Friday, August 31, 2007

Speedlinking 8/31/07

Quote of the day:

"We do what we must, and call it by the best names."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image of the day:


BODY
~ Half-Rep Heroes: A Rant -- "Are you tired of seeing all those idiots in the gym doing everything wrong? Are you tired of the laziness, the stupidity, the lack of backbone, and the careless disregard for everything you hold dear? Move over, so's Jeff Ingram."
~ Ice or Heat: The Great Debate -- "Ice or heat? As straightforward as this question sounds, these two choices are often points of hot debate amongst athletes attempting to soothe injured body parts. Yet despite strong arguments from both sides, here’s the simple truth: ice and heat both have their advantages and neither is a cure-all."
~ Case Strengthened For Daily Calcium Pill -- "A landmark study by University of Western Sydney researchers has found people over 50 who take calcium supplements suffer fewer fractures and enjoy a better quality of life.The meta-analysis of over 63,000 people taking calcium or calcium and vitamin D supplements, conducted by the UWS Centre for Complementary Medicine Research (CompleMED), has been published this week in the prestigious international medical journal, The Lancet."
~ Lose Your Love Handles Workout -- "Love handles, those pinchable rolls of fat that sprout from the waistline, are one part of the body we love to hate. Even "six-pack" abs don't look their best with handles attached. So what's the deal with this extra jelly that clings stubbornly, frustratingly around your belly? Is there any way to get a handle on those handles? Absolutely. And the approach is twofold: Burn off body fat, build muscle."
~ Hotel room workout -- "Exercise physiologists show that your conditioning level can fall to pieces in as little as 3 days, which is exactly the amount of time that is required for a short business trip or a weekend get-away trip. Although most hotels have gyms you can use, many of them disturb your regular workout routine."
~ Veggies may lower aggressive prostate cancer risk -- "Men may be able to halve their risk of aggressive prostate cancer by adding large amounts of broccoli and cauliflower to their menu. However, the overall risk of prostate cancer was not changed." These cruciferous vegetables contain compounds that reduce estrogen or help eliminate estrogen from the body -- so this study would strengthen the link between estrogen and deadly prostate cancers.
~ How to Win the Weight Battle -- "Ten years and billions of dollars into the fight against childhood fat, it's clear that the campaign has been a losing battle. According to a report released last week by the research group Trust for America's Health, one third of kids nationwide are overweight now; other stats show that the percentage of children who are obese has more than tripled since the 1970s."


PSYCHE/SELF
~ We’re no slaves to our senses -- "Free will and agency are not merely the creation of nerve endings in the human brain. So while neuroscience can tell us a lot, it does not hold the key to understanding human uniqueness."
~ Babies develop imagination by age 2 -- "If someone tells you a friend got her nose pierced, you can visualize the new look and incorporate the information into your thinking and expectations. Young infants can't imagine such things. So when do children gain this ability to visualize things based on what they've been told?"
~ Are you your own worst enemy? -- "I'm going to tell you about seven bombs you can blow yourself up with. There are more. But I like lucky seven, because if you pay attention, you may be fortunate enough not to stab yourself in the eyes. So pay attention!"
~ 15 Quick Ways to Give Value and Make a Positive Impression -- "Making a positive impression on someone you met through a networking event or online need not be a difficult or use much of your time or resources. The following 15 quick ways to make a positive impression are designed to be easy to implement and most only take a few minutes to do, depending on where you are at."
~ Master The Simple Science of Positive Thinking! -- "Just by simply spending some effort and time, staying positive every day can be easily achieved. All that is required is a fraction of your time, 10-15 minutes a day to cultivate the positive you! But first, what is really positive thinking? Do you have to be in an upbeat, cheerful and enthusiastic mood all day to be positive minded? No. Positive thinking simply means the absence of negative thoughts and emotions - in other words, inner peace!"
~ How to Build Courage Through Personality Traits and States of Mind -- "New research suggests courage is driven by personality traits, self-efficacy, hope, resilience, values, beliefs and social forces. PsyBlog shows how all these can be enhanced."
~ The problems of dualism -- "Dualism works on the principle that there are two distinct forms of reality; the mental and the physical. The most well known form of it is interactionism. Descartes in The Meditations argued that mind and body (or what we can interpret as mental and physical) had to be distinct realms of reality due to their difference in properties."
~ What is the Self? -- "'The self' is one of the most challenging and interesting issues in philosophy of mind and Cognitive Science. We all have a phenomenal conscious feeling that our experiences are unified into one identity – a self; that our experiences belong to someone. However what this self actually is or whether it actually exists is open to debate."


CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Congress has enough evidence for an impeachment inquiry -- "Detractors of an impeachment inquiry by the House judiciary committee into whether President George W. Bush has committed impeachable offenses contend that no questions should be asked until conclusive incriminating evidence is either volunteered up by the suspects themselves or appears before them by spontaneous combustion. In other words, they say, no inquiry should commence until proof of the president's guilt has been unearthed—proof which would, of course, make the inquiry superfluous!"
~ A New Mingus Concert -- "A previously unknown 1964 recording surfaces to supply us with another dazzling look at one of the greatest jazz bands to ever take a stage."
~ Warner Decides Against Sixth Term -- "Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia, one of the most authoritative voices in Congress on the military and a key figure in the debate over Iraq, said Friday he will not seek a sixth term in 2008." This is our loss -- I may not always agree with him, but at least he's a thinking politician, not a politico.
~ Politics: The Fed Won't Help the Working Class -- "By pumping more money into the economy to bail out hedge funds and subprime lenders, the Federal Reserve will only worsen inflation's bite into average Americans' paychecks, Nicholas von Hoffman writes."
~ Top 10 Greatest Hoaxes of all time -- "A hoax is an attempt to trick an audience into believing that something false is real. We came up with a selection of the Top 10 Greatest Hoaxes of all time."
~ Time for a Reality Check on Iraq -- "Incomprehensibly, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and the dwindling number of Iraq war enthusiasts continue to push the false argument of "They attacked us on 9/11, and we're fighting them in Iraq." Who are "they"? There was no Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq before we overthrew Saddam Hussein. The self-proclaimed "Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia"--a band of Iraqi and foreign terrorists who are, at most, loosely affiliated with Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda--came into existence after our invasion. We are not in Iraq because of Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is in Iraq because of us."
~ The Friends of Larry Craig -- "As the nation now knows, Craig was arrested in June in an airport men's room in Minneapolis, charged with propositioning an undercover cop, who was on duty there because the place had become notorious." I'm always scared when I agree with Pat Buchanan.


HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ One Species' Genome Discovered Inside Another's -- "Scientists at the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute have discovered a copy of the genome of a bacterial parasite residing inside the genome of its host species."
~ Lost City Apollo Found at Stonehenge -- "Could Stonehenge be home to the mythical Lost City of Apollo? Highly acclaimed archaeologist Dennis Price, noted for his startling discovery of Stonehenge’s lost alter stone near a roadside in Berwick St James last year, believes he’s found the reknowned Lost City of Apollo in the land near Stonehenge."
~ Arctic Habitats Melting Away -- "The icy north is disappearing faster than ever, report scientists."
~ Digital Dandelions -- "What looks like the head of a digital dandelion is a map of the Internet generated by new algorithms from computer scientists at UC San Diego. This map features Internet nodes - the red dots - and linkages - the green lines. But it is no ordinary map. It is a (mostly) randomly generated graph that retains the essential characteristics of a specific corner of the Internet but doubles the number of nodes."
~ Extinct dolphin possibly sighted -- "A white dolphin native to China's Yangtze River that scientists had declared extinct last year has possibly been spotted swimming in the wild, offering a small shred of hope for its revival, a researcher said Wednesday."
~ Agreement Reached on Greenhouse Gas Curb -- "Negotiators from 158 countries reached basic agreement Friday on rough targets aimed at getting some of the world's biggest polluters to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming."
~ A genetic trigger for the Cambrian explosion unraveled? -- "A team of scientists led by young Croatian evolutionary geneticist Tomislav Domazet-Lošo from Ruder Boškovic Institute (RBI) in Zagreb, Croatia, developed a novel methodological approach in evolutionary studies. Using the method they named 'genomic phylostratigraphy', its authors shed new and unexpected light on some of the long standing macroevolutionary issues, which have been puzzling evolutionary biologists since Darwin."
~ Climate, Conscience, and Atmospheric Carbon -- "Both the NGO that I run, and the consultancy that I own, regularly send people around the planet, on planes powered by that ancient congealed plant matter we call "fossil fuel." What about the carbon dioxide emissions associated with all that travel? It has become more and more popular to "neutralize" carbon emissions by making a financial investment in renewable energy projects or tree-planting programs."


INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ New book from Integral Life graphic designer Joel Morrison -- "Our own graphic design guru, Joel Morrison, has finished work on his new book: SpinbitZ - Volume 1 - Interface Philosophy: Mathematics and Nondual-Rational Empiricism. Joel is an amazing guy with an amazing mind, and i highly recommend that you take a look at his work. You can purchase the book (or download the ebook for free) here."
~ Why You Should Think Twice About Your Public Face -- "Few people, I think, share about the downs in life half as much as they share about the ups. And when our “business reputation” is on the line, who wants to sound like they don’t have it all together?" I guess he's never read IOC.
~ On Mother Theresa again: "Unfaith" -- "I'm loathe in a sense to bring this up again because it doesn't matter a whit obviously for Theresa. She is wherever she is. It matters (I guess) only for us, which ought to be remembered in all this commentary (mine included)--how self-centered this whole thing can easily become."
~ shadow 101 -- "Of these (admittedly too general) four major camps, I'm more drawn to the body realm at this point of my life. I still read Jung and find him fascinating, but I'm not in any way looking to heal my archetypes. I bring this up in my continued thread around self-esteem, becoming more process-attentive and creative."
~ Personal reflections on integral -- "I find these days that I’m becoming less and less interested in this thing called “integral.” It seems like a fad that has come and is now going, fading into the sunset with bellbottom jeans and long sideburns."


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