Saw this in Boing Boing:
Pricey for a Filipino budget at 22 euros . every poster donates 4 euros to Amnesty International!
Learned Today::The .Plan: A Quasi-Blog: More negative evidence on stretching
Didn’t stretch when I played basketball earlier this afternoon. I didn’t have the time, this was somewhat comforting. PS I was able to do some warmups so the evidence is for what I did! hehehe!
More negative evidence on stretching
For Dr. [Stephen] Thacker's paper “The Impact of Stretching on Sports Injury Risk: A Systematic Review of the Literature,” he and his colleagues pored over nearly 100 other published medical studies on the subject. Their key conclusions: stretching does increase flexibility; the highest-quality studies indicate that this increased flexibility doesn't prevent injuries; few athletes need extreme flexibility to perform their best (perhaps just gymnasts and figure skaters); and more injuries would be prevented by better warmups, by strength training, and by balance exercises, than by stretching.
via The .Plan: A Quasi-Blog: More negative evidence on stretching.
rePost::Making Light: Peter Watts, distinguished Canadian SF writer, arrested by US border police while trying to re-enter Canada
Peter Watts, distinguished Canadian SF writer, arrested by US border police while trying to re-enter Canada
Posted by Patrick at 12:51 PM * 262 comments
From Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing: Dr. Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, beaten and arrested at US border.
I already linked to this from the sidebar, but on reflection, I have a little more to say.
First, it’s worth noting that comment #2 to the Boing Boing post observes “And now the inevitable ‘we don’t know the whole story so we shouldn’t pass judgments but he probably did something to provoke them’ comments can commence.” Indeed, there seems to be a kind of person who makes it their business to hover around at sites like Boing Boing or Consumerist to explain that probably the police had no choice but to beat up that guy, or that we don’t know that Wal-Mart abused that customer, since after all it’s her word against theirs. And indeed, comment #5 shows up right on schedule: “It’s my observation that most of these cases begin with a person who becomes belligerent when asked to do something he doesn’t want to do (get out of the car, step away from the car, etc.) These officers may very well have overstepped their bounds, but I doubt very seriously that Watts is completely innocent.”
For what it’s worth, I don’t know exactly what happened, but a couple of things seem pretty evident to me. One is that this wasn’t a routine border search. Rather, American border guards in Port Huron, Michigan demanded to search Watts’s car as he was leaving the US for his native Canada. This is very squirrelly. We’re conducting exit searches now?
via Making Light: Peter Watts, distinguished Canadian SF writer, arrested by US border police while trying to re-enter Canada.
This is nothing. If you see a checkpoint here and a car similar to yours in model is flagged one wrong move and you’d get sprayed with bullets or drugs get planted on your car.
Hope people can think more clearly. We give law enforcement people more power to combat something without stopping to consider that we are only helping enemy we are fighting. To foster a society without trust, full of paranoia and other fucking attituted related with fear and insecurity. We cannot let the terrorist win.
Praise::National Bookstore
Kudos to National Bookstore they make it specially painless for you to give books to charity.
I also observed that there is a nice nudge when you buy it takes one and other people tend to follow the good hearted’s lead.
Let’s analyze what they did.
They get their employees to convince you to give.
When you give you feel good.
When you give the people who convinced you feels good.
When you give the children from schools where the books are going have books to read.
Smiles All Around.
Some foundations need to take a cue from National Bookstore, some people would love to help, let’s make it easy for each other.
Advice::Use the wastebasket « What’s new
One has to know when one should be persistent and patient, and when one should be pragmatic and realistic; stubbornly working away at a dead end is not the most efficient use of your time, and publishing every last scrap of your work is not always the best way to meet the standards of quality you expect from your publications (though sometimes it is still worth making your partial successes available in some format). Of course, in today’s digital age it is cheap and easy to backup all your work, and you should certainly do this before performing major surgery on any paper.
via Use the wastebasket « What’s new.
I’ve always had a problem with balance. In a sense excess, persistence or resignation has always been what I’m about, Always about extremes. Hope I can learn to regulate myself one day!
rePost::Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on our fascination with excess | Books | The Guardian
Excesses of appetite are the ways we conceal from ourselves what we hunger for. Kafka’s Hunger Artist – the man in the story of that name, who does performance-fasting for a living – is asked why he devoted his life to starving himself in public; he couldn’t help doing it, he says, “because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you and everyone else”.
via Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on our fascination with excess | Books | The Guardian.
loved this article! I’m reposting my favorite line. Hope you can read the whole thing, don’t agree with a lot, but it made me introspect!
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rePost::3M, and Google, and Unity! Oh my! | themadpeacock
3M call it the 15 percent rule, Google call it 20% time and now Unity has adopted what they call FAFF (Fridays Are For Fun).
“I think there are a lot of low hanging fruits in Unity where somebody with drive can just do something cool that pushes us forward. Things that are hard to put in words, but just make sense when you see it done.
