Music to melt your brain.

I don't know if you have heard of any of these, but they are best heard flat on your back, headphones on, and the lights out. 
For me, this comes to as close to time travel as I can get.
Chill out, breathe easy, and take a drive across the stars.

Richard deHove

The Moon & The Stars

Mars Calling

John Serrie

Deep Starship

Stellardrone

Ultra Deep Field

Red Giant

Man who didn’t board crashed airplane thanks the same god who didn’t bother to save everybody else

This person's supercilious attitude is beyond any description I can muster.  His kind of deluded "me" attitude is evident every day, but this one takes the cake.

AirAsia's lost flight

Understanding the racial bias you didn't know you had

From VOX.com December 28, 2014

Barack Obama has been confused with a valet.  Teachers have lower expectations for black and Hispanic students. Jurors are more likely to see darker-skinned defendants as guilty.

Sure, you could throw all of these things under the broad category of racism. But some of these disparities are often perpetuated by people who insist that they believe with all their hearts in racial equality.

“It seeps into just about every aspect of life”

There's a term for what's happening when, despite our best intentions and without our awareness, racial stereotypes and assumptions creep into our minds and affect our actions:  implicit racial bias.

It seeps into just about every aspect of life, including areas like criminal justice that can have deadly consequences. Thirty years of neurology and cognitive psychology studies show that it influences the way we see and treat others, even when we're absolutely determined to be, and believe we are being, fair and objective.

That's why implicit racial bias has been called "the new diversity paradigm — one that recognizes the role that bias plays in the day-to-day functioning of all human beings."

Here's what you need to know about how it works.

What is implicit bias?

The first step in understanding how implicit racial bias works is to understand the general concept of implicit bias, which can shape the way we think about lots of different qualities: age, gender, nationality, even height.

You can think of it generally as  "thoughts about people you didn't know you had."

Two of the leading scholars in the field, Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, capture it well in the title of a book they wrote about the concept. It's called "Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People"

“You can think of it generally as  "thoughts about people you didn't know you had"”

What do these "blind spots" look like, and how do they shape behavior?  Well, if you have a stereotype about Asian people that labels them as "foreign," implicit bias means you might have trouble associating even Asian-American people with speaking fluent English or being American citizens. If you've picked up on cultural cues that women are homemakers, it means you might have a harder time connecting women to powerful roles in business despite your conscious belief in gender equality.

The effects aren't always negative: if you have a positive attitude about your alma mater, implicit bias could mean you feel more at ease around someone who you know also graduated from there than you do around people who went to other schools.

But there are a couple of things make implicit bias especially fascinating and potentially insidious:

First, since our thoughts often determine our actions, implicit bias can lead to discriminatory behaviors (more on those below). Second, it is impossible to detect without taking a test. In other words, you can't sit down and do introspection about your biases, and you can't just decide not to let them affect your attitudes and actions. Implicit bias lives deep in your subconscious, and it is largely separate from the biases you know you have.

How does implicit racial bias affect the way we think about race?

Implicit bias comes from the messages, attitudes, and stereotypes we pick up from the world we live in, and research over time and from different countries shows that it tends to line up with general social hierarchies.

Studies have shown that people have implicit biases that favor Germans over Turks (in Germany), Japanese over Koreans (in Japan), men over women (when it comes to career-related stereotypes), youth over elderly, and straight people over gay people.

So, it's no surprise race is a prime area for implicit bias, and if you live in America, you can probably make an educated guess about some of the ways it tends to play out: among other things, there's a widespread preference for light skinned over dark skinned and white over black.

How is this related to regular old racism?

Implicit racial bias tends to work against the same groups that are the victims of the type of overt racism that you hear from white supremacists or the more subtle bigotry of people who believe that racial minorities suffer from cultural pathology or who actively defend racial and ethnic stereotypes.

But it can also affect the minds of people who would say — honestly — that they are horrified by these types of attitudes. That's because the implicit associations we hold often don't align with our declared beliefs.

“the implicit associations we hold often don't align with our declared beliefs”

As Cynthia Lee, a professor at the George Washington University School of Law, has explained, "the social science research demonstrates that one does not have to be a racist with a capital R, or one who intentionally discriminates on the basis of race, to harbor implicit racial biases."

