Went to Harvest Fair at Sonoma County Fairgrounds and saw the winners of the pumpkin contest, the flower arranging competition, and met a very nice white llama. Next year I am going to the wine tasting!
Oct2
Category Archives: News
Sep14
Logout, go outside! – Alison Chaiken
I went to a linux meeting last night and the speaker was a GIRL! MIT graduate, Lawrence Livermore Lab and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center physicist, but she was FIT! Skinny, muscled, Jane-Fonda-in-the-70s arms, trim tight body under a relaxed polo shirt tucked into herringbone slacks. God, is she smart.
The linux guys were more animated than usual (I was the only other female in the room) and her talk was on linux in CARS. Cars! The guys loved it. And she was funny. At one point she grumbled, “I’m too old and bitter to think they will fix that…” The audience laughed.
Then I realized she was bike lady. http://www.exerciseforthereader.org/ I had found her page months ago from her postings on the devchix listserv.
My take away is how she manages stress. Her website is simple and full of info. It says “Logout, go outside!” This woman has fun. She apologized to the guys for her attire. “I had to go to Intel today for a developers conference and I knew I had to dress up to cope with the scary grownups.” She got a laugh. She likes Chrissie Hynde’s advice to women:
Chrissie Hynde's Advice
I think Christianne Northrup is right, your body is a barometer of how you are doing in your life — in the largest, spiritual sense. I think I am going to change my attitude about work being more important than exercise. I can exercise more and accept a lower work output. I don’t want to be forced into taking care of myself due to a bad diagnosis. I want to choose it.
I choose it now.
Aug18
Whacking the Volvo
As I left the gym today, I heard the sound of a Volvo in distress. Someone was cranking the engine of a 1983 Volvo wagon but the engine wasn’t catching. I kept walking, “Don’t meddle. No one wants car advice from a girl…” but the faded maroon wagon kept cranking loudly. I walked back.
“Hi, I have a Volvo wagon and it sounds like your fuel pump…”
“Yeah,” a young man grinned up from the driver’s seat. “I just replaced the relay, but… ”
“There are two fuel pumps. One in the gas tank and the other under the driver’s seat. It’s different in every model, I don’t know exactly where yours is.”
He knew where the fuel pump was and he had tools. He had recently purchased this elderly Volvo, Eleanor, for $250 and had been working on it with great enthusiasm and affection. I offered to crank the engine while he applied “percussive maintenance” to the fuel pump. He crawled under his car and yelled, “Ready!”
I cranked, he whacked, the Volvo started right up. He whooped and jumped to his feet. Brandishing his ratchet handle, he showed me his tattooed forearm. “And I’m the one with the Volvo tattoo! My name is Bryce.”
I smiled, shook his hand and walked away. He will never know if I, too, have a Volvo tattoo.
Aug7
Santa Rosa Cattle Drive
Cattle drive through the center of Santa Rosa CA to publicize the Sonoma County Fair.
Aug7
Mary Visits Peg To See Her New Deck
Howard Schultz helped Bob Rice finish the deck by building steps and installing the French Doors to the living room.
Jul24
Healdsburg Water Carnival 7/2011
no images were found
Jun5
Attention > Dopamine > Detailed Memory
Joyfulness seems factory-installed in the young, but can slip away as people get older. Young people easily remember specific times they were happy, and can recall enthusiastic, unconditional love. As we get older, many of us start to ruminate broadly. “I never get a break,” for example. That over-general “tape loop” leads to feeling bad.
Detailed Memories of Happiness
Spanish researchers have reported that aging patients showed fewer symptoms of depression and hopelessness after they practiced techniques for retrieving detailed memories, according an a May 10, 2011 article in the NYTimes Science News. Teaching people to focus on moment-to-moment experiences and to accept their negative thoughts may make them more tolerant of negative memories. The Mindfulness Meditation technique he teaches short-circuits the over-generalization habit that people often develop as a way of dampening emotional effects, according to Dr. Hermans.
Over-generality creates a risk factor for PTSD. “Some people tend to ruminate at a very categorical, general level about how unsafe life is or how weak I am, or how guilty I am,” says Richard Bryant. “If I do that habitually, that sets me up for developing PTSD after a trauma.”
“If you’re unhappy and you want to be happy, it’s helpful to have memories that you can navigate to come up with specific solutions,” Dr. Williams said. “It’s like a safety net.”
The formation of detailed memories is impaired by screensucking according to Nicholas Carr in “The Shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains.” On page 193 he points out that the key to memory consolidation is attentiveness. Storing explicit memories and forming connections between the requires strong mental concentration, amplified by repetition or by intense intellectual or emotional engagement. The sharper the attention, the sharper the memory. This is why arousal is important. When you are afraid or very excited, the memory formation is sharper and more likely to become permanent.
The Web is a Technology of Forgetfuless
Because web browsing fills up short term working memory but does not leave time for deep memory formation, Carr says, “The Web is a technology of forgetfulness.”
Nobel prize winning biologist Dr. Eric Kandel says, “For a memory to persist, the incoming information must be thoroughly and deeply processed. this is accomplished by attending to the information and associating it meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory.”
The influx of competing messages that we receive online overloads our working memory; making it much harder for us to concentrate on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. And, thanks, to the plasticity of the brain, the more we train our brain to be distracted, the harder it becomes to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Our use of the web makes it harder to lock information into our biological memory, and we’re forced to rely more and more on the Internet. It makes us shallower thinkers.
