10.10

1) Essential Graphics: PsychoNeuroImmunology Chart

2)

"The world has already passed the point of no return for climate change, and civilisation as we know it is now unlikely to survive, according to James Lovelock, the scientist and green guru who conceived the idea of Gaia - the Earth which keeps itself fit for life.
In a profoundly pessimistic new assessment, published in today's Independent, Professor Lovelock suggests that efforts to counter global warming cannot succeed, and that, in effect, it is already too late."

3) Epigenetics

"...research has demonstrated that genes and the environment are not mutually exclusive but are inextricably intertwined, one affecting the other.The idea that inheritance is not just about which genes you inherit but whether these are switched on or off is a whole new frontier in biology. It raises questions with huge implications, and means the search will be on to find what sort of environmental effects can affect these switches."

Eipigenetics - web tour



4) Return of the Puppet Masters - Toxoplasma gondii Unleashed


5) String Theory - Aspects of "Landscape"


6) Pimpin' Ain't Easy - An Historical Perspective

"The only true lesson of history, it seems, is that we never learn from history."

7) Gloria Trembicky is a bad landlord


8) Glyceollins

"Scientists with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in New Orleans, La., have uncovered what could be a healthier soybean, by tricking the legume into churning out a new class of impressive, health-guarding compounds.
These phytochemicals, called glyceollins, aren't new to soybeans--it's just that they're absent from the soy-based foods currently on the market."

9) Nanoparticles and Health Issues


10) Pickett on the Oprah/Frey Connection

10.9

1) Essential Jazz: Keith Jarrett - Inside Out



Track: When I Fall In Love



2) The Edge --- What Is Your Dangerous Idea?

My Favorites:

Roger Shank

"Schools are structured today in much the same way as they have been for hundreds of years. And for hundreds of years philosophers and others have pointed out that school is really a bad idea... Schools should simply cease to exist as we know them. The Government needs to get out of the education business and stop thinking it knows what children should know and then testing them constantly to see if they regurgitate whatever they have just been spoon fed.
Schools need to be replaced by safe places where children can go to learn how to do things that they are interested in learning how to do. Their interests should guide their learning..."

Rudy Rucker

"Mind is a universally distributed quality...Panpsychism. Each object has a mind. Stars, hills, chairs, rocks, scraps of paper, flakes of skin, molecules — each of them possesses the same inner glow as a human, each of them has singular inner experiences and sensations.
The minds of panpsychism can exist at various levels. As well as having its own individuality, a person's mind would also be, for instance, a hive mind based upon the minds of the body's cells and the minds of the body's elementary particles.
I still haven't said anything about why panpsychism is a dangerous idea. Panpsychism, like other forms of higher consciousness, is dangerous to business as usual. If my old car has the same kind of mind as a new one, I'm less impelled to
help the economy by buying a new vehicle. If the rocks and plants on my property have minds, I feel more respect for them in their natural state. If I feel myself among friends in the universe, I'm less likely to overwork myself to earn more cash. If my body will have a mind even after I'm dead, then death matters less to me, and it's harder for the government to cow me into submission.

("Rucker writes in his introduction to the Princeton edition of _Infinity and the Mind_ that he must have settled his questions about God, because he stopped thinking about them. Here, in a short afterword, he confirms that he still accepts the premises on which _White Light_ is based, and adds that he has also adopted a new belief: that far from being merely an impersonal metaphysical abstraction, God can and will help human beings overcome our spiritual difficulties if we just ask.")

Michael Nesmith

"Existence is Non-Time, Non-Sequential, and Non-Objective...Not a dangerous idea per se but like a razor sharp tool in unskilled hands it can inflect unintended damage. These three notions, Non-Time, Non-sequence, and Non-Object have been peeking like diamonds through the dust of empiricism, philosophy, and the sciences for centuries. Quantum mechanics, including Deutsch's parallel universes and the massive parallelism of quantum computing, is our brightest star — an unimaginably tall peak on our fitness landscape.
They bring us to a threshold over which empiricism has yet to travel, through which philosophy must reconstruct the very idea of ideas, and beyond which stretches the now familiar "uncharted territories" of all great adventures."

Eric R Kandel

"...These experiments led to the radical insight that by observing another person's brain activity, one can predict what someone is going to do before he is aware that he has made the decision to do it. This finding has caused philosophers of mind to
ask: If the choice is determined in the brain unconsciously before we decide to act, where is free will? They would argue that the choice is made freely, but not consciously. Libet for example proposes that the process of initiating a voluntary action occurs in an unconscious part of the brain, but that just before the action is initiated, consciousness is recruited to approve or veto the action. In the 200 milliseconds before a finger is lifted, consciousness determines whether it moves or not. Whatever the reasons for the delay between decision and awareness, Libet's findings now raise the moral question: Is one to be held responsible for decisions that are made without conscious awareness?"

Daniel Gilbert

"The idea that ideas can be dangerous...Dangerous does not mean exciting or bold. It means likely to cause great harm. The most dangerous idea is the only dangerous
idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous.We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence."

Andy Clark

"The quick-thinking zombies inside us...So much of what we do, feel, think and choose is determined by non-conscious, automatic uptake of cues and information.
[...]
It now seems clear that many of my major life and work decisions are made very rapidly, often on the basis of ecologically sound but superficial cues, with slow deliberative reason busily engaged in justifying what the quick-thinking zombies inside me have already laid on the table. The good news is that without these mechanisms we'd be unable to engage in fluid daily life or reason at all, and that very often they are right. The dangerous truth, though, is that we are indeed designed to cut conscious, aware choice out of the picture wherever possible. This is not an issue about free will, but simply about the extent to which conscious deliberation cranks the engine of behavior. Crank it it does: but not in anything like the way, or extent, we may have thought. We'd better get to grips with this before someone else does."

