No Sex in Space, Yet, Official Says

While humans have been a spacefaring species for more than 50 years, it's quite possible we have yet to perform that most basic of acts — sex — beyond terra firma. Yet.

Rumors have long swirled that astronauts may have hooked up in orbit, perhaps even as part of secret sex-in-space experiments run by the Russian or American governments. But those stories are likely the product of overactive — and overheated — imaginations, experts say.

A Russian space official, for example, has categorically denied any such weightless shenanigans by his countrymen, the news agency AFP reported Friday (April 22).

"There is no official or unofficial evidence that there were instances of sexual intercourse or the carrying out of sexual experiments in space," Valery Bogomolov, the deputy director of the Moscow-based Institute of Biomedical Problems, told the news agency Interfax, AFP reported. "At least, in the history of Russian or Soviet space exploration, this most certainly was not the case." [10 Surprising Sex Statistics]

What about NASA astronauts?

Bogomolov also addressed the rumors of American hanky-panky, though with considerably less authority.

"As for American space exploration, well, I just don't have the information to categorically deny that," Bogomolov told Interfax, according to AFP. "There are just anecdotal rumors, which are not worth trusting."

But those in the know say NASA astronauts have likely been as chaste as their Russian counterparts while zipping around Earth at 17,500 mph (28,164 kph). While NASA apparently doesn't explicitly forbid sex in orbit, its astronaut code of conduct calls for "relationships of trust" and "professional standards" to be maintained at all times.

"I'm not aware of an official NASA policy on this," said former astronaut Leroy Chiao, a veteran of four space missions between 1994 and 2005. "It was not discussed when I was there, it was simply understood. Nobody brought it up — it simply wasn't a consideration."

Despite the advent of mixed-gender crews in 1983, NASA astronauts seem to have behaved themselves in orbit, according to Chiao.

"As for any couple having had sex in space, I seriously doubt it," Chiao told SPACE.com in an email interview.

Chiao, who spent more than 229 days in space, explained some of his reasoning in a blog post for the tech website Gizmodo back in 2009.

"Guys are guys. If a guy had sex in space, he would not be able to stand not bragging about it," Chiao wrote. "Sorry to disappoint you, but there it is. We would all know about it. Or, I should say, we will all know about it when it happens."

Other astronauts have backed Chiao's viewpoint, saying that NASA's spaceflyers have thus far been too focused on their missions to risk any romantic entanglements in orbit.

That's not to say that such entanglements don't unfold back on Earth, however, as the messy love triangle involving then-astronauts William Oefelein and Lisa Nowak demonstrates. Nowak was arrested in 2007 for allegedly attacking a woman she viewed as a rival for Oefelein's affections. She ultimately received probation.

It will happen

Sex in space will happen eventually, if it hasn't already. It's one thing for a space shuttle crew to contain themselves for a few weeks, or astronauts aboard the station to remain chaste for five or six months. But manned missions to Mars would last years, so abstinence for that long would be a tall order for most people.

And sex would likely be a natural part of life at a lunar or Mars base, especially if the aim is to one day establish a self-sustaining colony.

The rise of private spaceflight should open the door even more to sex in space. Space tourists would not be bound by NASA's code of conduct, or as restricted by the demands of a complicated mission.

And some people will probably even fly to space just to join the "220-mile-high club." Virgin Galactic, which hopes to start flying tourists to suborbital space as early as next year, has already turned down a $1 million offer from an unidentified party to aid in the production of a sex-in-space movie.

Read more: http://www.space.com/11473-astronauts-sex-space-rumors.html

Kaewong Boy: I bet somebody has already started working on the 'Zero-G Edition' of the famous ancient Indian text Kāmasūtra.

The Biocentric Universe Theory: Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos Itself

by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman

Adapted from Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, by Robert Lanza with Bob Berman, published by BenBella Books in May 2009.

The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves.

This insight snapped into focus one day while one of us (Lanza) was walking through the woods. Looking up, he saw a huge golden orb web spider tethered to the overhead boughs. There the creature sat on a single thread, reaching out across its web to detect the vibrations of a trapped insect struggling to escape. The spider surveyed its universe, but everything beyond that gossamer pinwheel was incomprehensible. The human observer seemed as far-off to the spider as telescopic objects seem to us. Yet there was something kindred: We humans, too, lie at the heart of a great web of space and time whose threads are connected according to laws that dwell in our minds.

Is the web possible without the spider? Are space and time physical objects that would continue to exist even if living creatures were removed from the scene?

Figuring out the nature of the real world has obsessed scientists and philosophers for millennia. Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all.

For centuries, scientists regarded Berkeley’s argument as a philosophical sideshow and continued to build physical models based on the assumption of a separate universe “out there” into which we have each individually arrived. These models presume the existence of one essential reality that prevails with us or without us. Yet since the 1920s, quantum physics experiments have routinely shown the opposite: Results do depend on whether anyone is observing. This is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the famous two-slit experiment. When someone watches a subatomic particle or a bit of light pass through the slits, the particle behaves like a bullet, passing through one hole or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave that can inhabit all possibilities—including somehow passing through both holes at the same time.

