Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Speedlinking 11/13/07

Quote of the day:

"Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."
~ Philip K. Dick

Image of the day (Mark Simms):


BODY
~ Non-Sexy Training and Nutrition -- "Testosterone runs a lot of "sexy" new training articles. Trouble with that is the essential stuff, stuff like progression, energy system work, the 90% rule, and supplements, often gets forgotten. Not so with this article."
~ Keith Wassung’s Strength Training Program: Timed Total Tonnage -- "Keith Wassung has a 710lbs Squat, 480lbs Bench Press, 700lbs Deadlift & 355lbs Overhead Press at 220lbs body-weight. He walks the talk."
~ Eating Your Greens Could Prove Life-Saving If A Heart Attack Strikes -- "A diet rich in leafy vegetables may minimize the tissue damage caused by heart attacks, according to researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. Their findings, published in the November 12 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the chemical nitrite, found in many vegetables, could be the secret ingredient in the heart-healthy Mediterranean diet."
~ Try Adding These Superfoods To Your Thanksgiving Dinner This Year -- "Tired of spinach, bored with broccoli? Experts say there's a new generation of superfoods that promise to do double or triple-duty when it comes to preventing illness. At the top of the list kiwi. "In a recent study, kiwi was found to be one of the most nutritionally dense fruits out of 27 fruits," says Stephanie Dean, R.D., dietitian with Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas."
~ The Important Role Of Natural Foods! -- "There is a particular body of research by two nutritional pioneers which provides some amazing insight into just how import raw, unprocessed foods are to our overall health. Learn more about them right here!"
~ Spotlighting teen's weight fuels unhealthy eating -- "Overweight adolescents may be more likely to continue practicing extreme eating or weight-control measures when their parents focus too much weight issues, study findings suggest."
~ Personal Health: Chronic Pain: A Burden Often Shared -- "When people experience unrelenting pain, everyone they live with and love is likely to suffer."


PSYCHE/SELF
~ Thinking About Thought -- "Metaphor is not just a poet's tool to express touching feelings. Metaphor is pervasive in our language. "Her life is a nightmare", "My room is a jungle", "She is a snake", "This job is a piece of cake", etc.: we communicate all the time metaphorically."
~ Using Your Personal Power - You Can Learn to Be Assertive -- "Saying "no" and setting limits doesn't come easily to most people. It becomes especially difficult during the holiday season as we try to make everyone around us happy, often at the expense of our own well-being. How can we take better care of ourselves?"
~ Move to Boost Mood -- "How physical activity alleviates depression."
~ Body of Evidence: Laws of Motion -- "Upholding body and mind through movement."
~ 15 Tips to Make Today the Day You Finish Your To-Do List -- "You’ve seen it before. Every checkmark only leaves two more unfinished tasks. Your to-do list has become an living organism, spawning more and more work while leaving you less and less time to finish. Is it possible to stop your to-do list, or will it just become an unstoppable blob of extra work?"
~ Gratitude, the Great Mood Lifter -- "While studies tend to confirm that no sudden stroke of good or bad fortune can shift your basic level of happiness much, from the results of this study it does seem that taking a few minutes a day to note specific things we are grateful for, as opposed to hassles and random things, can up baseline happiness by a full 25%."
~ IQ Equals Innate Intelligence? Maybe Not! -- "Is there such a thing as a finite and innate capacity to learn? Is it at all possible to measure it? Is there any point, and what could be the possible motives in doing so?"
~ The Culture of Our Discontent -- "Meredith F. Small examines the western medical model of mental illness from the perspective of an anthropologist. Her book journeys across various approaches which attempt to shed light on some of the evolutionary perspectives and cultural differences surrounding mental illness."


