Author: Brian

Planet enters ‘ecological debt’

A computer-simulated model of sudden cardiac death has showed increased fish oil intake by Americans could reduce the rate of cardiac death by 6.4 percent, which scientists estimated could be a greater reduction than by cardiac defibrillators. – even if automated defibrillators were available in every home and public area.

Even if defibrillators were implanted!

The study was published in the October issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Journalist and former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal chronicles the unprecendented changes the Bush administration is making to the executive office.

Giving your way to Profitability

Most of us get into business in a large part to earn a living, preferable a good living. We spend immeasurable energy in our efforts to produce profit for our businesses.

In my opinion the most over looked strategy for a high income is the act of giving.

Now yes philanthropy is important and maybe the subject of a future blog, but that is not what I am getting at here. What I am talking about is giving of our selves, and I really mean giving.

In my experience much of life is counter intuitive. When we switch our thinking in business from what we get to what we give something magical happens.

I have been self employed most of my life. Whether I was an employee or retained by clients I have always tried to exceed their expectations. I think that holds true for relationships of all kinds when someone feels like they getting more than they are giving they generally want the relationship to continue.

When the “giving” come from a place of passion, from a place of love (yes I know I am writing to a business audience) the cost of the “giving” is so nominal so we feel what we are getting is truly awesome. I have experienced love in the work place (and no it was not what you’re thinking).

When I was President of Community Prescription Service I reported to Stephen Gendin who was co-founder & CEO. We shared an office. We were so completely opposite in every way our staff could not figure out how we worked together never mind really got along well, and enjoyed each other company. Our “love” for each other made our differences a strength. In the four years before Stephen’s death we doubled our gross revenue and grew profits substantially more proportionally.

Recently an employee at a client company said something that really hit home with me. She said “the owner wants us (the employees) to get out of our comfort zone (for improved performance); he needs to get out of his comfort zone first”. One of the biggest barriers in business is trust.

If we as leaders give of ourselves and I mean dig deep and really give, people will respond in kind and I promise profits will follow.

‘Know thyself’ is one of the most successful slogans in history.

Thales of Miletus — a philosopher, who flourished in the 6th century before Christ, is credited with having coined the phrase, and Plato tells us that it was inscribed at the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi, and it is still popular today, over 2500 years later.

‘Know thyself’ sounds terrific in theory, but how feasible — or desirable — is it in practice?

On the face of it, there is something puzzling about the idea that self-knowledge is difficult to attain. After all, we are more intimately related to ourselves than we are to anything else in the universe, aren’t we?

We have to live with ourselves day in and day out, so shouldn’t it follow that we know ourselves better than we know anything else?

…

And you and I cannot afford to see through the innumerable deceptions that we unwittingly perpetrate in our daily lives.

Our lives are awash with deceit, but becoming aware of it would be to sip from a poisoned chalice, because it would undermine the foundations on which our lives are built.

Self-deception is not a pathological state, a deviation from the norm of truthfulness. It is normal, ‘healthy’ and adaptive.

In Praise of Self-deception

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: What are you doing for others?” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Written by Vaughan Bell of Mind Hacks, this summarizes psychology’s frontier:

To generalise, most psychiatrists see themselves as applied neuroscientists, while most clinical psychologists explain psychopathology in terms of mental processes and social relationships, and make little reference to the brain. This rift is partly fuelled by a lack of research that examines how biological and psychological factors interact to cause mental ill health. One 2005 study was a notable and refreshing exception, and has provided a compelling glimpse into how stress and the dopamine system interact to predict the presence of unusual experiences in everyday life.

…

One of the most heated debates in science concerns whether psychiatric conditions are mainly caused by lifelong brain dysfunction or are largely the result of stress and trauma. This study is one of a growing number that are important because they suggest that a narrow view of human distress is counter-productive, and that we need to understand both the lived experience and the biology of the brain to fully comprehend it.

How many new foods can we expect to be produced from seaweed?

Cavi-Art is a product made of seaweed that looks and tastes exactly like salmon caviar or lumpfish caviar (four varieties).

Cooking for Engineers says,

“When we were first presented with the salmon Cavi-Art, we thought it looked amazing.