Some of the greatest physicists have described these results as so confounding they are impossible to comprehend fully, beyond the reach of metaphor, visualization, and language itself. But there is another interpretation that makes them sensible. Instead of assuming a reality that predates life and even creates it, we propose a biocentric picture of reality. From this point of view, life—particularly consciousness—creates the universe, and the universe could not exist without us.

MESSING WITH THE LIGHT

Quantum mechanics is the physicist’s most accurate model for describing the world of the atom. But it also makes some of the most persuasive arguments that conscious perception is integral to the workings of the universe. Quantum theory tells us that an unobserved small object (for instance, an electron or a photon—a particle of light) exists only in a blurry, unpredictable state, with no well-defined location or motion until the moment it is observed. This is Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle. Physicists describe the phantom, not-yet-manifest condition as a wave function, a mathematical expression used to find the probability that a particle will appear in any given place. When a property of an electron suddenly switches from possibility to reality, some physicists say its wave function has collapsed.

What accomplishes this collapse? Messing with it. Hitting it with a bit of light in order to take its picture. Just looking at it does the job. Experiments suggest that mere knowledge in the experimenter’s mind is sufficient to collapse a wave function and convert possibility to reality. When particles are created as a pair—for instance, two electrons in a single atom that move or spin together—physicists call them entangled. Due to their intimate connection, entangled particles share a wave function. When we measure one particle and thus collapse its wave function, the other particle’s wave function instantaneously collapses too. If one photon is observed to have a vertical polarization (its waves all moving in one plane), the act of observation causes the other to instantly go from being an indefinite probability wave to an actual photon with the opposite, horizontal polarity—even if the two photons have since moved far from each other.

In 1997 University of Geneva physicist Nicolas Gisin sent two entangled photons zooming along optical fibers until they were seven miles apart. One photon then hit a two-way mirror where it had a choice: either bounce off or go through. Detectors recorded what it randomly did. But whatever action it took, its entangled twin always performed the complementary action. The communication between the two happened at least 10,000 times faster than the speed of light. It seems that quantum news travels instantaneously, limited by no external constraints—not even the speed of light. Since then, other researchers have duplicated and refined Gisin’s work. Today no one questions the immediate nature of this connectedness between bits of light or matter, or even entire clusters of atoms.

Before these experiments most physicists believed in an objective, independent universe. They still clung to the assumption that physical states exist in some absolute sense before they are measured.

All of this is now gone for keeps.

WRESTLING WITH GOLDILOCKS

The strangeness of quantum reality is far from the only argument against the old model of reality. There is also the matter of the fine-tuning of the cosmos. Many fundamental traits, forces, and physical constants—like the charge of the electron or the strength of gravity—make it appear as if everything about the physical state of the universe were tailor-made for life. Some researchers call this revelation the Goldilocks principle, because the cosmos is not “too this” or “too that” but rather “just right” for life.

At the moment there are only four explanations for this mystery. The first two give us little to work with from a scientific perspective. One is simply to argue for incredible coincidence. Another is to say, “God did it,” which explains nothing even if it is true.

The third explanation invokes a concept called the anthropic principle,? first articulated by Cambridge astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1973. This principle holds that we must find the right conditions for life in our universe, because if such life did not exist, we would not be here to find those conditions. Some cosmologists have tried to wed the anthropic principle with the recent theories that suggest our universe is just one of a vast multitude of universes, each with its own physical laws. Through sheer numbers, then, it would not be surprising that one of these universes would have the right qualities for life. But so far there is no direct evidence whatsoever for other universes.

The final option is biocentrism, which holds that the universe is created by life and not the other way around. This is an explanation for and extension of the participatory anthropic principle described by the physicist John Wheeler, a disciple of Einstein’s who coined the terms wormhole and black hole.

SEEKING SPACE AND TIME

Even the most fundamental elements of physical reality, space and time, strongly support a biocentric basis for the cosmos.

According to biocentrism, time does not exist independently of the life that notices it. The reality of time has long been questioned by an odd alliance of philosophers and physicists. The former argue that the past exists only as ideas in the mind, which themselves are neuroelectrical events occurring strictly in the present moment. Physicists, for their part, note that all of their working models, from Isaac Newton’s laws through quantum mechanics, do not actually describe the nature of time. The real point is that no actual entity of time is needed, nor does it play a role in any of their equations. When they speak of time, they inevitably describe it in terms of change. But change is not the same thing as time.

