big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
Neurocritic has just published a fantastic summary of Professor Martha Farah’s recent work on the effects of poverty on mind and brain function.
For example, it is known that poor diet alone can restrict the development of certain skills and abilities.
However, one of Farah’s main findings is that those from poorer backgrounds do not usually show a global impairment in mental function.
via mind hacks
A once-rare drug-resistant germ now appears to cause more than half of all skin infections treated in U.S. emergency rooms…
Many victims mistakenly thought they just had spider bites that wouldn’t heal, not drug-resistant staph bacteria.
Only a decade ago, these germs were hardly ever seen outside of hospitals and nursing homes.
Doctors also were caught off-guard — most of them unwittingly prescribed medicines that do not work against the bacteria.
“It is time for physicians to realize just how prevalent this is…”, said researchers who documented the superbug’s startling spread in the general population.
Story at KTVU 2
Rutala points out that more than 30 million food-borne infections have been estimated to occur each year, resulting in more than 9,000 deaths.
I asked Allah to take away my habit. Allah said, No. It is not for me to take away, but for you to give it up.
I asked Allah to make my handicapped child whole. Allah said, No. His spirit is whole, his body is only temporary.
I asked Allah to grant me patience. Allah said, No. Patience is a byproduct of tribulations; it isn’t granted, it is learned.
I asked Allah to give me happiness. Allah said, No. I give you blessings; Happiness is up to you.
I asked Allah to spare me pain. Allah said, No. Suffering draws you apart from worldly cares and brings you closer to me.
I asked Allah to make my spirit grow. Allah said, No. You must grow on your own!, but I will prune you to make you fruitful.
I asked Allah for all things that I might enjoy life. Allah said, No. I will give you life, so that you may enjoy all things.
I asked Allah to help me love others, as much as He loves me. Allah said…. Ahhhh, finally you have the idea.
Mikons is a new web service that builds, catalogs and socializes icons created by users.
Most are doodles. Just junk.
But this ‘pictogram’ contains a lot of information.
Extra comma costs loser $2.13 million. A costly piece of punctuation. Can you find the error?
The placement of a comma in a contract permitted a deal’s cancellation.
“The agreement shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party”.
via Sellsius.
Story link with registration required at globeandmail
To reduce the hype and fear if not the burden, the Economist writes a thorough examination of the upcoming energy options we face that reveals several facts beyond the headlines and frenzy.
“For years a small group of geologists has been claiming that the world has started to grow short of oil, that alternatives cannot possibly replace it and that an imminent peak in production will lead to economic disaster.
In recent months this view has gained wider acceptance on Wall Street and in the media. Recent books on oil have bewailed the threat. Every few weeks, it seems, “Out of Gas”, “The Empty Tank” and “The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel”, are joined by yet more gloomy titles.”
But is the world really starting to run out of oil?
And would hitting a global peak of production necessarily spell economic ruin?
Both questions are arguable.
“Governments may decide to shift away from petroleum because of its nasty geopolitics or its contribution to global warming. But it is wrong to imagine the world’s addiction to oil will end soon, as a result of genuine scarcity.”
There you have it.
We only need to worry about ‘synthetic scarcity’.
Robin Williams plays John Stewart as Presidential Candidate [youTube]
The trouble with fiction… is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
Aldous Huxley
There’s only one corner of the universe
you can be certain of improving,
and that’s your own self.
Aldous Huxley
“Domains have and will continue to go up in value
faster than any other commodity EVER known to man.”
Bill Gates, Microsoft Corp
“The web will become so important and so empowering to person to person and group to group communication that it will cease to be another place where we go. We will always be there.”
Matt Terenzio is quoted.
Why do we allow landlords to cram our land, wreck our lifestyle, drain our cash, burn our fuel and pile us into their profit machines?
Divinity and nature do not propel density. We do.
Much hardship is unnecessarily created.
We deserve better.
