09 NOV 2015 by ideonexus
Physiological Decline in the Body When You Stop Exercising
...regular endurance exercise leads to four major consequences:
Increased ability of the heart to eject blood
increased ability of the blood vessels to send blood to where blood is needed
Increased number of capillaries (the vessels that deliver oxygen and ‘food’ to the muscles)
increased size and the number of mitochondria (the “power plants” of the cells).
All these changes lead to the more efficient use of oxygen, as well as nutrients.
[...]
Pino considers a person who can run... 1 
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notes24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Dyson VS Sagan on Nuclear Winter
I do not wish here to get into a technical argument about the details of nuclear winter. I will merely summarize my own struggles with the technical issues. I spent a few weeks in 1985 trying to make nuclear winter go away. The phrase "go away" here is used in the sense customary among scientists. To destroy a new theory, you try to find a simple situation where the theory predicts that something happens and you can prove that the same something does not happen. Then you say that the thing pr... 1 notes
notes09 AUG 2014 by ideonexus
Spherical Cows
Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, "I have the ... 1 notes
notes11 DEC 2013 by TGAW
Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Amma) on Compassion
Not long ago, a young boy handed me an envelope containing 300 euros. He said he wanted it to be used to help the orphans at our ashram. I asked him to keep the money, which he had won in a music competition, but he refused.
Two weeks later, his little sister came to me with an envelope containing her ice-cream pocket money. She told her parents: “I eat ice cream all the time. This time I want to give to the orphans, like my brother.” The sister’s compassion was awoken by her brother...I really responded to this excerpt of Amma's response to the New York Times on who our moral leaders are.
Two sentences in particular stuck out: “The sister’s compassion was awoken by her brother’s moral integrity” (on the girl who donated her ice cream money after seeing her brother donate his music competition winnings) and “The universe is like a vast net; if one corner is shaken, the vibration pervades the whole.” (on the man who mowed the Lincoln Memorial).
She really illustrated how generosity and compassion can spread.
13 MAY 2013 by ideonexus
Dyson Tree
Many species of terrestrial plants, including the skunk cabbage that sprouts in February in the woods of Princeton, New Jersey, where I live, are warm-blooded to a limited extent. For about two weeks the skunk cabbage maintains a warm temperature by rapidly metabolizing starch stored inside the part of its anatomy known as the spadix, which contains the hidden flowers with their male and female structures. According to folklore, the spadix is warm enough to melt snow around it. The evolutiona...Folksonomies: biology speculation
Folksonomies: biology speculation
1 notes
notesA plant that grows a greenhouse to sustain itself in persistently cold climates.
28 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
Prejudice of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA)
Our Sunday mornings began with the smell of a big breakfast. Our traditional Sunday “worship” took place in our kitchen. We worshiped each other and thanked the adult income-makers for providing us all with good food, a roof over our heads, and all the comforts we never took for granted. Sunday breakfast was a time for planning the upcoming week (we all brought our calendars to the table), discussing the events of the past week, distributing allowances, enjoying good food, and a lot of jo...Folksonomies: atheism discrimination
Folksonomies: atheism discrimination
1 notes
notesStory of a child being subject to heartbreaking discrimination for being an atheist.
24 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Testosterone's Effect on Memory
Like many other areas of development, memory generally matures more rapidly in girls than boys. Beginning in the womb, female fetuses are known to habituate to auditory stimuli about two weeks earlier than males. After birth, they are more advanced at visual habituation. Toward the end of the first year, girls are about a month ahead in tests of short-term, explicit memory, like remembering, after a few seconds' distraction, where they just saw a toy being hidden. Girls also outperform boys o... 1 notes
notesMemory develops faster in females and testosterone appears to be the culprit.
21 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Development of Memory in Infants
Memory is not a single entity but a patchwork of several different forms of information storage that emerge progressively with the maturation of different brain circuits. Babies begin life with a primitive yet very useful set of memory skills; lower parts of the brain can store information, but it is at an automatic level, beneath consciousness, and lasts for relatively short periods of time. Then, starting at eight or nine months of age, they show signs of a more flexible, deliberate type of...Folksonomies: memory infant development
Folksonomies: memory infant development
1 notes
notesThe first paragraph in this passage outlines the development milestones, while the second is included for its eloquence. Then select passages on habituation, classical and operant conditioning are included as types of memory.
08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Teaching Babies Science
But we also have some more direct evidence for the idea that children learn like scientists. Alison and Virginia Slaughter, one of her students, looked at three-year-old children who didn't yet fully understand belief—children who still said they had always thought that there were pencils in the candy box. Then, over the course of a few weeks, Virginia gave the children systematic evidence that their predictions were false. She told them firmly that they hadn't said pencils at all, they had... 1 notes
notesHaving children predict something and then systematically demonstrating how their prediction is false makes them more capable of understanding how beliefs work.
21 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Get Babies Used to Strangers
Grandmother says, "You had them and you should never leave them." Such martyrdom is selfish and harmful to both you and the child. Someday such clinging, dependent children will have to be torn from their mothers and get the rude shock that there are other people m the world—on the first day at school, for instance. This shock will be far less and the adjustment to the presence of other residents of this planet far better if they get a sneak preview in advance that there are others. There i...Folksonomies: child rearing
Folksonomies: child rearing
1 To prevent them from being to clingy later in life.