To measure anything’s position precisely, at any given instant, is to lock in on one static frame of its motion, as in the frame of a film. Conversely, as soon as you observe a movement, you cannot isolate a frame, because motion is the summation of many frames. Sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. Imagine that you are watching a film of an archery tournament. An archer shoots and the arrow flies. The camera follows the arrow’s trajectory from the archer’s bow toward the target. Suddenly the projector stops on a single frame of a stilled arrow. You stare at the image of an arrow in midflight. The pause in the film enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy, but you have lost all information about its momentum. In that frame it is going nowhere; its path and velocity are no longer known. Such fuzziness brings us back to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which describes how measuring the location of a subatomic particle inherently blurs its momentum and vice versa.

All of this makes perfect sense from a biocentric perspective. Everything we perceive is actively and repeatedly being reconstructed inside our heads in an organized whirl of information. Time in this sense can be defined as the summation of spatial states occurring inside the mind. So what is real? If the next mental image is different from the last, then it is different, period. We can award that change with the word time, but that does not mean there is an actual invisible matrix in which changes occur. That is just our own way of making sense of things. We watch our loved ones age and die and assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime.

There is a peculiar intangibility to space, as well. We cannot pick it up and bring it to the laboratory. Like time, space is neither physical nor fundamentally real in our view. Rather, it is a mode of interpretation and understanding. It is part of an animal’s mental software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects.
Most of us still think like Newton, regarding space as sort of a vast container that has no walls. But our notion of space is false. Shall we count the ways? 1. Distances between objects mutate depending on conditions like gravity and velocity, as described by Einstein’s relativity, so that there is no absolute distance between anything and anything else. 2. Empty space, as described by quantum mechanics, is in fact not empty but full of potential particles and fields. 3. Quantum theory even casts doubt on the notion that distant objects are truly separated, since entangled particles can act in unison even if separated by the width of a galaxy.

UNLOCKING THE CAGE

In daily life, space and time are harmless illusions. A problem arises only because, by treating these as fundamental and independent things, science picks a completely wrong starting point for investigations into the nature of reality. Most researchers still believe they can build from one side of nature, the physical, without the other side, the living. By inclination and training these scientists are obsessed with mathematical descriptions of the world. If only, after leaving work, they would look out with equal seriousness over a pond and watch the schools of minnows rise to the surface. The fish, the ducks, and the cormorants, paddling out beyond the pads and the cattails, are all part of the greater answer.

Recent quantum studies help illustrate what a new biocentric science would look like. Just months? ago, Nicolas Gisin announced a new twist on his entanglement experiment; in this case, he thinks the results could be visible to the naked eye. At the University of Vienna, Anton Zeilinger’s work with huge molecules called buckyballs pushes quantum reality closer to the macroscopic world. In an exciting extension of this work—proposed by Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist—not just light but a small mirror that reflects it becomes part of an entangled quantum system, one that is billions of times larger than a buckyball. If the proposed experiment ends up confirming Penrose’s idea, it would also confirm that quantum effects apply to human-scale objects.

Biocentrism should unlock the cages in which Western science has unwittingly confined itself. Allowing the observer into the equation should open new approaches to understanding cognition, from unraveling the nature of consciousness to developing thinking machines that experience the world the same way we do. Biocentrism should also provide stronger bases for solving problems associated with quantum physics and the Big Bang. Accepting space and time as forms of animal sense perception (that is, as biological), rather than as external physical objects, offers a new way of understanding everything from the microworld (for instance, the reason for strange results in the two-slit experiment) to the forces, constants, and laws that shape the universe.
At a minimum, it should help halt such dead-end efforts as string theory.

Above all, biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of physics, as scientists have been trying to do since Einstein’s unsuccessful unified field theories of eight decades ago. Until we recognize the essential role of biology, our attempts to truly unify the universe will remain a train to nowhere.

Adapted from Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, by Robert Lanza with Bob Berman, published by BenBella Books in May 2009.

Read more: http://www.robertlanza.com/the-biocentric-universe-theory-life-creates-time-space-and-the-cosmos-itself/

Kaewong Boy: The double-slit experiment proves that the world we all lives in is a world of indefinite probabilities. And what happen next is restricted only on how we perceive what reality should be. Open up your mind and be free, for this is how we are meant to be... :p

How The Martians Went Extinct

 

Life on Mars has been the subject of much debate and speculation that has gripped our minds since we gazed upon the stars. Many years ago, the discovery of ice in the red planet offered some clues as to whether it once had water and was able to support life sometime in the distant past.

NASA scientists recently discovered an underground dry ice lake containing more carbon dioxide than originally thought. The trapped carbon dioxide is thought to have come from the planet’s atmosphere earlier in its history when it was conducive for life on Mars to exist.

“It really is a buried treasure,” said Jeffrey Plaut, a scientist of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a report appearing in the journal Science. “We found something underground that no one else realized was there.”

The discovery was made possible through ground-penetrating radar of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter who is searching for clues of life on Mars.

Dry ice on Mars is not a new discovery, but the recent finding suggests that what is locked down there is about 30 times more than originally thought.

