Happy New Year!
31-Dec-08
Via boffo.
A strange kind of wealth
30-Dec-08
“In these moments of peace, deprivation seems a strange sort of gift. I find food in a couple hours of fishing each day, and I seek shelter in a rubber tent. How unnecessarily complicated my past life seems. For the first time, I clearly see a vast difference between human needs and human wants. Before this voyage, I always had what I needed — food, shelter, clothing, and companionship — yet I was often dissatisfied when I didn’t get everything I wanted, when people didn’t meet my expectations, when a goal was thwarted, or when I couldn’t acquire some material goody. My plight has given me a strange kind of wealth, the most important kind. I value each moment that is not spent in pain, desperation, hunger, thirst, or loneliness.”
Steven Callahan
Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea
He who is ever brooding over the result, often loses nerve in the performance of duty. He becomes impatient and then gives vent to anger and begins to do unworthy things; he jumps from action to action, never remaining faithful to any. He who broods over results is like a man given to the objects of the senses; he is ever distracted, he says good-bye to all scruples, everything is right in his estimation and he therefore resorts to means fair and foul to attain his end.
Ghandi
Quotes from How you can practice non-attachment in your daily life. by Adam Khan
Seven Steps for Overcoming Ego’s Hold on You
Extract from There is a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem
Dr. Wayne Dyer
Here are seven suggestions to help you transcend ingrained ideas of self-importance. All of these are designed to help prevent you from falsely identifying with the self-important ego.
1. Stop being offended.
The behavior of others isn’t a reason to be immobilized. That which offends you only weakens you. If you’re looking for occasions to be offended, you’ll find them at every turn. This is your ego at work convincing you that the world shouldn’t be the way it is. But you can become an appreciator of life and match up with the universal Spirit of Creation. You can’t reach the power of intention by being offended. By all means, act to eradicate the horrors of the world, which emanate from massive ego identification, but stay in peace. As A Course in Miracles reminds us: Peace is of God, you who are part of God are not at home except in his peace. Being is of God, you who are part of God are not at home except in his peace. Being offended creates the same destructive energy that offended you in the first place and leads to attack, counterattack, and war.
Some of us are dying a little faster
30-Dec-08
“Don’t be sorry. We are all dying Jack. It’s just that some of us are dying a little faster. The key is to not live your life as if you are already dead.”
Prosper.com shut down
29-Dec-08
Prosper.com shut down.
Exceptional memories
26-Dec-08
Nature Neuroscience 6, 90 – 95 (2002)
Published online: 16 December 2002; | doi:10.1038/nn988
Routes to remembering: the brains behind superior memory
Eleanor A. Maguire1, Elizabeth R. Valentine2, John M. Wilding2 & Narinder Kapur3
1 Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, Institute of Neurology, University College London, 12 Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG, UK
2 Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK
3 Department of Clinical Neuropsychology, Wessex Neurological Centre, Southampton General Hospital and Department of Psychology University of Southampton, Southampton SO16 6YD, UK
Correspondence should be addressed to Eleanor A. Maguire [email protected]
Why do some people have superior memory capabilities? We addressed this age-old question by examining individuals renowned for outstanding memory feats in forums such as the World Memory Championships. Using neuropsychological measures, as well as structural and functional brain imaging, we found that superior memory was not driven by exceptional intellectual ability or structural brain differences. Rather, we found that superior memorizers used a spatial learning strategy, engaging brain regions such as the hippocampus that are critical for memory and for spatial memory in particular. These results illustrate how functional neuroimaging might prove valuable in delineating the neural substrates of mnemonic techniques, which could broaden the scope for memory improvement in the general population and the memory-impaired.
Goodbye Innocence
26-Dec-08
RIP: Eartha Kitt
25-Dec-08
Merry Christmas!
25-Dec-08
All hail the return of the unconquered sun! Many thanks to all my friends and family, who have brought such joy (and rum-fueled eggnog) into my life.
May your next whirl on our planet be filled with the caress of lovers and the camaraderie of friends.
Also, may your enemies get herpes and die.
How to Grow a Super-Athlete
24-Dec-08
How to grow a super athlete
Russia is the birthplace of a group of athletes who have affected the World Tennis Association rankings in the same way that zebra mussels have affected the Great Lakes — which is to say, pretty much clogged them. The invasion happened swiftly: at the end of 2001, Russia had one woman (Elena Dementieva) in the W.T.A. Tour’s top 30. By the start of 2007, Russian women accounted for fully half of the top 10 (Dementieva, Maria Sharapova, Svetlana Kuznetzova, Nadia Petrova and Dinara Safina) and 12 of the top 50. Not to mention 15-year-old Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, who was the International Tennis Federation’s No. 1-ranked junior and who was joined in the top 500 by five countrywomen also named Anastasia.