Even after being told it was made from seaweed and after close examination, I thought it looked exactly like salmon roe. (Unfortunately, I didn’t have a side by side comparison with real salmon roe.) The flavor and texture of the roe was uncanny as well. The surface of each Cavi-Art drop had just the right amount of tension and the burst of flavor as they burst in your mouth was so close to salmon roe that I honestly couldn’t tell the difference. I think the main benefits of Cavi-Art is that it’s shelf stable, doesn’t contribute to overfishing, and (for calorie conscious guests) low in calories.”

I’ll have the Kelp Filet please.

Oliva Sabuco — a 16th Century female philosopher, a precursor of psychosomatic medicine, a figure that deserves wider recognition for proposing the relationship between emotional and physical health.

In 1587 she published a comprehensive book titled,

Sabuco.org is compiling her work, much lost under Inquisitions. They report:

Sabuco scholarly describes how emotions may impair health and cause premature death.

She urges physicians to treat in unison the whole person: body, mind and soul.

Sabuco’s thesis confronted some skepticism from the medical establishment, and from a community ready to stigmatize a woman as unfit to tackle matters dealing with taboo physiological topics.

Recognition of her work grew nevertheless steadily in Spain from the first (1587) throughout the seventh (eight with the one of 1734) editions. Sabuco’s Nueva Filosofia was known in France at the beginning of 17C, but it was in England where it was recognized as seminal work, and, soon after, “silently” quoted (plagiarized?).

Sabuco’s theory of human nature is a scientific, comprehensive and secular argument on the relations between mind and body.

She draws selectively on the Platonic conceptions of the tripartite soul, on the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean in Ethics, and on Pliny’s natural philosophy, illustrating similarities and differences among humans, animals and plants. Her philosophy of Medicine is grounded in Psychology, Metaphysics, Virtue Ethics, and plain common sense that agrees mostly with Church doctrine.

Yet, there are subtle incongruities in the text, e.g., God is brought forth as Creator and Provider throughout the seven treatises but there are no references to the Scriptures, the figure of Jesus, the Purgatory, and the Church itself and its catechism. Communication with God, and the promise of Heaven -as rewards- are indeed, conspicuous, but her theory is also tied to Cosmology and its effect on humans.

All together, a holistic view of nature prevails.

Sabuco.org

A brain region that curbs our natural self interest has been identified. The studies could explain how we control fairness in our society, researchers say.

Humans are the only animals to act spitefully or to mete out “justice”, dishing out punishment to people seen to be behaving unfairly – even if it is not in the punisher’s own best interests.

This tendency has been hard to explain in evolutionary terms, because it has no obvious reproductive advantage and punishing unfairness can actually lead to the punisher being harmed.

Researchers have identified the part of the brain responsible for punishing unfairness.

New Scientist

A peptide found by a Wisconsin research group seems to effectively block the influenza virus.

“It attacks a completely different part of the virus life cycle,” explains Curtis R. Brandt, a co-author of the study and a UW-Madison professor of medical microbiology and immunology and of ophthalmology and visual sciences.

“The virus can’t even get into the cell. The peptide is blocking the very earliest step in infection.”

Science Blog

A neurologist says that if he can get to a stroke victim quickly he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke. He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized, diagnosed and getting to the patient within 3 hours, which is tough. Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. But doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:

1. Ask the individual to SMILE.
2. Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.
3. Ask the person to SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (Coherently, ie: It is sunny out today)

If he or she has trouble with any of these tasks, call 9-1-1 immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher. — Passed along by Michael Hawley

via CoolTools

Breaking News
Eric Schmidt Warns Politicians That Elections Will Forever Change

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, warned politicians at a Tory party conference in Bournemouth that the outcome of general elections will be changed “within five years” by what Eric Schmidt calls “truth predictor” software.

“We [at Google] are not in charge of truth
but we might be able to give a probability.”

I am a slave and a saint.
I am a window cleaner, a truck driver, a president, a child.
I am a brother, a father, a lover, a bother, a fop.
I am experience itself and I enjoy this robust body.
I am a journey in a frame of an infinity of color.
I am a discourse of experiment in a cast of activity.
I am a contract to my future and a vault of my past.
I am a keeper of agreement, a binder of the book of life.
I am a hermetic priest, a mountain fool, and a noble man.
I am a ray of sunlight, a sparkle of a star.
I am a vibration in space, a creator of heaven.
I am a magnet of ideas and a vortex of results.
I am an agent of the cosmos, a clerk in an angel’s court.
I am a redeemable stamp, a currency in gold.
I am a charted position and a page of filigree.
I am a movement in a stream and a particle of air.
I am a mountain in a pebble and a peak below the sea.
I am an ancient lantern of perpetual wick.
I am electric mystery and frost of light.
I am a flame within a flame, a flicker and a furnace.
I am community and a nation of striving.
I am a script of opposites and a symphony of harmony.
I am an idea itself and a mirror of every day.
I am. I am. I am.
Each moment I am.
A moment infinite.
I enjoy this spirit.

