Saturday, July 09, 2016

Wellbeing: Wired for Hoarding Happiness

If honor were profitable, everybody would be honorable.
— Thomas More

Via Bohemians at Stedman’s: “Drugs.com offers Stedman’s online medical dictionary, free of charge, as part of our medical and drug information service. To use the medical dictionary, type in your search term, or browse the A-Z index 

Via Slavs at High Tatra Mountains Daddies, “Dates,” and the Girlfriend Experience: Welcome to the New Pr Vanity Fair

 “Dieu me pardonnera; c’est son métier.
(God will pardon me. That is His business.)”`Then 1980: Cigarettes,Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women'; Now 2016: Wild Rustic Gardening:

Urban Agroecoloy: 6,000 lbs of food on 1/10th acre Urban Permaculture 

In which countries does being a parent most and least contribute to happiness?  Also known as “The culture that is America.” 

 Do you talk about "devouring" books? The metaphor is common but hardly benign. Consider the long, turbulent relationship between reading and eating ...


The limits of our language are said to define the boundaries of our world. This is because in our everyday lives, we can only really register and make sense of what we can name. We are restricted by the words we know, which shape what we can and cannot experience.
Vocabulary of happiness

Alas, there are some healthy people who are lucky enough to be both young and rich. And a report released last month by Capgemini Consulting showed some interesting trends in the strategies young millionaires use to manage their money The Youngest Richest Characters at the Vrbov Cemetery ...
Speaking of the mortuary where MEdiaDragon was born all those centuries ago ... WE DEMAND: FOR MAGICIANS TO BE FASTER, PLEASE: Searching for the Perfect Anti-Aging Drug

Innovation seems to be the buzzword at the moment – you hear it everywhere you go. But when people hear innovation they normally think of ground-breaking inventions when most of the time, innovations are small changes that deliver large rewards Exporting MEdiaDragons

Paul Simon, American Tune, live version, solo live version here

“Find the top employer that best suits your needs. Sort the Best Places to Work by key criteria, such as training days, and add filters by region and/or organization size. Note that the more filters you add, the fewer organizations will be listed.” This list also includes related articles on the respective top large firm, mid size firm, and small firm that was ranked best in class. 

Without Government Intervention, Self-Driving Cars Could Make Our Lives Worse Motherboard  Glad someone has figured that out!
Gut bacteria spotted eating brain chemicals for the first time. “Bacteria have been discovered in our guts that depend on one of our brain chemicals for survival. These bacteria consume GABA, a molecule crucial for calming the brain, and the fact that they gobble it up could help explain why the gut microbiome seems to affect mood.”
Great frigate birds found able to fly for months at a time. “In charting their flight patterns, the team found that the birds travel incredible distances—sometimes covering up to 250 miles in a single day.  

Marijuana Compound Removes Alzheimer’s-Related Protein From Nerve Cells Huffington Post 

Riin Sirkel reviews The Quest for the Good Life: Ancient Philosophers on Happiness, by Øyvind Rabbȧs, Eyjólfur K. Emilsson, Hallvard Fossheim, and Miira Touminen
The psychogeographic links between writing and walking are a cult fascination, as though the rhythms of perambulation and those of the pen are somehow inextricably intertwined. But for all those famously inveterate walking authors, “street sauntering and square haunting” like Virginia Woolf, there are just as many for whom the rhythm of the wheel is both a personal passion and an influence on their writing. Transformed by tubular frames, the low wheel and pneumatic tyres, the modern bicycle brought unprecedented freedom at the end of the 19th century; John Galsworthy, author of The Forsyte Saga, claimed in 1930 that the bicycle was responsible “for more movement in manners and morals than anything since Charles II”. Forget walking – authors were all cyclists now.
Bicycling in literature

“Good readers will find something that can be found only in great literature. . . . The literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman and a few of his blood brothers.”  
—Roberto Bolaño Seconded by Jozef Imrich

 At a time when so much of the world is talking about the policing of borders and the construction of walls, Andrés Neuman’s playful and philosophical stories in The Things We Don’t Do are refreshing. For Neuman, there is no simple divide between one self and another; love and hate; or even life and death. We find that what occurs ‘between’ two people is not so different from what occurs within one. The Things We Don’t Do is an achievement, and an extension of the Latin American tradition blazed by the likes of Cortázar and Bolano ... The things we do not do ...

earth: a visualization of global weather conditions forecast by supercomputers updated every three hours nullschool

Scientists just doubled the number of known contagious cancers Washington Post

Exit Not: Wellbeing on the web: the 9 wellbeing blogs you need to bookmark 
“Suddenly, an increasing number of independent presses are going into the retail book business, morphing into full-service community hubs for book browsing and expanded literary programming. Some see retail floor space as an opportunity to bring more customers and supporters to their front doors. Others see it as an important source of income to support the publishing. All say it fulfills their missions as the literary hearts of their communities.”
Literary Hub

 
Somewhere in the distance, a train leaving, and nearby another arriving and somewhere inside is a place for blogging...
Meet the happiness bloggers

“Sadly, the parks rarely get much attention on the national stage unless some knucklehead displaces a cute little baby bison or tries to feed a grizzly bear. But in this year when the Park Service is celebrating its centennial with all sorts of hand-wringing about the future, it’s instructive to remember how language can save landscape. Powerful prose has been put to good use in the cause of America’s Best Idea.”
The New York Times
 
Wired for Happiness

The mysteries of women’s health Daily Kos  One example from an endocrinologist: 1/3 of the women who are on antidepressants have low testosterone, and getting their testosterone to normal levels would in a very high percentage of the cases clear up the depression. But women are just about never tested for testosterone. 

Five myths about class in America Washington Post

Advanced-Stage Charter Syndrome: What “Maturity” Means to the Charter Movement Education Week Teacher
World Wealth Report 2016

 We look at alien grace, unfettered by any determined form, and we say: balloon, flower, heart, condom, opera, lampshade, parasol, ballet. Hear how the mouth, so full of longing for the world, changes its shape? 
—Mark Doty

When poets are parents. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an exemplary father; Robert Lowell, not so much. How does becoming a dad change how one writes?...  Papa Do You Hear Media dragon?

“The manufacture of typewriters in India might have come to a halt, but in Goa, as in the rest of the country, there are plenty of machines still going clackety-clack. Government-run offices, village schools, and other rural administrative offices still use typewriters for work such as drawing up contracts or bills.”
CityLab




A strange blend of Thoreau, Edison, and Ford, Buckminster Fuller was a consummate visionary. He was also a failure and a fraud ...

“Pam in the library was like milk and sugar in bitter tea”
A bibliography of libraries in novels

New York Times:  The United States of Inequality, by Teresa Tritch:
It will come as little surprise that income inequality in the United States is greatest in New York and Connecticut. Those states are home base for Wall Street, where the income gains of the few have been amplified by outsized growth in the financial sector and protected by taxpayer-provided bailouts.
But forces of rising inequality are operating throughout the United States, as a new study by researchers at the Economic Policy Institute makes clear [Income inequality in the U.S. by State, Metropolitan Area, and County].




Researchers have found a ‘striking’ new side effect from eating fast foodWashington Post. Furzy also sent the link to the study: Recent Fast Food Consumption and Bisphenol A and Phthalates Exposures among the U.S. Population in NHANES, 2003–2010National Institutes of Health

Catholic Nursing Home Successfully Sued for Refusing Euthanasia. 

5 prosecutors are responsible for 440 death sentences. That is incredibly disturbing. [The Guardian] 

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