Life is what we make it. Always has been, always will be."
– Grandma Moses
//////////////......Yahoo (noun)
Pronunciation: ['yah-hu]
Definition: The original word was a proper noun which was "commonized", i.e. converted into a common noun. The common noun refers to any boorish, crass person.
Usage: Used in the first instance among students of 18th-century British literature. More recently it has been usurped by a successful Internet company. Despite the company's success, it's a rather unfortunate choice for a name, don't you think?
Suggested Usage: Usage: We should work to prevent this word's becoming a trademark. "She came in late and didn't hear the lecture, but still attacked him during the question period. What a yahoo." It is particularly important to impress the original meaning on young people: "Wash your hands before you eat; we aren't raising a yahoo."
Etymology: A nonsense word first appearing in Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" in 1726. Yahoos were degraded humanoid inhabitants of the island of the Houyhnhnms, a race of rational horses that used them as beasts of burden.
–Dr. Language, YourDictionary.com
////////////////Babies Born During High Pollen And Mold Seasons Have Greater Odds Of Wheezing By Age 2
Newborns whose first few months of life coincide with high pollen and mold seasons are at increased risk of developing early symptoms of asthma, suggests a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
/////////////////psd=
Re: Dukkha
Posted by: "John (Eljay) Love-Jensen" eljay@adobe.com eljay451
Fri Feb 27, 2009 4:50 am (PST)
A bit of a disjointed, rambling answer to a poetic question...
I am not suffering now.
I am not dead now.
I am not experiencing injustice now.
I am enjoying the show.
My past sufferings and injustice are past. It is not productive to dwell upon them or harbor regrets or resentments, since there is nothing I can do about them now, and I am not experiencing them now. The stress about those "what happened" memories is all in my head, my own reflections of events past.
My future sufferings and injustices are not here now. It is not productive to have anxiety, worry, and stress about them now, since they are not now. The stress about those "what if's" is all in my head -- my own imaginings of future events.
Before I existed, my non-existence did not bother me at all. After I die, I suspect my non-existence will not bother me at all. In the meantime, I am not going to expend even one minute of my time to worry about that, since I am not dead now.
I try to acquire the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I can only change things in the now.
I live in the now, since the now is the only moment I have. The past is past. What is, is. Que sera, sera.
/////////////////.........Re: Dukkha
Posted by: "Analemma" analemma54@live.com analemma54
Fri Feb 27, 2009 10:19 am (PST)
Hi, Grace,
I took a different slant from the poem. Since I'm fighting terminal breast cancer, I find it easier to accept that I am a very insignificant part of the bigger picture. When I walk in the woods and see trees dying because the ants have chewed away the heartwood, I remember that death is a part of Nature, and I am no more important than these trees. I grieve for the trees as I grieve for my own health. I spend time on cancer support forums where there is a lot of prayer, belief in "miracles" and anger at having cancer. I find more comfort in my belief that the Universe is so big that it will be just fine without me.
But I really am enjoying the show! And I do believe it was worth the "price."
B
//////////////////Though a country can offer its citizens
the right to life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness,
Nature does not.
If Nature has allowed you in,
be assured -
You will suffer --
mildly, or perhaps horribly.
You will die –
later, or perhaps sooner;
You will know,
while alive,
injustice
and resentment.
Perhaps abundantly.
And if you love,
each one you love
similarly
will die,
suffer,
know injustice,
and resentment.
This is the fine print you could not read
when
you were being pushed into this world.
This is what you pay for the show.
/////////////////Re: Dukkha
Posted by: "luz0delalba" artrr@luciferian.org luz0delalba
Fri Feb 27, 2009 6:30 pm (PST)
Brenda, it is true that the Universe is BIG. Is All. And that It will
be fine. But you will not leave. We can't leave. This is home. We
were, are and will be here. From Alpha to Omega and to Alpha again for
ever. Those little pieces that today are organized in the marvelous
arrangement you call YOU, will move in all directions to be part of
many new marvelous arrangements tomorrow. And new ones and new ones
for ever and ever. Some of our little pieces will be snow, and birds,
and rocks, and maybe in many moons from now some will be part of
another marvelous She or He who will think about this and about You.
/////////////////A planetary recycling program.We do live in a closed system after all.It's my take on Eastern re-incarnation.