So every Friday, developers can work on something cool, something they have been craving to do for a long time.”
Joachim Ante, Unity CTO, via Unity Blog.
This idea of giving employees company time to pursue their ideas is powerful. It acknowledges that everyone in the company has great ideas worthy of investment.
via 3M, and Google, and Unity! Oh my! | themadpeacock.
Heart this, hope more company follow thier lead!!!
fridays are for fun!
Advice:: Are You a Guitar Player or Club Owner?
The Guitar Player Paradox
I’m intrigued by this observation that we prefer stress over hard focus. My current hypothesis proposes two explanations:
First, the club owner strategy is more predictable — you can’t go wrong working harder, even if its rewards are distilled.
Second, and perhaps more important, hard focus, at first, can be incredibly uncomfortable — so much so that we’d rather accept 12 hour days of regular work than spend 2 hours on intense concentration. The good news is that, as Haruki Murakami taught us, hard focus is a practiced skill. If you improve this ability enough, the guitar player path might eventually seem less onerous.
I plan on exploring this paradox in more detail in the near future, as I wonder if it might hold the key to jump-starting a remarkable life. In the mean time, you should ask yourself a simple question:
Who are you trying to become, the guitar player or the club owner?
via Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Are You a Guitar Player or Club Owner?.
I choose to see this differently. To focus, invest yourself in a single thing seriously does not allow you the luxury of failing gracefully. We know that if we fail our psyche have no where to hide. When we fail with something we focused on singly we face our weakness, our inability to do something. This is scary. This is why some people never show others what they: write,compose,paint,draw, or create in general. We hate to see ourselves in positions of weakness, we hate rejection, we hate failure. We must learn to not be stopped by the voices in our heads that tell us we aren’t good enough. We can not be great if we continue to be paralyzed by our fears!
In Memoriam::20th anniversary of Montreal Massacre: We remember : Sciencewomen
20th anniversary of Montreal Massacre: We remember
Category: Alice shares…
Posted on: December 6, 2009 5:22 PM, by Alice
On December 6, 1989, an armed gunman named Marc Lepine entered an engineering classroom at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec. He demanded all 48 men in the class leave the room, lined up all 9 women against a wall, and, shouting “You are all a bunch of [expletive] feminists!”, proceeded to shoot them. He went into the hall and shot 18 more people, mostly at random. He finally shot himself.
He had killed 14 women all together, and injured 9 more women and 4 men.
The women who died could have been anyone. They could have been your friends, your mothers, your sisters, your lovers, your daughters, your neighbors, your students, your teachers, maybe even you.
They were killed because they were women.
Remember those who died in the Montreal Massacre:
Genevieve Bergeron, 21, was a 2nd year scholarship student in civil engineering.
Helene Colgan, 23, was in her final year of mechanical engineering and planned to take her master's degree.
Nathalie Croteau, 23, was in her final year of mechanical engineering.
Barbara Daigneault, 22, was in her final year of mechanical engineering and held a teaching assistantship.
Anne-Marie Edward, 21, was a first year student in chemical engineering.
Maud Haviernick, 29, was a 2nd year student in engineering materials, and a graduate in environmental design.
Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31, was a 2nd year engineering student specializing in engineering materials.
Maryse Laganiere, 25, worked in the budget department of the Polytechnique.
Maryse Leclair, 23, was a 4th year student in engineering materials.
Anne-Marie Lemay, 27, was a 4th year student in mechanical engineering.
Sonia Pelletier, 28, was to graduate the next day in mechanical engineering. She was awarded a degree posthumously.
Michele Richard, 21, was a 2nd year student in engineering materials.
Annie St-Arneault, 23, was a mechanical engineering student.
Annie Turcotte, 21, was a first year student in engineering materials.
Please honour the white ribbon as a symbol of the fight against violence against women.
via 20th anniversary of Montreal Massacre: We remember : Sciencewomen.
rePost::God and real life « Paulo Coelho’s Blog
Christian tradition
A protestant priest, having started a family, no longer had any peace for his prayers. One night, when he knelt down, he was disturbed by the children in the living room.“Have the children keep quiet!” he shouted.His startled wife obeyed. Thereafter, whenever the priest came home, they all maintained silence during prayers. But he realized that God was no longer listening.One night, during his prayers, he asked the Lord: “what is going on? I have the necessary peace, and I cannot pray!”An angel replied: “He hears words, but no longer hears the laughter. He notices the devotion, but can no longer see the joy.”The priest stood and shouted once again to his wife: “Let the children play! They are part of praying!”And his words were heard by God once again.
via God and real life « Paulo Coelho’s Blog.
It is easy to understand the apprehension towards religion of a lot of people, It is in a sense because religion boxes what is intuitively boundless. FIND the JOY, FIND the LAUGHTER!