Monday, December 30th, 2013
Stephan: Not a trend, but a piece that caught my attention and I thought might interest my readers as well.
They are a fixture in daily newspapers, varying enormously in difficulty and complexity. Crosswords range from simple puzzles that provide amusement in waiting rooms and coffee-breaks to fiendish tests of intelligence that were even used to recruit code breakers during the second world war. But where and when did the modern crossword originate?
Arranging words in grids is a pastime that dates back centuries. The earliest known example of the Sator square, a Latin palindrome consisting of the words SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS, was found scratched on a wall in the buried Roman town of Pompeii. Word puzzles of various kinds appeared in 19th-century English publications. But the genesis of the modern crossword lies in the Sunday edition of the New York World published on December 21st, 1913. Arthur Wynne, a violinist-turned-journalist, created a word puzzle, called ‘Word-Cross’, for the paper’s ‘Fun’ supplement. It is the ancestor of all modern crosswords, but differs from them in several ways. For one thing, it is laid out on a diamond-shaped (rather than square) grid. Unlike many modern crossword puzzles, it contains no black squares. Its numbering system is also unfamiliar: rather than ‘2 across’, for example, it names clues using the numbers […]
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Monday, December 30th, 2013
ALYSSA BROWN, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: Here are the 10 trends that define us.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Gallup published nearly 100 unique articles in 2013 about Americans’ health and well-being. Through its daily surveys, conducted year-round, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index uncovers new insights and provides the most up-to-date data available on Americans’ mental state, exercise and eating habits, healthcare coverage, physical health, and financial well-being. The following list represents Gallup editors’ picks for the top 10 most important findings from this year.
Lacking employment is most linked to having depression: For Americans, being unemployed, being out of the workforce, or working part time — but wanting full-time work — are the strongest predictors of having depression. Gallup found that these relationships hold true even after controlling for age, gender, income, education, race and ethnicity, marital status, having children, region, obesity, having health insurance, and being a caregiver. Bonus finding: Depression costs U.S. employers $23 billion in absenteeism each year.
Obesity is a growing problem for Americans: The adult obesity rate has been trending upward in 2013 will likely surpass rates since 2008, when Gallup and Healthways began tracking. The obesity rate has increased across almost all demographic groups.
Those who are actively disengaged at work […]
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Monday, December 30th, 2013
ANYA VIEN, - LA Healthy Living
Stephan: Here is some 'home truth' about life styles that may hold information that is useful in your own life.
When we think of Amish people we think of a simple life, free of modern advancements. Most of us view them as foolish for not using the advantages of convenient technology and even look down on them for not conforming to the norms of mainstream society. But if we look at the statistics, the Amish are much healthier than the rest of America. They virtually have no cancer, no autism, and rarely get sick. What are they doing different from the rest of America? Let’s look at some of the things they are doing different (here).
Why the Amish Don’t Get Sick
The Amish have chosen the traditional wisdom of our ancestors over our ‘modern
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Monday, December 30th, 2013
RICHARD J. MILLER, - The Atlantic
Stephan: Back in the early 1970s, a friend, Andrija Puharich (then called Henry), wrote a book about the use of mushrooms in religious ceremonies, and Tim Leary, another friend from those days, also pursued this inquiry. It was a line of research that has continued to this day, and here is the latest.
The notion that hallucinogenic drugs played a significant part in the development of religion has been extensively discussed, particularly since the middle of the twentieth century. Various ideas of this type have been collected into what has become known as the entheogen theory. The word entheogen is a neologism coined in 1979 by a group of ethnobotanists (those that study the relationship between people and plants). The literal meaning of entheogen is ‘that which causes God to be within an individual’ and might be considered as a more accurate and academic term for popular terms such as hallucinogen or psychedelic drug. By the term entheogen we understand the use of psychoactive substances for religious or spiritual reasons rather than for purely recreational purposes.
Perhaps one of the first things to consider is whether there is any direct evidence for the entheogenic theory of religion which derives from contemporary science. One famous example that has been widely discussed is the Marsh Chapel experiment. This experiment was run by the Harvard Psilocybin Project in the early 1960s, a research project spearheaded by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Leary had traveled to Mexico in 1960, where he had been introduced to the effects of […]
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Sunday, December 29th, 2013
JESSE McKINLEY, - The New York Times
Stephan: I find this development particularly interesting because, as sea rise gobbles up large parts of Florida many of these people, or their children, are going to have to leave. And this is not that far into the future. In the short term though it may shift Florida into a purple, or even blue, state. That would significantly reduce the chance another incompetent ideologue like Rick Scott was elected governor. And that would put Florida in a better position to deal with climate change.
ALBANY — New York, whose status as the most populous state has long been ceded, will soon fall behind Florida into fourth place, a long-anticipated drop that is rife with symbolism and that could carry potentially serious economic consequences in coming years.
When the Census Bureau releases its latest population estimates on Monday, demographers expect that Florida and New York will be narrowly separated – perhaps by as little as a few thousand people – and that if Florida does not pass New York this time, it almost certainly will do so in 2014.
The census figures underscore immigration trends, as foreign-born migrants continue to move to warm-weather states such as California and Texas – No. 1 and 2 – as well as to Florida. The newcomers also include winter-weary New Yorkers who move or retire to Florida at a rate of over 50,000 a year, twice the number of Floridians who head to New York.
But the shift also highlights the struggles in upstate New York, which has lost large-scale manufacturing jobs and large chunks of population, offsetting consistent gains in New York City. But the city’s growth has seemingly not been robust enough to stave off hubs in Florida like Jacksonville, […]
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