CULTURE/POLITICS
~ The evolution of creationism -- "Two years ago, Pennsylvania federal Judge John Jones III handed down a stunning decision that many said would take down the intelligent design movement. But American creationism doesn't die. It just adapts."
~ The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush -- "When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page."
~ The Limits of Clear Language -- "The primary villain in “Politics and the English Language” is the kind of fancy, pretentious, imprecise prose that is usually purveyed by intellectuals (Orwell’s particular targets were intellectuals on the left), not the state. Nobody who has read the essay can ever use a formulation such as “not unlike” again with a clear conscience."
~ Division of the U.S. Didn’t Occur Overnight -- "A veteran political reporter explains how hyperpartisanship came to rule Washington."
~ The Coming Foreclosure Tsunami -- "As Congress grapples with the wave of foreclosures and bankruptcies resulting from the subprime mess, why are some Dems siding with the banks?"
~ A-Rod's Salary: Watching for Collusion -- "Back in the '80s baseball's owners were found to have conspired to keep salaries down. Could they be planning the same thing when Alex Rodriguez's agent goes shopping?"
~ Bhutto says Musharraf must quit -- "Held under house arrest behind barbed wire, Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto called on Tuesday for military leader Pervez Musharraf to quit as president, isolating him in the run-up to a general election."


HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Challenges to Both Left and Right on Global Warming -- "The left says global warming is a real-time crisis requiring swift curbs on smokestack and tailpipe gases that trap heat, and that big oil, big coal and antiregulatory conservatives are trashing the planet. The right says global warming is somewhere between a hoax and a minor irritant, and argues that liberals’ thirst for top-down regulations will drive American wealth to developing countries and turn off the fossil-fueled engine powering the economy."
~ Cheap Dirty Fuels Versus Costly Clean Fuels -- "Burning fossil fuels loads the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, and that's raising the earth's average temperature. This raises the question: Will today's higher oil and gas prices necessarily spark the development of low-carbon, climate-friendly transport fuels? Unfortunately, energy produced from unconventional sources of fossil fuels is still often cheaper than many other proposed alternative fuel supplies. In addition, some allegedly green fuels aren't all that green."
~ 'Big Five' Oil Companies Limit Exploration -- "The "Big Five" international oil companies are spending less money on oil exploration in real terms despite a four-fold increase in operating cash flow since the early 1990s. On the flip side, the study, "The International Oil Companies," finds that second-tier oil companies are spending more in exploration, positioning themselves to be in better shape when it comes to future oil reserves."
~ New Method Converts Organic Matter To Hydrogen Fuel Easily And Efficiently -- "Hydrogen as an everyday, environmentally-friendly fuel source may be closer than we think. A new process produces 288 percent more energy in hydrogen than the electrical energy that is added to the process."
~ Scientists reveal secrets of ancient ocean in new book -- "Call it the ocean that time forgot. About 400 million years ago, the Rheic Ocean played a big role in Earth`s history. When this massive body of water closed, the Appalachians were lifted to Himalayan heights and the planet`s continents slammed together to form the supercontinent of Pangaea. Dinosaurs and early mammals evolved to traverse the large swath of land, spreading life to every corner of the globe."
~ Changing environment organizes genetic structure -- "What is the fundamental creative force behind life on Earth? It's a question that has vexed mankind for millennia, and thanks to theory and almost a year's worth of number-crunching on a supercomputer, Rice University physicist and bioengineer Michael Deem thinks he has the answer: A changing environment may organize the structure of genetic information itself."


INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ The Paranormal is Very Normal -- "I know I’m about to open myself up to attack with this post, but sometimes a good attack feels good!"
~ Deepening Compassion -- "I thought I'd therefore share some further reflections on Gampopa's threefold classification of Compassion (from The Jewel Ornament of Liberation)."
~ Buddhist Politics and Barriers -- "It is weird that I am both at a high and low point in regards to my relationship to Buddhism right now."
~ Obstacles & Challenges to Practice -- "I recently sat down to list (ostensibly for the mindfulness group I’ve been developing on campus) what kind of obstacles we can experience in our practice. As I was putting these down it quickly became apparent that these are nothing but my own challenges to practice. All of them. Persistently. Hence, the list became an inventory of obstacles to my own practice, and a good way to look deeply at the same. Feel free to add to these and repost."
~ Spiritual Dissonance Part One -- "How is it possible that so few are able to find the only thing that can never be lost? How do we actually accomplish the miraculous feat of seeing what's not and not seeing what is? By what specific mechanism does delusion maintain its hold over those who seek to free themselves of it?"


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