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POPSThe language you speak affects your personality A study of bilingual women suggests that when you switch from speaking one language to another, your personality and your perceptions change as well. I've experienced this myself switching between German and English.
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POPSNative American Code of Ethics 20 in all. One of my Favorite, 11. Nature is not FOR us, it is a PART of us. They are part of your worldly family. An Oldie But Goodie Good Wisdoms We All Need To Live By, Remember And Honor. Blessings
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POPSCulture influences brain function “Everyone uses the same attention machinery for more difficult cognitive tasks, but they are trained to use it in different ways, and it's the culture that does the training,”
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POPSWar on Blogs? Hmm. . . could this have something to do with the user comments on the ill-fated Tom DeLay Blog?
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POPSHow Advertising Manipulates Our “Caveman” Brains (& How to Resist) Fortunately, there are ways to go about PROOFING YOUR BRAIN. 1. Change your mindset to “postmore” by challenging culture’s ingrained assumption that “more” of everything is automatically better. 2. Grow your gratitude. Our poor, starved, frozen ancestors would cry tears of joy if they suddenly landed in our culture of abundance. Fostering our appreciation of this bounty can also block the consumerist “cool” pressure to deride so many of our fine, workable possessions as “so last year”. 3. Be enough. We’re constantly told that we aren’t rich enough, glam enough, cool enough, networked enough, etc. This has a powerful insidious effect on our primitive, socially competitive brain circuits. It’s like a toxic substance that turns rational brains into needy toddlers wanting “more, more, more!
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POPSKilling the Buddha a fascinating and interesting read:from the article: "It is as yet undetermined what it means to be human, because every facet of our culture—and even our biology itself—remains open to innovation and insight."
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POPSchildren lost the right to roam in 4 generations The article reflects our changing habits and our relationship with our environment. I agree completely about the necessity of outdoors, nature, plants, our good ol' earth. Ever been fishing? To a quiet golf course? A hike? How does it rejuvenate you? I am working on making my backyard a kind of restful, naturalist place for me to go and be refreshed.
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POPSCan we learn to love uncertainty? "... Yet they are all defined in terms of the unsettling lack of something positive or better. It is perhaps for that reason that the stories of those who discovered these uncertainties have been largely overlooked. This is why I made Dangerous Knowledge for BBC television: to champion the incomplete, the uncomputable and the uncertain."
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POPSLanguage Without Numbers: Amazonian Tribe Has No Word To Express 'One,' Other Numbers However, the MIT team decided to add a new twist--they started with 10 objects and asked the tribe members to count down. In that experiment, the tribe members used the word previously thought to mean "two" when as many as five or six objects were present, and they used the word for "one" for any quantity between one and four. This indicates that "these aren't counting numbers at all," said Gibson. "They're signifying relative quantities." He said this type of counting strategy has never been observed before, although it may also be found in other languages believed to have "one," "two," and "many" counting words.
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POPSπ Pi(π) appears where you least expect it. Coincidentally, Pi Day is also the birthday of Albert Einstein, who no doubt knew more than a little about pi. Pi Day celebrants, usually children with an enthusiastic teacher and a varying degree of personal interest in the subject, learn about pi, circles, and, if they're lucky, eat baked pies of various sorts.
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POPSStretching the Mind Stretching your mind is hard. Once we've settled on a worldview that suits us, we tend to hold on. New information is bent to fit, information that doesn't fit is discounted, and new views are resisted.
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POPSBrave New World of Digital Intimacy 
It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site — “What are you doing?” — can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.