Friday, July 08, 2016

Training.

7/8 - press, chins, pushdowns, plate raise, speedbag, shadobox, stretch
7/5 - bench, chins, seated row, rear delt fly, backxt
7/2 - treadmill, stretch
7/1 - treadmill, press, chins, tricep dips, stretch






Whatever happened to ... bodybuilder Lynn Conkwright? | Other Sports | pilotonline.com: "As a fledgling teacher at First Colonial High, Lynn Conkwright started the Conditioning Club. Intent on encouraging students who didn't play sports to eat right and get in shape, she organized after-school activities focused on running, jumping rope, biking, weight lifting and nutrition. That was almost 40 years ago, just before Conkwright began transforming her own physique into a marvel of symmetrical muscularity, building up her back, legs, arms and abdomen in preparation for entering the world of professional bodybuilding. Entering it … and taking it by storm."
Whatever happened to ... bodybuilder Lynn Conkwright? | Other Sports | pilotonline.com: "Conkwright became a celebrity in international bodybuilding in her mid-20s after winning the 1981 Pro World championships in both the individual and couples divisions. The victories and her subsequent appearances in six Ms. Olympia contests transformed the petite P.E. teacher from Virginia Beach into a global ambassador for women's bodybuilding. "Unlike what bodybuilding is today," she says, "they considered me the representative of something any woman could achieve." What made her unique was that, at only 5 feet, 110 pounds, she defied stereotypes. Her figure was perfectly balanced; her muscles spectacularly defined, but not bulky. "










"...asking "why?" isn't negative, but rather a necessary question to gain more clarity and achieve better results."

Be a Skeptical Optimist by Randy Gage: "You need skepticism, because that’s the critical thinker part of it all. You must question premises and not follow the herd blindly. When people tell you that something can’t be done, you don’t accept that at face value. When people tell you that you “should” be doing something, you’ll weigh the input rationally and ponder questions like these: Is the premise correct? Do they have a conflicting agenda here? Do they have my best interests at heart? Are they unknowingly following a mind virus that isn’t in my highest good? Are they qualified to give me that advice? But you also need the optimist part. You have to go into things expecting them to work out. Nine times out of ten, the team that expects to win does. And when they both expect to win, the team that believes it more usually does. Skepticism is good, because it keeps your mind open. But never fall prey to cynicism, because that closes your mind again. To be successful, you need a default setting of optimism. And this is a good strategy, because the evidence supports it."



The Counterintuitive Trait That Will Make You Significantly More Successful | Shane Snow | LinkedIn: "...the most counter-intuitive quadrant is the one where the most breakthrough success can be found: Optimistic, but Skeptical. This is where the innovators reside, where inventors who dare to doubt the status quo ask the questions that need to be asked in order for the world to change. They need a healthy amount of optimism to believe that the world can change for the better, and that drives them to make transformative things happen...

Harriet Tubman, one of my favorite historical characters, was clearly an optimist when she had many reasons not to be. She was born a slave, lived a hard life, suffered a head injury that caused her seizures; her husband remarried another woman and declined to flee north with her. And yet, after she escaped from her captors, Tubman ventured back into slave territory to rescue people. She clearly had faith in a better future for her and them, and that's what people remember. But Tubman wasn't credulous. She was extremely careful, carried a pistol with her (and had occasion to pull it out). She was wary of circumstances and people's loyalty and intentions until proven otherwise—and that allowed her to rescue dozens of people from slavery and inspire millions more. The skeptical optimist believes things can be better, but doubts conventional wisdom. Sure, madmen also fall under this definition. But as I've written before, crazy is one of genius's main ingredients."


Think Splendid®: On Being A Skeptical Optimist: "An optimist is not the opposite of a skeptic, it is the opposite of a cynic. Cynical people operate with a doom and gloom energy, an outlook that shuts down ideas before they can even start. Skeptics are critical thinkers. They look beyond the surface and dig deeper.  Skeptical optimists believe that there's always a light at the end of the tunnel and that people can change and have the capacity to do good far beyond what we could ever imagine. They're also aware that asking "why?" isn't negative, but rather a necessary question to gain more clarity and achieve better results."

Is An Optimistic Skeptic an Oxymoron? | theyellowkite: "If I had to identify myself based on my primary outlook, I am definitely an optimist. I’m a glass half full, it will all work out, can-do kind of woman. However, I question everything I hear. Some would say that is good, it means I’m curious. I am curious! But, I’m also a skeptic, especially when it comes to the news and to gossip. I used to simply filter what I wanted to hear, checked out facts on items that piqued my interest, and let unsubstantiated gossip fall on deaf ears. However, lately I find myself becoming annoyed with people who take everything they see, hear or read at face value. When did we become a nation of spoon-fed, short-sighted, LAZY people? Yes, lazy."

Thursday, July 07, 2016

Fun > Safety


Analogies are fun.



Charlie Confidence.


"The Moderate Position."


True Story.




Two can play at the this incredibly dumb game.


"...do calculus at levels that make TI-89 calculators weep tears of pain."

"Well meaning"" propaganda is still propaganda.


