Category: interesting

We are so often merely commodities for each other. This snippet captures the issue.

“You should stop jerking off, Jack, and just write books. It is what you are supposed to do.”

I thought about that all the way home from New York. Perhaps he was right – I may have a book to write after all.

A little fable that tells how these people are fakers, their pretence on film just the tip of the iceberg. How publicity is a lifestyle to he who seeks it, his lies indiscernible from our daily prayers, his conscience forgiven by his movie star dreams. How success can make a good man swollen with lust for praise, needlessly bluffing his way into good books and buying his way out of bad. About how this egotist’s plaything called Motion Pictures is out of control, the characters jumping from the screens and swinging their dicks in ordinary lives.

All the world’s a stage, it seems, and an elite few are aware of the plot. We clueless extras are there to be deceived, abused and bullied into playing our parts, for the show that celebrates the stars must go on.

From “I was Russell Crowe’s stooge” at Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald

The German company ESG has developed personal STRAP-ON WINGS for use by special forces to fly over enemy lines.

The wings will enable soldiers to be dropped from airplanes at high altitude, and soar up to 120 miles in total silence and without being detected by radar.

Once the user is above their target landing spot, they deploy a parachute.

As RawFeed notes, “It’s only a matter of time before illegal immigrants discover these.”

Why are Americans so fat? It’s the corn.

In Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, he uses an analysis of four conventional meals to explore the origins of fundamental components of the American diet: how food is grown via industrial farming, what organic food is about, and what it’s like to grow, and hunt, your own food. He focuses especially on the ominpresence of corn in the American diet, directly and indirectly (dairy from corn-fed cattle and eggs produced by corn-fed chickens). From a New York Times review of Pollan’s book:

Big agribusiness has Washington in its pocket. The reason its titans want to keep corn cheap and plentiful, Pollan explains, is that they value it, above all, as a remarkably inexpensive industrial raw material. Not only does it fatten up a beef steer more quickly than pasture does (though at a cost to ourselves and cattle, which haven’t evolved to digest corn, and are therefore pre-emptively fed antibiotics to offset the stresses caused by their unnatural diet); once milled, refined and recompounded, corn can become any number of things, from ethanol for the gas tank to dozens of edible, if not nutritious, products, like the thickener in a milkshake, the hydrogenated oil in margarine, the modified cornstarch that binds the pulverized meat in a McNugget and, most disastrously, the ubiquitous sweetener known as high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Though it didn’t reach the American market until 1980, HFCS has insinuated itself into every nook and cranny of the larder — in Pollan’s McDonald’s meal, there’s HFCS not only in his 32-ounce soda, but in the ketchup and the bun of his cheeseburger — and Pollan fingers it as the prime culprit in the nation’s obesity epidemic.

Read a synopsis at WorldChanging here.

“If you’re interested in making clean fuels, this microbe makes an excellent starting point.”

Isolated from a hot spring on the Russian volcanic island of Kunashir, this microbe lives almost entirely on carbon monoxide. While consuming this normally poisonous gas, the microbe mixes it with water, producing hydrogen gas as waste.

“C. hydrogenoformans is one of the fastest-growing microbes that can convert water and carbon monoxide to hydrogen,” remarks TIGR evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen, senior author of the PLoS Genetics study.

Supermicrobe Hydrogen Generation

It may be shocking, but over 90 percent of the cells in your body are not yours. They are various kinds of bacteria that live in symbiosis with your body.

Only a small number of bacteria in our bodies are harmful; most of them get something from our bodies and deliver useful tricks in return – such as enzymes needed for digesting the food and which cannot be synthesized by our own bodies. Now, for the first time, scientists have studied the genetics of the world inside our gut, or colon.

They have found up to 100 trillion microbes,
representing more than 1,000 species.

They help us digest much of what we eat, including some vitamins, sugars, and fiber. This colon “microbiome”, to sum of all these microbes, includes more than 60,000 genes – twice as many as found in the human genome. Because some of these microbial genes code for enzymes that humans need to digest food, scientists think they co-evolved with their human host, to mutual benefit.

“We’re entirely dependent on this microbial population for our well-being…”

For the first time, scientists describe the busy microbial world inside
via Feed Biology

It appears that many people are still living in the world of the old debate between “the free market” and “socialism”.

…all societies have always had market economies.

The question is: what SORT of market economy?

The modern market economy with which we are familiar, and for which many argue so hysterically, did not come into existence because of the magical thing called “the free market”.

Rather, the kind of free market with which we are familiar and which we admire so much arose in Reformation countries (as distinct from market economies in other times and places, in which markets simply reinforced entirely unjust hierarchical social relations).

Why did the sort of “market economies” arise in Reformation countries and not in other societies?

Because Reformation countries forefronted the rule of law (in other words, treated the rulers as well as the ruled as equal before the law), because they had a view of individuals as neither autonomous nor subject to society but related to and responsible for society, because they had a high view of ethics and diversity and work and living within one’s means, and so on.