Attentiveness Produces Dopamine
Leaning to think includes learning to exercise some control over how and what you think, over where we focus our attention. The establishment of attention lead the neurons of the cortex to send signals to neurons in the midbrain that produce the powerful neurotransmitter dopamine. The axons of these neurons reach all the way into the hippocampus, where the dopamine jumpstarts the consolidation of explicit memory.
You need dopamine to learn, and learning is pleasurable. Is this why dopamine sensitive people love new learning experiences? Attentiveness and the dopamine it produces help create specific memories that can be accessed with sufficient granularity to ward off depression.
We can choose where our attention goes and where our energy flows. We can practice mindfulness meditation and choose to remember pleasant experiences rather than ruminating on over-general fears.
May24
The Brain is Plastic
No, not MADE of plastic — the brain physically changes when you do the same thing over and over. To me it feels like it creates little grooves in my brain. You have to rest your brain by doing something different — something so absorbing that you are completely diverted from what has exhausted you. You can’t fly an airplane safely and fret about taxes at the same time. You can’t line up a pool shot and plan a marketing strategy simultaneously.
Nobel-prize winner Dr. Kandel, featured on PBS’ show about the brain, is quoted in “The Shallows”:
“The growth and maintenance of new synaptic terminals makes memory persist.” The process also says something important about how, thanks to the plasticity of our brains, our experiences continually shape our behavior and identity: “The fact that a gene must be switched on to form long-term memory shows clearly that genes are not simply determinants of behavior but are also responsive to environmental stimulation, such as learning.”
Learning changes our brain, and continual learning strengthens our “learning muscles.” The more we do something, the better we get at it. But constant pressure can be exhausting.
Two important elements to repair “the little grooves” that we wear into our brains by intense repetition of the same mental activities:
- A change of scene and
- Doing something different that is creative and absorbing.
How do you relax your brain? Non-verbal play or do you use mental diversions like playing Bridge? What do you think is most effective?
May23
Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring
This is a Japanese TV commercial for cell phones that are made from inexpensive tropical wood. Part of the purchase price of these phones goes to preserving the endangered forests in Japan.
May22
In Arabic, Democracy means Decadence
Michael Scheuer was the chief of the CIAs bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999 and remained a CIA counterterrorism analyst until 2004. His writing is maddeningly unquotable, and his point of view is hidden until the last pages of the book.
He says that in 1996 he was fortunate to join a small company of CIA officers who worked in the US and overseas, who came to hate bin Laden but who also came to respect his piety, integrity and skills. Their mission was to understand bin Laden’s motivation, to capture or kill him, and to destroy al-Qaeda but it was “thwarted… by self seeking cowardice… in the senior levels of the intelligence community” and by the Clinton and Bush administrations.
Even today, the “former CIA officer who stopped plans to capture bin Laden in 1998-1999 is now President Obama’s senior advisor on ‘extremism.'” When Scheuer left the CIA in 2004, he directed his frustration into training young non-commissioned officers and junior officers for the US Marines and the Army on how al-Qaeda and its allies perceive the world. Many of his trainees were veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan or both. He found them to be “decent, smart, tough and funny, though also cynical and angry.” The experienced officers who had already served overseas had learned that they were not fighting “freedom-hating nihilists, as they senior commanders had told them, but hard-fighting, brave and intelligent men” who were defending their homes and who intended to drive the American invaders out of their country and out of the Muslim world. Scheuer ends the book by praising his trainees, saying “all Americans should support and honor these young… lions [who are] led by self-serving moral cowards.” The political leadership of this country has misled us so that “most of the assumptions Americans have about bin Laden — are dead wrong.” Scheuer wrote the book in the hope that we would stop deceiving ourselves.
The first chapter is practically unreadable but the information in the book is so interesting and so well documented that you might find it worth the trouble, although you might be advised to read it back to front. One of the most cogent passages in the book is a quote from Omar, the son of Osama (p. 111):
My father paused before explaining it this way. “Omar, try to imagine a two-wheeled bicycle. One wheel is made of steel. The other is made of wood. Now, my son, if you wanted to destroy the bicycle, would you destroy the wooden or the steel wheel?”
“The wooden wheel of course, ” I replied.
“You are correct my son. Remember this: America and Israel are one bicycle with two wheels. The wooden wheel represents the United States. The steel wheel represents Israel. Omar, Israel is the stronger power of the two. Does a general attack the strongest line when in battle? No, he concentrates on the weakest part of the line. The Americans are weak. It is best to attack the weakest point first. Once we take out the weak wooden wheel, the steel wheel will automatically fail. Who can ride a bicycle with only one wheel?”
He patted my knee with his hand. “First we obliterate America. By that I don’t mean militarily. We can destroy America from within by making it economically weak, until its markets collapse. When that happens, they will have not interest in supplying Israel with arms, for they will not have extra funds to do so. At that time, the steel wheel will corrode and be destroyed by lack of attention.
“That’s what we [Muslims] did to the Russians. We bled blood from their body in Afghanistan. The Russians spent all their wealth on the war in Afghanistan. When they could no longer finance the war, they fled. After fleeing their whole system collapsed. Holy Warriors defending Afghanistan are the ones responsible for bringing a huge nation to its knees. We can do the same thing with America and Israel. We only have to be patient.”
[see OxfordIslamicStudies.com]