Scientists have often wondered where atmospheric gases capable of supporting life on Mars went and resulted to the present thin atmosphere of the planet. They speculate that some gases became trapped in dry ice as part of a seasonal cycle.

Still, even the enormous amounts of dry ice discovered will not be able recreate an atmosphere thick enough to support life on Mars, the scientists said.

The polar ice caps as well as existing canyons, gullies and river channels who have carved the surface of the planet are the other possible signs of past life on Mars.

Read more: http://empowerednews.net/life-on-mars-scientists-discover-buried-treasure-an-underground-ice-lake/187325/

Kaewong Boy: They did not went extinct, human beings are descendants from Mars. A long long time ago, our ancestors became too careless with technology & greed, they somehow managed to kill the life force of our once beautiful home planet. To escape certain death & extinction, they ran away from the dying planet. Some became space explorers & others went to earth to start a fresh new civilization with hope that they can guide this new generations away from being self-destructive & make the same mistakes as they did to Mars.

The 5 Biggest Fitness Mistakes

by Bill Phillips and the Editors of Men's Health

People are always asking me questions about fitness. Two reasons: 1) I’m an editor at the world’s largest health and fitness magazine; 2) they think I’m the other Bill Phillips.

Truth is, I’m no fitness expert, but I’ve been at the magazine long enough to play one at cocktail parties:

• “Is it better to exercise in the morning or evening?” (Exercise when you feel like it, which will reduce the chances you won’t do it at all.)

• “Which builds muscle more effectively: machines or free weights?” (Which cleans your car more effectively: a machine wash or a hand wash?)

• “Why don’t I have abs yet?” (Because you have a day job, enjoy Doritos, and aren’t a genetic freak.)
But when the questions get really tough, I turn to Adam Campbell, the Men’s Health Fitness Director. He sits right next to me. Adam understands fitness better than anyone I know.

In fact, a few years ago, I walked into his office and told him that I was hiring a personal trainer. Even though I was exercising—pushups, situps, crunches—I was still packing on pounds. That morning, I’d looked in the mirror and saw a fat guy staring back. I freaked. I needed to make big changes, quick.

“You don’t need to find a personal trainer,” he told me. “You need to find an hour.”

An hour? Adam promised that if I could make time to exercise 20 minutes a day, three days a week—while cutting my two-sodas-a-day habit—I’d be lean again in no time. My workouts were ineffective, he explained, because I was battering the same small muscles over and over. He gave me a workout that hit all my large muscle groups. When these muscles grew bigger, he said, they’d burn more calories—and I’d begin to lose weight.

He was right. Over the next six months, I dropped 20 pounds.

If you’ve looked into the mirror recently and didn’t recognize the person staring back, I’ve got good news. Adam is happy to be your personal trainer, too. I asked him what advice he’d give men and women in my situation: Working out, but not seeing results. He wrote up this list of the five biggest fitness blunders—along with the fixes you need for the results you want.

 
Mistake #1: You Don't Lift Weights

You’ve no doubt been told that aerobic exercise is the key to losing your gut, but weight training is actually more valuable. Three reasons:

1. Lifting protects your muscle. When people diet without lifting weights, research shows that 75 percent of their weight loss is from fat and 25 percent is muscle. That 25 percent may reduce your scale weight, but it doesn’t do a lot for your reflection in the mirror. However, if you weight train as you diet, your weight loss is more likely to be 100 percent fat. Think of it in terms of liposuction: The whole point is to simply remove unattractive flab, right? That’s exactly what you should demand from your workout.

2. Lifting boosts your metabolism. Your muscles need energy to repair and upgrade your muscle fibers after each resistance-training workout. For instance, a University of Wisconsin study found that when people performed a total-body workout comprised of just three big-muscle exercises, their metabolisms were elevated for 39 hours afterward. What’s more, they also burned a greater percentage of their calories from fat during this time, compared with those who weren’t hitting the weights.

3. Lifting torches calories. It’s considered common knowledge that jogging burns more calories than weight training. Turns out, when scientists at the University of Southern Maine used an advanced method to estimate energy expenditure during exercise, they found that weight training burns as many as 71 percent more calories than originally thought. The researchers calculated that performing just one circuit of eight exercises—which takes about 8 minutes—can expend 159 to 231 calories. That’s about the same as running at a 6-minute mile pace for the same duration.

Need a weight workout? Check out the 20 best we've ever published. No matter your goal, we have the right workout for you.

Mistake #2: You Don’t Use the Right Dumbbells

Ladies, we’re especially talking to you on this one. Your goal is to challenge your muscles, not just go through the motions. For instance, if you can lift a weight 15 times, it’s not going to do your muscles much good to lift it for only 8 repetitions. A good way to gauge if a weight is appropriate: Note the point at which you start to struggle. Let’s say you’re doing 10 repetitions. If all 10 seem easy, then the weight you’re using is too light.
However, if you start to struggle on your tenth repetition, you’ve chosen the correct poundage.

