Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Speedlinking 9/11/07

Quote of the day:

"Silent gratitude isn't very much use to anyone."
~ Gertrude Stein

Image of the day:



BODY
~ 5 Battle-Tested Strategies for Size and Strength -- "James Chan is into machine gunning, shot guns, and cross wiring. If we didn't know better, we'd think he was one of those militia guys holed up in some shack in Montana, swearing never to be taken alive."
~ Why You Should Always Squeeze Your Glutes -- "Most common mistake in strength training & weight training: not squeezing the glutes at all. Squeezing your glutes is the best way to increase strength & safety. Here’s why."
~ Having The Right Grains For Breakfast Keeps Blood Sugar In Check All Day -- "If you eat the right grains for breakfast, such as whole-grain barley or rye, the regulation of your blood sugar is facilitated after breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was previously not known that certain whole-grain products have this effect all day. This is due to a combination of low GI (glycemic index) and certain type of indigestible carbohydrates that occur in certain grain products."
~ Body Fat Rate Measurement: A Cheaper And More Accurate Means Of Determining State Of Health, Australia -- "Researchers have determined that one's Body Fat Rate (BFR) - attained using bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) - provides a highly accurate and economical method to measure body composition. This study is published in the Online Early edition of the journal, Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Physiology, published by Wiley-Blackwell." I've been arguing for a long time that body fat is more relevant than BMI.
~ Study Sheds Light On Role Of Vitamin E In Heart Disease Prevention -- "Conflicting reports about the potential benefits of dietary supplements can make a person's head spin. That's certainly been the case with vitamin E. Some human studies have shown this antioxidant to play a protective role in cardiovascular disease, while other studies have shown it to have no effect at all."
~ A Chocolate Cookie A Day Puts 20 Lbs On An Energetically Balanced Kid In Four Years -- "After summer holidays, miracle diet adherents stick to these diets to lose the weight gained in the last months in record time. Gyms also become overcrowded with people making a final sprint of sacrifice whose results do not exactly match previous expectations and with few benefits for health."
~ Judge strikes down NYC calorie-posting rule -- "A judge struck down a New York City rule Tuesday that required fast-food restaurants to post calorie content on their menus."
~ Can't quit chocolate? Don't fret, it's no addiction -- "Resistance is futile. The more we try to fight off a craving for chocolate, the more our desire for it grows, a British researcher said on Tuesday."


PSYCHE/SELF
~ men like good-looking women; or, the argument for facial attractiveness -- "Thanks for another good chuckle, FoxNews. This time, it's the headline that got me: Earth-Shattering Study: Men Like Good-Looking Women."
~ The claim: Politically liberal brains are better at handling change [Cognitive Daily] -- "Could one study of 43 college students actually tell us all that? Let's take a look at what the researchers, led by David Amodio, actually did find."
~ Thinking of a Psychology Degree? Free Lectures from University of California at Berkeley -- "Psychology is now the third most popular subject at degree level in the UK. If you're thinking of studying for a psychology degree and you're not sure whether it's for you, then these free Psych 101 lectures from Berkeley are just the thing."
~ Saying No to Yourself: The Neural Mechanisms of Self-Control -- "To do or not to do? We ask ourselves this question constantly, and our answers shape the quality and even the length of our lives. Try to make it through the yellow light? Tell the boss what you really think of that new haircut? Turn on the tube while your spouse is talking to you? These quick, go/no-go decisions can have lasting consequences."
~ 7 Stupid Thinking Errors You Probably Make -- "The brain isn’t a flawless piece of machinery. Although it is powerful and comes in an easy to carry container, it has it’s weaknesses. A field in psychology which studies these errors, known as biases. Although you can’t upgrade your mental hardware, noticing these biases can clue you into possible mistakes."
~ Dream Symbols 16: The House Part 5: The Cellar -- "Coming back to the parts of the house section of this series, the cellar is an interesting phenomenon, as it refers to the lowest part of the house, the part that is actually interred underneath the part of the house that is visible and above ground."
~ New Theory: How Intelligence Works -- "How well information travels through the brain could determine intelligence."


CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Bush to Announce 30,000-Troop Cut -- "President Bush will tell the nation this week he plans to reduce the American troop presence in Iraq by about 30,000 by next summer." Which is just back to pre-surge numbers.
~ Anita Roddick, the Queen of Green -- "Appreciation: Long before it became popular, The Body Shop founder Anita Roddick made us feel good about doing good."
~ The Oprah Effect -- "If Oprah spurs people to go to the polls, she'll have done something significant not just by commercial television's standards, but for our democracy."
~ Why Portland is America's indie rock Mecca -- "I never paid much attention to the band-rehearsal squawk that used to waft through the open windows of my house in the early evenings. The leafy, artsy neighborhood where I live on the east side of Portland, Ore., is home to many a band, after all, and this squawk—though unusually loud and yelpy—sounded like a typical Pabst- and angst-fueled racket. But one day, as I was running in a park adjacent to the squawk-producing home, I realized how mistaken I'd been: That noise actually belonged to Modest Mouse, the hugely popular indie rock group whose latest album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in March."
~ More on the Legacy of September 11 -- "In commemoration of the September 11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans six years ago today, the staff of U.S. News looked at an assortment of 9/11 issues."
~ Goldberg: Hard-Wired Right -- "Is politics all in the mind?"
~ Kennedy Center Names Next 5 Inductees -- "Pianist Leon Fleisher, actor Steve Martin, singers Diana Ross and Brian Wilson and film director Martin Scorsese will share the 30th annual honors of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in December."
~ What To Read This Fall -- An interesting assortment of books recommended by Rebecca Skloot.
~ Mike McCready: Is America On The Right Path? -- "It's been six years since 9-11 and the question everyone is asking is, "are we safer"? All the news channels are filling air time with the multi sides of that issue. What we can all agree upon is that 9/11 changed our country. For as far as I can see into the future, there will always be a pre-9/11 America and a post-9/11 America. That's just the most recent change to our country."


HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Experts: Spiders Spin Giant Web in Texas -- "A variety of spider species built on one another's work to create a sprawling web that blanketed hundreds of yards of trees and shrubs at a North Texas park, according to entomologists who studied the unusual formation."
~ Scientists Use the 'Dark Web' to Snag Extremists and Terrorists Online -- "Terrorists and extremists have set up shop on the Internet, using it to recruit new members, spread propaganda and plan attacks across the world. The size and scope of these dark corners of the Web are vast and disturbing. But in a non-descript building in Tucson, a team of computational scientists are using the cutting-edge technology and novel new approaches to track their moves online, providing an invaluable tool in the global war on terror."
~ Micro-dust could tame hurricanes: study -- "Seeding a hurricane with microscopic dust could sharply reduce its force, according to a study which calculated that the technique might have spared New Orleans from the devastating power of Katrina in 2005."
~ Ford turns harmful fumes into electricity -- "Ford is further advancing its commitment to eco-friendly manufacturing technology by installing the third generation of its patented Fumes-to-Fuel system at Oakville Assembly Plant. The industry-leading pollution-control system converts emissions from the plant’s paint shop into electricity to help power the plant."
~ New rules for action -- "I'd like to propose a few new rules our political leaders might keep in mind as they figure out their role in addressing global climate change."
~ Hubble Captures Stars Going Out in Style -- "The colorful, intricate shapes in these NASA Hubble Space Telescope images reveal how the glowing gas ejected by dying Sun-like stars evolves dramatically over time."
~ Who's afraid of the big, bad wolf? Coyotes -- "While the wily coyote reigns as top dog in much of the country, it leads a nervous existence wherever it coexists with its larger relative, the wolf, according to a new study from the Wildlife Conservation Society. In fact, coyote densities are more than 30 percent lower in areas that they share with wolves."
~ Nanoscale Printing Has Big Implications for Science and Technology -- "Researchers from IBM's Zurich Research Lab and Switzerland's ETH Zurich science and technology university today announced the development of a dramatic new printing process that can manipulate nanosize particles to create larger images."


INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ The Integral Tradition -- "The Canon is meant to be a central part of one's study through life, especially starting in the rhetoric phase, for its works store cultural insights and persuasions not to be swallowed whole or naively, but following Cairns, as highly suggestive thought stimulation, that bear the fruits of depth and profundity through one's maturity."
~ Merging with Autumn and Preparing for Winter -- "Autumn is a beautiful time of year when everything is vibrantly changing to make way for the long winter sleep. The trees begin to turn color to put on a glorious art show before shedding them to conserve energy for the cold days to come. Animals grow thicker fur and hair to adapt to the chill. It is a wonderful season to contemplate upon impermanence and how joyful change can be." Nice post.
~ Karma & the changed mind -- "So I've been surfing around the tipitaka and making sure I have some decent understanding of the basic teaching of the Buddha. Stuff like karma, impermanence, renunciation, calm abiding meditation and some stuff about emptiness. I just had a flash of a concept that was kind of interesting."
~ 10 Easy ways to not get enlightened -- "Am I silly or does this list make a whole lot of sense!" Funny . . . but, not so much.
~ To be perfect as He is perfect is the condition of His integral attainment -- "It is only when we put aside all irreconcilable antinomy between Self and the world that things fall into their place by a less paradoxical logic. We must accept the many-sidedness of the manifestation even while we assert the unity of the Manifested."
~ The Radical Spirituality of Generation X, Part 8: Loose 'Roos on the Road to Eleusis -- "But in Australia waking up to yourself isn't Waking Up to your Self. It means snap out of it and get in line. It's a phrase to pull out whenever someone breaches the unwritten code of the culture, when the values that contain our identity are undermined."
~ Is my life worth living? -- "Buddhism assert we have had limitless past lives. In some of these past lives we were born as humans, and in others we were not so lucky. A human rebirth in which one has meet the teachings of the Buddha and sees the value of these teachings is a perfect human rebirth."


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