Better in Britain

Yes, the roads are confusing, the food portions unambitious, the peanut butter not so good, but for this American, life in the U.K. has its compensations.   By Yasmeen Serhan

This September marks my fifth year of living in Britain, a milestone that comes with its own special reward: a test. 

Specifically, the “Life in the U.K. Test,” an examination that anyone seeking to obtain permanent residency rights in the country and ultimately British citizenship must take. 

The test covers all sorts of questions on Britain’s history—including such seeming trivia as the specific ways Henry VIII got rid of each of his six wives—its laws, its values, and its traditions.

“Comedy and satire, the ability to laugh at ourselves, are an important part of the U.K. character,” reads one passage from the official study handbook. In another, pubs are described as “an important part of U.K. social culture.

”Self-deprecating humor and pub culture are just some of the survival skills you naturally pick up if you live here long enough. But as I prepare for this exam, I can’t help but think about all the practical things about British life that the test-prep materials leave out. 

Contrary to what Sir Elton John would have you believe, sorry really doesn’t seem to be the hardest word for Brits (even if they aren’t always using it sincerely). Talking about the weather really is a perfectly acceptable conversation starter. 

“You all right?” really is a simple greeting rather than an expression of genuine concern.  READ MORE...

Running Bear

 

Fixing Shoulder Pain

After the use of their tissue platform, the researchers observed regeneration of tissues 

and shoulder function recovery.

The new complex tissue platform can restore damaged rotator cuffs

The typical office worker often has soreness throughout their body as a result of their sedentary desk jobs. Even young individuals may develop shoulder pain, which was previously primarily an issue for elderly people. 

Once shoulder pain creeps in, it is difficult to dress oneself, let alone move one’s body freely. It is also difficult to fall asleep. While the rotator cuffs are often naturally harmed as we age, repairing them has shown to be difficult.

Through a collaboration with Professor Hak Soo Choi at the Harvard Medical School, a Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) research team made up of Professor Dong-Woo Cho, Dr. Suhun Chae, and Jinah Jang, as well as Professor Jinah Jang and Ph.D. candidate Uijung Yong, has developed a complex tissue platform that can repair damaged rotator cuffs. 

This platform, which can precisely replicate the intricate structure of rotator cuffs, is 3D-bioprinted using tissue-specific extracellular matrix bioink.

The international journal Bioactive Materials recently published the findings of this study, which could potentially provide patients with chronic shoulder pain renewed hope.


The study team transplanted this platform in rats that had full-thickness rotator cuff injuries. The researchers observed tissue regeneration and recovery in shoulder function. 

The results proved that the platform, which includes stem cells, can actually regenerate rotator cuffs.  READ MORE...

Approaching Horse

 

Shortest Path to Human Happiness

The researchers created a digital model of psychology aimed to improve mental health. The system offers superior personalization and identifies the shortest path toward a cluster of mental stability for any individual.

Deep Longevity, in collaboration with Harvard Medical School, presents a deep learning approach to mental health.

Deep Longevity has published a paper in Aging-US outlining a machine learning approach to human psychology in collaboration with Nancy Etcoff, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School, an authority on happiness and beauty.

The authors created two digital models of human psychology based on data from the Midlife in the United States study.


The first model is an ensemble of deep neural networks that predicts respondents’ chronological age and psychological well-being in 10 years using information from a psychological survey. This model depicts the trajectories of the human mind as it ages. 

It also demonstrates that the capacity to form meaningful connections, as well as mental autonomy and environmental mastery, develops with age. It also suggests that the emphasis on personal progress is constantly declining, but the sense of having a purpose in life only fades after 40-50 years. 

These results add to the growing body of knowledge on socioemotional selectivity and hedonic adaptation in the context of adult personality development.  READ MORE...

Escaped Fish

 

Finding Yourself

How To Find Yourself

1. Think back to a time when you really felt comfortable in your own skin
2.  Mull over your family dynamic
3. Get out and try new things
4. Start going places by yourself
5. Try to figure out what's important to you
6. Ditch bad habits
7. Learn how to practice mindfulness—and actually do it
8. Tell your inner critic to get lost
9. Learn to be okay with not being liked by everyone
10. Volunteer
11. Unplug more
12. Identify what makes you different from everyone else
13. Consider therapy

SOURCE:  WellandGood.com

Every expert tells their audience to make a list...  and, every expert takes the list and tries to explain what each of the items on that list actually means or doesn't mean.   However, none of these so-called experts actually tells you how to think back, mull it over, try to figure out, learn how, unplug, or identify (another list).

Finding yourself is a pretty straightforward activity to initiate...  One of the best ways, perhaps the only way to find yourself is to take the Myers-Briggs Online Questionaire....  CLICK HERE...

