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Have you ever been in love?

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 20:08:09 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks:

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' or 'how very perceptive' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.

Tags: neil gaiman, the sandman, comics, quotes

Ok ... now put your paws like this ...

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 20:08:31 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: I think they are both adorable

Clip Source: photo.net

Ok ... now put your paws like this ...

If you have a 1.5 year old and a cat you know the two don't sit still for two seconds. This was one of those rare moments that comes along every once in a while. And as a rule usually happens when you don't have your camera nearby. This was an exception to that rule :)

Marcel de Jong

Tags: photo, kids, cats, cute

2007: A year of stunning progress in the science of life

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 19:18:59 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

From the identification of dozens of disease genes to the cloning of a monkey embryo, several important milestones in biology have been passed over the past 12 months. There were also significant breakthroughs in cosmology and climate science

When the human genome was sequenced seven years ago, scientists knew that most of the major scientific discoveries of the 21st century would be in biology. This was particularly true of 2007, which saw huge leaps in our understanding of how genes cause disease and how life works (and can be manipulated) at its most fundamental level.

CLIMATE CHANGE

HEART CELLS

DARK MATTER DETECTED?

GENES

SPECIES TRANSFER

MINIMALLY CONSCIOUS MAN RESUSCITATED

HYBRID EGGS DEBATE

THE RETURN OF GM FOODS?

MONKEY CLONE

RE-PROGRAMMING BODY CELLS INTO STEM CELLS

Tags: science

Stretching the Mind

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 15:32:16 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Stretching your mind is hard. Once we've settled on a worldview that suits us, we tend to hold on. New information is bent to fit, information that doesn't fit is discounted, and new views are resisted.

Clip Source: www.edge.org

1) Stretch your mind, reach beyond your preconceptions; learn to think of things in ways you have never thought before.

2) Acquire tools with which to critically examine and evaluate new ideas, including your own cherished ones.

3) Settle eventually on a framework or set of frameworks that organize what you know and believe and that guide your life as an individual and a leader.

2) But never get so comfortable as to believe that your frameworks are the final word, recognizing the strong psychological tendencies that favor sticking to your worldview. Learn to keep stretching your mind, keep stepping outside your comfort zone, keep venturing beyond the familiar, keep trying to put yourself in the shoes of others whose frameworks or cultures are alien to you, and have an open mind to different ways of parsing the world. Before you critique a new idea, or another culture, master it to the point at which its proponents or members recognize that you get it.

Tags: education, mind stretch, frameworks

Hedonist Philosopher Epicurus

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 19:50:15 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad
clipper's remarks: "Philosophers down the ages have been keen to tell the rest of us how to live and how to be happy. Certainly their advice comes to us with the lustre of intellectual achievement; it is both high-brow and high-powered, but can we understand any of it and how does it fare against modern psychological research?"

Clip Source: www.spring.org.uk

Hedonist Philosopher Epicurus Was Right About Happiness (Mostly)

[Image credit: mharrsch]

"If a little is not enough for you, nothing is." --Epicurus

One philosopher who dispensed clear advice about how to live a happy life was Epicurus, a Greek who lived in the third century B.C.. In a new article in the Journal of Happiness Studies, Bergsma, Poot and Liefbroer (in press) explain Epicurus' guide to the good life and then compare it with some of the huge body of work in psychology looking at satisfaction with life.

Epicurus was a hedonist, but not in the popular modern sense. Now we tend to associate hedonism with excessive pleasure-seeking or with refined sensual pleasure. What Epicurus meant, though, was something more subtle; he certainly didn't think the road to happiness was paved with luxury or material wealth. What he emphasised was the idea of being 'untroubled'.

"sleep replacement" drug

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 11:23:17 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.wired.com

A nasal spray of a key brain hormone cures sleepiness in sleep-deprived monkeys. With no apparent side effects, the hormone might be a promising sleep-replacement drug.
Photo: Flickr/Mayr

In what sounds like a dream for millions of tired coffee drinkers, Darpa-funded scientists might have found a drug that will eliminate sleepiness.

A nasal spray containing a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests. The discovery's first application will probably be in treatment of the severe sleep disorder narcolepsy.

The treatment is "a totally new route for increasing arousal, and the new study shows it to be relatively benign," said Jerome Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA and a co-author of the paper. "It reduces sleepiness without causing edginess."

