I am just home from a terrific talk on cults by Lisa Kendall of Portland, Oregon. Her family joined a cult called The Move of God, which Wikipedia calls a nondemoninational charismatic Christian group. It happened because her 7 year old sibling made friends with another 7 year old on the walk home from school, in a city that seems as safe as Portland.
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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here's the text of a speech given by Richard Heinberg (the peak oil guy) to a set of college grads about entering the world as it exists today----on the downslope of the production curve. His words are oriented at helping them get past the denial that grips their parents, and "make the best of it".

... if you apply the critical thinking skills that you’ve learned here at WPI to an examination of the relevant data, you’ll probably come to the same conclusion as has been reached by the overwhelming majority of scientists who have studied all of these questions in great depth. Indeed, the scientific community is nearly unanimous in assessing that the Earth is warming, and that the only credible explanation for this is rising levels of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels. That kind of consensus is hard to achieve among scientists except in situations where a conclusion is overwhelmingly supported by evidence.

Women don't want the carved guy walking down the beach. But they want everything else. Many thanks to hausfrauatu for pointing out THIS NY times story about sex research. It centers around researcher Meredith Chivers and her findings. Her study involved monitoring people's arousal while viewing video of various sex acts. Arousal was measured subjectively (self report) and objectively (genital physiology). Then the people's real and reported arousal levels were correlated, along with their reported sexual prefences. The findings were...well....INCREDIBLE. Yet credible. My head is reeling with the implications. Makes me want to go into sexual health...
( text from which I will make my usual notesCollapse )

From the last chapter of Deep Survival, here are the actions of a survivor according to Gonzales:
( 12 survival tipsCollapse )

I am having tremors in my left hand. I don't know how long it's been going on, because I never paid attention before. I thought I was just getting low blood sugar, which I do if I forget to eat. But today I thought to check my right hand, and it is steady. I have had no caffeine. I had breakfast of cottage cheese and peaches about 2 hours ago. And my right hand is steady.
( bad newsCollapse )

Homework for week 8
Doctor-Patient Communication
Liz Sutherland, ND, teaching
( here's my homework for tomorrow morningCollapse )