New Life Goal.

Long-term Immersion in the DMT Realm Through Controlled Intravenous Injection | The Daily Grail: "Using pharmacokinetic modelling and DMT blood sampling data, we demonstrate that the unique pharmacological characteristics of DMT, which also include a rapid onset and lack of acute tolerance to its subjective effects, make it amenable to administration by target-controlled intravenous infusion."

Just genetics, really.


"Fat-Shaming Works."

Science Proves It: Fat-Shaming Works - Breitbart: "A landmark study by obesity experts in 2014 found that a “desire to improve self-worth” was one of the most important motivating factors encouraging people to lose weight. What does this tell us? That encouraging fatties to “love themselves,” as the fat acceptance movement does, is the worst possible message you could send people if you want them to lose weight...

The same study found that obese people were more likely to lose weight around “life transitions,” like starting high school. In other words, people start to worry about how others will see them, especially when they need to make a good first impression. Fear of social judgement is key...

A study from UCLA’s dedicated eating research institute concurred, explicitly recommending social pressure on the overweight as a remedy to America’s obesity crisis. Sorry Lindy West, but the experts agree: fat-shaming is good for you. There’s another danger in our society’s perennial niceness and reluctance to offend. You see, if a fatty isn’t shamed immediately, it’s likely that the hambeast’s self-destructive behaviour might spread to its friends. Why? Because people change their health and dietary habits to mimic that of their friends and loved ones, especially if they spend lots of time around them. Peer pressure encourages people to look like the people they admire and whose company they enjoy. Unless there’s a more powerful source of social pressure (say, fat shaming) from the rest of society, of course...

Why are we fine with shaming and peer pressuring smokers, deluging them with ads and facts about smoking-related illnesses, when obesity is just as deadly, if not more so? Why is it OK to show cancerous lungs on fag packets, but not an enlarged heart on a carton of ice cream? Not only that, but smokers are forced to pay higher insurance premiums to offset the cost of their health problems. Smokers sometimes have to pay up to 50 per cent more than normal for health coverage. Yet fatties, despite being more prone to health problems than smokers, get a pass. The rest of us have to subsidize their poor lifestyle choices."

“I think there’s no doubt that insulin is pro-cancer."

An Old Idea, Revived: Starve Cancer to Death - The New York Times: "...when Warburg tested additional tumors, including ones from humans, he saw the same effect every time. The cancer cells were ravenous for glucose. Warburg’s discovery, later named the Warburg effect, is estimated to occur in up to 80 percent of cancers. It is so fundamental to most cancers that a positron emission tomography (PET) scan, which has emerged as an important tool in the staging and diagnosis of cancer, works simply by revealing the places in the body where cells are consuming extra glucose. In many cases, the more glucose a tumor consumes, the worse a patient’s prognosis.

...diets that are linked to our obesity and diabetes epidemics — specifically, sugar-heavy diets that can result in permanently elevated levels of the hormone insulin — may also be driving cells to the Warburg effect and cancer. 

The insulin hypothesis can be traced to the research of Lewis Cantley, the director of the Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medical College. In the 1980s, Cantley discovered how insulin, which is released by the pancreas and tells cells to take up glucose, influences what happens inside a cell. Cantley now refers to insulin and a closely related hormone, IGF-1 (insulinlike growth factor 1), as “the champion” activators of metabolic proteins linked to cancer. He’s beginning to see evidence, he says, that in some cases, “it really is insulin itself that’s getting the tumor started.” One way to think about the Warburg effect, says Cantley, is as the insulin, or IGF-1, signaling pathway “gone awry — it’s cells behaving as though insulin were telling it to take up glucose all the time and to grow.” 

Cantley, who avoids eating sugar as much as he can, is currently studying the effects of diet on mice that have the mutations that are commonly found in colorectal and other cancers. He says that the effects of a sugary diet on colorectal, breast and other cancer models “looks very impressive” and “rather scary.” Elevated insulin is also strongly associated with obesity, which is expected soon to overtake smoking as the leading cause of preventable cancer. 

Cancers linked to obesity and diabetes have more receptors for insulin and IGF-1, and people with defective IGF-1 receptors appear to be nearly immune to cancer. Retrospective studies, which look back at patient histories, suggest that many people who develop colorectal, pancreatic or breast cancer have elevated insulin levels before diagnosis. It’s perhaps not entirely surprising, then, that when researchers want to grow breast-cancer cells in the lab, they add insulin to the tissue culture. When they remove the insulin, the cancer cells die. “I think there’s no doubt that insulin is pro-cancer,” Watson says, with respect to the link between obesity, diabetes and cancer. “It’s as good a hypothesis as we have now.”"

"Conspiracy."


Intricacy.




Ruining the narrative.

People interviewing for a tech job had their genders masked. It made things worse for the women. | Fusion: "The company decided to build a voice-masking tool to see if that made a difference in how candidates fared. They developed a few different types of voice modulations, and tested them out on 234 different interviews. They were surprised to find, however, that the gender swapping had no significant effect, and actually achieved the opposite of what they had hoped."