However, this online questionnaire is NOT OFFICIAL and may not be 100% accurate.  But, even if it is not 100% accurate, it will still be 90%+ accurate, giving you a damn good idea of your personality.

If you prefer a more accurate test, then contact Myers Briggs Foundation and be put in touch with a professional to administer this test.

Personal Note:  I have taken this questionnaire 4 times during my life with a 10-year interval between each test and all 4 tests yielded the same result.

Once you have your personality identified, type those 4 letters into GOOGLE to find out what your personality is all about.  Once you understand your personality, you will be in the perfect position to begin investigating what you need to do to find yourself...

You will not need therapy which is a crutch anyway.  Therapists can help you but more often than not, they are helping themselves to your money as they lead you through the layers of your life that prevent you from finding yourself.

If you have determination and discipline, you can do it yourself.

Quality of Life - Part IV

Quality of life is defined by the World Health

Organization as "an individual's perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns". Wikipedia

There are several key terms in the above description...

1. Position in life
2. context of culture
3. context of value systems
4. goals
5. expectations
6. standards
7. concerns

My Personal Story...

"Quality of life,"  what the hell is that, I asked my self a few times before I reached the age of 50?  And, my answer was always the same...  "who gives a shit?"  I had a job or would soon have a job...  I had the money to do whatever I wanted as long as it was not too expensive...   I mean I could fly to Florida to visit my childhood friend but I could not fly first class.  I could visit him as long as I stayed at his home and not at a motel.

That was my quality of life as perceived by me...  and, I could see all around me, the other people who had the money or the willingness to use a credit card to have a higher quality of life by enjoying the luxuries of life that I had deemed was not possible for me given my current state of affairs...

But, I was alive, physically fit and content.

At the age of 60, my life changed substantially...

I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and a few months later discovered that I had experienced a severe heart attack and should undergo a triple bypass.  I was able to have stents inserted instead.

Five years after that situation, my cancer treatments had made my body susceptible to melanoma and now I was being treated for two cancers simultaneously.  The cancer treatments also screwed with my thyroid and 14 years after my cancer diagnosis, I underwent lumbar fusion surgery to fuse together L2, L3, L4, L5, and S1 disks from which I am currently recovering three weeks after surgery.

My quality of life has declined rapidly and having more money would not have made any difference at all to that quality of life other than I would be recovering in a more expensive home...

When I was 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or even 60, I had no idea that my quality of life would be like it is at the age of 74...  but, here I am...

My quality of life is all MENTAL these days...

• My wife and I are debt-free
• My wife and I each have reliable cars
• Our backyard has a 24-foot round pool surrounded by an oversized deck that incorporates a gazebo, a sunning area, and a hot tub
• Our 24oo square foot home sits on an acre of land
• We live in a quiet and safe community
• We walk around the community for exercise
• We have the finances to pay our bills until both are 95
• We are 40 minutes away from UT Medical Center
• We are 50 minutes away from an airport
• We grow our own vegetables each summer

In case you are wondering, the photo that I use is from 1972 when I was honorably discharged from the US Navy...  I cut off my beard a few days later and have been clean-shaven ever since except for a couple of years where I supported a mustache and/or a goatee.  I don't like to have my photo taken so I use old photos.

Having more money would not alter my physical health...  

Having a larger house would be a burden even if I was able to pay someone to clean it each week...

Having a driver would just make me lazier...

Eating great food at a fancy restaurant would just make me fatter along with the consumption of alcohol which I no longer drink...

My quality of life is better than some but worse than others...  and, I don't care either way because my quality of life is what I have been given and what I have earned...  so, it is what it is.

Gamer Kitten

 

Improve Your Memory

Or in non-researcher-speak, sleeping on it helps your brain file away what you've learned and makes that information easier to access.

But you don't have to go to bed to improve your memory and recall.

A study just published in Nature Reviews Psychology found that "evn a few minutes of rest with your eyes closed can improve memory, perhaps to the same degree as a full night of sleep."

Psychologists call that "offline waking rest." In its purest form, offline waking rest can be closing your eyes and vegging out for a couple minutes. But offline waking rest can also be daydreaming. 

Mind wandering. Zoning out. None of which sounds productive, but actually can be: Without those intermittent periods of lack of focus, memory consolidation doesn't occur nearly as efficiently.  READ MORE...

Deer Lover Cat

 

Moon's Permanent Shadows

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research develop­ments and trends in mathe­matics and the physical and life sciences.



ON OCTOBER 9, 2009, a 2-ton rocket smashed into the moon traveling at 9,000 kilometers per hour. As it exploded in a shower of dust and heated the lunar surface to hundreds of degrees Celsius, the jet-black crater into which it plummeted, called Cabeus, briefly filled with light for the first time in billions of years.

