs of our time shares how extraordinarily helpful an Integral Approach can be in reconciling and integrating even the most volatile, difficult, highly-charged aspects of one’s own being—and not only live to tell the tale, but find true meaning, peace, and wholeness."
Includes free sample audio clip.
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Gampopa - Compassion with Reference to Sentient Beings, Reference to Dharma, and without Reference Point -- "In a sense, what distinguishes these three types of Compassion that Gampopa sets out in 'Jewel Ornament of Liberation' is the development or level of our compassion (and wisdom)."
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Towards an Integrative Theory of Peace Education -- "In this paper Danesh outlines an a multi-dimensional & integrative theory of peace. Danesh argues that an integrative theory of peace (ITP) incorporates many of the currently held perspectives and approaches to peace education, while at the same time challenges some of the most widely held concepts with respect to the nature of peace itself."
Tags:
integral theory, peace, Gampopa, compassion, Buddhism, Joe Perez, self transformation, love, Nichiren Buddhism, identification, disidentification, progynmasmata, writing, asteroids, hydrogen fuel, ape fossil, warp speed, poisonous plants, dinosaurs, Bay oil spill, Second Amendment, Supreme Court, E-Trade, Veterans Day, Barack Obama, Employment Nondiscrimination Act, lethal injection, Deepak Chopra, poetry, men and women, therapy, depression, color red, childhood trauma, conventional wisdom, ADHD, brains, mastering emotions, brainscans, BOSU ball, weight loss, John Berardi, beta carotene, fibromyalgia, avoid sugar, omega-3 fats, cancer risks, women, steroids, speedlinking
