Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Speedlinking 7/3/07

NOTE: An early speedlinking today -- weird schedule at the gym. There will be no speedlinking tomorrow -- I'm taking the holiday off to train clients and eat grilled animal flesh.

Quote of the day:

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Image of the day:


BODY
~ The Push-Pull Workout -- "It's one of the oldest bodybuilding methods, but it works, big-time. You can train practically every day without beating your body up. TC describes his lasting love affair with Push/Pull Training."
~ Stress Can Make Us Obese - How Can We Stop It From Doing So? -- "New findings published in Nature Medicine online could offer hope to millions of people who have become obese as a result of stress."
~ Food Nutrition Labels a Puzzle? Here's Help -- "If you think you're the only one who gets confused trying to read nutrition labels on food, relax. You've got plenty of company. In a study of educated adults -- 75 percent had at least a high school education -- most had trouble understanding everyday food nutrition labels."
~ Many diets work about the same, U.S. study finds -- "Looking for that perfect diet? Researchers have bad news -- all diets have just about the same result, and none of them are great, U.S. researchers reported on Monday." They're right -- nutrition is a lifestyle.
~ Exercise Grows New Brain Cells -- "Exercise stimulates the growth of new brain cells, a new study on rats finds. The new cells could be the key to why working out relieves depression."


PSYCHE
~ The Psyche Behind Ambition: Driven or a Little Crazy? -- "Learning Why Some People Just Can't Stop Building on Their Dreams."
~ Scientists can erase bad memories -- "Scientists believe they have found a way to dampen down the impact of bad memories in people's brains. A US and Canadian team used a drug called propranolol to target unwanted memories, while leaving others intact."
~ Finding Joy: A Mind-Body-Spirit Guide -- "A Western psychiatrist draws on Eastern traditions to guide us out of depression."
~ Crying lets truth, healing follow -- "The only way to bring people comfort is to demonstrate your willingness to walk inside those tears where the real pain exists. And in doing so, you always will run the risk of being kicked out of a room, a place or a life. But I promise, it's worth the risk."
~ Selection of Antidepressants: Wellbutrin -- bupropion [The Corpus Callosum] -- "Bupropion, then, is unique. For that reason, it deserves particular attention..."
~ Emotional Eating Carnival July 2007 -- Four articles on emotional eating.
~ Your Life Metaphor Matters. Listen to 107 year-old Clara Font -- "Our metaphors help us make sense of the world. Metaphors allow us to understand something as complex as “life” by thinking of it in terms of something we already know like “a gift.” Clara’s “life is a gift” metaphor is all the more impressive to me, considering that her first forty years were marked with tragedy."


CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Apparition in the Woods -- "The atmosphere of the house is heavy and musty, as if Sibelius’s spirit were still pent up inside. But you get a different feeling when you walk into the forest that abuts one side of the house. The treetops meet in an endless curving canopy. The ground is uncluttered: many paths fork among the trunks."
~ Obama, Poet -- "Harold Bloom, who in fifty-three years of teaching literature at Yale University has had many undergraduate poems pressed hopefully upon him said, when reached by telephone in New Haven last week, that he was not familiar with Obama’s oeuvre. But after studying the poems he said that he was not unimpressed with the young man’s efforts—at least, by the standards established by other would-be bards within the political sphere."
~ White House Won't Rule Out Libby Pardon -- "The White House declined to rule out an eventual pardon for former vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. But spokesman Tony Snow said, for now, President Bush is satisfied with his decision to commute Libby's 2 1/2-year prison sentence."
~ Selling Out Sans Guilt -- "Indie rockers are happily hawking corporate fare. Is selling out really such a big deal anymore?"
~ The Notion: MoveOn Puts Impeachment Back on the Table -- "Now influential Democratic activists are pressing Congress to put impeachment back on the table."
~ Assessing Eat, Pray, Love -- "Eat, Pray, Love begins with Gilbert in her early 30s, crying on the floor of a bathroom of a big suburban house because she realizes that she does not want to have a child; she divorces her husband, falls dramatically to pieces, and then travels around the world. Along the way, she finds god in an ashram in India, big plates of pasta in Italy, and triumphs over her severe depression. Doesn't it sound awful? It is not."


HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ High-performance energy storage -- "North Carolina State University physicists have recently deduced a way to improve high-energy-density capacitors so that they can store up to seven times as much energy per unit volume than the common capacitor."
~ Remotely Controlled Nanomachines -- "Physicists at the University of California at Berkeley have produced images that show how light can control some of the smallest possible machines."
~ Fat kills cancer -- "Researchers in Slovakia have been able to derive mesenchymal stem cells from human adipose, or fat, tissue and engineer them into “suicide genes” that seek out and destroy tumors like tiny homing missiles. This gene therapy approach is a novel way to attack small tumor metastases that evade current detection techniques and treatments...."
~ Today's waste, tomorrow's fuel -- "A Cardiff University research collaboration is working to recycle precious metals from road dusts and vehicle exhausts to create greener energy."
~ Northern Canada Ponds Drying Up -- "Ponds that have provided summertime water in the high arctic for thousands of years are drying up as global warming advances, Canadian researchers say."
~ Narrative Cartography -- "Last week Wired ran two articles about the wonders that have befallen us since the advent (and through the evolution) of Google Earth and Google Maps. A feature by Evan Ratliff explores the exploding population of citizen cartographers."


INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ Meaning -- "While conversing with some friends over the weekend, we got into the topic of meaning. This is one of my old conceptual haunts so its nothing new to me, but trying it out on other people always gives new perspective."
~ Selfdistinguishing action of each new entity -- "Pulses of Emotion: Whitehead’s “Critique of Pure Feeling” -- Actual entities, then, are not primordially located in space and ordered by time. Rather, spatial location and temporal sequence are themselves generated through the becoming of these actual entities. That is to say, an entity composes or creates itself by feeling the other entities that have influenced and informed it; and it feels them as being spatially and temporally distinct from itself."
~ Nature's Law -- "Why goals anyway? Why wait for anything when it is all here right now if we choose - when all the fun is in the process! Why wait? It takes no time at all to step back and inviting that which we already Are to sit in the driving seat instead of playing host to the sad belief system that feels the need to improve or better ourselves, or pay our dues. 'Waiting' is an anathema to the truly creative mind."
~ How to Live in the Moment? – A Scientific Perspective: Part I -- "Both Einstein and spiritual masters have said that time is an illusion. Then isn’t each moment of time an illusion in itself? How is it possible to live in the moment if it is an illusion?"
~ Learning Self Acceptance -- "Lack of self acceptance actually creates a cycle that cements low self esteem. People who suffer low self esteem often feel that people don’t like them. Unfortunately this is only partially true. It’s not the person themselves that isn’t liked; the fact is other people rarely even know who they are. They have never been their true self around other people so they have never had the opportunity to know if they are not as themselves. When people who suffer a lack of self acceptance allow themselves to be themselves, they soon learn that others truly enjoy their company."


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