Mistake #3: You Don’t Work Your Lower Body

To cut inches from your waist, make sure you’re working the muscles below your belt. In a Syracuse University study, people burned more calories the day after they did lower-body resistance training than the day after they worked their upper body. “Leg muscles—like your quads and glutes—generally have more muscle mass than those of your chest and arms,” says study author Kyle Hackney, Ph.D. (c), C.S.C.S. “Work more muscle during your exercise session, and your body has to expend more energy to repair and upgrade them later.” So the best approach, of course, is to hit every muscle each workout.


Mistake #4: You Don’t Watch What You Eat

You can’t out-exercise a bad diet. After all, you can eat 1,000-calorie fast food burger in just 5 minutes, but it’ll take you more than an hour to burn that many calories with physical activity. So make sure you’re not using exercise as an excuse to eat whatever you want. You may even find that regular workouts help you better follow a smart eating plan. Case in point: University of Pittsburgh researchers studied 169 overweight adults for 2 years and found that the participants who didn’t follow a 3-hour-a-week training plan ate more than their allotted 1,500 calories a day. The reverse was also true—sneaking snacks sabotaged their workouts. The study authors say it’s likely that both actions are a reminder to stay on track, reinforcing your weight-loss goal and drive.


Mistake #5: You Skip Workouts

We’re all busy, but that’s usually just a lame excuse. After all, plenty of people find time to exercise. And when was the last time you heard someone say they regretted their workout? Probably never, and here’s why: U.K. researchers found that workers were 15 percent more productive on the days they made time to exercise compared to days they skipped their workout. They were also 15 percent more tolerant of their coworkers. Now, consider for a moment what these numbers mean to you: On days you exercise, you can—theoretically at least—accomplish in an eight-hour day what normally would take you nine hours and 12 minutes. Or you’d still work nine hours, but get more done, leaving you feeling less stressed and happier with your job, another perk that the workers reported on the days they exercised.

Thanks, Adam! For more strategies that will keep you fit and healthy for life, check out The Best Fitness Tips Ever!

Read more:  http://health.yahoo.net/experts/menshealth/5-biggest-fitness-mistakes

Kaewong Boy:  "exercise 20 minutes a day, three days a week". That sounds real easy until around the 3rd week or so onwards. Because that is when the brain starts compiling a list of excuses & slooowly telling you that you are much to busy to find even 5 or 10 mins a day for this until you leave it all together.

But, if you stay strong to your hope of not wanting to see "that fat man looking back at you every time you look in the mirror" then challenge yourself & stay with the course, because after the 10th week or so you will find yourself automatically finding excuses to schedule yourself for your workout & the best thing is this time you will really enjoy doing it.

Found! The Seat of Embarrassment in Your Brain

Ever wonder why your pulse races and your heart beats faster and you start to sweat when you're embarrassed?

You can blame your pregenual anterior cingulate cortex, a thumb-sized region in the brain that seems to determine the size of your emotional response to, say, accidentally tripping in public or realizing that you've beamed an amorous email meant for your honey to your boss instead.

Virginia Sturm, a postdoctoral fellow at the Memory and Aging Center of the University of California, San Francisco, recently reported at the American Academy of Neurology annual meeting that changes in this part of the brain can regulate how much — or little — you're shamed.

She studied the size of this particular region of the cingulate cortex in both healthy controls as well as people with neurological disorders, and correlated these measurements with an embarrassment-inducing task: listening to themselves sing the Temptations' "My Girl" karaoke-style. "The smaller the region," she says, "the less embarrassed people were."

Sturm says emotions like embarrassment are slightly different from feelings like sadness and anger, because embarrassment involves a social element. Feelings like guilt, pride, shame and embarrassment all tend to occur in the presence of others, and result largely from how we think others perceive us.

What's interesting about the region of the cingulate cortex that Sturm identified is the fact that it connects to both higher-level behavioral networks in the frontal cortex, which regulate how we interact with others, as well as to more basal functions and automatic behaviors that are less under our control, such as heart rate and breathing.

Other parts of the cingulate cortex have previously been linked to depression, and deep brain stimulation of the area has helped some patients feel less depressed.

That means that treatments that stimulate activity in this part of the brain could help increase mindfulness in people with neurological disorders that make them too uninhibited or oblivious to the effect their behavior has on others. Conversely, suppressing activity in the region can help people with outsize embarrassment responses; perhaps, rather than suffering from social awkwardness, they could be helped to interact more normally with others. "There are lots of ways this region could affect emotional behavior," says Sturm.

In any case, it's nice to know that being embarrassed is a perfectly natural response — and a biologically built-in part of being human.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/04/18/the-seat-of-embarrassment-in-your-brain/

Kaewong Boy: 'Pregenual Anterior Cingulate Cortex', why do they have to name it with words so difficult even to pronounce.

