Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Speedlinking 4/25/07

Quote of the day:

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."
~ Niels Bohr

Image of the day
:


BODY
~ The Case for Single Limb Training -- "Bodybuilders and strength athletes often scorn single limb training, but what do they call any type of dumbbell work? That's right, it's single limb training. Well, it's time to extend the courtesy to the legs. Employing this type of training will definitely make you bigger and stronger!"
~ Your Brain Can Grow Larger with Exercise -- "Regular exercise makes your brain larger, according to a study from the University of Illinois (Journal fo Gerontology, November 2006). With aging, your brain becomes smaller. This study showed that 60 to 79-year-old men who exercised regularly actually had their brains grow larger. Study participants who did only a stretching and toning program had their brains shrink."
~ Fast Food Health Lottery - Frequent Consumption Is "Unsafe" Warn Obesity Experts -- "Eating regularly in some fast-food chain outlets is unsafe in many parts of the world, top Danish research experts warn today. Food quality and portion sizes need to be improved dramatically, according to the Copenhagen University research group, led by Prof Steen Stender, who found major variations in the quality of products offered by the same chains across 35 countries."
~ Low Vitamin D Levels Linked To Poor Physical Performance -- "Older adults who don't get enough vitamin D either from their diets or exposure to the sun may be at increased risk for poor physical performance and disability, according to new research from Wake Forest University School of Medicine and colleagues."
~ Study Reports Changing To A Low-fat Diet Can Induce Stress -- "Changing one's diet to lose weight is often difficult. There may be physical and psychological effects from a changed diet that reduce the chances for success. With nearly 65% of the adult population currently classified as overweight or obese and with calorically dense foods high in fat and carbohydrates readily available, investigating those factors that contribute to dieting failures is an important effort."
~ Hormone deficit may hinder alcoholics' recovery -- "During the early stages of recovery, alcoholics have abnormalities in a key hormonal system that regulates responses to psychological and physical stress, but the system returns to normal after about eight weeks of abstinence, Italian researchers report."
~ Back pain linked to short-term memory deficits -- "Patients with chronic back pain have significant impairments in short-term prospective memory compared with people without pain, according to the findings reported in the February/March issue of Psychosomatic Medicine."
~ Campaign Offers Easy Steps to Cutting Diabetes Risk -- "Experts at the American Diabetes Association (ADA) are launching a new national prevention program to help people lower their risk for obesity-linked type 2 diabetes and heart disease. CheckUp America will educate Americans on curbing risk factors such as overweight/obesity, high blood glucose, high LDL ("bad") cholesterol, high triglycerides, low HDL ("good") cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking and physical inactivity."


PSYCHE
~ How Slimming Groups Can Help Lift Depression -- "Depression is often linked with obesity but while the two conditions frequently occur together, it is unclear exactly which is cause and which is effect. For some people being overweight leads to depression, while for others mental illness can lead to changes in behaviour that lead to weight gain."
~ Brain Networks Strengthened By Closing Ion Channels -- "Yale School of Medicine and University of Crete School of Medicine researchers report in Cell April 20 the first evidence of a molecular mechanism that dynamically alters the strength of higher brain network connections."
~ New Depression Therapy Gives Reason For Hope -- "A study at the University Clinics of Bonn and Cologne gives people with therapy-resistant depression reason for hope. The doctors treated two men and a woman with what is known as deep brain stimulation. All three patients have been suffering from very severe depression for several years which could neither be brought under control using medication nor by other therapies."
~ Can money buy some happiness? In my case, YES. -- "One extremely important and interesting happiness question is the relationship between money and happiness. On the question of whether money buys happiness, I believe the answer is: It depends."
~ Psychedelics: resurgence or flashback? -- "Time magazine has recently published two articles on psychedelic drugs: the first on the recent publication of successful psychedelic treatment studies and the other suggesting LSD was first taken up by the cultural and business elite before becoming a staple of the 60s underground."
~ UAB Study May Lead To New Therapies For Binge Eating Disorder -- "University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) psychologists have developed an animal model for the binge eating disorder, which affects an estimated one in 20 Americans. The Sprague-Dawley rat model could lead to the identification of physiological mechanisms that distinguish different types of eating disorders and to the creation of new, targeted drug therapies."
~ Positive Psychology In-the-News, 4-23-07 -- "News from Wired, UCSD Guardian, and TrainingZONE."
~ New Research Offers Insight Into Cause Of ADHD -- "In the children's game "red light green light," winners are able to stop, and take off running again, more quickly than their comrades. New research reveals that a similar race goes on in our brains, with impulse control being the big winner."The research provides new insights into how the brain controls movements, which helps explain the impulsivity of people with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder..."


CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Turn on, tune in, get out -- "No sooner than we post something about psychedelic drug research becoming mainstream than a newspaper reports on a psychologist being barred entry to the US because he wrote an article on a 1967 LSD experience."
~ Framing the Great Atheist Schism [Mixing Memory] -- "Those on one side of the schism have been called Churchill school atheist, skeptical atheists, new atheists (new to what, I'm not sure), "meanie" atheists, and several less flattering names (anti-religious bigots comes to mind). Those on the other side (which includes me) have been called Neville Chamberlain atheists, appeasers, and probably some other names I'm forgetting."
~ Is This the End For Televised Debates? -- "A troika of major political websites--Yahoo News, Slate, and the Huffington Post--announced yesterday that they will jointly sponsor a pair of online presidential debates for the Democratic and Republican nominees. PBS host Charlie Rose will moderate."
~ The New World of Crisis Management -- "The Internet has changed the nature of calamity, says a new breed of disaster masters. For the worse."
~ Isikoff: The NRA's Take On the Cho Massacre -- "The NRA’s top lobbyist speaks out on the gathering debate over gun control triggered by the Virginia Tech massacre. And some gun owners don't like what he has to say."
~ The national orgy of mawkishness that followed the Virginia Tech shootings -- Christopher Hitchens has some opinions.
~ SCOTT HORTON—Halberstam and the Duty of the Press -- "David Halberstam, a giant of exposé journalism who had a long relationship with Harper's among many other publications, died yesterday in a tragic automobile accident. Via Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, Halberstam’s words to the Columbia Journalism School graduates in 2005: . . ."
~ The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Libertarian -- "Libertarians have been delighted by some recent analysis via the Cato Institute’s David Boaz and the America’s Future Foundation’s David Kirby. Their interpretation of polling data from various sources indicates 9 to 14 percent of Americans, depending on the specific poll questions, have political views that can be considered libertarian. That is, those people think government in general should be smaller, that free markets can handle many, even most, social problems, and that social tolerance is good." Aside from the free-market stuff, which I have doubts about because capitalism is greedy, I'm down with some of their viewpoints. Does that make me a libertarian?
~ Panel: Social Security funds gone in 2041 -- "The six-member Washington panel that oversees Medicare and Social Security spending says Medicare will become insolvent by 2019."


HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Things That Should Exist: Light Storage -- "Indulge me in a bit of science fiction for a moment, for a very simple product that could revolutionize all lighting. Today, if you wanted eco-friendly illumination, you would have solar panels generate power during the day to run your T8 fluorescent bulbs at night. But what if you could just store daylight itself and save it 'till later?"
~ Conservation Districts for Preserving Urban Character -- "No longer are national chains confined mostly to the exurbs, where we’re accustomed to seeing car-centric, gaudy commercial districts indistinguishable from the next strip mall down the highway. Tanning salons, copy shops, and fast-food restaurants displace local cafes, bars, restaurants and boutiques in a city's urban core, until, eventually, the institutions that gave a neighborhood its character are lost."
~ All Wet? Astronomers Claim Discovery of Earth-like Planet -- "A team of astronomers announced they have discovered the smallest and potentially most Earth-like extrasolar planet yet. Fives times as massive as Earth, it orbits a relatively cool star at a distance that would provide earthly temperatures as well, signaling the possibility of liquid water."
~ Discovery of new family of pseudo-metallic chemicals -- "A new discovery by a University of Missouri-Columbia research team, published in Angewandte Chemie allows scientists to manipulate a molecule discovered 50 years ago in such as way as to give the molecule metal-like properties, creating a new, "pseudo" element. The pseudo-metal properties can be adjusted for a wide range of uses and might change the way scientists think about attacking disease or even building electronics."
~ New car smell is bad for you -- "That "new car smell" can be hazardous to your health, The Ecology Center, a Berkeley, Calif., environmental group said."
~ Revamped experiment could detect elusive particle, physicists say -- "An experiment called "shining light through walls" would seem hard to improve upon. But University of Florida physicists have proposed a way to do just that, a step they say considerably improves the chance of detecting one of the universe's most elusive particles, a candidate for the common but mysterious dark matter."
~ Feeding the world sustainably -- "There is enough food produced (including meat and fish) worldwide not just to feed everyone on the planet, not just to make everyone fat, but to make everybody morbidly obese. Counting grain, beans, roots, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and other plants and fungi (not including animal feed), plus livestock, dairy, fish, eggs, and other animal products raised for human consumption, we produced nearly 2,800 calories per person per year in 2001[1] -- including 75 grams of protein. 2,200 calories per day is generally accepted as the average needed to keep a person healthy -- neither losing nor gaining weight[2]. 56 grams of protein is the U.S. RDA for adult men[3]."
~ Scientists find mineral just like Superman's 'kryptonite' -- "A newly-found mineral contains the same elements described in the fictional kryptonite used by the enemies of comic-book and film superhero "Superman," a scientist said Tuesday."


INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ BLOG: Integral Politics, part 3 -- "The following is the last installment of three of the middle chapters from Book Two of a work-in-progress, The Many Faces of Terrorism, a trilogy referred to as the "terrorism trilogy." Taken together, these chapters outline an Integral Political Theory, which is much further detailed in the trilogy itself. But all the essentials are here, but for now, the theoria...."
~ A Workshop on Big Love Integral beginning May 12 in Seattle -- Gary Stamper is doing some great stuff -- wish I still lived in Seattle.
~ sacrificium Dei -- "Everything submits to the Divine, naturally. The tree grows and bends its branches, its leaves growing in due season. It is in perfect submission to God. The soil, the air, the rain. The leopard, the mountain bear. The comet, the asteroid. All are as they have been made to be. Everything submits, except the human. It only has the choice to submit."
~ Can You Feel Compassion for a Murderer? -- "On a day like today, a week after this terrible tragedy, I wonder. I wonder if we will look at what happened and count thirty-three casualties of this incident. I wonder if we can summon compassion for a murderer."
~ Virginia Tech Massacre / Stuart Davis Show -- "In the spirit of love, the show is intended as a memorial to the victims as their families. In it, various causes and reactions to the shooting are explored, from different perspectives (subjective, objective, inter-subjective, and inter-objective), and distinct altitudes of awareness. I attempted to offer a slightly more integral view to this profoundly painful event."
~ How To Outsmart Your Brain and Handle Emotions At Work -- "So, how can we maintain our professionalism and handle emotions at work? Here are a few ideas that will help you raise your emotional energy and help you to focus and succeed."


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