Families of Drug Addicts May Be Part of Their Problem
Once those closest to the problem can recognize that their moral superiority may be part of the cause, we might see an improvement in recovery rates.
more at Science Blog
More evidence is showing how cumulative stress and the occurrence of disease may define age more than chronological aging.
Science Blog’s “Wear and tear of stress: the psychoneurobiology of aging” summarizes research from leading researchers in the fields of neurobiology and psychoneuroendocrinology [wiki].
“Acute stress seems to enhance immune function and improves memory but chronic stress has the opposite effect and can lead to disorders like depression, diabetes and cognitive impairment in aging.”
Cumulative stress effects are showing up in people who are under constant stress, like those in caregiver situations or those who suffer from obesity and/or diabetes. These people are more likely to have decreased telomerase activity.
Telomeres are enzymes that regulate how many times an individual cell can divide.
Telomeric sequences shorten each time the DNA replicates, which is a process that happens prior to cells dividing. When at least some of the telomeres reach a critically short length, the cell stops dividing and ages (senesces) which may cause or contribute to some age-related diseases.
“If you don’t have rich parents, it’s almost hopeless.”
Real estate prices have risen as much as 100 percent in the eight former communist states that joined the EU in 2004, driven by buyers from Western Europe.
While EU membership has spurred economic growth by attracting investment from Western companies, wages in the region still are a fraction of those in Western Europe. In Latvia, the average gross monthly wage is $410, compared with more than $4,000 in Germany.
Many local residents, with less than a quarter the buying power of their neighbors, have been locked out of the market, adding to frustration with EU membership and eroding support for budget cuts needed to adopt the euro.
East Europeans are angry about rules that prevent them from working in most of the 15 older EU nations, while their own governments are reducing spending on pensions, health care and other social programs…
more details at IHT
Techdirt is running a response to Dvorak’s column on YouTube where once again Dvorak tells us we are all wrong, but aside from that, Techdirt’s post welcomes YouTube to our world and celebrates the technology, the innovation, the hard work, the excitement, in short, the geeks in the garage.
The YouTube phenomenon is not about its business model (or lack thereof), what it’s going to sell for, how much it spends on bandwidth, or how it can prevent copyright infringement.
Granted, all of those things may be interesting, but the interesting part of the story is YouTube created an extremely simple way for people to share video, which as it turned out, is something that people really like to do.
I threw my response into the comments:
I want to pipe in to say that our first language is visualization. We are primarily visual. Literacy is a new thing. Perhaps an inefficient tool as well.
Technology that enable recovering and pursuing visual communication will rise to the forefront at every introduction.
Even as YouTube goes the way of the wooden wheel, the future will be very different.
Pictures will win.
TechDirt’s post, Who Are You And What Have You Done With The Real John Dvorak?
“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who are alive.” Harold Whitman via workHappy
The Washington Post posts a story entitled “Do No Harm“
A medical ethicist accuses prison doctors at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo of abetting abuse.
[An] accumulation of disturbing reports effectively buttresses his larger charge that — at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere — post-9/11 America has become “a torturing society.”
Vulnerable in body and mind, we look to our physicians for compassion — which makes torture that’s abetted by the medical profession especially horrific.
“The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity
is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” Thomas Jefferson
Found at blogShares, Ed Hinders writes:
In 1982, we were the world’s largest creditor nation.
By 1986 we were the world’s largest debtor nation…
By the end of this decade the cost to pay interest
will be more than all discretionary spending combined.
Read his Open Letter
“I hardly know what to make of this one.”, reports Time senior writer Michael D. Lemonick.
Now For Something Truly Bizarre
A biological scientist from the U.S. Geological Survey–of all places–have published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biology, suggesting that human culture may be significantly influenced by a parasite that commonly infects cats, but also targets humans.
“In populations where this parasite is very common, mass personality modification could result in cultural change,” says the scientist, Kevin Lafferty, who’s based at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In a press release, variations in the prevalence of Toxoplasma gondii “may explain a substantial proportion of human population differences we see in cultural aspects that relate to ego, money, material possessions, work and rules.”
