Life its ownself..........................

 We pass our existence within this warm wobble of flesh and yet take it almost entirely for granted.  how many among us know even roughly where the spleen is or what it does?  Of the difference between tendons and ligaments? Or what our lymph nodes are up to?  How may times a day do you suppose you blink?  Five hundred?  A thousand?  You've no idea, of course.  Well, you blink fourteen thousand times a day—so much that your eyes are shut for twenty-three minutes of every waking day.  Yet you never have to think about it, because every second of every day your body undertakes a literally unquantifiable number of tasks—a quadrillion, a nonillion, a quindecillion, a vigiantillion (these are actual measures), at all events some number vastly beyond imagining—without requiring an instant of your attention.

-Bill Bryson, The Body:  A Guide For Occupants

Ed Note:  To save you the trouble, a vigintillion is, in US measurements, a number equal to 1 followed by 63 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

You can look up the spleen yourself.

the rare and supremely agreeable condition....

     Altogether it takes 7 billion billion billion (that's 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 octillion) atoms to make you.  No one can say why those 7 billion billion billion have such an urgent desire to be you.  They are mindless particles, after all, without a single thought or notion between them.  Yet somehow for the length of your existence, they will build and maintain all the countless systems and structures necessary to keep you humming, and to make you you, to give you form and shape and let you enjoy the rare and supremely agreeable condition known as life.
     That's a much bigger job than you realize.  Unpacked, you are positively enormous.  Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast.  The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around the earth.  The most remarkable part of all is your DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid).  You have a meter of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto.  Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system.  You are int the most literal sense cosmic.

-Bill Bryson, The Body:  A Guide for Occupants

One reason life is so interesting......

via

Please pass the salt...................

.................More from the world of unsettled science:   Higher salt intake may be a key to reducing obesity?   It gets curiouser and curiouser.   Full story here.  Wee excerpt (the Mike reference is Bloomberg) here:


Savor this (pardon the pun): salt consumption may be useful in fighting obesity, the current obsession of the nattering class.  If Mike has been encouraging people to gain weight by limiting salt consumption, he is undoing the work he did limiting soda servings to 16 ounces.

via

In praise of worms (and stuff)...................?

It is probably not just worms. The impoverishment of our gut flora — the bacteria in our intestines — in the modern world, as a result of excessive hygiene and antibiotics, looks increasingly likely to be the cause of various other health issues, including obesity and possibly autism, though early experiments on the latter are inconclusive. Open Biome is a “stool bank” that will supply you with faecal transplants from healthy people to enrich your gut garden. It will also pay good money for faecal donations from healthy people. Now there’s a tip you did not expect to read in The Times.

I do hope you enjoy your lunch.

-concludes this Matt Ridely post

The essence.........................

      Socrates spent much of his time pondering the Good Life and how to attain it.  For he believed, and it was the core of his belief, that only by striving to lead good lives did humans attain a degree of content in their existence and happiness in eternity.  He had a simple view of the body and soul and their relationship.  The body was the active, physical, earthly aspect of a person and was mortal.  The soul was the spiritual aspect and was immortal.  The body was greedy for pleasure and material satisfactions, was selfish, and if not kept under control, became a seat of vice.  The soul was the intellectual and moral side of the person, which had a natural propensity to do right and to improve itself.  It could be, with proper training, the seat of virtue.  The most important occupation of a human being was to subdue his bodily instincts and train himself to respond to the teachings of the soul.  This training took the form of recognizing, understanding, and learning about virtues and applying this knowledge to everyday situations.  Such, to Socrates, was the essence of wisdom.  Knowledge, virtue, and wisdom were thus intimately related, and exploring these connections was the object of his "examinations" of himself and others.

-Paul Johnson,  Socrates:  A Man For Our Times

On balance and bearing fruit......

Unless the mind, body, and spirit are
equally developed and fully
integrated, no spiritual peak 
or state of enlightenment
can be sustained.
This is why extremist religions and
ideologies do not bear fruit.

When the mind and spirit are forced into
unnatural austerities or adherence 
to external dogmas, the body
grows sick and weak and
becomes a traitor to 
the whole being.
When the body is emphasized to the
exclusion of the mind and spirit,
they become like trapped snakes:
frantic, explosive, and poisonous
to one's person.
All such imbalances inevitably lead to
exhaustion and expiration
of the life force.

True self-cultivation involves the
holistic integration of
mind, body, and spirit.
Balancing yin and yang through the
various practices of the Integral Way,
one achieves complete unity 
within and without.
This manifest in the world as
perfect equilibrium,
and perfect grace.

-Verse 58
Hua Hu Ching:  The Unknown Teachings of Lao Tzu
as channeled by Brian Browne Walker

Been watching my mind here of late............

The gray in your hair doesn't make you old,
Nor the crow's feet under your eyes, I'm told.
But when your mind makes a contract your body can't fill,
You're over the hill, brother, over the hill.
-Mary E. Mitchell, as excerpted from here

Only as a public service......................

....................would we point you to this Vox  post on flatulence.

More than you wanted to know....................

.................about the amygdala can be found here or here.

No fixed agenda............................

“If you obsess over whether you are making the right decision, you are basically assuming that the universe will reward you for one thing and punish you for another.

The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience. 

If this sounds too mystical, refer again to the body. Every significant vital sign- body temperature, heart rate, oxygen consumption, hormone level, brain activity, and so on- alters the moment you decide to do anything… decisions are signals telling your body, mind, and environment to move in a certain direction.” 
-Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life

via

This is really cool........................

.........and makes odd sense in an eerie kind of way.   But, where's the ice cream?

Revolutionary anatomy.................................

"For more than 1,300 years, all Western professional knowledge about human anatomy has stemmed from the teachings of the Greek physician Galen (AD 129-216), and most physicians were never required to study the inside of the human body.  So when Flemish physician and anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514-64) suddenly focused his attention on dissecting human corpses and describing what he found in meticulous detail, both his approach and its results shook up the medical field.  Many considered it profane."
-Scott Christianson, 100 Diagrams That Changed The World

Sleep.....................................

"We definitely have a culture where lack of sleep is glorified. I think that it's a good skill to be able to operate as well as possible on low sleep, but that doesn't mean that that skill should be exercised regularly. By getting a full nights rest and sleeping as long as your body wants you to, you can easily overcome the raw time shortage through better focus and higher quality work."
-Tynan, as excerpted from this post

image via

This can't be good news................

 “For a typical North American, their fat tissue is their biggest organ,”

Never heard it put that way before.  Full story, from whence the quote came, is told here.

thanks craig

Damn........................

Majesty...........................

via

Admiring things I will never be doing................

thanks jonathan