When the rich steal from the rich, it’s Good Business;
When the rich steal from the rich for the poor, it’s Noblesse Oblige;
When the middle steal from the middle, it’s Corruption;
When the rich and the middle steal from the poor, it’s Fiscal Responsibility;
When the poor steal from the rich and the middle, it’s Crime;
When the poor steal from the poor, it’s Tough Luck.
BH

And here’s the real story about our economy, complete with some of the facts:

A postscript from wood s lot:

The Afterlife: Letter to Stephen Dobyns
Hayden Carruth
American Poetry Review, May/Jun 1999

You live in a sinking nation, Stephen, in a stinking
Time. America is falling apart. We look down in
Astonishment, but mostly in dismay. The other day
When I met Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison
On the plaza they turned their backs on me. I
Understood them. I’m a recent arrival, tainted
With degeneracy, no matter what my personal
State of innocence or guilt. Alas, they say
They can tell it in my speech. They say the spectacle
Of presidents and professors impeached on charges
Of trivial misconduct for patently greedy
And partisan ends is more than they can stand.
Who would have thought America could become
A nation where the putsch, the coup, the revolution
Advertisement
Of the swine could prevail against the common
Will. Stephen, we conclude the common will
Isn’t strong enough, not any more, the corruption
Has reached so deep and spread so far. You
Must learn again to live in the common shame,
As in the days of slavery and the massacres of the
Natives. You must learn to live again in
Dreadful isolation, a castaway. Oh Stephen,
For the first time I’m actually glad I’ve escaped,
Even to the nullity of the afterlife, even in spite
Of all the beauty and comradeship I’ve lost.

Not genes but germs cause most chronic diseases.

So argues respected evolutionary biologist Paul W. Ewald in his book, Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Cause Cancers, Heart Disease, and Other Deadly Ailments

The Amherst professor is attempting to drag the medical establishment into the Darwinian age.

Although it’s trendy today to blame most major long-term diseases on inheriting bad genes, Ewald contends that today’s “Human Genome Mania” often violates the fundamental principle of biology, Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection. Darwin argued that families with harmful hereditary traits will die out over time. They would be replaced by lineages whose hereditary constitution better enables them to survive and reproduce.

Although Ewald is attempting to revolutionize the practice of medicine, he has made sure that lay readers will find his book interesting and intelligible. He believes that patients are often more open-minded than their doctors.

In an interview, Ewald claimed that the health benefits of the Human Genome Project are over hyped because “Most diseases aren’t genetic.” He claimed that spending on improving antibiotics would bring greater payoffs than spending on the glamour field of genetic research.

via Steve Sailer

Run! There’s a trillionth of a benzene!
Biology might offer better clues to disease than chemistry too.

Ewald points to the obvious when he notes that before we were pouring billions into DNA labs, we were looking for chemicals that might trigger disease. Yet, our age old scourge of germs and their toxins remain, inviting communities of trouble in our bodies — while the research remains underfunded.

Historically, infectious agents have been harder to identify than nonliving poisons as the cause of diseases because germs can evolve ways to hide. Simple chemicals cannot.

We can evolve new defenses, says Ewald, against both bad genes and bad germs. What makes infections more dangerous than genes, however, is that germs can fight back. They can counter our new resistance strategies by evolving news methods of attack against us.

As a close analogy, consider one of our artificial defenses, penicillin. It is less effective today than in 1950 because today’s germs tend to be descended from the germs that had the right stuff for surviving onslaughts of penicillin.

Most diseases that are both widespread and nasty, like AIDS, malaria, and syphilis have already been identified as infectious. Yet, suspicions have only recently turned toward infections as the origin of some of the most devastating chronic diseases, such as atherosclerosis (heart disease) and breast cancer.

Now, back to business [Bob Adams warns us].

The next step in understanding and dealing with the future is to look at it. That is, to be truly focused on what is coming, not what has come and gone.

