Entries by tag: my book
It's been nine months since I posted here?! That tells me I'm overbusy. I generally post when I have time to reflect and no time for reflection is bad.
We're just back from a Middle Fork Salmon self-support trip. Self-support means we were in kayaks and canoes and carried all our gear and food for a week in the wilderness in our boats. I like that better than going with rafts that bring "the kitchen sink" and many other things that are truly unnecessary. It was a good trip though the water was very low due to the megadrought in the West. We only had one night of bad air quality due to wildfires.
Not a lot has changed at the home base. Covid meanders on. I'm still wearing a mask to work in the clinic, which stinks but I've gotten used to it. I have a new job, doing remote lab interpretation. I still have a patient every now and then for my private naturopathic practice. It's plenty.
I'm still working on an assortment of writing projects. I write articles for the local canoe club and for American Whitewater now, about safety on the river. I have several different books in brainstorm/outline form. That form can persist for years, but once I have all the points I want to make arranged in the right order with all the supporting documentation the writing part goes pretty quickly. I've yet to be published in book form. Somebody is going to publish my stuff though, because it's good and there's a lot of it fomenting.
Kitten is dead. My beloved wild feline finally gone. I just returned from a trip and felt the usual worry about her, wanting to see her when I got back. All that was there waiting was a house full of old smells and some photos which I cried over. She was with me for many years.
We're just back from a Middle Fork Salmon self-support trip. Self-support means we were in kayaks and canoes and carried all our gear and food for a week in the wilderness in our boats. I like that better than going with rafts that bring "the kitchen sink" and many other things that are truly unnecessary. It was a good trip though the water was very low due to the megadrought in the West. We only had one night of bad air quality due to wildfires.
Not a lot has changed at the home base. Covid meanders on. I'm still wearing a mask to work in the clinic, which stinks but I've gotten used to it. I have a new job, doing remote lab interpretation. I still have a patient every now and then for my private naturopathic practice. It's plenty.
I'm still working on an assortment of writing projects. I write articles for the local canoe club and for American Whitewater now, about safety on the river. I have several different books in brainstorm/outline form. That form can persist for years, but once I have all the points I want to make arranged in the right order with all the supporting documentation the writing part goes pretty quickly. I've yet to be published in book form. Somebody is going to publish my stuff though, because it's good and there's a lot of it fomenting.
Kitten is dead. My beloved wild feline finally gone. I just returned from a trip and felt the usual worry about her, wanting to see her when I got back. All that was there waiting was a house full of old smells and some photos which I cried over. She was with me for many years.
--Winston Churchill
Last night while at a Sierra Club meeting involving the effort to hasten decommission of the Columbia Generating Station (nuke at Hanford), I started having all manner of thoughts about my book on homeopathy. I brainstormed my intro and some chapter ideas on the same page where I'd taken a few notes about newly understood seismic activity in the Tri-Cities area, the power needed to make fuel rods, the types of nuclear waste storage currently in use, and such. Part of what brought homeopathy to mind was the groupthink in evidence among the meeting attendees. The anti-nuke information being conveyed was at times not even faintly believable, but the group assumed that all present were on board with the effort to eliminate nuclear power from our bevy of power sources.
This morning in my inbox I find an interesting article by Art Markman on the question of what kind of creativity we display while our conscious minds are occupied with something else. It appears that for simple decisions, it's better to think about consciously it, however for complex issues it may be good to be distracted from the direct question. Dijksterhuis and Nordgren presented Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) in this paper. Another paper by Haiyang Yang et al shows that the duration of unconscious thought has an inverted-U shaped relationship with creativity, suggesting that unconscious thought may outperform conscious for moderate-length deliberations.
So for quick decisions tis best to focus on the matter at hand. For very long and complex deliberations, there might be time for both conscious and unconscious contemplation. And to harness the power of unconscious synthesis thinking, one needs a moderate amount of time in which to do it.
