I want to go to the Devil’s Swimming Pool at the top of Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe.
Stelvio Pass. Worth a drive.
Even better is the Transfăgărăşan
This isn’t really a *do*, but I came across it while looking at Snopes. The Chaiten Volcano in Chile erupted, and lightning came out of it. Here are bigger pictures of the lightning volcano.
In its current incarnation, conservatism has taken on an angry crankiness. It is caught up in a pseudo-populism that true conservatism should mistrust — what on Earth would Bill Buckley have made of “death panels”? The creed is caught up in a suspicion of all reform that conservatives of the Edmund Burke stripe have always warned against.
…
First, conservatives are suspicious of innovation and therefore subject all grand plans to merciless interrogation. Their core question goes something like this: Maybe you think this new health (or education or environmental) plan is a great idea, Mr. Liberal, but will it really work?
What are its unintended consequences? Can our governmental institutions carry it off? Not all progressive ideas pass the test. In the health care debate, conservatives were at their best when they shelved the demagoguery and asked practical, focused questions.
Three points for conservatives
I really like this article. Conservatives should be playing Devil’s Advocate to Progressive ideas. Political party fighting is crap. Focused, insightful, and thoughtful questioning of another’s ideas is a compliment. “I take you seriously enough to consider your ideas”
Synchronization in the brain is influenced by “theta waves” which are associated with relaxation, daydreaming and drowsiness, but also with learning and memory formation, the scientists explained in the study in the journal Nature.
While scientists already know that relaxed minds are better at receiving new information, this study pinpoints a mechanism by which relaxation neurons work together to improve memory.
“Our research shows that when memory-related neurons are well coordinated to theta waves during the learning process, memories are stronger,” said Adam Mamelak, a neurosurgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
I don’t want you to confuse being happy with being soft. One can be both happy and hard-nosed at the same time. In fact, I like to consider myself a happy warrior. I love life and relish in the entreprenurial adventure, but yet I am (or try to be) ruthless in how I judge and execute that which is important around me and my baby.
In their study, participants (students) were shown a flyer complimenting them for being stylish and chic and were asked to imagine that it had come from a clothing store. The participants knew perfectly well the compliment wasn’t aimed specifically at them, and the ulterior motive was plain — the leaflet contained a message asking them to shop at the store. There was nothing subtle about the attempt to flatter — its obviousness was “over the top,” Sengupta says.
On a conscious level, the students discounted the value of the compliment because of its impersonal nature and the ulterior motive. But careful assessment of their implicit attitudes revealed that they felt more positively about the store than participants who hadn’t seen the flyer. These positive feelings could have an impact on a company’s bottom line, the researchers found: Given a choice, participants were more likely to choose a coupon from a store that had complimented them than from one that hadn’t.