In other words, it is not “free markets” that provided for prosperity, peace and freedom, it was a spiritual revolution (the Reformation) that created the environment within which markets of the right sort could be built over time.

from Renaissance: Insights for Action in Today’s World

There are specific brain regions that are dedicated to processing threatening facial expressions.

By comparing how quickly human facial expressions of different types are detected in a crowd of neutral faces, researchers have demonstrated that male angry faces are a priority for visual processing – particularly for male observers.

In addition, men find angry faces of both genders faster than women, whereas women find socially relevant expressions (for example, happy or sad) more rapidly. The work suggests that although males are biased toward detecting threatening faces, and females are more attuned to socially relevant expressions, both sexes prioritize the detection of angry male faces … via Softpedia.

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Youth with bipolar disorder (previously known as manic depression) misread facial expressions as hostile and show heightened neural reactions when they focus on emotional aspects of neutral faces, … read more >

Why Religion Must End

What got you going where?

By combining a hand-held global positioning system with a galvanic skin response sensor (that measures the sweatiness of your fingers), London-based artist Christian Nold has created a gadget that measures your arousal as you walk around. Superimposing the data onto your route, using something like Google Earth, allows you to see a kind of ’emotion map‘ for where you’ve been.

Nold has tested the device on over 300 people so far (his data is publicly available), and is looking for academic and commercial research partners to explore the project’s potential.

Link to Bio-mapping website.
Link to Bio-mapping documentary download.

Science News has a cover article on the psychology, neuroscience and genetics of how violence and anti-social behaviour develops in young people.

The article examines how human biology and the influence of family and social life interact to increase the chances of violence and bullying in some, while leaving others able to control their actions despite being subject to hostile experiences.

Henry’s story highlights a theme that is attracting increasing scientific attention: Like all children, chronic troublemakers and hell-raisers respond to a shifting mix of social and biological influences as they grow. Some developmental roads arc relentlessly toward brutality and tragedy. Others, like Henry’s, plunge into a dark place before heading into the light of adjustment.

Developmentally minded researchers are now beginning to map out violence-prone paths in hopes of creating better family and school interventions. New evidence indicates that a gene variant inherited by some people influences brain development in ways that foster impulsive violence, but only in combination with environmental hardships. Other studies explore how family and peer interactions build on a child’s makeup to promote delinquency.

Separate work examines ways to counteract the malign effects of bullying rituals and other types of coercion in schools.

“Violence is such a complicated issue,” Twemlow says. “There’s always a set of preconditions to violent behavior and never just one cause.”

Link to ‘Destructive Impact’ from Science News via Mind Hacks

Introducing the Super Shrink

When it comes to client recovery, it’s not the type of therapy that matters so much as the individual therapist who’s giving it – that’s the message from a study by researchers at Brigham Young and Ohio universities in America.

John Okiishi and a team of colleagues examined real-life data from 1,841 student clients with problems ranging from homesickness to personality disorder, who between them saw 56 therapists at a large university counselling centre. Before each therapy session, clients completed an outcome questionnaire designed to track their progress and recovery.

The researchers found no effect of therapists’ sex, level/type of training, or their theoretical orientation (cognitive behavioural, humanistic or psychodynamic) on clients’ recovery. There were, however, massive differences between therapists in the typical outcome of their clients and the duration of therapy. A client seeing one of the top three therapists(on average) could expect to feel dramatically better after a few weeks treatment. By contrast, a client seen by one of the bottom three therapists could expect, on average, to feel the same, possibly worse, after three times as much treatment. The range of severity of clients’ problems at treatment onset was similar for the different therapists.

The authors concluded “something about these (more successful) therapists and the way they work, independent of the amount of time spent with clients, has a significant impact. . . There is an urgent need to take account of the effectiveness of the individual therapist and it is time for clinicians to welcome such research”.
______________________________

Okishi, J., Lambert, M.J., Nielsen, S.L. & Ogles, B.M. (2003). Waiting for supershrink: an empirical analysis of therapist effects. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 10, 361-373.

Do not expect your written communications to be understood.

In effect, e-mail cannot adequately convey emotion.

A recent study by Profs. Justin Kruger of New York University and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago focused on how well sarcasm is detected in electronic messages. Their conclusion: Not only do e-mail senders overestimate their ability to communicate feelings, but e-mail recipients also overestimate their ability to correctly decode those feelings.

Frequency that..	Email	Phone
Communicator believes he is clearly communicating	78%	78%
Receiver believes he is correctly interpreting	89%	91%
Receiver correctly interprets message	56%	73%

via Future Pundit

World Powers and International Order:

“The USA’s status as a world power will be substantially weakened in the next 15 years. This is the result of a representative international survey by the German Bertelsmann Stiftung.

According to this study, only 57% of the 10,000 people surveyed worldwide still see the USA as a world power in the year 2020. Today, 81% of people worldwide reckon the USA is a world power, followed by China with 45%, Japan with 37%, Great Britain with 33%, the EU with 32% and Russia with 27%.

However, expectations shift considerably for the year 2020. Then, 55% of those surveyed expect China to be a world power, followed by Japan with 32%, the EU with 30%, Russia with 27% and India with 24%.”
Press Release (PDF)
Conclusions (PDF)
Survey (PDF)

A new warship. the USS New York, is being built in New Orleans with 24 tons of steel taken from 9/11’s World Trade Center.

