Sounding Circle

Saturday, June 28, 2003

Monarch Butterflies 0 comments

28 Jun 2003 @ 17:34 Like a lot of Americans, millions of monarch butterflies spend their winters in Mexico. Trouble is, the Mexican government has been unable to protect the monarch's forest habitat from illegal logging. Reasoning that illegal logging stems from necessity -- the 200,000-odd largely impoverished people who live in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve clear the lands to grow crops, build their homes, and fuel their stoves. A Mexican nonprofit organization called Alternare has begun a quiet revolution to teach farmers sustainable living techniques in the name of the butterfly. The group teaches farmers to build from adobe rather than wood, to farm without chemical fertilizers, and to rotate crops for increased land productivity. Once farmers master the techniques, they teach them to others, and so Alternare's vision is slowly spreading through the Mexican forest. With monarch habitat disappearing at alarming rates, critics fear the change is coming too slowly, but advocates say that for the first time, the interests of both the human beings and the butterflies in the area are being served.

Two People To Do All The Work 2 comments

28 Jun 2003 @ 17:10 My friend Warren sent me this. -For a couple years I've been blaming it on lack of sleep, too much pressure from my job, earwax buildup, poor blood, but now I found out the real reason: We're tired because we're overworked. Here's why: The population of this country is 273 million; 140 million are retired. That leaves 133 million to do the work. There are 85 million in school. This leaves 48 million to do the work. Of this there are 29 million employed by the federal government. Leaving 19 million to do the work. 2.8 million are in the armed forces. This leaves 16.2 million to do the work. Take from the total the 14,800,000 people who work for state and city governments. That leaves 1.4 million to do the work. At any given time there are 188,000 people in hospitals, Leaving 1,212,000 to do the work. Now, there are 1,211,998 people in prisons. That leaves just two people to do all the work... You and me ... And you're sitting on your ass, at your computer, reading jokes.  More >

We're Not In The Mood 0 comments

28 Jun 2003 @ 15:54 WE¹RE NOT IN THE MOOD By Kathleen Deveny With Holly Peterson, Pat Wingert, Karen Springen, Julie Scelfo, Melissa Brewster, Tara Weingarten and Joan Raymond Newsweek June 30 Issue For married couples with kids and busy jobs, sex just isn¹t what it used to be. How stress causes strife in the bedroom -- and beyond For Maddie Weinreich, sex had always been a joy. It helped her recharge her batteries and reconnect with her husband, Roger. But teaching yoga, raising two kids and starting up a business -- not to mention cooking, cleaning and renovating the house -- left her exhausted. She often went to bed before her husband, and was asleep by the time he joined her. Their once steamy love life slowly cooled. When Roger wanted to have sex, she would say she was too beat. He tried to be romantic; to set the mood he'd light a candle in their bedroom. "I would see it and say, 'Oh, God, not that candle'," Maddie recalls. "It was just the feeling that I had to give something I didn't have." Lately, it seems, we're just not in the mood. We're overworked, anxious about the economy -- and we have to drive our kids to way too many T-Ball games. Or maybe it's all those libido-dimming antidepressants we're taking. We resent spouses who never pick up the groceries or their dirty socks. And if we actually find we have 20 minutes at the end of the day -- after bath time and story time and juice-box time and e-mail time -- who wouldn't rather zone out to Leno than have sex? Sure, passion ebbs and flows in even the healthiest of relationships, but judging from the conversation of the young moms at the next table at Starbucks, it sounds like we're in the midst of a long dry spell. It's difficult to say exactly how many of the 113 million married Americans are too exhausted or too grumpy to get it on, but some psychologists estimate that 15 to 20 percent of couples have sex no more than 10 times a year, which is how the experts define sexless marriage. And even couples who don't meet that definition still feel like they're not having sex as often as they used to. Despite the stereotype that women are more likely to dodge sex, it's often the men who decline. The number of sexless marriages is "a grossly underreported statistic," says therapist Michele Weiner Davis, author of "The Sex-Starved Marriage." If so, the problem must be huge, given how much we already hear about it. Books like "The Sex-Starved Marriage," "Rekindling Desire: A Step-by-Step Program to Help Low-Sex and No-Sex Marriages" and "Resurrecting Sex" have become talk-show fodder. Dr. Phil has weighed in on the crisis; his Web site proclaims "the epidemic is undeniable." Avlimil, an herbal concoction that promises to help women put sex back into sexless marriage, had sales of 200,000 packages in January, its first month on the market. The company says it's swamped with as many as 3,000 calls a day from women who are desperately seeking desire. Not that the problem is confined to New Agers: former U.S. Labor secretary Robert Reich jokes about the pressure couples are under in speeches he gives on overworked Americans. Have you heard of DINS? he asks his audience. It stands for dual income, no sex. Marriage counselors can't tell you how much sex you should be having, but most agree that you should be having some. Sex is only a small part of a good union, but happy marriages usually include it. Frequency of sex may be a measure of a marriage's long-term health; if it suddenly starts to decline, it can be a leading indicator of deeper problems, just like "those delicate green frogs that let us know when we're destroying the environment," says psychologist John Gottman, who runs the Family Research Lab (dubbed the Love Lab) at the University of Washington. Marriage pros say intimacy is often the glue that holds a couple together over time. If either member of a couple is miserable with the amount of sex in a marriage, it can cause devastating problems -- and, in some cases, divorce. It can affect moods and spill over into all aspects of life -- relationships with other family members, even performance in the office. Best-selling novels and prime-time sit-coms only reinforce the idea that we're not having sex. In the opening pages of Allison Pearson's portrait of a frazzled working mom, "I Don't Know How She Does It," the novel's heroine, Kate Reddy, carefully brushes each of her molars 20 times. She's not fighting cavities. She's stalling in the hopes that her husband will fall asleep and won't try to have sex with her. (That way, she can skip a shower the next morning.) And what would Ray Romano joke about on his hit series "Everybody Loves Raymond" if he didn't have to wheedle sex out of his TV wife? Romano, who has four kids, including 10-year-old twins, says his comedy is inspired by real life. "After kids, everything changes," he told NEWSWEEK. "We're having sex about every three months. If I have sex, I know my quarterly estimated taxes must be due. And if it's oral sex, I know it's time to renew my driver's license." Yet some couples seem to accept that sexless marriage is as much a part of modern life as traffic and e-mail. It's a given for Ann, a 39-year-old lawyer with two kids who lives in Brooklyn. When she and her husband were first married, they had sex almost every day. Now their 5-year-old daughter comes into their bedroom every night. Pretty soon, the dog starts whining to get on the bed, too. "At 3 or 4 a.m., I kick my husband out for snoring and he ends up sleeping in my daughter's princess twin bed with the Tinkerbell night light blinking in his face," she says. "So how are we supposed to have sex?" READ ON....  More >