In all areas touched by implicit bias, including race, we tend to hold biases that favor the group that we belong to (what researchers call our "ingroup"). But research has shown that we can also hold implicit biases against our ingroup. So yes, white Americans generally have implicit biases against other races, but racial minorities can hold implicit biases against themselves, too. These results are rarely reflective of conscious attitudes.

How do you figure out whether you have implicit racial bias?

To evaluate implicit bias, scientists mostly use tests that measure reaction time and rely on the idea that if we closely associate two concepts in our minds, they'll be easy for us to sort together. And if we don't associate them, they'll be harder, and take more time, to sort together.

The most popular of these tests is the Implicit Association Test, or IAT. Anthony Greenwald and his colleagues invented it in the mid-1990s. An organization called Project Implicit, maintained by Greenwald, Mahzarin Banjai, and Brian Nosek, allows people to take it online. The test is basically a video game that you play on a computer, the object of which is to sort categories of pictures and words.

An image from an implicit-bias test at Project Implicit

Here's an example of how it measures implicit racial bias: in the black-white race attitude test, test takers are asked to sort pictures of white and black people's faces, and positive and negative words, by pressing one of two keys on the keyboard. It turns out that most people are able to do this more quickly when the white faces and positive words are assigned to the same key (black faces and negative words are assigned to the other key), compared with when white faces and negative words are assigned to the same key (and black faces and positive words are assigned to the other key). The difference in the time it takes a user to respond in different situations is the measure of implicit bias. Try a test yourself at Project Implicit.

“[M]y hands were literally frozen when I had to associate black with good”

Here's how Banaji explained the way taking the IAT feels, in a 2013 interview with the Boston Globe:

"So when I took the test ... it was stunning for me to discover that my hands were literally frozen when I had to associate black with good. It's like I couldn't find the key on the keyboard, and doing the other version, the white-good, black-bad version was trivial. So the first thought that I had was: 'Something's wrong with this test.' Three seconds later, it sunk in that this test was telling me something so important that it would require a re-evaluation of my mind, not of the test."

How do the implicit racial biases the IAT reveals play out in reality?

Implicit racial bias can shape our beliefs and assumptions, color the way we treat other people, and even help decide what "feels true" for us when it comes to larger social and political issues.

Banaji explained that in one version of the IAT, researchers took famous Asian Americans such as Connie Chung and Michael Chang and Kristi Yamaguchi and picked white foreigners such as Hugh Grant, Katarina Witt, and Gerard Depardieu, and asked test takers to connect them to American symbols and foreign symbols. They found it was easier to associate Hugh Grant with American symbols than Connie Chung. "That shows how deeply the category 'American' is white" in many people's minds, she said.

“It was easier to associate Hugh Grant with American symbols than Connie Chung”

She went on to explain what she said were the connotations of implicit bias when it comes to politics: "The reason I especially like that result is that in the first Obama election and since then, the issue has come up about these 'birthers,' and I think what we captured there was a little bit of a birther in all of us. I think this is where conscious attitudes matter. You and I say, 'I consciously know Barack Obama was born in this country, and I believe this because the evidence is there.' For some people who we might write off as the lunatic fringe, the association to be American is to be white. I can see for them that feels true."

What are the main areas in which implicit racial bias affects our everyday lives?

Implicit biases are pervasive.  Researchers say everyone possesses them, even people like judges, who have avowed commitments to impartiality.

And they don't just stay tucked away in our unconscious until they're revealed by a computer game. They determine how we behave. There is increasing evidence that implicit bias — including implicit racial bias, which the IAT measures — predicts behavior in the real world. This behavior, of course, harms the people who are members of groups that are the subjects of negative implicit bias.

For example, research has shown that it can affect healthcare: in one study, despite self-reporting very little explicit bias, two out of three clinicians were found to harbor implicit bias against blacks and Latinos. And it turns out that this affected the care that black patients got: the stronger the clinicians' implicit bias against blacks relative to whites, the lower the black patients rated them on all four sub-scales of patient-centered care. It's also been connected to racial discrimination in hiring, performance evaluations, housing discrimination, and even perceptions of neighborhood crime.

How does implicit bias affect criminal justice?

Criminal justice — from arrests, to police shootings, to juries' perceptions of defendants — is such a rich area for implicit racial bias to operate that it deserves its own separate discussion.