There is no shortage of scrap metal in New Orleans these days, but the girders taken from Ground Zero have been treated with a reverence usually accorded to religious relics.

More than 250 foreigners have been abducted since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. At least 44 have been killed; 135 were released, three escaped, six were rescued and the fate of the others remains unknown. Documents seen by The Times show three countries paid ransoms in spite of denying it in public – sums from $2.5 million to $10 million per person have been paid over the past 21 months.

WorldChanging posts, “What if every window was a solar panel?”

Blaine Brownell explains: XsunX has developed very thin translucent coatings and films that create large area monolithic solar cell structures. This semi-transparency makes their so-called Power Glass glazing desirable for placing over glass, plastics, and other see-through structures. Using patented processes, such as reel-to-reel manufacturing techniques and multi-terminal cell structure designs, XsunX is working to commercialize large area cell manufacturing processes for thin film flexible plastics.

We have acquired our potential.

We are a forward people.

We labor potency.

We sell promise.

Little to keep.

Less to give.

Power.

Love,

Do.

Sometimes I go about in pity for myself,
all the while a great wind is carrying me across the sky.

Ojibwa chant via JackZen

Eighty per cent of America’s health care dollar is spent in the last two years of life. Think about that.

“We must fundamentally redesign the way we care for chronically ill Americans,” said the authors of this report.

“We must reward, rather than penalize provider organizations that successfully reduce excessive care and develop broader strategies for patients with chronic illness.”

Each single drink hits a woman like a double. This study documents how women, pound-for-pound, not only get more drunk or higher faster then men, but also become addicted more easily. The risk of addiction to alcohol and drugs, including nicotine, is approximately doubled.

Your work describing networks is also work discovering networks, wherein we make decisions, thus democracy.

http://www.networkweaving.com/

Certainly we will see progress as interaction is enhanced. Effect. Studies in group process seem to show that raw interaction is often all that change & benefit require.

Didn’t Plato warn that city states should be constrained to about 5,000 people? If larger, he thought the human eye could not visualize each adjacent citizen as an individual. Thus not ‘seeing’ his neighbor, he could not sensibly accomodate his neighbor. I’ve often thought democracy, any government, fails after a certain scale. It’s somewhat absurd to ask a smidgeon of leadership to steer this boat.

Finally, again admiring your ingenious and diligent effort,

Network from matrix
And matrix from node,
to coin a modern ode,

The Dead Poet
Al Purdy

I was altered in the placenta
by the dead brother before me
who built a place in the womb
knowing I was coming:
he wrote words on the walls of flesh
painting a woman inside a woman
whispering a faint lullaby
that sings in my blind heart still

The others were lumberjacks
backwoods wrestlers and farmers
their women were meek and mild
nothing of them survives
but an image inside an image
of a cookstove and the kettle boiling
– how else explain myself to myself
where does the song come from?

Now on my wanderings:
at the Alhambra’s lyric dazzle
where the Moors built stone poems
a wan white face peering out
– and the shadow in Plato’s cave
remembers the small dead one
– at Samarkand in pale blue light
the words came slowly from him
– I recall the music of blood
on the Street of the Silversmiths

Sleep softly spirit of earth
as the days and nights join hands
when everything becomes one thing
wait softly brother
but do not expect it to happen
that great whoop announcing resurrection
expect only a small whisper
of birds nesting and green things growing
and a brief saying of them
and know where the words came from

How many countries are there in the world? The question is not as simple as it seems.

The United Nations claims 191 members, the United States Department of State supposes 192 independent countries, while the C.I.A. World Factbook spreads its net even further by suggesting 268 nations, dependent areas, and other entities.

But leaving aside whether territories or colonies such as Puerto Rico or Bermuda should be included (not to mention the political status of such “non-countries” as Palestine, Tibet, and Taiwan) there are a vast number of claims from other, less well-known nations asserting their independent status.

Call them micro-nations, model countries, ephemeral states, or new country projects, the world is surprisingly full of entities that display all the trappings of established independent states, yet garner none of the respect.

Zazen is a subtle practice. You and I are hardly ever just being here and experiencing. We’re usually thinking about what we’re going to do in the future, or trying to think of something clever to say, or remembering something that happened once, or wishing we were someplace else, or resisting something, reacting to something, pretending to be something, and so on. It’s very rare we think this moment is worth experiencing.

This reminds me of building the “Be Here Now Cafe” in Marin’s Mill Valley during the 1970s. Way a ‘head’ of its time.

And this reminds me of a book I built for a photography degree in Alberta called, “The Moment is Infinity”. Think about that.

Jeremy Raikes. This is how he starts a tribute to the little friend he describes as the “quintessential” boy:

“Now he can be laid to rest,
this boy who bore with life so brief,
and left the world to be impressed
by more than sorrow’s stifling grief.”

Jeremy also wrote:

I’ll always roll a seven,
Choosing heaven ‘stead of hell.
I am the watchman,
And the watchman cries, “All’s well.”