Five things... help keep you mentally well

five things you do that help keep you mentally well

At the suggestion of MindApples

1. Feed the birds - This helps to keep my "abundance" of riches in perspective.
2. Engage my wife and children in conversation - something we all need to practice.
   
3. Let the muse loose - I seldom know where she leads but if I don't follow then I won't get there.
   
4. Aspire to great things - while seldom achieved it gives me license to attempt (and to fail).
   
5. Silence: practicing the fine art of being silent and then trying to listen.

Here’s how it works:

• Write a post telling your readers five things you do that help keep you mentally well.
• Link to the Mindapples site www.mindapples.org
• Invite five blog-friends to do the same (if you want to)

And that’s it.

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Worth retweeting...

Dave Winer

RT @gruber: Republicans now hold 41-59 majority in Senate.

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The fish come out ...

Great site for silly signs... Oddly Specific

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The worst kind of "Journalism" (FAIL)

Report: Google China Hack Might Be Inside Job

3:40 PM - January 19, 2010 by Marcus Yam

Washington sends "diplomatic note" to China asking for an explanation on Google hacking incident.

As the topic of Google and China litter the headlines, we continually wonder whether or not the search giant will continue business in the censorship-filled country. But before Google can go any further, it needs to investigate what happened when it had its networks attacked by hackers.

New wire Reuters today published a story that cites its own sources as saying that the hacking of the networks may have been an inside job.

"The sources, who are familiar with the situation, told Reuters that the attack, which targeted people who have access to specific parts of Google networks, may have been facilitated by people working in Google China's office."

Security analysts also told Reuters that the malicious software used in the hack was a trojan called Hydraq.

This is a prime example of why journalism FAILS!  Starting with a very poor headline which is little more than sensational innuendo.  Followed by an equally misleading "authoritative" third-party "expert" quote.  Finished with the FAIL coup de grace, the driveling assignment of blame, a trojan.

In light of the ethnic and national origins of this story I hesitate to use the term but this is a serious case of ...

Yellow journalism is a type of journalism that downplays legitimate news in favor of eye-catching headlines that sell more newspapers. It may feature exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, sensationalism, or unprofessional practices by news media organizations or journalists.

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Robert B. Parker is Dead

Robert B. Parker is Dead (UPDATED) - Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

Robert B. Parker is Dead (UPDATED)

At the age of 77, "just sitting at his desk" at his home in Cambridge, Mass., according to an email sent out by a representative of his U.K. publisher Quercus, Robert B. Parker is dead. The news of Parker's death on Monday was confirmed by Parker's U.S publisher, Putnam; on Twitter, a representative wrote: "R.I.P beloved author Robert B. Parker. You were indeed a Grand Master, your legacy lives on, and you will be missed by us all."

In a statement released late Monday, Parker's longtime editor at Putnam, Christine Pepe, said: “What mattered most to Bob were his family and his writing, and those were the only things that he needed to be happy. He will be deeply missed by all us at Putnam, and by his fans everywhere.”The thriller writer Joseph Finder also confirmed the news directly with Parker's family, said to be "in shock."And the Bookseller quotes Parker's UK editor, Nick Johnston: "He was a great talent who will be mourned by all his many fans."

I'm really not sure how to process this. Not at all. I suppose it's exactly the way the author best known for his Spenser private detective novels, who by the latter portion of his career was up to publishing three novels a year, working at a five to ten page-a-day clip, should die - doing exactly what he was doing, day in, day out.

He is survived by his wife, Joan, and his sons, David, a choreographer, and Daniel, an actor. Several more novels will be published in 2010, including SPLIT IMAGE, the newest Jesse Stone novel (out February 23) and BLUE-EYED DEVIL, an Appaloosa novel (out on May 4). In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Community Servings, 18 Marbury Terrace, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130. As well, Parker's literary agent, Helen Brann, told the Associated Press that a private ceremony will take place this week to remember the author, and a public memorial, a "celebration of his life and work," is planned for mid-February in Boston.

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Worth repeating ... from every mountain top!

humorzo

“Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but he’s a molder of consensus. And on some positions, cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expedience asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’

“But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?”

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Ricardo Villavicencio

Ricardo Villavicencio

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It ain't so simple...

http://black-and-white.tumblr.com/post/342290792/franklieu-what-a-vague-fortune-clarify-what

Black and White

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Life is too short...

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Makin' Bacon... a little squishy

Scientists turn stem cells into pork

The texture of the meat as sort of like scallop, firm but a little squishy

AP In this image of a photomicrograph of muscle, tissue shows muscle fibers are seen diagonally from lower left to upper right. The blue dots are the nuclei of the cells, the yellow color is the result of an overlay (green and red) of two of the most important proteins in skeletal muscle, actin and myosin. View related photos

By Maria Cheng

updated 12:57 p.m. CT, Fri., Jan. 15, 2010

LONDON - Call it pork in a petri dish — a technique to turn pig stem cells into strips of meat that scientists say could one day offer a green alternative to raising livestock, help alleviate world hunger, and save some pigs their bacon.

Dutch scientists have been growing pork in the laboratory since 2006, and while they admit they haven't gotten the texture quite right or even tasted the engineered meat, they say the technology promises to have widespread implications for our food supply.

"If we took the stem cells from one pig and multiplied it by a factor of a million, we would need one million fewer pigs to get the same amount of meat," said Mark Post, a biologist at Maastricht University involved in the In-vitro Meat Consortium, a network of publicly funded Dutch research institutions that is carrying out the experiments.

Story continues

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Beauty inspires...

Beauty inspires greatness.

- Laura Boggess

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Laugh-ability!

FBI admits Photofit of Osama Bin Laden had Spanish features

A MOCKED-UP image of how Osama Bin Laden may look today has been withdrawn by the US State Department after the FBI admitted it was partly based on a photograph of a Spanish MP taken from the internet.

The Photofit image of an older, greying Al-Qaeda leader bore a striking resemblance to the left-wing politician Gaspar Llamazares, a member of Spain’s Communist party and a critic of the US “war on terror”. It turned out Llamazares’s grey hair, jaw line and forehead had been simply cut and pasted from an old campaign photograph by an FBI technician.

The FBI originally claimed it used “cutting edge” technology to come up with new images of terrorist suspects for the State Department’s Rewards for Justice website.

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