Orexin A is a promising candidate to become a "sleep replacement" drug

Tags: sleep replacement, neuroscience

aww

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 23:20:24 GMT

clipped by: Lawl78

Clip Source: images.thatimagesite.com

Tags: cartoon, humor, humour

Cancer-Fighting Agent Found In Beer

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 08:41:02 GMT

clipped by: thisnamecantbetaken
clipper's remarks:

Clip Source: www.upi.com

Cancer-fighting agent found in beer

A key ingredient of beer may contain a cancer-fighting substance, a German study indicated.

Studies indicated xanthohumol, found in hops, inhibits a family of enzymes that can trigger the cancer process, as well as help the body detoxify carcinogens, science newswire Ivanhoe reported Monday. Preliminary studies at Oregon State University show that xanthohumol can kill breast, colon, ovarian and prostate cancers.

"It's very healthy. I think the ingredients in the beer are very good," Werner Back of Brewing Technology at the Technical University of Munich.

Xanthohumol contains more powerful antioxidants than vitamin E and some studies indicate it helps reduce oxidation of bad cholesterol, the newswire reported.

"Xanthohumol has been shown to be a very active substance against cancer," said Markus Herrmann , also in Munich. "It comes in small sticky beads, which you find within the hops."

It would take 60 regular beers to equal

one super beer.

Tags: cbgc, beer

Record Industry Goes After Personal Use

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 11:40:23 GMT

clipped by: Jo5329
clipper's remarks: So you pay for the CD and then load it into iTunes to put on your iPod and now that is illegal? Are these people so desperate for money they are now going after the end user who has already paid for it?

Clip Source: www.washingtonpost.com

Despite more than 20,000 lawsuits filed against music fans in the years since they started finding free tunes online rather than buying CDs from record companies, the recording industry has utterly failed to halt the decline of the record album or the rise of digital music sharing.

In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

Tags: music, itunes

Books by email or RSS

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 01:36:13 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad
clipper's remarks: For everyone but especially for Deepti and Antara. These books are available anywhere to the best of my knowledge.
Public domain books are free as well as some copyright books. Other copyright books have a charge

Clip Source: www.dailylit.com

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ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 15:57:39 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: we need not assume that the thesis of substrate-independence is necessarily true (either analytically or metaphysically) – just that, in fact, a computer running a suitable program would be conscious

Clip Source: www.simulation-argument.com

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

from the interest this thesis may hold for those who are engaged in futuristic speculation, there are also more purely theoretical rewards. The argument provides a stimulus for formulating some methodological and metaphysical questions, and it suggests naturalistic analogies to certain traditional religious conceptions, which some may find amusing or thought-provoking.

Tags: computing, simulation, future

Wife's happy marriage leads to less stress

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 15:22:41 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad

Clip Source: www.earthtimes.org

Wife's happy marriage leads to less stress

Posted : Tue, 01 Jan 2008 21:56:28 GMT

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 1 How happy a woman feels in her marriage affects how a key stress hormone -- linked to several diseases -- recovers during the day, a U.S. study found.

Lead author Darby E. Saxbe, a University of California at Los Angeles graduate student and Rena Repetti, a UCLA professor, said long-term elevated cortisol levels have been associated with depression, burnout, chronic fatigue syndrome, relationship problems, poor social adjustment and possibly cancer.

Cortisol levels start high in the morning and decline during the day -- with intermittent rises as stressors arouse the adrenal gland. The slope of the hormone's daily decline is linked to well-being and better health.

The study, published in Health Psychology, found women in happy marriages enjoyed stronger cortisol declines than women in less blissful unions, but there was no difference in the men.

Drunk driver kills mom and 4 kids

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 16:49:02 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: Made me cry my eyes out

http://www.toledotalk.com/cgi-bin/tt.pl/article/9720/Wrong-way_drunk_driver_kills_five_on_I-280/17

Clip Source: www.toledotalk.com

Police estimate the drunk driver drove at least 3 miles in the wrong direction before hitting the other vehicle.

After the fatal accident, a motorist on the scene noticed the drunk driver walking around and complaining about jaw pain.

The drunk driver was combative at times and refused to submit a blood sample. Police got a search warrant to obtain the sample.

The drunk driver was under guard at the hospital. He will likely be released later in the day on Dec 31, and then he will be arrested and charged with five counts of aggravated vehicular homicide. The charge is a second-degree felony. Minimum penalty is two years in prison. Maximum penalty is eight years.