Pain Really Is "All In The MInd" 0 comments

28 Jun 2003 @ 15:54 This type of research always intrigues me. One of my favorite books is The Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert. PAIN REALLY IS 'ALL IN THE MIND' By Andy Coghlan June 23, 2003 Doctors and nurses have known for many years that some people are more sensitive to pain than others. Now brain scans of people experiencing the same painful stimulus have provided the first proof that this is so. But the scans also suggest that how much something hurts really is "all in the mind". "We saw a huge variation between responses to the same stimulus," says project leader Bob Coghill of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. "The message is: trust what patients are telling you." Coghill tested the pain tolerance of 17 healthy volunteers by applying heat to the back of their calves. He varied the heat from around body temperature to 49 °C, the temperature of very hot washing-up water. Volunteers asked to rate the pain on a scale of zero to 10 showed huge variations. One resilient volunteer rated pain at the hottest temperature at just over one, whereas another could scarcely bear it at all, rating it at almost nine. Stark differences Then Coghill repeated the experiment when the volunteers were in MRI brain scanners. The scans revealed stark differences that reflected each individual's sensitivity to pain. The volunteers least able to bear pain showed more activity in the cerebral cortex, the region of the brain associated with higher cognitive function. Specific areas activated included the prefrontal cortex -- linked with attention, working memory and emotion -- and the anterior cingulate cortex, a region already linked with pain. Finally, the "leg" region lit up on the primary somatosensory cortex -- a pain "map" of the body. None of these areas lit up in the resilient individuals. But an area called the thalamus, which receives pain messages from the spinal cord and peripheral nerves, was active in all 17 volunteers. This suggests that the pain signal was not dampened on its way to the brain in any of the volunteers, so all the differences must be down to what happens in the brain itself. "Once the signal arrives, the cerebral cortex interprets and colours the information based on prior experience, emotion and expectation, and that's when the differences kick in," says Coghill. Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1430684100)

Historic Cities Website 0 comments

28 Jun 2003 @ 15:54 Historic Cities This site contains maps, literature, documents, books and other relevant material concerning the past, present and future of historic cities and facilitates the location of similar content on the web.

68 New BBC RSS Feeds 0 comments

28 Jun 2003 @ 15:54 68 New BBC RSS Feeds For RSS aficionados, these feeds from a trusted source on topics including specific regions, e-commerce, higher education, technology, global politics etc. The site says: From Kevin Hinde at BBC News Interactive comes word that "We now have RSS feeds for all our News indexes. Sport should follow soon. We haven't quite worked out how to publicise them yet, we need to persuade our graphic designers that the orange XML lozenge is a beautiful complement for their delightful layout, so it's all a bit samizdat at the moment, but I thought you might like to know."