I never realized how much my dog Maggie could teach me about marriage. Much cheaper than counseling 
http://nyti.ms/crlK8h
William Li reviews promising research and studies that show Anti-Angiogenesis drugs and foods reducing cancer tumor size by cutting off their blood supply. Eating the right foods can be helpful in reducing the probability of large tumor formation in people as they age.
Very, very interesting! Here are some good foods to start with:
Here is the 20 Minute TED Talk where Dr. Li talks about his findings:
Sam Harris makes some interesting arguments for why science should be involved in evaluating moral arguments in his recent TED Talk. He argues that there is often not one “correct” position to take on an issue, but a range of position, some better, some worse than others, and that science can help us figure out which help people live more fulfilled lives.
For example, in looking at how societies portray the model of womanhood, there are probably a number of morally positive ways to do this in between the extremes of the Islamic Burka, and the overt sexuality on the covers of many western mens magazines.
Harris also addresses the issue of giving the same weight to all moral arguments, irregardless of their source. He argues that some people are better at moral thinking that others, just like some people are better a physics than others, so why should we put the Dali Lama and Ted Bundy on the same footing when it comes to looking at moral arguments?
A thought provoking video even if you don’t agree with everything he says.
Today I ran across an link on the LifeHacker.com to a website that would have been very helpful when I was diagnosed with Leukemia almost 6 years ago. The site is called Information Is Beautiful, and the data visualization is called “Snake Oil? Scientific Evidence for Popular Health Supplements“
At the time of my diagnosis I was inundated with suggestions from friends about different supplements that I should try that would hopefully help my condition. I’m happy to say that I’m still here to write this blog post! I’m also here to tell you that I didn’t follow any of the suggestions. It would have taken me a year or more to throughly research the dozens of “suggestions” I received (some of them plausible, and some outright crazy sounding – “wheat grass cures most cancers”?). A visualization of supplements with an indication of the quality of the science backing up their claims, would have been an invaluable tool in helping to quickly sort out quackery from the truly helpful.
I am even more skeptical now than I was back then, so I would not accept this as the final word on any of the supplements they list, but would use it as a good starting point for doing some research if a particular supplement looked helpful. One thing I really like is that they included a link to the underlying data was used to generate the visualization, including links to the studies they relied on, so you can do your own analysis if you wish.
Have fun researching!
The most insightful information I’ve seen on the Swine Flu… a very interesting graph from the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta. Shows numbers of deaths from regular flu season, and then death’s from the swine flu. Doesn’t look as bad as the hype in the media would lead one to believe… It was not good for sure, but similar to having 2 flu outbreaks in one year.
Do you think online prenatal classes are a good idea? If you or your spouse were expecting, would you consider an online class as an alternative or supplement to a face to face class?
My wife Heather is a Prenatal Class Teacher and a Doula. She has put an enormous amount of time (at least it seems like it to me), putting together materials and activities for her prenatal classes. Recently she has started to allow her clients to customize their classes to meet their specific needs (or as I think, address their specific fears) through a form on her website. This seems to be a hit, combined with the one on one teaching she does.
Recently I suggested that she might want to put her lessons online, and let people access her lessons for free, and pay for the web site and her time by using Google Adsense. We currently have Google Ads on the birth stories she has written for each of our children. We typically get about 700 page views per day, and average $1.40 in ad revenue per day. While not a lot of money, it is amazing that over the past year she has earned over $500 from the birth stories. This has more than paid for her time in writing them (although as she would be quick to point out, money was the furthest thing from her mind when she wrote them up).
So… Online birth classes with text, pictures, video and some interactive elements like quizzes. There would also be a question / comment feature so you could ask questions on the lesson pages so that Heather and/or others could respond to the question. Again, what do you think? Would you or your spouse go to a site like this to check it out? Just post your comments at the bottom of the blog post. Thanks!
I’ve got a bad back this morning so I’m going to do a “copy & paste” blog posting this morning. The embedded video below is great, and dovetails nicely with my previous post on Manufacturing Happiness. Enjoy!
“Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz’s estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness.” – from the TED website
“The Secret to happiness is low expectations.” Low expectations make it much easier to be pleasantly surprised.
Dan Gilbert gave a great 20 minute lecture at the TED Conference about Happiness and how we stumble into it, and how we create it ourselves.
Our brain is a simulation machine… It is great, but it tends to overemphasize the effects of major events in our lives. For example we tend to overestimate the potential upside of good things that happen to us, and tends to overemphasize the potential downside as well. If something happened over 3 months ago, it has virtually no impact on your current happiness. A great example of this is the opposite cases of the lottery winner, and someone who becomes a paraplegic. After one year, both individuals are at the same level of happiness that they we at before their supposed life changing events. Very counter intuitive.
We have with-in us the ability to create or “synthesize happiness”. In other words we can look for the good in everything that happens to us, and can genuinely feel happy. He gives examples of people who have had terrible things happen to them (like being put in jail for 20 years for a crime the person did not commit), and how they say that that terrible thing was the best thing that happened to them. These people looked for the good in what they experienced and “created” or “synthesized” happiness.
Dan talks about how we tend to place a higher value on happiness that we encounter by chance rather than by happiness that we create ourselves. Natural happiness is when you get what you want, and synthetic happiness is what make when we don’t get what we want. In our society we tend to believe that natural happiness is of a higher quality than synthetic happiness. Why? “What kind of an economy would we have if people believed that they could be just as happy with the ‘stuff’ they currently own, rather than going out and buying new stuff at the shopping mall, that marketers have told us that will make us happy?”
He goes on to explain that “Synthetic” happiness is just as good as “Natural” happiness. Watch the 20 minute video for the details… It’s great!
Lastly Dan talks about how excessive choice is the enemy of synthetic happiness. We seem to be able to more easily create happiness when we are stuck with a choice or stuck in a particular situation. We find ways to be happy with what we are stuck with. If we have multiple choices or opportunities to change our choices we don’t have the same sort of ownership of the situation. We may change the situation or what we have, so we unconsciously don’t invest in it by synthesizing happiness. Ironically enough, if people are given a choice to be in a situation where they can change their minds, or simple make a choice and stick with it, most people with opt for the situation where they can change their minds, which will tend to make them less happy.