Sitting Can Kill You

He's killing himself.

Well, it's official: Sitting all day is bad for you.

It makes you fat.

It makes you weak.

It makes you more likely to keel over dead.

How do we know?

Because "inactivity researchers" have finally cracked the code.
Specifically, they have figured out why some people get fat when they eat too much and other people don't get fat, even when they eat the same amount:

The people who get fat get fat because they sit around all day. The people who don't get fat don't sit around as much.

Importantly, the difference between the fatties and the non-fatties in the study had nothing to do with exercise. None of the folks in the "inactivity" study were allowed to exercise. The folks who didn't get fat didn't exercise--they just didn't spend as much time sitting. Instead, they stood. They walked. They took stairs instead of elevators. They fidgeted. Etc.

And sitting doesn't just make you fat. It makes you sick, too.

Why is sitting so bad for you? Per James Vlahos in the New York Times, here's what happens when you sit:

• Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” [inactivity researcher Marc] Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall. 

• Hamilton’s most recent work has examined how rapidly inactivity can cause harm. In studies of rats who were forced to be inactive, for example, he discovered that the leg muscles responsible for standing almost immediately lost more than 75 percent of their ability to remove harmful lipo-proteins from the blood. To show that the ill effects of sitting could have a rapid onset in humans too, Hamilton recruited 14 young, fit and thin volunteers and recorded a 40 percent reduction in insulin’s ability to uptake glucose in the subjects — after 24 hours of being sedentary.

Over a lifetime, sitting really can kill you:

• Men who sit 6 hours a day are 20% more likely to die than men who sit 3 hours a day

• Women who sit 6 hours a day are 40% more likely to die

Another bummer: You can't counter the harmful effects of sitting by exercising once in a while. You actually have to stop sitting.  Or at least start moving around more.

So get off your ass!

 Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/sitting-can-kill-you-2011-4

Kaewong Boy: Lazy bums, beware!

Bruce Lee’s Top 20 Tips for Living a Successful Life

 

 

1. Apply What You Learn

“Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.”

How many people do you know that read a lot of books and spend a lot of time buying courses, but never apply the knowledge they learn?

You may even notice these tendencies in your life. It’s hard to take action and apply what you learn, because we’re all afraid of failure, and taking action can be paralyzing from time to time.

However, success in life doesn’t happens until you use the knowledge that you have inside of you. Most of us have exactly what we need to get to our goals, but we make excuses not to even get started.

2. Learn, Discard, Create

“Absorb what is useful, Discard what is not, Add what is uniquely your own.”

It’s all well and good to learn from others, but it’s not until you take action that you discover what works and doesn’t.

When you discover what doesn’t work, you simply discard it and keep going. When you keep moving forward, you will create your own path.

Living a successful life is all about experimenting and trying new things. The more things you try, the closer you will get to true success.

3. Simplicity

“Simplicity is the key to brilliance.”

If you can simplify your life, your goals, and your tasks, you will not only be happier, you will also get more done and be more successful.

It was not until I started focusing on one single task and one major goal in my life that I started seeing rapid results in the direction of my dreams.

If you’re trying to go after multiple things at once, you will end up accomplishing none of them. Pick one thing that’s the most important to you and go after that.

The funny thing about focusing on one goal is that it seems that you’re neglecting all the others aspects of your life, but when you focus on one goal, magically the other aspects of your life improve, sometimes dramatically.

4. Break Barriers

“Using no way as way, using no limitation as limitation.”

We all have negative beliefs that stop us from being as successful in life as we would like.

The only person holding you back is you. Once you become comfortable with overcoming your fears, you will start seeing dramatic success in your life.

One of the most common characteristics of successful people is that they are willing to try new things and face their fears. They are not fearless, they are merely willing to do what it takes.

5. Be Open-Minded

“Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.”

There’s no right or wrong in the universe. It’s completely subjective.

Getting caught up in the drama of who is right or wrong or who is better than will only distract you from reaching your goals and creating a successful life.

Stay open to new possibilities, and the viewpoints of others. You can never know what you will learn when you explore things you at first thought were pure nonsense.

6. Contribute

“Real living is living for others.”

It wasn’t until I found my passion and started contributing to the world with my writing that I started feeling fulfilled.

We all have our unique gifts that we can use to make the world a better place. These are usually talents and skills you have that you are very good at, and that you like to do.

It doesn’t matter if you like to make jewelry or if you enjoy cooking, because everything is connected to everything else.

You are here to make a difference with the talents you have. There’s a reason why you are you.

7. Manage Your Time

“If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.”

We are surrounded by distractions, such as e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook. They are great at connecting us to each other, but they distract us from what is truly important.

Learn to manage your time, and get the most valuable tasks done before you start to play. Use time management courses to get your life in order.

You can often double, triple, or even quadruple your productivity by using just a few simple time management tips.

A good one that I use is to write down the three most important tasks for the next day before I go to bed.