To understand the gaping racial disparities in criminal justice, it helps to understand implicit bias. As Vox's German Lopez has explained:

Part of the problem is outright racism among some judges and cops, socioeconomic disparities that can drive more crime, and drug laws that disproportionately affect black Americans. But the other explanation is that cops, like everyone else, carry this implicit bias, which experts agree affects how they police people of different races. Since these are the people who carry out the initial steps of law enforcement, this bias might launch a cascading effect of racial disparities that starts with simple arrests and ends in prison or death.

These are a few ways implicit bias has been found to operate at every level of the criminal-justice system:

•Studies have shown that a person's level of implicit racial bias predicts the amount of shooter bias — meaning, how much easier it is to shoot African Americans compared with white people in a video-game situation. And when researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and California State University at Northridge  reviewed a decade of empirical evidence about cops and implicit bias in 2012, they found police officers seem to possess implicit bias that might make them more likely to shoot black suspects than white ones.

•Writing for the Yale Law Journal in 2013, L. Song Richardson and Phillip Atiba Goff demonstrated that the triage practices by which defense attorneys accept their cases can be informed by implicit racial bias and argued that the overwhelming case loads and time constraints create an environment in which implicit bias has an outsized influence on judgments.

•In a 2013 Law and Society Review article, Casey Reynolds examined how jurors unknowingly enter the courtroom with a set of inferences informed by implicit bias that can determine how they decide what constitutes "reasonable doubt."

•In a 2013 article for Court Review, Kimberly Papillion addressed the idea that well-meaning judges can have neurophysiological responses that activate implicit racial biases, concluding that "Assuming that judges can simply try harder to be fair, take more time when making decision, or utilize their egalitarian value systems to eliminate bias in their decision-making process is naïve. The solutions should be tailored to the neurophysiologic reactions that infuse bias into the sentencing decisions."

Can you get rid of implicit racial bias?

The good news is that there is some evidence that implicit biases, including implicit racial biases, are malleable.

“There are studies that demonstrate that you can at least produce shifts”

Several different approaches have shown promise for getting rid of implicit bias, generally, which all apply to implicit racial bias, too.

•Counter-stereotypic training: People can be trained, using visual or verbal cues, to develop new associations that contrast with the stereotypes they hold.

•Exposure to individuals who defy stereotypes:  Being made aware of people who challenge the assumptions that fuel our biases — for example, male nurses, elderly athletes, or female scientists — has shown potential to decrease them.

•Intergroup contact: Simply having contact with the people about whom you have bias can reduce it. But researchers have found the contact typically has to involve individuals sharing equal status and common goals, a cooperative rather than competitive environment, and the presence of support from authority figures, laws, or customs.

•Education efforts aimed at raising awareness about implicit bias: the criminal-justice and health-care realms especially have embraced this approach.

•Taking the perspective of others: considering contrasting viewpoints and recognizing multiple perspectives can reduce automatic implicit bias.

•Mindfulness-meditation techniques: new research suggests that these can reduce implicit bias by short-circuiting negative associations.

While these methods are promising, implicit biases are really tough to shake. As Banaji told the Boston Globe, "I would say we should not be naïve about how easily we can change them. On the other hand, there are studies that demonstrate that you can at least produce shifts."

After Year Of Atheism, Former Pastor: 'I Don't Think God Exists'

This man's journey is not unique and a lot of people, especially the younger more analytical and inquisitive types are coming to the same conclusion.

Read the article and listen to it on NPR.

This subject is more in the forefront these days, and I'm happy to say, the people who are voicing their opinions are certainly more outspoken about it. Do your own research. Carve your own path of discovery.  The choices you disclose could be life changing.

Amazing music

I listen to internet radio a lot, and in my music travels, I've encountered a number of incredible artists most people probably didn't know even existed. There is more of this kind of music than anyone person has time to hear, but it has become one of the most pleasurable past times I've had the time to enjoy. 

This is just a small sample, but I hope it leads you in a new direction of appreciation. It's a source of meditation I thrive on and it brings me back to center when I need it most. 

I invite you to explore it for yourself. I hope you find something in this music you can call your own..  

Blue Tente feat. Stine Grove - Heading home

Vibrasphere - The big sleep

Blade Runner Blues - Vangelis

Space Ambient Mix 1 - Across the Universe - Meditation Music

Samsara - Purple Sunrise

Hearts of Space - Suspension

Joe Cocker dies - December 22, 2014

Sad news comes from England today.

