11.30.06
Posted in health at 9:51 pm by site admin
Check out this article about 40 amazing facts about sleep. A few examples:
- Exposure to noise at night can suppress immune function even if the sleeper doesn’t wake. Unfamiliar noise, and noise during the first and last two hours of sleep, has the greatest disruptive effect on the sleep cycle.
- Experts say one of the most alluring sleep distractions is the 24-hour accessibility of the internet.
- The extra-hour of sleep received when clocks are put back at the start of daylight in Canada has been found to coincide with a fall in the number of road accidents.
I also found this article on 77 ways to improve your learning.
16. Speedread. Some people believe that speedreading causes you to miss vital information. The fact remains that efficient speedreading results in filtering out irrelevant information. If necessary, you can always read and re-read at slower speeds. Slow reading actually hinders the ability to absorb general ideas. (Although technical subjects often requirer slower reading.) If you’re reading online, you can try the free Spreeder Web-based application.
24. Stimulate ideas. Play rhyming games, utter nonsense words. These loosen you up, making you more receptive to learning.
26. Learn by osmosis. Got an iPod? Record a few of your own podcasts, upload them to your iPod and sleep on it. Literally. Put it under your pillow and playback language lessons or whatever.
42. Constrain yourself. Most people need structure in their lives. Freedom is sometimes a scary thing. It’s like chaos. But even chaos has order within. By constraining yourself — say giving yourself deadlines, limiting your time on an idea in some manner, or limiting the tools you are working with — you can often accomplish more in less time.
47. Learn what you know and what you don’t. Many people might say, “I’m dumb,” or “I don’t know anything about that.” The fact is, many people are wholly unaware of what they already know about a topic. If you want to learn about a topic, you need to determine what you already know, figure out what you don’t know, and then learn the latter.
48. Multi-task through background processes. Effective multi-tasking allows you to bootstrap limited time to accomplish several tasks. Learning can be bootstrapped through multi-tasking, too. By effective multitasking, I don’t mean doing two or more things at exactly the same time. It’s not possible. However, you can achieve the semblance of effective multitasking with the right approach, and by prepping your mind for it. For example, a successful freelance writer learns to manage several articles at the same time. Research the first essay, and then let the background processes of your mind takeover. Move on consciously to the second essay. While researching the second essay, the first one will often “write itself.” Be prepared to record it when it “appears” to you.
Permalink
Posted in society at 12:22 pm by site admin
Check out this article about the peaking of productivity. In this short article, this guy talks about how organization and technology have allowed him to dramatically improve his productivity. His new bottleneck is himself. The limiting factor in organizational and technoogy is that they are simply tools- they do not provide intelligence.
However, as soon as we are able to have intelligent technology, its will put man’s necessity in a new light. If 100 workers can be replaced by a machine, what do you do with the workers?
Permalink
11.28.06
Posted in health at 2:17 pm by site admin
Check out this article which discusses how a reclined sitting position is better for you than sitting up straight. Sitting at a 135 degree recline puts the least strain on your back. I think this article shows us that our love of reclining chairs is well-grounded.
Permalink
Posted in Humor at 2:10 pm by site admin
Check out this article on yahoo news about 2006′s word of the year. Topping the list are: filibuster, sectarian, vendetta and decider. For those of you who dont know, ‘the decider’ was a term coined by our decider-in-chielf George W. Bush. You can do a quick search on google or youtube for decider jokes and paradies.
Permalink
11.24.06
Posted in society at 12:42 pm by site admin
Check out this article on freakonomics about the real tax gap in the US. The IRS estimates the gap between taxes owed and taxes paid is about 20% of all taxes collected by the IRS. They attribute the majority of this gap to non-reported income.
Does this mean that the average self-employed worker is less honest
than the average wage earner? Not necessarily. It’s just that he has
much more incentive to cheat. He knows that the only chance the I.R.S.
has of learning his true income and expenditures is to audit him. And
all he has to do is look at the I.R.S.’s infinitesimal audit rate –
last year, the agency conducted face-to-face audits on just 0.19
percent of all individual taxpayers — to feel pretty confident to go
ahead and cheat.
Permalink
11.22.06
Posted in Environment at 9:26 pm by site admin
Check out this article on scientific american talking about sustainable use of water. Nothing exceptionally new here, but the article does provide some new details. For example, global warming will decrease ice caps on mountains, and thus reduce river flow and also lower the water table. So this is bad news for regions relying on rivers underground water supplies. Since supplies are limited, more water in one region, means less in another. An interesting point in the article:
The Yellow River no longer flows to the sea.
Permalink
11.21.06
Posted in health at 9:03 pm by site admin
Check out this article (registration required) on the nytimes about the compound resveratol found in red wine.
He believes that activation of the sirtuins is what keeps the body healthy in youth, but that these enzymes become less powerful with age, exposing the body to degenerative disease. That is the process that he says is reversed by resveratrol and, he hopes, by the more powerful sirtuin-activator drugs that his company is developing, though many years of clinical trials will still be needed to demonstrate whether they work and are safe to use.
heres more info:
Besides these uncertainties over what a safe and effective dose of resveratrol might be, the science underlying the field is still in full flux. Many central details are still unclear. The principal theory developed by Dr. Guarente and others is that the sirtuins somehow sense the level of energy expenditure in living cells and switch the body’s resources from reproduction to tissue maintenance when food is low.