8. Be Flexible

“Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.”

Life will throw curve balls at you, so you have to get used to being flexible. The more comfortable you can be with being uncomfortable, the faster you will grow as a human being and the more success you will have in life.

This is exactly what distinguishes successful people from unsuccessful ones. Successful people are more willing to be uncomfortable, because they know that that is the fastest path to their goals.

Whenever you bump into something that makes you feel bad, stay flexible, and find the positive in the situation. I’ve found that most of the problems in my life are blessings in disguise.

The only thing separating positivity from negativity is time.

9. Set Goals

“A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.”

If you want to create your dream life you want you first have to know what you want. For the longest time I avoided setting goals, because I thought it was unnecessary.

It wasn’t until recently that I discovered that goal setting can not only make me more productive, it can also dramatically increase the clarity I have.

When you set goals, use the S.M.A.R.T criteria, which stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely goals.

10. Be Patient

“A quick temper will make a fool of you soon enough.”

One of my weaknesses is my impatience. However, I’ve learned to channel my impatience into getting more done and being productive.

It’s also important to realize that most of the things that are truly valuable in life take time.

For example, I discovered that creating an online business usually takes anywhere from 3 to 5 years, if your goal is a full-time income.

Whatever you do, keep taking small steps each day toward your primary goal, and you will be surprised at how much you can accomplish in just a few years.

11. Kill the Box

“All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.”

It’s easy to get into a rut, which is simply a familiar pattern that feels comfortable. If you truly want to grow as a person and lead a successful life, you have to get out of the box.

In fact, throw the box out altogether, and start following your heart wherever it leads you. This can be as simple as following your highest excitement in the moment.

Most people are stuck in their minds and never listen to their heart’s deepest desire. Don’t let this be you.

12. Control Your Thoughts

“As you think, so shall you become.”

What you think about, you draw into your life. If you’re constantly being negative, you will draw more negativity into your life.

Instead of focusing on the negative, think about what you want to get out of life and focus on the positive.

This is another way of telling you that you have to set goals and focus on those goals as often as possible. The results you will get by doing this will be dramatic.

Most people sit around whining about their miserable life, and then they wonder why nothing good ever happens to them.

13. Take Action

“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”

Don’t over analyze and over think. Take massive action even if things aren’t perfect before you start.

Most people that try to get things perfect never get started at all.

I used to be a perfectionist, but I realized that by taking action, I could get much more done and make much more progress.

I also realized that people don’t want perfect. They just want solutions to their problems.

14. Allow

“I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”

It’s easy to get stuck on what other people would think of you if you became successful. Most people are so afraid of this that they never rise above mediocrity.

It is not up to you to make people happy. You can only make yourself happy, and the way others react is just the way they will react.

Don’t let other people dictate how you live your life. Determine what you want, go after it, and don’t look back. You will be much happier for it.

15. Create Your Own Destiny

“To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.”

You can make all the excuses in the world, but nothing happens until you stop blaming your circumstances or people in your life, and take control of your life.

It is up to you to take responsibility for your life and create your own opportunities. You may not be able to do exactly what you want right now, but you have the opportunity to take steps toward it.

No one will create the dream life for you. You have to do it yourself.

16. Be You

“Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.”

As I said earlier, you were born with unique talents, gifts, and skills. When you try to be someone you’re not, you will only attract people into your life that are not in harmony with you.

When you are you, and that includes the weird things about you, you will find that the most amazing and interesting people start popping up in your life.

Sometimes this may take years, and sometimes it can happen in just a few days. Let whatever happens be okay and go with the flow.

17. Have Integrity

“Knowledge will give you power, but character respect”

No success in life is worth it unless you have integrity.

It’s very hard to find people that are honest and have integrity as one of their highest values. It’s easy to throw in a lie here and there and try to manipulate people.

Only conscious people realize that this won’t make anyone happy in the long term. It might get you what you want in the short-term but it’s not a recipe for happiness.

Live with integrity, and people will respect you. And best of all, you will respect yourself which is a very desirable character trait.

18. Learn the Rules, Break the Rules

“Obey the principles without being bound by them.”

If you want success in life, learn what other successful people have done to get to where they are.

It’s important to learn the principles of success, but not be bound by them. Once you know what you need to do, follow your heart and your intuition.

If you want to learn how to create a profitable website for example, I recommend you sign up for a training course, and follow the instructions step-by-step.

Once you start seeing success, you can start breaking the rules and begin experimenting.

19. Do Things for You

“Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.”

Life is not about impressing other people. If you try to show off, it will backfire.

And if you try to seek the approval of others, it will just make you miserable. The only person that needs to approve of you is you.

This goes hand in hand with many of the quotes above. You can only be you, and it is not until you reclaim your unique self that you can be truly great.

20. Believe in Yourself

“You just wait. I’m going to be the biggest Chinese Star in the world.”

