*Counting Blessings Counts

Counting blessings sounds like a platitude, but recent studies by Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough found that recording reasons for gratitude once a week improved health, exercise and attitude toward the future, but had no significant influence on the frequency of positive feelings. However counting blessings daily also made people feel happier and sleep [...]

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*Star Flash

This is Hubble’s view of a stellar flash that suddenly appeared, with no explanation, in January 2002. And just as suddenly it disappeared. It isn’t a supernova or a nova, what it is–nobody knows. But it’s beautiful and astonishing and it is in our own milky way, about 20,000 light years from here. (More detail [...]

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*Niagara Falls…Before

Before Ripley’s Believe it or Not, before the Wax Museum, before Marineland, there was this.
h/t Bouphonia

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*Dead Sea Scrolls

I couldn’t take any pictures, cameras being forbidden at this special exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum. I went to see the scrolls a week ago Wednesday with an old friend of mine, AB. (And as an aside, haven’t posted most of this week because of being under the weather due to side effects of [...]

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*Monday Nov 2/09

The Elephant’s Child, originally uploaded by B℮n.

Click on the link above for more info on elephants in Laos.

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*Flight

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*More tea?

So this poor guy who drank black tea for 25 years decided to switch to Earl Grey, thinking it would be better for his stomach. A week later he suffered from muscle cramps that required medical attention. The cause? Toxicity from bergamot oil, made from the rind of the bergamot orange, which gives Earl Grey [...]

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*Positive Psychology

About ten years old, positive psychology studies how individuals and communities can thrive. A reaction against psychology as the study of mental illness, it aims to redress the imbalance in understanding human nature and what makes us happy and healthy and peaceful individually and socially.
This reminds me of a book I read years ago: The [...]

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*What About Faith?

Via middle English and Anglo-French, the word “faith” comes from the Latin word “fidere,” to trust. Merriam-Webster’s first definition of faith is about allegiance and sincerity. It’s only at the second definition that we arrive at religion, firstly in God and secondly in something for which there is no proof. That’s where the arguments begin.
I’m [...]

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*Nature and Nurture

A new study, due to be published today, shows that people who have even the most cursory contact with nature, show greater compassion, caring and generosity.
In one type of experiment, the participants viewed either buildings, roads, city or deserts, lakes and other natural landscapes on a computer screen. The views were chosen to have similar [...]

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*Uncertainty

From The Situationist:
[P]eople feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur. Most of us aren’t losing sleep and sucking down Marlboros because the Dow is going to fall another thousand points, but because we don’t know whether it will fall or not — and human beings find uncertainty more painful [...]

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*Star Dust and Dignity

Since every particle in your body goes back to the first flaring forth of space and time, you’re really as old as the universe. So when you are lobbying at your congressperson’s office, or visiting your local utility, or testifying at a hearing on nuclear waste, or standing up to protect an old grove of [...]

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