Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Speedlinking 8/22/07

Quote of the day:

"Everything is in a state of flux, including the status quo."
~ Robert Byrne

Image of the day:


BODY
~ Lean and Mean Cookin' -- "How to Eat Right, Get Full, and Woo Women -- Contrary to popular belief, Texan Chris Shugart doesn't just eat the lean parts of armadillos. Well, he used to, but now he's figured out some simple, manly style dishes that he uses to put women into salivary overdrive."
~ Targeted Mobility -- "I caught a video clip of a strength coach going through a series of hip mobility drills and stretches designed to increase hip range of motion to improve squat performance. I applaud his intent but question the effectiveness his exercise technique."
~ Combination Training For The Best Of Both Worlds - Adding Variety! -- "There is no one best program, as no program will produce results forever. Eventually, you will adapt... To make better progress here is what I propose: add some variety right off the bat with 5x5, 3x3, HIT, sample regimen, and more right here!"
~ Injuries more likely if you have only one sport -- "Triathletes are injured only about one third as often as marathon runners even though they do far more work in their program of swimming, cycling and running. Training intelligently for three sports is less likely to injure you than training very hard for one."
~ Study Shines More Light On Benefit Of Vitamin D In Fighting Cancer -- "A new study looking at the relationship between vitamin D serum levels and the risk of colon and breast cancer across the globe has estimated the number of cases of cancer that could be prevented each year if vitamin D3 levels met the target proposed by researchers."
~ Low glycemic load diet may help fight acne -- "Avoiding high glycemic load foods could help acne sufferers clear up their skin, the results of a new small study suggest."
~ Older adults with low selenium have weaker muscles -- "Older adults with low levels of the mineral selenium may be lacking in muscle strength, a new study suggests."


PSYCHE/SELF
~ Sexed-up seniors do it more than you'd think -- "An unprecedented study of sex and seniors finds that many older people are surprisingly frisky — willing to do, and talk about, intimate acts that would make their grandchildren blush."
~ A Better Life -- "Thoughts can only be formed in the present moment. And thoughts can only exert effects in the present moment. If you can grasp these two concepts, you’ll be able to discard some forms of delusional thinking and craft much more effective intentions."
~ Self-Reported Vividness of Imagery and the Cortex -- "In 2002, I published an article critical of the generally weak-to-nonexistent relationships between self-reported vividness of imagery and performance on tasks psychologists have often thought to involve imagery, such as mental rotation tasks and tests of visual memory and visual creativity. Differences in subjective report about imagery, I suggested, may relate only poorly to real differences in imagery experience. This fits with my general skepticism about the trustworthiness of our reports about our own conscious experience."
~ What is Courage? -- "Positive psychology research asks whether experiencing fear is a central component of courage."
~ 7 Ways to Break Out of Your Comfort Zone and Live a More Exciting Life -- "But if you want to improve your life you’ll sooner or later need to step out of that zone. Because it’s there you’ll find all those new and exciting experiences. Where you’ll find freedom from boredom. Here are 8 ideas that can help you get out of your comfort zone. Some are ways to make the process easier. Some are ways you may not have thought of (or forgotten)."
~ Peaceful Simplicity: How to Live a Life of Contentment -- "In our daily lives, we often rush through tasks, trying to get them done, trying to finish as much as we can each day, speeding along in our cars to our next destination, rushing to do what we need to do there, and then leaving so that we can speed to our next destination."
~ After Talk, When’s the Time to Take Action? -- "Laura Sessions Stepp has a nice article in today’s Washington Post about when men and women decide to stop talking and start doing something about the issues in their lives. Because although there’s a time to listen, there’s also a time to eventually take action."
~ Yoga And Breathing For Stress Management -- "While the various asanas or exercises are the basic building blocks of the practice of yoga, the breath is its very essence of it. Some go so far as to say, “If you can breathe, you can do yoga.” One of the main reasons for this is that one of the main goals of yoga is to teach you to still and quiet your mind through the use of your breath."