Last, but definitely not least are the expectations you have of yourself. Your beliefs will determine the success you have in life.

There are ways to overcome limiting beliefs and negative expectations, but nothing happens until you accept that they exist within you.

And nothing happens until you take full responsibility for the life that you have created in this very moment.

Read more: http://www.wakeupcloud.com/bruce-lee-successful-life/

Kaewong Boy: Everything else does not matter if you don't have the courage to 'Take Action'.

Blogging Bloggers 101

Blogger (Service)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Blogspot)

Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish blogs on other hosts, via FTP. All such blogs had (or still have) to be moved to Google's own servers, with domains other than blogspot.com allowed via Custom URLs.

History

On August 23, 1999, Blogger was launched by Pyra Labs. As one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools, it is credited for helping popularize the format. In February 2003, Pyra Labs was acquired by Google under undisclosed terms. The acquisition allowed premium features (for which Pyra had charged) to become free. In October 2004, Pyra Labs' co-founder, Evan Williams, left Google. In 2004, Google purchased Picasa; it integrated Picasa and its photo sharing utility Hello into Blogger, allowing users to post photos to their blogs.

On May 9, 2004, Blogger introduced a major redesign, adding features such as web standards-compliant templates, individual archive pages for posts, comments, and posting by email. On August 14, 2006, Blogger launched its latest version in beta, codenamed "Invader", alongside the gold release. This migrated users to Google servers and included some new features. In December 2006, this new version of Blogger was taken out of beta. By May 2007, Blogger had completely moved over to Google operated servers. Blogger was ranked 16 on the list of top 50 domains in terms of number of unique visitors in 2007.

Redesign

As part of the Blogger redesign in 2006, all blogs associated with a user's Google Ahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogspotccount were migrated to Google servers. Blogger claims that the service is now more reliable because of the quality of the servers.^[5]

Along with the migration to Google servers, several new features were introduced, including label organization, a drag-and-drop template editing interface, reading permissions (to create private blogs) and new Web feed options. Furthermore, blogs are updated dynamically, as opposed to rewriting HTML files.

In a version of the service called Blogger in Draft,^[6] new features are tested before being released to all users. New features are discussed in the service's official blog.

In September 2009, Google introduced new features into Blogger as part of its tenth anniversary celebration. The features included a new interface for post editing, improved image handling, Raw HTML Conversion, and other Google Docs-based implementations, including:

• Adding location to posts via geotagging.
• Post time-stamping at publication, not at original creation.
• Vertical re-sizing of the post editor. The size is saved in a per-user, per-blog preference.
• Link editing in Compose mode.
• Full Safari 3 support and fidelity on both Windows and Mac OS.
• New Preview dialog that shows posts in a width and font size approximating what is seen in the published view.
• Placeholder image for tags so that embeds are movable in Compose mode.
• New toolbar with Google aesthetics, faster loading time, and "undo" and "redo" buttons. Also added was the full justification button, a strike-through button, and an expanded color palette.

In 2010, Blogger introduced new templates and redesigned its website. The new post editor was criticized for being less reliable than its predecessor.

Integration

• The Google Toolbar has a feature called "BlogThis!" which allows toolbar users with Blogger accounts to post links directly to their blogs.
• "Blogger for Word" is an add-in for Microsoft Word which allows users to save a Microsoft Word Document directly to a Blogger blog, as well as edit their posts both on- and offline. As of January 2007^[update], Google says "Blogger for Word is not currently compatible with the new version of Blogger", and they state no decision has been made about supporting it with the new Blogger.^[8] However, Microsoft Office 2007 adds native support for a variety of blogging systems, including Blogger.
• Blogger supports Google's AdSense service as a way of generating revenue from running a blog.
• Blogger also started integration of Amazon Associates as a service to generate revenue.^[9]
• Blogger offers multiple author support, making it possible to establish group blogs.
• Blogger offers a template editing feature, which allows users to customize the Blogger template.
• Google Docs has direct publishing integration to Blogger.
• Windows Live Writer, a standalone app of the Windows Live suite, publishes directly to Blogger.

Limitations

Blogger has imposed the following limitations on content storage and bandwidth, per user account^[11]:

• Number of blogs = Unlimited
• Size of pages = Individual pages (the main page of a blog or archive pages) are limited to 1 MB
• Number of labels = 5,000 unique labels per blog, 20 unique labels per post
• Number of pictures (hyperlinked from user's Picasa Web Album) = Up to 1 GB of free storage
• Size of pictures = If posted via Blogger Mobile, limited 250 KB per picture; posted pictures are scaled to 800px^{[citation needed]}
• Team members (those that can write to a blog) = 100

On February 18, 2010,^[12] Blogger introduced "auto-pagination", which limited the number of posts that could be displayed on each page, often causing the number of posts on the main page to be less than that specified by the user and leading to a hostile response from some users.

Read more:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogspot

 

Kaewong Boy: Lets do it....