////////////////From One Genome, Many Types of Cells. But How?
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By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: February 23, 2009
One of the enduring mysteries of biology is that a variety of specialized cells collaborate in building a body, yet all have an identical genome. Somehow each of the 200 different kinds of cells in the human body — in the brain, liver, bone, heart and many other structures — must be reading off a different set of the hereditary instructions written into the DNA.
Secrets of the Cell
A Cell's Many Faces
This is the first in a series of occasional articles on a frontier of biology - the workings of the cell.
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The Epigenome: Guiding Cells to Their Specialized Roles
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The system is something like a play in which all the actors have the same script but are assigned different parts and blocked from even seeing anyone else’s lines. The fertilized egg possesses the first copy of the script; as it divides repeatedly into the 10 trillion cells of the human body, the cells assign themselves to the different roles they will play throughout an individual’s lifetime.
How does this assignment process work? The answer, researchers are finding, is that a second layer of information is embedded in the special proteins that package the DNA of the genome. This second layer, known as the epigenome, controls access to the genes, allowing each cell type to activate its own special genes but blocking off most of the rest. A person has one genome but many epigenomes. And the epigenome is involved not just in defining what genes are accessible in each type of cell, but also in controlling when the accessible genes may be activated.
In the wake of the decoding of the human genome in 2003, understanding the epigenome has become a major frontier of research.
NYT SC=
///////////////////Physical fitness improves spatial memory, increases size of brain structure
When it comes to the hippocampus, a brain structure vital to certain types of memory, size matters. Numerous studies have shown that bigger is usually better. Now researchers have found that elderly adults who are more physically fit tend to have bigger hippocampi and better spatial memory than those who are less fit.
http://www.brainmysteries.com/research/Physical_fitness_improves_spatial_memory_increases_size_of_brain_structure.asp
///////////////////The reason is that evolutionary success can now be measured in terms of the number of genes an individual contributes to the next generation. Anyone who dies without reproducing does not directly contribute any. But because individuals have some genes in common with their family members, they can make an indirect genetic contribution if they help their relations to reproduce instead of reproducing themselves. Such “kin selection” is thought to have contributed to the evolution of the social insects — especially, ants, bees, wasps and termites — where only a few individuals reproduce and everyone else looks after the offspring.
We’d want to discuss evolution beyond natural selection — the other forces that can sometimes cause (or prevent) evolutionary change. For although natural selection is the only creative force in evolution — the only one that can produce complex structures such as wings and eyes — it is not the only force that affects which genes will spread, and which will vanish.
////////////////98 UMBRLLA KEY
///////////////Darwin is occasionally criticized as an imprecise, nonnumeric naturalist, a man of ideas, perhaps brilliant and original in that mode, but not a scientist like those of today. ... Mendel's rational, experimental analysis of the inheritance of unit characters is without question a work of great genius. .... However, if Darwin failed to discover Mendel's laws, it was not so much because of what he lacked in genius or numeracy or the experimental cast of mind, but rather because of the forceful tendency of what he already possessed. His focus on continuous variation as the source of evolutionary change was not wrong, and coupled with the power he could see in the integration of infinitesimals over time he built his case on the solid foundation of Lyell's uniformitarian thinking. Much of variation and inheritance was simply opaque in those terms, but continuous variation, not unit characters, was, for Darwin, the way forward. Thus Darwin boxed himself in, unable to see the laws of inheritance in continuous variation, unable to see the real importance of discontinuous variation where the laws of inheritance could be discerned.
/////////////////HTTNTT VNUS
///////////////////.....Feb 26, 2009 (2 days ago)
Voters use child-like judgments when judging political candidates [Not Exactly Rocket Science]
by Ed Yong none@example.com
During elections, what affects our decision to vote for one politician over another? We'd like to think that it's an objective assessment of many different factors including their various policies, their values, their record and so on. But in reality, voters are just not that rational.
In the past, studies have shown that people can predict which of two politicians will win an election with reasonable accuracy based on a second-long looks at their faces. With a fleeting glance and little purposeful consideration, people make strong judgments about a candidate's competence, that can sway their final choices. And they do this in a remarkably child-like way.
John Antonakis and Olaf Dalgas from the University of Lausanne found that when judging the faces of potential leaders, the decision-making technique of adults is no more sophisticated than that used by children.
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