Monday, August 20, 2007

Speedlinking 8/20/07

Quote of the day:

"We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves."
~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Image of the day:


BODY
~ Brightly coloured fruits could hold the key to fighting cancer -- "Natural pigments which give certain fruit and vegetables their bright colour can have a dramatic effect in fighting cancer, new research has shown."
~ Phys Ed: Lobes of Steel -- "Consider this before skipping yet another workout: Exercise can improve your brain, too."
~ Spot Reduction Exercises Don't Work -- "Many people believe that if they do enough sit-ups they will get rid of belly fat, but your body does not work that way. Exercising a specific muscle does not get rid of more fat over that muscle in comparison to the rest of your body." I'm surprised this myth persists.
~ Exercise Tips For Diabetics -- "You have diabetes and want to exercise. It is possible, says Dr. Stephen G. Rosen, Chief of Endocrinology & Metabolism at Pennsylvania Hospital. Diabetes affects 20.8 million people in the, about 7% of the population, according to the American Diabetes Association. Staying active is a great way to prevent and control diabetes."
~ Exercise Must Mean Exertion If You Want Good Health -- "If you want to get any health benefit from exercise you have to push yourself, according to an article published in the journal Circulation. Members of the American College of Sports Medicine wonder whether some people's idea of 30 minutes of gentle exercise might not be just a bit too gentle."
~ Trans Fat Labels: When 'Zero' Doesn't Mean Zero -- "Foods with labels touting zero grams of trans fat may still have a small amount."


PSYCHE/SELF
~ Thinking Out Loud -- "In “Um...,” Michael Erard brings together two of humanity’s signature traits: using language and messing things up. The way we misspeak is endlessly interesting, but not because it is a sign of bad habits or unconscious feelings. Rather, interruptions and mistakes result from one of the fundamental properties of language, its linearity."
~ Brain cells work differently than previously thought -- "Scientists know that information travels between brain cells along hairlike extensions called axons. For the first time, researchers have found that axons don’t just transmit information – they can turn the signal up or down with the right stimulation."
~ Misprediction Of Emotions After Decision Making Studied -- "Behavioral research over the past 15 years has confirmed what anyone who has purchased a house or dumped a significant other could tell you: When people make decisions, they anticipate that they may regret their choices. It is important that we maintain this ability, because as the aforementioned house-buyers and spouse-dumpers know, regret can be a terrible feeling."
~ Rejection Can Bring Real Pain -- "The brain registers social pain much like physical injury."
~ How to Handle Criticism and Get Something Good Out of It -- "Receiving criticism isn’t always fun. However there are ways to handle it in a less hurtful way and – sometimes - get something good out of it. "
~
Too Many Choices -- "An article in the Times Online reports on the stressful effects of having too many consumer choices. The availability of dozens of salad dressings and hundreds of cell phones (and mobile service plans) apparently isn’t giving us the freedom we may assume."
~ Introspection Develops Much Earlier Than Previously Thought -- "Preschoolers are more introspective than we give them credit for, according to new research by Simona Ghetti, assistant professor of psychology at UC Davis. Ghetti and her co-investigator, Kristen Lyons, a graduate student in psychology at UC Davis, presented their findings during the "Young Researchers in Developmental Psychology" symposium at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in San Francisco."
~ Internet addiction more serious than OCD -- "Internet addiction should be grouped with extreme addictive disorders such as gambling, sex addiction and kleptomania, an Israeli psychiatrist said."