The article follows below:

Singer Joe Cocker dies aged 70

Brett Favre's wife to QB Packers:

In an article in Yahoo news from the Christian Science Monitor entitled "Hillary Clinton slips in presidential poll: Was 2014 a bad year for her?", a new poll shows that Hillary Clinton holds a shrinking lead over the Democratic field for the 2016 presidential race. But it is still huge and the drop isn't alarming.

In the comments, one writer wrote this (it was too good not  to share):

Brett Favre's wife to QB Packers:

In a news conference Deanna Favre announced she will be the starting QB for the Packers next season. Deanna asserts that she is qualified to be the starting QB because she has spent the past 16 years married to Brett while he played QB for the Packers. During this period of time, she became familiar with the definition of a corner blitz, the nickel package, and man-to-man coverage, so she is now completely comfortable with all the
other terminology involving the Packers offense. A survey of Packers fans shows that 50% of those polled supported the move. 

Does this sound idiotic and unbelievable or familiar?

Hillary Clinton makes the same claims as to why she is qualified to be President and 50% of Democrats polled agreed. She has never run a City, County, or State during her "career" of being Bill Clinton's wife.

When told Hillary Clinton has experience because she has 8 years in the  White House, my immediate thought was "So has the pastry chef". When it comes to running the state department, her biggest achievement was getting a US Ambassador and 3 other Americans killed by pretending terrorism had been defeated.

On the other hand, she has more experience than Obama had.

Paleo diet

Overzealous policing sadly becoming the norm

I thought this letter to the editor of the Arizona East Valley Tribune was an interesting addition to the topic of how the police in their effort to do their job sometimes can cross into something over-enthusiastic. I have experienced this myself in the past, so I know just what the writer is talking about.

Read the article and judge for yourself.

Motherhood knows no limits

We think we understand the known world, but in truth we are only just beginning to know about our home world. We know more about space than we do what goes on in the depths of the oceans.

This is a great story of the true dedication of a mom.

What is an infidel? What is a racism?

How much do you know about the terms? There is much more to them than you realize, and they have long histories. Sometimes I'm troubled by their overuse and misuse, although there are times when there is nothing more appropriate.

Infidel.

Racism.

Check them out. You owe it to yourself to understand what effect they have in your world and how to interpret the way they are used in the media.

Got English?

Before you use a word, make sure it's the right one.
40 Incorrectly Used Words That Can Make You Look Dumb

Five Cardio Myths You Need to Stop Believing

Five Cardio Myths You Need to Stop Believing  from Women’s Health

At the end of a rough day, the rhythmic swooshing of the elliptical, whir of a bike, or patter of feet on the belt of a treadmill might sound like music to your ears—for stress relief, cardio is effective. It's also, of course, good for your heart (um, it's in the name), and helps burn calories (BUT you already know not to trust the calorie counter on the display, right?). Still, while all that good stuff is true, there are a lot of fallacies running around out there, and following them may be stopping you in your fitness tracks. Here, 5 of the biggest cardio myths:

MYTH #1: Cardio, cardio, and more cardio is the ticket to faster weight loss.

FACT: Hours logged on those fast-paced gym machines alone are not the best way to melt off the FAT. "You may lose “weight” doing cardio only, but unfortunately it's the wrong kind of weight," says Kansas City-based personal trainer Greg Justice. Cardio alone burns away both muscle and fat. 

For a lasting change, you have to integrate strength workouts into your routine. "Weight training builds lean muscle mass, which elevates your metabolism and burns more fat, even when you're not exercising," says Justice. He recommends Metabolic Resistance Training, a hybrid method in which weight training is done at a faster pace, with minimal rest. One example of this double whammy: kettlebell training.

MYTH #2: If you don't have an hour to commit to the cardio gods, it's not worth it.

FACT: Flat-out not true. All body movement contributes to calorie burn. What you can change, though, is how efficiently you burn those calories. "You may be able to do lower intensity, steady-state cardio longer, but the key is what happens after your workout," says Justice. "By doing high-intensity interval training [HIIT], which means you incorporate intense periods of work with short recovery, your metabolism is elevated and you'll be burning calories for up to 38 hours after your HIIT workout is completed." So, if you think you have to pray at the altar of the treadmill, take heart. "The American Heart Association says that doing three, 20-minute sessions of cardio at a vigorous intensity is the equivalent of doing five, 30-minute sessions at a moderate level [like fast walking]," says exercise scientist Wayne Westcott, Ph.D. Even 10 minutes at a high intensity is beneficial. And a recent study suggests that short, infrequent bouts of slow running can do your heart good. So, no excuses that you don't have the time!