I've heard of UTT before but not by name. I generally have my best ideas while walking, which suggests to me that cross-crawl integration of walking may bring the two brain halves to apply their knowledge to whatever problem is at hand. I've seen the process modeled extensively by television character Dr House. House plays ball, drives bumper cars, or does pranks on his coworkers to distract himself from the burning questions, and allow his unconscious mind to sort out the myriad details of a medical case and arrive at a diagnosis and treatment. People may think that he is goofing off, but in fact it is physical play that brings his most astounding ideas to the fore. He starts with the conscious brainstorming with the help of his team, then goes off to do whatever activity life presents, then returns to the conscious cogitation. The science is beginning to support the use of this technique for creative decisionmaking.
This morning in my inbox I find an interesting article by Art Markman on the question of what kind of creativity we display while our conscious minds are occupied with something else. It appears that for simple decisions, it's better to think about consciously it, however for complex issues it may be good to be distracted from the direct question. Dijksterhuis and Nordgren presented Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) in this paper. Another paper by Haiyang Yang et al shows that the duration of unconscious thought has an inverted-U shaped relationship with creativity, suggesting that unconscious thought may outperform conscious for moderate-length deliberations.
So for quick decisions tis best to focus on the matter at hand. For very long and complex deliberations, there might be time for both conscious and unconscious contemplation. And to harness the power of unconscious synthesis thinking, one needs a moderate amount of time in which to do it.
I've heard of UTT before but not by name. I generally have my best ideas while walking, which suggests to me that cross-crawl integration of walking may bring the two brain halves to apply their knowledge to whatever problem is at hand. I've seen the process modeled extensively by television character Dr House. House plays ball, drives bumper cars, or does pranks on his coworkers to distract himself from the burning questions, and allow his unconscious mind to sort out the myriad details of a medical case and arrive at a diagnosis and treatment. People may think that he is goofing off, but in fact it is physical play that brings his most astounding ideas to the fore. He starts with the conscious brainstorming with the help of his team, then goes off to do whatever activity life presents, then returns to the conscious cogitation. The science is beginning to support the use of this technique for creative decisionmaking.
What the Dalai Lama said when asked what surprises him most:
Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.
Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.
In whatever tradition they occur, spiritual practices focuessed on an awareness of interbeing tend to have the intriguing psychological side effect of bringing significant earthly happiness to their most devoted practitioners, almost regardless of external circumstances.
--Martha Stout, Ph.D., in The Sociopath Next Door, p212-213.
ONLY THE HALF MAD ARE WHOLLY ALIVE.
--Edward Abbey
--Edward Abbey
(Reuters) - People with insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes are more likely to develop plaques in the brain associated with Alzheimer's disease, researchers in Japan reported on Thursday.
The study involved 135 elderly participants in the town of Hisayama, Fukuoka prefecture, who had their blood sugar levels checked several times at the start of the study. They were then monitored for signs of Alzheimer's disease for 10 to 15 years.
After they died, researchers conducted autopsies on their brains and found plaques, particularly in those who had high blood sugar levels while they were alive.
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The study involved 135 elderly participants in the town of Hisayama, Fukuoka prefecture, who had their blood sugar levels checked several times at the start of the study. They were then monitored for signs of Alzheimer's disease for 10 to 15 years.
After they died, researchers conducted autopsies on their brains and found plaques, particularly in those who had high blood sugar levels while they were alive.
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Cup of warm strong coffee, organic half and half, brown sugar. Cool morning, first cool one since I returned here from AZ. I clipped the grape and wisteria vines back from the deck already, as I've been working on kayaks out there and the tendrils are a bother. The spiders will hopefully recede a bit also, now that there is less to attach to. I ate one egg a la Bill (on a corn tort with cheese, green onion and garlic) and am saving the other one for dinner. My appetite has been almost gone in the hot weather, but the coolness incited me to cook eggs.
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Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.
-Hippocrates
The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.
-Isak Dinesen
-Hippocrates
The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.
-Isak Dinesen
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