Evolution of our Oversized Brains

Article

You are what you eat, and so were your ancient ancestors. But figuring out what they actually dined on has been no easy task.

There are no Pleistocene cookbooks to consult. Instead, scientists must sift through an assortment of clues, from the chemical traces in fossilized bones to the scratch marks on prehistoric digging sticks.

Scientists have long recognized that the diets of our ancestors went through a profound shift with the addition of meat. But in the September issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology, researchers argue that another item added to the menu was just as important: carbohydrates, bane of today’s paleo diet enthusiasts.

In fact, the scientists propose, by incorporating cooked starches into their diet, our ancestors were able to fuel the evolution of our oversized brains.

Roughly seven million years ago, our ancestors split off from the apes. As far as scientists can tell, those so-called hominins ate a diet that included a lot of raw, fiber-rich plants.

Frank Phillips

Paintings

Steve Martin

“The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready.”
- Steve Martin

Dream

I dreamed my friend Triona was meeting Adam West this week in Ireland.

Phantom Footgasms and the The Somatosensory Homunculus

In the case of some phantom foot patients, Ramachandran found that the amputees' brains didn't just fail to erase the missing foot from their body image map, they accidentally rewired the map in a way that caused the person's phantom foot to become sexy. Phantom foot patients reported feeling sexual pleasure, and even orgasms, in their missing feet.
Article

The Foot Fetish Brain Map
Sex nerd Emily Nagoski floats a possible explanation for the common foot fetish, and publishes an awesome diagram of the brain: "The somatosensory homunculus is the sensory map of your brain in your body," she writes. "You’ll notice that the feet are immediately adjacent to the genitals. So even though your feet are at one end of you actual body and your genitals are in the middle, as far as your brain is concerned, they’re right next to each other." And even if Nagoski is wrong, she notes that the somatosensory homunculus is "fun to say and makes you sound like a real smarty pants too."

New Details on Old Story

Article

Music Saves the World

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Instead Of Arresting Drug Addicts, These Massachusetts Cops Are Offering Free Treatment

Article

The New Debtor's Prison

Article

Sam Quinones Dreamland

In 1929, in the blue-collar city of Portsmouth, Ohio, a company built a swimming pool the size of a football field; named Dreamland, it became the vital center of the community. Now, addiction has devastated Portsmouth, as it has hundreds of small rural towns and suburbs across America—addiction like no other the country has ever faced. How that happened is the riveting story of Dreamland.
http://www.samquinones.com/books/dreamland/

If you happened to live near a certain clinic in Portsmouth, Ohio, in the early 2000s, you might find yourself regularly answering your doorbell to people asking to buy your urine.
Article

How Heroin Made Its Way From Rural Mexico To Small-Town America

Book

In a Book

I always need good information. I discovered how to find my best teachers in books I hunted down at the library. When I was a kid I saved up for the Boys and Girls Book About Divorce. It came out in 1970, when I was 9 years old. I also saved up for Carleton Fredericks book on high fiber way to total health in 1976.

Morning is Sacred

When my energy is outward I crash early and wake early and my morning is sacred. When my energy is inward the reverse is true. It means I have to stay flexible and change up the order of my routine for a few months. Stay flexible.

Aurelius: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?”

Marcus Aurelius (/ɔːˈriːliəs/; Latin: Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus;[1][notes 1] 26 April 121 – 17 March 180 AD) was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180. He ruled with Lucius Verus as co-emperor from 161 until Verus' death in 169. He was the last of the Five Good Emperors, and is also considered one of the most important Stoic philosophers.

During his reign, the Empire defeated a revitalized Parthian Empire in the East; Aurelius' general Avidius Cassius sacked the capital Ctesiphon in 164. In central Europe, Aurelius fought the Marcomanni, Quadi, and Sarmatians with success during the Marcomannic Wars, with the threat of the Germanic tribes beginning to represent a troubling reality for the Empire. A revolt in the East led by Avidius Cassius failed to gain momentum and was suppressed immediately.

Marcus Aurelius' Stoic tome Meditations, written in Greek while on campaign between 170 and 180, is still revered as a literary monument to a philosophy of service and duty, describing how to find and preserve equanimity in the midst of conflict by following nature as a source of guidance and inspiration.


“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.”
― Marcus Aurelius

“Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not "This is misfortune," but "To bear this worthily is good fortune.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Jim Carrey

Wealth and fame come from asserting your individuality. Peace comes from knowing there is no such thing.
-Jim Carrey

Marcus Aurelius

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but of the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

-Marcus Aurelius

DNA Decades Later

The revelation that Warren G. Harding had a child with Ms. Britton, according to genetic testing, has roiled the two families.Article

Love: Ram Dass

Being Love Now

I honor the light in all of us. The more I love God, the more I love the forms of God, which are all forms. Living from the soul is very much a heart-center journey. I get on a bus, and by the time I get off, I feel like I have met intimately family members I’ve known all my life. We’re all in love with one another. To live in your spiritual heart with the degree of openness it entails, trust in the One. In that loving awareness, you are not as vulnerable as you would be in the ego, where you think you are separate from others.

How did the rose ever open its heart
And give to this world all of its beauty?
It felt the encouragement of light against its being,
Otherwise we all remain too frightened.
– Hafiz

How does one become loving awareness? If I change my identification from the ego to the soul, then as I look at people, they all appear like souls to me. I change from my head, the thought of who I am, to my spiritual heart, which is a different sort of awareness – feeling directly, intuiting, loving awareness. It’s changing from a worldly outer identification to a spiritual inner identification. Concentrate on your spiritual heart, right in the middle of your chest. Keep repeating the phrase, “I am loving awareness. I am loving awareness. I am loving awareness.”

The object of our love is love itself. It is the inner light in everyone and everything. Love is a state of being.

You begin to love people because they just are. You see the mystery of the Divine in form. When you live in love, you see love everywhere you look. You are literally in love with everyone you look at.

When you and I rest together in loving awareness, we swim together in the ocean of love. Remember, it’s always right here. Enter into the flow of love with a quiet mind and see all things with love as part of yourself.

– Ram Dass

Fragments

“I certainly have not told my story yet, I know that, though I’ve revealed fragments.”
—James Baldwin, Paris Review

Dreams for Woonsocket

If a children's book can save a lighthouse and a poem can save a tree then we can save our city of Woonsocket.