MYTH #3: Doing cardio on an empty stomach torches maximum body fat.

FACT: This one comes from the idea that if your body doesn't have readily available food calories, it'll dip into the body's stored fat supply, shrinking that muffin top. Research bears out that the opposite is true: A 2011 meta-analysis concluded fat burn is consistent regardless of whether or not you've eaten before a workout. And other research shows an unfavorable effect on muscle catabolism (a.k.a. muscle loss) from skipping a pre-workout snack. "Your body needs energy to perform and energy comes in the form of food,” says Justice. "I'm not talking about gorging yourself, but having a small (healthy, balanced) snack before doing cardio can actually help you perform at a higher level."

MYTH #4: It's important to stay in the "fat-burning zone" if your aim is to burn fat.

FACT: Like a lot of fitness fallacies, this one seems logical, but the details reveal a different picture. At a lower intensity—the heart rate deemed the "fat-burning zone"—you will indeed burn a greater percentage of your calories from fat. But, as Westcott explains, its total calories burned (those pesky calories out) that matter for fat loss, not the percentage. The math: If you run at 7 miles per hour, you’ll burn 25% of your calories from fat, while walking at half that speed at 3.5 mph burns 40% from fat, says Westcott, citing past research. So far, walking seems to have an edge. However, at that 7 mph pace, you might burn about 500 calories in 30 minutes, which would amount to 125 fat calories. At the 3.5 mph walking pace, you might burn about 250 calories in the same time, and 40% of 250 is only 100, so neither total calories nor the "fat-burning zone" doesn't win that race. Bottom line: Working out at a higher intensity equals more total calories torched, which is what leads to more pounds lost.

MYTH #5: If you go for a run or a bike ride, you can skip a leg strength workout. FACT: Unless you're doing full-on sprints uphill or cranking the bike's resistance to the point where you can barely push the pedals (and yet you push), you are not getting much muscle-building benefit from your workout.

So while you feel like your legs and glutes did some work, in order to get the awesome metabolic gains of strengthening and sculpting those largest muscles in your body, you have to incorporate strength moves like squats, deadlifts, and lunges. Not only that, but strength workouts will make you a better runner and cyclist. "Back when I coached track at Penn State, our runners dominated the sport," says Westcott. "We were the only ones at the time having our athletes strength-train. Now, of course, everybody does.”

What Really Happened in Ferguson?

This is a reprint from eSkeptic magazine, December 17, 2014.

What Really Happened in Ferguson? 
When eyewitness testimony collides with contradictory evidence.

BY MICHAEL SHERMER

Psychologists have known for decades that memory does not

operate like a video camera, with our senses recording in high definition what really happens in the world, accurately stored in memory awaiting high fidelity playback on the viewing screen of our mind. Instead, fragments of scenes are processed by our senses, filtered through our emotions, biases, and prejudices, and put into context created by earlier memories, subsequent events, and the interpretations of our social group and culture. The world-renowned memory expert Elizabeth Loftus, in her 1991 book Witness for the Defense—a critical analysis of eyewitness testimony—explained the process this way:

As new bits and pieces of information are added into long-term memory, the old memories are removed, replaced, crumpled up, or shoved into corners. Memories don’t just fade…they also grow. What fades is the initial perception, the actual experience of the events. But every time we recall an event, we must reconstruct the memory, and with each recollection the memory may be changed. Truth and reality, when seen through the filter of our memories, are not objective facts but subjective, interpretative realities.

Loftus turned her research acumen to this problem when, in 1987, she was asked to testify for the defense of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born Cleveland autoworker who was on trial as “Ivan the Terrible,” the Nazi who murdered tens of thousands of Jews at Treblinka during the Second World War. But was Demjanjuk really Ivan? A witness named Abraham Goldfarb initially recalled that Ivan was killed in a 1943 uprising, but when he saw Demjanjuk he changed his story, now identifying him as the mass murderer. On the heals of Goldfarb’s testimony another witness named Eugen Turowski changed his original story of not recognizing Demjanjuk, now fingering him as the killer. The prosecution presented five witnesses who positively identified Demjanjuk as the man they had seen at Treblinka, but the defense countered with 23 other survivors of the concentration camp who could not positively ID Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. An initial guilty verdict was overturned when another man was found guilty of the crimes.

