December 2015

When most of your economy is digging stuff out of the ground, and speculating on house prices, this is where it ends up. The banana republic.

There's lots of debate around diet now, and people are learning amazing new things about nutrition, and reaffirming some old wisdom about food at the same time etc. What isn't questioned to the same extent, but it's coming, is exercise. Thanks to Adrian for this link. Professor Peter O'Sullivan is taking on some of the sacred truths around core stability and strengthening, and in the process questioning a lot of the assumptions we have around exercise more generally. (Worth a watch too if you've ever suffered from lower back pain.) Much of exercise science, and its hangers-on like personal trainers and gyms, is a very damaging fairy tale. People think 'working out' is healthy, but much of it is a full-on assault on the body.

Happy birthday twinnie!

Happy Birthday Brett!

Happy birthday Pen! Hope you get spoiled :)

Happy birthday teach! Have a splendid day.

Sweet genius.

The serial social media quitters, its not just the famous who spit the dummy. Many of them come back. A bit strange that they blame the technology rather than the way they use it.

Happy birthday Helen!

The humanity.

I guess age is part mindset. Does anything signal the victory of pragmatism over self-respect better than the big sunnies to wear over glasses?

Happy birthday :)

Sometimes art says things the best

Leeches.

Ideas change the world. It took me a long time to understand how true that is. They may be the only things that really change the world, even if we don't see it straight away. And that's what universities are for. To look after ideas - to test them, to provide a place for new ones to grow.

Men are mocked for playing with their balls every day. But you don't get this skill without it.

Doobie!

Barry McDonagh really knows how to get rid of anxiety, permanently and fast. And anxiety and depression are related, so it will deal with the latter to a large extent too. He's giving away his latest book, as an ebook, so it'd be a nice present for somebody you know who suffers.

A bat and ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Answer quickly.

One of my favourites. Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to switch doors?" What should you do to maximise your chance of winning the car?

Beep beep. Yeah. Wow this song was made for female vocals.

The effects of WW2 are still being felt, emotionally and psychologically, as well as in all sorts of other ways. For example agriculture changed profoundly after this war, as the war industries looked to new sources of work. (Since this war agriculture has become probably the most destructive force on the planet.) Wonderful vid.

:-)

One for the dreary and ever-growing modern atheist community, that doesn't understand anything much. Including truth.

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a fancy name for that tingling people some get when listening to certain sounds, or having their hair cut, scalp massaged, or listening to pages in books being turned etc. There are thousands of videos on YouTube now designed to produce this effect, but these creep some people out because they're a bit calculating and deliberate. There are however plenty of vids that achieve the same thing, but which are accidental. That's the best model for many. Nice sample here: http://discoverasmr.com/asmr-videos/unintentional-asmr/

Happy birthday, long time :)

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-star-wars-the-force-awakens-stinks-20151226-column.html This is starting to be said, more often, now that the hype is dimming.

Really worth thinking about, should we be allowing houses in some of these places? It not only costs a fortune to constantly replace them, but most back burning is driven by the need to protect properties like this. And the smoke from back burning is incredibly damaging to health, way more than the fires themselves, and impacts thousands of people, or even entire cities and regions.

50 degrees hotter than normal. 50. Amazing what piddling little things we find to be worried about, like terrorism.