Stephen M. Kosslyn

"A Science of the Divine?...Here's an idea that many academics may find unsettling and dangerous: God exists. And here's another idea that many religious people may find unsettling and dangerous: God is not supernatural, but rather part of the natural order...
1.0. First, here's the specific conception of God I want to explore: God is a "supreme being" that transcends space and time, permeates our world but also stands outside of it, and can intervene in our daily lives (partly in response to prayer).
[...]
In short, it is possible to begin to view the divine through the lens of science. But such reasoning does no more than set the stage; to be a truly dangerous idea, this sort of proposal must be buttressed by the results of empirical test. At
present, my point is not to convince, but rather to intrigue. As much as I admired Stephen Jay Gould (and I did, very much), perhaps he missed the mark on this one. Perhaps there is a grand project waiting to be launched, to integrate the two great sources of knowledge and belief in the world today — science and religion."

Bravo.



3) "An EXTRAORDINARY 'hyperspace' engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government. "

New Scientist coverage

Heim Quantum Theory for Space Propulsion

Best Papers of 2005



4) Global warming 55 million years ago shifted ocean currents



5) Google Video - Rickson Gracie fights Hugo Duarte


6) A novel method for the removal of ear cerumen

David A. Keegan* and Susan L. Bannister
*Departments of Family Medicine and Paediatrics; Department of Pediatrics, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, University of Western Ontario, London, Ont.



7) Power Napping



8) N.Y. Cabs to Get a High-Tech Makeover

"Cabs in New York City are getting a major tech upgrade next year, in the form of video screens that will display movie listings and city maps to riders and let them *** pay for their trips with the swipe of a credit or debit card ***."

9) Getting Fit, Even if It Kills You



10) John Clesse Ringtones

10.8

1) Essential Jazz: My Funny Valentine - Miles Davis In Concert



1a) Herbie Hancock - The Piano



Tracks: My Funny Valentine



2) Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein's Strangest Theory

"One of the most extreme points of view belongs to Dr. Zeilinger of Vienna, a bearded, avuncular physicist whose laboratory regularly hosts every sort of quantum weirdness. In an essay recently in Nature, Dr. Zeilinger sought to find meaning in the very randomness that plagued Einstein.
"The discovery that individual events are irreducibly random is probably one of the most significant findings of the 20th century," Dr. Zeilinger wrote.

*** Dr. Zeilinger suggested that reality and information are, in a deep sense, indistinguishable ***, a concept that Dr. Wheeler, the Princeton physicist, called "it from bit."

In information, the basic unit is the bit, but one bit, he says, is not enough to specify both the spin and the trajectory of a particle. So one quality remains unknown, irreducibly random. As a result of the finiteness of information, he explained, the universe is fundamentally unpredictable.
"I suggest that this randomness of the individual event is the strongest indication we have of a reality 'out there' existing independently of us," Dr. Zeilinger wrote in Nature.'

My "Matrix Revolutions" review

Zeilinger site

on quantum teleportation



3) Fate of Endocrine-Disruptor, Pharmaceutical, and Personal Care Product Chemicals during Simulated Drinking Water Treatment Processes


4) Experts Urge Less Focus on Antioxidants

"Experts aren't suggesting antioxidants aren't important or that people shouldn't eat foods that contain them. Instead, they're saying not enough is known about how they work to justify focusing one's diet on any particular antioxidant or food."
Even people trying to address specific health problems would do better to eat a broad mix of foods than to tailor their diets around certain ingredients, the experts say.
When people get prostate cancer, all of the sudden they make all the changes in their diet," Erdman says. "We don't even know if those changes make a difference then. *** But we know that if people eat that diet before getting cancer, you don't tend to get it ***."

Clearly, it's a spread of actives (anticarcinogens, antioxidants, antivirals and antibacterials) working in synergy over a long period of time that produce maximum prophylactic effect (see My BioShields files in sidebar link).


5) 1Association of Muscular Strength with Incidence of Metabolic Syndrome in Men. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. 37(11):1849-1855, November 2005.

"Purpose: To examine the association between muscular strength and incidence of metabolic syndrome.
Methods: Participants were 3233 men (20-80 yr) initially free of metabolic syndrome who had two or more clinical examinations between 1980 and 2003...
Conclusions: Muscular strength was inversely associated with metabolic syndrome incidence, independent of age and body size.
Potential benefits of greater muscular strength presumably through resistance exercise training should be considered in primary prevention of metabolic syndrome."

6) Weight Training Combats Metabolic Syndrome



7) Playing The Didgeridoo and Sleep Disorders

"Researchers in Switzerland examined 25 patients who suffered from snoring and moderate obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome, both common sleep disorders.
Half the group were given daily lessons in playing the didgeridoo, a wind instrument about 1.5 metres (yards) long which originated in northern Australia and is traditionally made from the trunk of a tree hollowed out by termites.
The study, published in the British Medical Journal's online edition on Friday, found that those who played the unusual instrument over a four-month trial period saw a significant improvement in their daytime sleepiness and apnoea.
Their partners also reported less disturbance from snoring.
The researchers said training the upper airways through the breathing techniques required to play the didgeridoo was behind the improvement."

Didgeridoo - Google



8) Verden Psychiatric Hospital - Photo Gallery



9) Polar bears drown as ice shelf melts

"Scientists have for the first time found evidence that polar bears are drowning because climate change is melting the Arctic ice shelf. The researchers were startled to find bears having to swim up to 60 miles across open sea to find food."

10) Year-End Views


25 Most Interesting Webcams of 2005

Reuters Pictures of the Year

Reuters 2005 Award Winners


World Press Photos - Winners Gallery 2005