Toxoplasma infection is actually quite common in humans, and varies from one region to another.
About a third of Americans show antibodies to the parasite, but in Brazil the number rises to nearly 70%, while in South Korea it’s under 5%.
Those differences could explain, at least in part, why people from different nationalities have developed different cultures.
Link to story
Another story indicating human social-scale chemistry:
via mindHacks
Can differences in national levels of trust be partly explained by nutrition? Zack Lynch picks up on an interesting research paper that suggests it can.
Forcing pupils to study religious education is an abuse of their human rights assert Members of Parliament in the UK. The Parliamentary joint committee on human rights said in a report that pupils aged 16 and over should be able to opt out of religious education lessons.
Ministers have already conceded that older pupils should not be forced to take part in collective worship, a move which represents one of the biggest reforms of the laws governing religion in schools for more than 60 years.
The joint committee of peers and MPs, established to scrutinise legislation and ensure it does not contravene human rights, welcomed the reform but said it did not go far enough.
They said that under article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, pupils should be able to “enjoy the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”.
“This is a right they enjoy in their own right, not a right belonging to their parents.”
The “world’s leading green” architect and co-author of CRADLE TO CRADLE has been working closely with the government of China on developing six new wholly-green cities and on instituting a national “circular economy” with no waste. China may be moving from its position as the world’s worst polluter to a role as a global environmental leader.
Paper or plastic? Neither, say William McDonough and Michael Braungart. Why settle for the least harmful alternative when we could have something that is better–say, edible grocery bags!
At $5.25 per hour, can’t we circle our economy too? Oh. China’s cheaper. I see.
Hoch Fun-Food, the German confectioner that’s refining the art of edible paper, is now marketing it’s latest offering, an edible ‘post-it’ pad, under its Monster brand.
The snows of time,
a sharp blizzard of hope and memory,
drift across the ribbon of life’s highway.
The vast prairie of the mind
touches a new horizon with every moment
and encrusts a new footprint with every thought.
Seasons quilt the hills,
a stitchery of fresh and brown,
warming stone as it erodes toward sand.
The cup of earth
sways beneath the ocean’s heavy brew
as the magnetic hands of moon and star hold us all within.
We are vast creatures, we humans.
Touched by cold and crisp mists of endless space.
We are vast creatures, we humans.
Prevented from either dirt or star but much alike.
We are vast creatures, we humans.
None too small and none so large that one is greater than the next,
for not one can measure the infinite within which we are made.
We meet first within the caverns of the mountains
and second along the slopes toward the sea.
We meet again along the journey ’cross the seasons of the grass
and glimpse each other through the blizzard and the rain.
We meet as we wander the banks of flat rivers
or explore the spongy fingers of the delta near the sea,
And we meet once more in fresh waters,
turned within the change of brine.
Breeze can be the only wind a man will ever feel,
while another is seared by broiling desert,
another cut by hurricanes of torrid summer;
another by the crystal’d air of tundra winter.
Our life?
The mirror of our walk through time.
For the most part, 2005 was a mediocre year for the stock market. The market mostly went sideways to nowhere and was generally a boring year for most stock market investors.
The Dow Jones was down 0.61%, the S&P 500 was up 3% and the NASDAQ was up 1.37% for the year.
But quietly in the background:
Distributed Energy Systems Corporation (DESC) + 160%
DayStar Technologies, Inc. (DSTI) + 336%
Energy Conversion Devices, Inc. (ENER) + 160%
Evergreen Solar Inc. (ESLR) + 213%
Powershares Wilderhill Clean Energy Fund (PBW) + 19.5%
Spire Corporation (SPIR) + 120%
Sunpower Corporation (SPWR) +34%
Suntech Power Holdings (STP) +32%
Average Gain for U.S. solar stocks in 2005 = 134%
Average Gain for three Indexes in 2005 = 1.25%
As you can see from the numbers…
we’ve been ‘avoiding the obvious’ and thus doing too little with our money!!