In the 1990s there were two eyewitness-driven moral panics—the Recovered Memory Movement and the Satanic Panic—both of which involved court cases that turned entirely on the memories of eyewitnesses to satanic ritual abuse and sexual abuse claims, all of which unraveled before the facts (or the lack thereof), but not before destroying the lives of countless innocently accused. The Innocence Project, founded in 1992, uses DNA evidence to exonerate people on death row who were wrongfully convicted, the vast majority of which based on faulty eyewitness testimony—a total of 321 so far.

This process of mixing fantasy with reality to such an extent that it is impossible to sort them out is called confabulation, and Loftus has conducted numerous experiments showing how easy it is to plant false memories in people’s minds through simple suggestion and repetition, until the fantasy becomes a memory of reality. She famously concocted a story for little children about how they were once lost in a mall but rescued and returned to their parents—an event that never happened to any of her child subjects—and by merely asking them to recall details of the incident her child charges were able to recollect rich details. It was a chilling reminder of the frailty of human memory.

These historical examples should be kept in mind when assessing current events, most notably what really happened between 12:01pm and 12:03pm on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri when police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed teenager Michael Brown during a physical altercation after Wilson confronted Brown who had shoplifted cigarillos from a local market. When a grand jury failed to indict Wilson for murder, moral outrage trumped rational analysis and rioting ensued. When the documents reviewed by the grand jury were made public, however, it became clear why an indictment was dropped. The eyewitness accounts that would have indicated criminal wrong-doing on the part of the police officer were inconsistent, unreliable, provably wrong, changed over time, and even fabricated.

One woman, for example, reported that there was a second police officer in the passenger seat next to Wilson, a white “middle age or young” man in uniform. Wilson was alone. A number of bystanders said Wilson shot Brown in the back, including Brown’s friend standing next to him, Dorian Johnson. Johnson’s initial story that Wilson’s shot “struck my friend in the back” contradicted his grand jury testimony that the shot caused Brown’s body to “do like a jerking movement, not to where it looked like he got hit in his back, but I knew, it maybe could have grazed him.”

Another eyewitness said Wilson shot Brown in the back and then “stood over him and finished him off.” Under oath in front of the grand jury, however, he admitted that he made it up “based on me being where I’m from, and that can be the only assumption that I have.” His recantation was classic memory redaction based on new information. “So it was after you learned that the things you said you saw couldn’t have happened that way,” a prosecutor pressed him, “then you changed your story about what you seen?” The witness responded, “Yeah, to coincide with what really happened.” Whatever really happened we know what didn’t happen: the autopsy report concluded that Brown was not shot in the back.

More memory confabulation was apparent in another eyewitness who told a federal investigator that when he heard the first shot fired he looked out the window to see a police officer with his gun drawn and Brown “on his knees with his hands in the air. I seen him shoot him in the head.” When later told by the investigator, “What you are saying you saw isn’t forensically possible based on the evidence,” the man admitted that he based his account on what someone else told him because he was in a stairwell at the time and didn’t see it.

The moral outrage is understandable if Brown had his hands up or was face down in surrender, which would imply that Wilson executed him in cold blood. Knowing that is not what happened, however, should give us all pause before we dial up our moral modules to 11 and seek self-help justice in the form of rioting and looting, rather than the criminal justice system that, flawed as it is, still insists that indictments be based on facts instead of emotions, which are fed by long-simmering prejudices and all the cognitive biases and memory distortions that come packaged in the human mind.

A Field Guide to Critical Thinking

There are many reasons for the popularity of paranormal beliefs in the United States today, including:

1. the irresponsibility of the mass media, who exploit the public taste for nonsense,
2. the irrationality of the American world-view, which supports such unsupportable claims as life after death and the efficacy of the polygraph, and
3. the ineffectiveness of public education, which generally fails to teach students the essential skills of critical thinking.

Read James Lett's full article here - A Field Guide to Critical Thinking

Plastic Paradise

What do you know about the Great Pacific Garbge Patch?

This clip is a trailer of the movie Plastic Paradise. This is something you need to watch. If this lights a spark in you, watch the whole movie 'Plastic Paradise: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch' (this is just one source). The movie is probably the best 57 minutes you'll spend. Educate yourself. This issue affects us all. Know how it affects you.
Cheers

Hitler Rants About Miley Cyrus

This is just too funny to pass up sharing.

