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POPSTen cognitive distortions that mess you up David Burns is a pioneer in popularizing the cognitive-behavioral approach to mood therapy developed by Aaron Beck. As someone who has struggled on and off with crippling depression my whole life, I have found this list of "cognitive distortions" pretty useful in reframing certain elements of my thinking.
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POPSSteal my content, please!
I completely agree with Scoble on this one, although I can understand why people who make their living directly from their creations have a hard time letting go of the fear of giving away at least some of the rights to their content. Cory Doctorow began releasing all of his literary work under creative commons licenses years ago, allowing people to freely download and distribute his work under some light provisos. I downloaded and read "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" on my palm pilot, freely and legally, and was hooked. Because of that, I've read a huge amount of his writing, become a mammoth fan, and will likely purchase every book he publishes. I've also published everything I've written, shot, and produced under a similar license. While that certainly hasn't brought me traditional commercial success, it has definitely accelerated serendipity countless times for me, and if you trace out the effects of those 'lucky' events, it's helped shape both my career and life.
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POPSDalai Lama’s 18 rules for living # Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before. # Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other. # Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
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POPSjust loved this...wanted to share with you... How did you do? The point is, none of us remembers the headliners of yesterday. These are no second-rate achievers. They're the best in their fields. But the applause dies. Awards tarnish. Achievements are forgotten. Accolades and certificates are buried with their owners.
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POPSViruses can catch colds, says study that redefines life itself Prof La Scola and his colleagues were surprised to spot a smaller type of virus attached to the virus-making factory inside infected cells. The new virus - Sputnik - was unable to infect cells by itself but seemed to hijack the larger to achieve its infectious aims. By regulating the growth and death of plankton, giant viruses - and satellite viruses such as Sputnik - could be a major influence on ocean nutrient cycles and climate. "These viruses could be major players in global systems," Nature is told by Prof Curtis Suttle, an expert in marine viruses at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
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POPSPoverty and the Brain "The point is that poverty isn't just an idea, or a state of mind: it actually warps the mind. Some brains never even have a chance." deserves a second thought
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POPSPolygamy is the key to a long life Men, by contrast, can reproduce well into their 60s and even 70s and 80s, and most researchers assumed this explained their longevity. But Lummaa and colleague Andy Russell wondered whether other factors explained the long lifespan of men, such as a grandfather effect. If female survival is the main explanation for male longevity, then monogamous and polygamous men would live for about the same length of time. Instead, it seems that fathering more kids with more wives leads to increased male longevity. Men, then, live long because they're fertile well into their grey years. The explanation could be both social and genetic. Men who continue fathering kids into their 60s and 70s could take better care for their bodies because they have mouths to feed. But evolutionary forces acting over thousands of years could also select for longer-lived men in polygamous cultures.
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POPSThe Nose, an Emotional Time Machine Importantly, the olfactory cortex is embedded within the brain’s limbic system and amygdala, where emotions are born and emotional memories stored. That’s why smells, feelings and memories become so easily and intimately entangled
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POPSHistory Your Mama Didn't Tell You From the article: "Columbus and his men also used the Taino as sex slaves: it was a common reward for Columbus’ men for him to present them with local women to rape. As he began exporting Taino as slaves to other parts of the world, the sex-slave trade became an important part of the business, as Columbus wrote to a friend in 1500: “A hundred castellanoes (a Spanish coin) are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten (years old) are now in demand.” It seems Chris was a naughty, naughty boy.
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POPS14,000 year-old tool kit of an ancient man He did not have screwdrivers, knives, pinchers or drills in his bag of course but the contents of the bag shows he was well equipped for many things in prehistoric life. Interesting discovery.
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POPSMore Evidence for a Revolutionary Theory of Water The current study is the most recent addition to a growing body of evidence for a new theory about the structure of liquid water. In 2004, Nilsson and colleagues sparked controversy with a paper published in Science that suggested the tetrahedral model of water was incorrect. Nilsson agrees that the debate is far from settled and that much work remains before a clear picture of liquid water emerges. "Over the last decade or so we have discovered that materials once considered homogeneous exhibit complex nanoscale order," said Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory director Jo Stöhr. "In my view, the work on water is yet another example of the actual complexity of matter, this time within a simple liquid. Modern X-ray work appears to be triggering a new understanding of liquids and we may have only seen the beginning of a paradigm shift in our understanding."
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POPSTransformers - The Nature of Alien Life
The driving factor is a pragmatic desire to improve mental capacity. Alien beings may have already reached a point in their evolution where, having exhausted the potential of their biological brains, they have taken the next logical step and opted for robotic brains equipped with artificial intelligence. This brain swap may not be as far off for humans as one might think. In only a few decades, the computer revolution here on Earth has produced supercomputers capable of performing more than a quadrillion calculations per second. According to research by Hans Moravec, an artificial-intelligence expert at Carnegie Mellon University, that rate trumps the human brain’s estimated top speed of 100 trillion calculations per second. Some scientists speculate that in a few decades, an event called the technological singularity will occur, and machines armed with computer brains will become sentient and surpass human intelligence. Civilizations equipped with technology light-years ahead
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POPSThe end of Death The psychologist Ernest Becker wrote in his pulitzer prize winning book, “The Denial of Death,” that in the face of an acute and agonizing awareness of his mortality, man has developed three main devices to sustain his sanity.These illusions act as temporary solutions to the problem of death. The Religious Solution The Religious Solution invents the concept of God and projects onto him the power to grant us what we all really want: the ability to bestow eternal life on ourselves an our loved ones; to be freed from disease, decay and death. The Romantic Solution The second illusion Becker identifies - when we no longer believe in God, we then turn our lovers into gods and goddesses.When in love, man can “forget himself in the delirium of sex, and still be marvelously quickened in the experience”. We are temporarily relieved from the drag of “the animality that haunts our victory over decay and death.” When in love, we become immortal gods.
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POPSThe first evidence for a belief in the region for the soul - found in Turkey What is it with humans and the idea of a soul? "It might also be an evolutionary strategy that takes us away from the anxieties of self-consciousness. Once fully modern humans knew they could die, it probably made sense to pretend that no one really died but that some part of us lived on into the cosmos. Given the vagaries of ancient life, it probably also made sense to invent souls that had the power to haunt and cause harm to explain all the bad stuff in life".
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POPSIs Life finely tuned, or a cosmic accident If there is 1/1Billion chance of there being the right properties in a 'Big Bang' to create life, then you just need 1 Billion 'Big Bangs' . One of the threads on theory regarding the presence of life in the Universe. Having such inadequate information to come to any conclusions there are a number of projections, but it seems the best education we are getting, is in the the development of more and more sophisticated instruments and measuring techniques. We may keep opening doors only to find more doors. Or someone may find a key, while they were looking for something else.
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