This is an ancient strategy, Dr. Guarente believes, that allows an organism to live through famines and postpone breeding until good times return. The switch to tissue maintenance involves specific action to stave off the major degenerative diseases of aging, such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and neurodegeneration.
and a little more:
Dr. Bruce Spiegelman, a Harvard Medical School expert on fat metabolism, said Dr. Auwerx’s paper was “pretty good.†Dr. Auwerx believes resveratrol activates sirtuin, which in turn activates a factor known as PGC1-alpha in a manner first described by Dr. Spiegelman and his colleagues last year. Subsequent actions by PGC1-alpha then stimulate cells to produce more mitochondria.
and then the article ends with a puzzling thought:
Dr. Bruce Spiegelman, a Harvard Medical School expert on fat metabolism, said Dr. Auwerx’s paper was “pretty good.†Dr. Auwerx believes resveratrol activates sirtuin, which in turn activates a factor known as PGC1-alpha in a manner first described by Dr. Spiegelman and his colleagues last year. Subsequent actions by PGC1-alpha then stimulate cells to produce more mitochondria.
Permalink
Posted in society at 8:54 pm by site admin
Check out this article on the growing demand for bitchology in Russia.
“Bitchology is the theory, practice and technique of being successful in a man’s world,” he said. “A smart woman gets what she wants by pretending to be weak.”
“A bitch should be strong and self-confident but should remember to use feminine wiles, such as her attractiveness and, whenever useful, she should try to come across as a helpless creature.”
Permalink
11.17.06
Posted in Evolution, society at 9:53 pm by site admin
Check out this article titled “Sexual Success And The Schizoid Factor”. The article states that out of the four schizotypy dimensions: (1) Unusual experiences, (2) Cognitive disorganization, (3) Impulsive non-conformity, and (4) Introvertive anhedonia, (1) and (3) had a positive correlation with the number of partners a person had. A good read. check it out for yourself.
Permalink
Posted in health at 9:48 pm by site admin
Check out how A slower heartbeat could mean longer life. Normal people have a resting heart rate of 60-80. Athletes have a resting heart rate of 40-50 bpm.
Men whose pulse while at rest decreased by more than seven beats a minute in five years had a decrease in mortality of 18 percent compared to those whose heartbeat remained stable. An increase of more than seven beats a minute, on the other hand, meant a 47 percent increase in mortality.
Permalink
Posted in society at 9:46 pm by site admin
Check out this article which says the mere thought of money makes people selfish. To encourage cooperation, you gotta put money in the background or take it out of the equation all together.
In a series of nine experiments, researchers found that money enhanced people’s motivation to achieve their own goals and degraded their behavior toward others. The concept of money, they suggest, makes a person feel more self-sufficient and thus more apt to stand alone.
Permalink
11.15.06
Posted in health, society at 9:35 pm by site admin
Another article ta
Another article talking about the diabetes epidemic spreading across Asia. Of course, we have the modern diet to blame for this. So not much new, just a bunch of numbers. One thing I did find interesting:
In addition, several studies suggest Asians may lack suffient beta cells in the pancreas, or have flaws in these cells. These problems make them resistant to insulin, the precursor condition to Type 2 diabetes.
Permalink
Posted in Education at 9:07 pm by site admin
Check out this article that suggests more homework actually hurts students. The article states that more work strains strains a students limited time (homework, athletics, extracurricular activities, chores), and creates more tension in the home (Decreases the amount of quality family time).
Undue focus on homework as a national quick-fix, rather than a focus on issues of instructional quality and equity of access to opportunity to learn, may lead a country into wasted expenditures of time and energy,” LeTendre says.
But suprisingly, this article suggests that testing improves memory. There is a fine line here. The article states that the when students are actively retrieving a concept they boost their recollection of related issues. But too much homework is bad because it becomes repetitious. The conclusion I’m reading out of all this is practical application helps translate information into knowledge. So having homework is good, but if it becomes overly repetitious the brain shuts off, or overly difficult, then perhaps the student may shut down.
Permalink
11.14.06
Posted in Environment at 10:17 pm by site admin
Check out this article discussing residential ‘micro-combined-heat-and-power’ units are efficient furnaces that create electricity. It is a furnace that turns natural gas to heat and uses the byproduct heat to warm the home. The article states its triple the efficiency as power over the grid. Estimated cost is $6,000 more than traditional furnaces with a pay-off of 6-7 years. Pretty cool for those living in colder climates. Probably not something for where I am.
Permalink
11.12.06
Posted in society at 10:21 pm by site admin
askmen.com has a cool read titled How Men Get Screwed In Divorce. The article quotes a statistic from WebMD that divorced men are two and a half times as likely as a married man to commit suicide.
In some ways, her feeling of entitlement is a result of propaganda, starting with fantasies that promise an emotionally perfect life. Alas, reality cannot live up to cartoons. Women are trained to find a man with motivation from the beginning, starting with Disney classics like Cinderella (poor rag lures wealth under false pretences), Lady and the Tramp (uppity b*tch-hound hopes to make over motivated mutt) and Sleeping Beauty (catatonic do-nothing wakes up to unearned riches). Thank you very much, Walt.
Permalink
11.09.06
Posted in health at 9:03 pm by site admin
Check out this brief article on how gentle low voltage currents during sleep improves memory.
“The slow oscillations during slow-wave sleep trigger a kind of replay of these memories in the hippocampus,” he added.
Permalink