CULTURE/POLITICS
~ The Literature Network -- "We offer searchable online literature for the student, educator, or enthusiast. To find the work you're looking for start by looking through the author index. We currently have over 1900 full books and over 3000 short stories and poems by over 250 authors. Our quotations database has over 8500 quotes."
~ Where you fall in poll of U.S. reading habits -- "One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices." One in four read no books? That's horrible.
~ White House Seeks to Keep Emails Secret -- "The Justice Department said Tuesday that records about missing White House e-mails are not subject to public disclosure, the latest effort by the Bush administration to expand the boundaries of government secrecy."
~ The Trouble with Anonymity on the Web -- "Pundits of the Internet age are fond of excoriating the Web because anyone can post on it anonymously. Andrew Keen, whose recent book Cult of the Amateur is a good primer on why people hate the Web, highlights the horrors of anonymity in his work, contrasting the millions of unnamed Web scribblers with honorable, properly identified writers of yesteryear. Keen's point is that people who don't put their names on what they've written don't feel responsible for it; therefore they feel little compunction about lying or misrepresenting their chosen subjects."
~ Bush to CIA: 'Leave No Marks' -- "With no sign of torture on a prisoner, then it didn't happen, right?"
~ No coffee -- "For Jürgen Habermas, the coffeehouse is a place where bourgeois individuals can enter into relationships with one another without the restrictions of family, civil society, or the state. It is the site of a sort of universal community, integrated neither by power nor economic interests, but by common sense."
~ Why Max Roach was jazz's greatest drummer - "Max Roach's death last Wednesday, at age 83, marks another step toward the end of the modern jazz world's greatest generation. Only a few remain among the giants who were present alongside Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as they created the harmonically adventurous, rhythmically turbulent postwar music called bebop."


HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Fossils belong to new great ape -- "The 10 million-year-old fossils belong to an animal that has been named Cororapithecus abyssinicus by the Ethiopian-Japanese team. This new species could be a direct ancestor of living African great apes, say the researchers."
~ The Fight to Green the Eco-Unfriendly Skies -- "Aviation's contributions to climate change are slowly being acknowledged. But efforts to curb emissions are being hampered by industry and government foot-dragging."
~ U.S. Told to Issue Global Warming Plans -- "A federal judge ordered the Bush administration to issue two scientific reports on global warming, siding with environmentalists who sued the White House for failing to produce the documents."
~ U.S. Records Yet Another Trade Deficit in Technology Product Markets -- "U.S. technology product imports exceeded exports for the first time in 2002 starting a trend that left a $38.3 billion trade deficit in 2006 after reaching a high of $44.4 billion in 2005."
~ Pinging Photons without Destroying Them -- "It sounds like a simple task: Count the number of photons or particles of light in a light beam without destroying them in the process. But in fact, it took 17 years to accomplish the feat, researchers report this week in Nature."
~ Google Sky Turns Computer Into Telescope -- "The heavens are only a few mouse clicks away with Google Inc.'s latest free tool."
~ Hurricane Planet: Is the Worst Yet to Come? -- "Hurricanes will only get stronger and more frequent as the climate warms, say scientists."


INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ Buddhism and Your Brain Health? -- "Anyone keenly interested in either the topics of Neuroplasticity or the intersection between Buddhism and science may already be familiar with Sharon's book, but the topics and implications discussed in the book go far beyond these areas -- so much so that found ourselves continually reading between the lines, pausing and thinking, 'wait a minute...this means that I could get rid of that old bad habit of mine while making huge progress and becoming more productive, just by focusing thought on x, y and z'."
~ An Epiphany: My Spiritual Awakening and Path Toward Forgiveness -- "Taking a nod from Peter I decided to write about an epiphany in my life. This is the epiphany of my spiritual awakening. I had just returned from a difficult, trying, scary, confusing and exhausting two year Mormon mission from Cote D'Ivoire, West Africa where my world had been turned upside down. My unflinching commitment to the Mormon faith was unraveling by the day as I began to do some research into what were the opposing views. You see, I had been taught to not question the veracity of the church let alone read a different viewpoint on the history and teachings of the Mormon faith."
~ A Challenge to Wake Up -- "So why am I writing about 9/11 conspiracy theories, not-so-secret plans for world domination by the military industrial complex, etc., etc.? All you have to do is look at history to thoroughly support "so what's new?" Things simply have not changed that much, and still the majority of us aren't conscious enough to know or care. We have our drugs of choice, happily supplied by those who would dominate us."
~ The Universal Religion: Part 1 -- "To bring an understanding of Zen to Europe, Master Deshimaru talked as much in terms of 'God' as he talked about 'Buddha'. Yet, this wasn't a belief in a literal creator being or personal God - he was using the concept as a metaphor for 'the universal' or the fundamental principle of reality, not unlike the way that scientists like Einstein and Stephen Hawking use the concept."


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