CULTURE/POLITICS
~ The time for philosophising is over -- "Philosopher Ernst Tugendhat on Heidegger, his students' trauma and the rest."
~ Milton Friedman, Meet Richard Feynman -- "If economics can tell us something useful about crime, marriage, or carpooling—as I believe it can—then other academic disciplines should have something to tell us about economies. Last month, Science published an example that may turn out to be important. Two physicists, Cesar Hidalgo and Albert-László Barabási, and two economists, Bailey Klinger and Ricardo Hausmann, have been drawing unusual pictures of economic "space" that promise a deeper understanding of the biggest question in economics: why poor countries are poor."
~ Grading the Dems' Iowa Debate -- "Mark Halperin grades the candidates in their first debate in the key caucus state. Guess who was best in class?"
~ The Cult That Spawned the Tough-Love Teen Industry -- "The idea that punishment can be therapeutic is not unique to the Rotenberg Center. In fact, this notion is widespread among the hundreds of "emotional growth boarding schools," wilderness camps, and "tough love" antidrug programs that make up the billion-dollar teen residential treatment industry."
~ The poisonous rhetorical legacy of Karl Rove -- "Even Fox's Chris Wallace wants to know why Bush's newly departed advisor had to paint Democrats as traitors."
~ MTV and The Associated Press Release Landmark Study Of Young People and Happiness -- "The majority of young people - 13-24 - are happy with their lives and optimistic about the future a new study reports today. The study also say parents are a big positive influence, along with spirituality. Younger sexually active kids reported much lower levels of happiness." See also: What makes kids happy will surprise you.


HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Modern Cosmology: Science or Folktale? -- "It appears that everybody is interested in cosmology. In one anthropological study, every one of the more than 60 separate cultures examined was found to have several common characteristics, including "faith healing, luck superstitions, propitiation of supernatural beings, … and a cosmology." Apparently, to be human is to care how the physical world came to be, whether it has boundaries and what is to become of it. Modern cosmology is a highly sophisticated subject funded by governments with hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It is unquestionably interesting, but is it, even in its modern guise, convincing?"
~ Artificial Life Likely in 3-5 Years? -- "Creating life from scratch is hardly science fiction anymore, and soon it may be fact."
~ Time Travel Machine Outlined -- "Future generations might travel into the past."
~ Thermochemical process converts poultry litter into bio-oil -- "Provides safer, more environmentally friendly solution to waste disposal."
~ PFOS and PFOA linked to low birth weight -- "A U.S. study says exposure to perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) in the womb is linked to low birth weight and head circumference."
~ Is Sugar Ethanol Better Than Corn-Based? -- "How Brazil is transforming sugar cane into ethanol that it claims is a cleaner, cheaper and more sustainable source of fuel."


INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ Buddhist Geeks 33: Lacking Leadership, Lacking Conceptuality -- "In our final segment, speaking with Hokai Sobol and Daniel Ingram the conversation wraps up with a criticism of what is missing from some of the Buddhist leadership in the West, as well as the issues surrounding conceptuality and non-conceptuality."
~ We Create Moments of Perception to Remember -- "I used to do a lot of theorizing. Theorizing typically happens from the armchair position. You create a theory, I find, because you are too lazy to test something out in the actual world. I have given up theorizing for hypothesizing lately. The difference between a theory and a hypothesis is that the latter is testable. Not just that it is testable, but that it is designed to be tested. Testing is its whole purpose. An untested hypothesis is an unfulfilled hypothesis."
~ What do I mean by "involution"? -- "Any moron can see that involution is the metaphysical process by which the Absolute or God or Brahman involves itself in creation through a series of manifestations, generally regarded as a sequence of stages of enfolding. Evolution is the opposite of involution, so generally what we know about involution is by inference: it is what evolution is NOT."
~ Form is emptiness indeed -- "Several unorthodox videos bringing the Almighty Hannyashingyo, i.e. Heart Sutra in Japanese. Enjoy?"
~ Integral Time Management -- "I've been thinking lately about what an integral approach to the topic of time management might look like. Because in a career counselling or career coaching context, time management is a practical and important topic. But as far as I can tell, time management -even the term - tends to evoke a rationalist, "right-hand path" mindset, to use the integral term."
~ 101 Zen Stories -- "I just stumbled upon a website with 101 Zen Stories listed in a table of contents, or you can click for a random zen story. Here are a few of them."


2 comments:

Peter Clothier said...

Great quote from LaRochefoucauld! Can I borrow it? Cheers, PaL

william harryman said...

Of course -- if you follow the link, you too can get quotes of the day.

Peace,
Bill