That’s what Marshall McLuhan meant when he said, “The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” People do this, political parties do this, societies do this.

Serbia’s disastrous last couple decades result from such a backward view, putting more emphasis on the events of 500 years ago then those of the present. Panama, where folks could still be arguing about the days of the dictator, Manuel Noriega, is doing exactly the opposite and is very future-oriented. That has resulted in astonishing growth in the last few years. China is making its name by looking ahead, not through the rearview mirror. Nations like Russia and Iraq are making up their minds which way to look.

Whether it’s the Democratic Party, Al Qaeda, the European Union’s elite, or another signficant group, watch to see which ones focus on the future and which are looking in their rearview mirror. The former will always have the edge on the latter and, as history indicates, will eventually “win” any conflict, although that may take much longer than anyone expects.

Above all, monitor yourself.

Are you looking backward or forward, or just standing there with your eyes closed? Do you find yourself spending more time arguing about what should have happened in the past or talking about what you want to do in the future?

It was a classic China traffic jam.

Nobody, but nobody, moved.

Nobody gave another eye contact.

I’ve never seen anyone in China back out of a congested situation. And they didn’t: this culture doesn’t back down. And then the van, going in the other direction from the garbage truck, simply inched forward. Space compressed; it always does here.

“Don’t look at anybody,
don’t recognize anything,
but shimmy your way around,
on,
over and through.”

Olivia Wu, a staff writer for The Chronicle

When President Bush said “America is addicted to oil”, he could also have said that America is addicted to coal.

Most Americans are not aware of the sheer scale [YouTube] of current coal use in the United States. Over 50% of electricity is generated from coal with 20 pounds of coal per a person being burnt every day to generate electricity.

Clean Coal or Dirty Coal?

“It has been said that if you could become another person for even a few moments
you would probably become Enlightened. So strong is our attachment to the idea of who we are that even the smallest jolt out of it can have an immense effect.” – Manjusvara

But that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

…our data suggest that effort and hard work offer the most promising route to happiness. In contrast, simply altering one’s superficial circumstances (assuming they are already reasonably good) may have little lasting effect on well-being.

“[This is] a standout piece of work.”, says William D. Meek, a doctoral candidate in counselling psychology at the University of Missouri.

The route to happiness, another article by Will Meek

“The secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life, and in elevating them to art.” William Morris

Reinvented TV

Jeff Jarvis writes:

All the old definitions of TV are in shambles. Television need not be broadcast. It needn’t be produced by studios and networks. It no longer depends on big numbers and blockbusters. It doesn’t have to fit 30- and 60-minute moulds. It isn’t scheduled. It isn’t mass. The limits of television – of distribution, of tools, of economics, of scarcity – are gone. So now, at last, we can ask not what TV is, but what it can be. I envision TV that is interactive when it wants to be. I imagine TV that is live, with news from the scene thanks to a hundred video camera-phones. I look forward to the day when I can watch not what Hollywood recommends, but what my friends endorse. I am dying to see the advertising industry figure out that mass media were inefficient and ineffective ; when they start supporting the new TV with their money, huge things will happen. Television has already exploded. So now let’s build the new TV.

You don’t need stem cells for cloning, say scientists from Pittsburgh University.

In fact, they say other types of cells may be better than stem cells for cloning.

“The team managed to create two baby mice from a mature blood cell, disproving the previous conception that this could only be done with immature stem cells.”

You can read the story here and read the study in the journal Nature Genetics.

“[Some] 50% of all fibres are from petroleum, and we have an oil issue,” says Yiqi Yang, a professor of textile science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who is collaborating with doctoral candidate Narendra Reddy.

Yang and his colleagues think that agricultural waste could offer an alternative source.

Rice straw is made up of the bits and stems left over after a rice harvest and, like cotton and flax, is composed mostly of cellulose. It now accounts for about 526 million tonnes of waste worldwide.

Chicken feathers, which are composed of keratin, like wool, make up about 1.8 billion kilograms in waste each year in the US. Much of this material ends up in landfill.

According to Yang, even processing a small fraction of this agricultural waste and turning it into textiles could have a significant impact on world demand, which totals about 63 million tonnes of fibres a year. Story at abc.au

India’s charges per minute are said to be the lowest in the world, as service providers offer deals that include a lifetime of unlimited incoming calls for a one-time fee of 1,000 rupees ($21.75), writes The New York Times.