Now I know there are two of us who feel the same way.

Hitler Rants About Miley Cyrus

What You Don't Know About Religion (but should)

Seth Andrews and his radio broadcast for Dec. 16, 2014.
Religious or not, it's an interesting take on the subject.

A little help from my friends

I remember Joe Cocker from the Woodstock days, and I never get tired of this song. This version just makes it all that much better.

Enjoy

Joe Cocker at Woodstock

Jesus drove a Honda

Max Your Muscle Gain

Max Your Muscle Gain With This Essential 8-Tip Countdown 

by Alex Allan, Registered Kinesiologist, Toronto, Canada

How many sets get the best results? What's the most effective split routine for muscle gain? How much protein is optimal?

Putting on muscle can get confusing with all of the information floating around the internet. Success often hides in the details, and knowing what specifics to focus on can be overwhelming. This simple 8-tip countdown covers the basic ingredients of a successful hypertrophy (muscle sculpting) plan for muscle gain. Use it as a starting point and as a base to add more complexity as you progress. The checklist for serious muscle starts right here:

8 Hours of Sleep: In 2011, Cheri Mah, a researcher with the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Laboratory, studied men's basketball players and found that several weeks of sleep extension improved reaction time, mood, levels of day-time sleepiness, and specific indicators of athletic performance (including free throws, 3-point field goals, and sprint time). These findings suggest that sleep duration is an important component of peak performance.

7 Rep Sets: Research has shown that seven to eight reps develop the larger Type 2 muscle fibers responsible for size and strength through hypertrophy training. This is not absolute and should be varied over time. Bodybuilder hypertrophy has been shown to optimize around the 8-12 rep range. But for athletes, seven to eight reps is a great place to gain size and strength. Think of this as the sweet spot where muscle size and strength gains can overlap.

6 Protein-Rich Servings Per Day: You tear down in the gym and rebuild in the kitchen. Hard lifting with inadequate protein is like running out of bricks while building a house. Nutrition guru John Berardi recommends that men eat two servings of lean, complete protein (40-60g) with each meal every few hours, and women eat one serving of lean, complete protein (20-30g) with each meal every few hours.

5-Second Tempos: Charles Poliquin is well known for popularizing the science behind tempo in the North American strength and conditioning world. He points out studies that show protein synthesis is greatest after eccentric enhanced lifting. His recommendation for building more muscle is to use a 4- to 6-second eccentric motion with an explosive or 1-second concentric motion. For example, on a Pull-Up, fast on the way up, and go slow on the way down.

4 Compound/Multi-Joint Exercises Per Body Part Per Week: Research confirms that exercise volume may be more important than exercise intensity for stimulating and maximizing the duration of the muscle protein synthesis (MPS) response. To achieve this size-increasing response, studies show that at a minimum you need to hit six sets per body part per workout. The upper end of volume per body part should be roughly 10 sets per workout when hypertrophy is the goal. This would establish a range of 12-20 sets per body part per week if you hit it twice.

For example during the workouts that include legs:

Workout 1: 3 Sets Squats, 3 Sets Dumbbell Lateral Step-Ups

Workout 2: 3 Sets Bulgarian Split Squats 3 Sets Trap Bar Deadlifts

Total volume: 12 sets per week

3 Sets Per Exercise: A study in the Strength and Conditioning Journal found that multiple sets (two to three) were associated with 40 percent greater hypertrophy than one set, in both trained and untrained subjects. In addition, there was no significant difference in muscle size between two to three sets per exercise and four to six sets per exercise. For elite lifters and body builders, higher sets may be beneficial, but as a standard starting point, go with three sets.

2 Times Per Week—Work Each Muscle Group: A recent study showed trained individuals experience maximal gains by training each muscle group two days per week. An example of this could be a four-day split like this:

Day 1: Upper Body, Day 2: Lower Body, Day 3: Off

Day 4: Upper Body, Day 5: Lower Body, Day 6: Off, Day 7: Off

1 Minute Rest Periods: According to the authors of the NSCA Essentials of Strength and Conditioning, 3rd Edition, the optimal rest period for hypertrophy training is between 30 and 90 seconds. For moderate loads where seven to eight reps are generated, 60 to 90 seconds can be used to take advantage of the muscle's recovery curve by re-stressing it prior to full recovery.

0 excuses: Be precise. Be consistent. Be disciplined. Be successful!