Monday, December 28, 2015

Is Yogurt the Secret to Happiness?

The mystery and the reality of our lives consist in the understanding that we are coming from somewhere and that we are going somewhere, and that between these two mysterious phases God allows us to live and to know that we live while we live. Out of what is darkness to our imperfect minds, for sixty or seventy or eighty years we are living in the light, in the open.
~John Lukacs in a memoir called Confessions of an Original Sinner

We have ideas, many of them, every day. We have them, but we don’t often reflect on them. Mostly they just come and go... The constrained scope, the proportional structure, the "handsome, clever and rich" heroine who is somehow likeable: Emma is the perfect novel... Novel 


Is Yogurt the Secret to Happiness? Alternet. Junk science! First, not double blind, placebo controlled. Signs of researcher bias too. Second, how much yogurt actually has in the way of good bacteria in it depends a lot on a. how it was cultured and b. whether it was kept cool enough all the time since it was made. No evidence in this writeup as to whether they bothered testing any of the yogurts for their probiotic content, so it appears completely uncontrolled for that too. Third, I can tell you that as much as I like yogurt (plain!), ice cream makes me happier ANY time.

Czech out the original and legalversions of the classic poem,'Twas the Night Before Christmas
cows and cats links
Information Age. Information Overload. Information Explosion: Our problem isn't a deluge of information, but a lack of  self - knowledge 

‘Animated Life: The Living Fossil Fish’ New York Times (furzy). This is a great story with nerd appeal. I recall reading a book about it when I was a kid and being intrigued.

Some of the caddies were poor as sin and lived in one room houses with a neurasthenic cow in the front yard, but Dexter Green’s father owned the second best grocery-store in Black Bear—the best one was “The Hub,” patronized by the wealthy people from Sherry Island—and Dexter caddied only for pocket-money.

The Strangest, Most Spectacular Bridge Collapse (And How We Got It Wrong) Motherboard

The Purpose Of An Essay – How You Persuade

Before the eighteenth century, most pictures didn’t have titles. The public gallery changed everything Richard McSweeney Artist of real famous name When art had no name 


We have ideas, many of them, every day. We have them, but we don’t often reflect on them. Mostly they just come and go. How many ideas did you have today? What was their character? Some you might describe as big or small, simple or complex. Is it possible to gain a better understanding of ideas, their types and value to us? Is it possible to establish a taxonomy of ideas?

“I’m torn between making broad sweeping statements and getting at a truth that’s practical and mundane, truth in the trenches, sort of, which is much closer to how I experience the actual act of writing an essay.” Tin House 


INK BOTTLE“If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.”~ Stephen King, Christine

An article on TIME uncovered similarly interesting findings in relation to the effect that mindfulness has on the brain. The research found that practicing mindfulness reduced both pain intensity and emotional pain (in comparison to a placebo group), and that people who practiced mindfulness seemed to use different brain regions to reduce pain than other groups.  Acts of mindfulness

The simple act of saying thanks is a brilliantly effective tool for improving morale and productivity, but it seems to be in shockingly short supply How a little bit of thanks goes a very long way

THIS ISN’T UNHEARD OF: ‘Human chimera’: Man fails paternity test because genes in his saliva are different to those in sperm

HISTORY: Hitler really did have just one ball: historian. “After Hitler’s arrest in 1923 following his failed Beer Hall Putsch, the future Führer underwent a medical exam, according to documents found in a Bavarian archive by University of Erlangen history Professor Peter Fleischmann. At the Landsberg prison, Hitler was examined by Dr Josef Brinsteiner, who found that he suffered from ‘right-side chryptorchidism’, or an undescended right testicle, Fleischmann told Bild.”

New York Times, Liquor Taxes and Sexually Transmitted Infections

THIS ISN’T THE 21st CENTURY THAT TELEVISION ONCE PROMISED ME: Company selling ‘fake hymens’ to Muslim women in Germany — which burst with fake blood to trick husbands into thinking they are virgins – sees sales surge as migrant influx spikes.


In 1975, two equally important events happened in the life of prolific political journalist Mary McGrory; she won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her coverage of Watergate, and it was revealed that she was on President Nixon’s enemies list. There was no love lost between the two. “If he were a horse, I would not buy him,” McGrory wrote of Nixon.

In John Norris’s new biography “Mary McGrory: The First Queen of Journalism,” readers learn that Nixon’s hatred of McGrory led to her being audited by the IRS three years in a row. McGrory was the winner in that regard. Her significant charitable giving resulted in receiving a bigger refund than she had realized. As detailed by Norris throughout the book, McGrory usually emerged the winner in any tussle with a political figure. Read more