The crash was no accident. NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission aimed to see what would be kicked up from the lunar shadows by the impact. A spacecraft trailing the rocket flew through the dust plume to sample it, while NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter observed from afar. The results of the experiment were astonishing: Scientists detected 155 kilograms of water vapor mixed into the dust plume. They had, for the first time, found water on the moon. “It was absolutely definitive,” said Anthony Colaprete of NASA’s Ames Research Center, the principal investigator of LCROSS.

The moon isn’t an obvious reservoir of water. “It’s really weird when you stop to think about it,” said Mark Robinson, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University. Its lack of atmosphere and extreme temperatures should cause any water to almost instantly evaporate. Yet about 25 years ago, spacecraft began to detect signatures of hydrogen around the moon’s poles, hinting that water might be trapped there as ice. LCROSS proved this theory. Scientists now think there’s not just a bit of water ice on the moon; there are 6 trillion kilograms of it.  READ MORE...

For His Owner

 

King Arthur's Tomb

According to popular lore, Arthur’s Stone, a roughly 5,000-year-old tomb in the West Midlands of England, boasts ties to King Arthur, the mythical leader of Camelot. One legend holds that Arthur found a pebble in his shoe while marching to battle and threw it aside, at which point it grew in size out of “pride [at] having been touched by [him],” per Atlas Obscura. Another story suggests that Arthur clashed with a giant whose elbows left massive impressions in the earth when he fell in battle.

Myths aside, the Neolithic tomb has long mystified experts and the public alike. Now, reports James Thomas for the Hereford Times, the first-ever excavation of the site is poised to shed light on its enigmatic history.

Researchers from the University of Manchester and English Heritage, the charity that cares for the monument, are unlikely to unearth the remains of the legendary king. But they do hope to find traces of the actual Neolithic Britons who built and used the chambered tomb. Though archaeologists initially suspected that Arthur’s Stone formed part of a wedge-shaped stone cairn like those found in South Wales and the Cotswolds, recent excavations indicate otherwise.

“I think it has considerable potential,” Julian Thomas, an archaeologist at the University of Manchester, tells the London Times’ Jack Blackburn. “It’s a monument of an entirely different kind to the one that we’d imagined.”

Per a statement, only the inner chamber of the tomb—made up of nine upright stones topped by a massive capstone weighing more than 25 tons—survives today. A previous dig conducted outside of the monument showed that Arthur’s Stone extended into a field to the south and underwent two distinct phases of construction.  READ MORE...

Fire and Rain

 

Twice as Much

The problem with inflation is that expenses go up but income does not...  For many of us, we are making sufficient income that while inflation is annoying, it is not a financial problem...  therefore, we just ride it out and try not bitching about the small stuff in our lives...

For those who are wealthy, it is not even annoying because they are comfortable with paying more than something is really worth and expect to be over-charged for goods and services...

But for the rest of us, inflation is a problem and has a negative impact on every single member of our families...  and yet, those in power and/or those in a leadership position, don't seem to give a shit about how inflation may be harming some Americans...

• We want to BITCH about ABORTION
• We want to BITCH about the gays and lesbians and trans not getting what they deserve
• We want to BITCH about slavery and how blacks were treated 
• We want to BITCH about WHITE SUPREMACY and advantage

  

BUT WE DON'T GIVE A RAT'S ASS ABOUT THE POOR PEOPLE

88% of Americans Say US On The Wrong Track

Nearly 9 in 10 Americans say the country is headed on the wrong track, according to a survey from Monmouth University Poll released on Tuesday.

The survey found that just 10 percent said the country is headed in the right direction — an all-time low since the pollster began asking the question in 2013 — while 88 percent said it is on the wrong track.

The proportion of respondents who said the country is on the wrong track jumped by 9 percentage points from when the question was asked in May, which was also a record at the time.

Only 6 percent of Republicans said the country is headed in the right direction, compared to 18 percent of Democrats. Ninety-two percent of Republicans said the country has gotten off on the wrong track, as do 91 percent of independents and 8 in 10 Democrats.

Older Americans were more likely to believe the country is headed in the right direction.

Sixteen percent of those aged 55 and older said the U.S. is  headed in the right direction, compared to 8 percent of those aged 35 to 54 and 5 percent of those aged 18 to 34.

Monmouth conducted interviews both before and after the Supreme Court voted late last month to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, ending the constitutional right to abortion.    READ MORE...

Are You Experienced?

Are You Experienced is the debut studio album by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Released in 1967, the LP was an immediate critical and commercial success, and it is widely regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time. The album features Jimi Hendrix's innovative approach to songwriting and electric guitar playing which soon established a new direction in psychedelic and hard rock music.

The question "Are you experienced" was commonly interpreted as Hendrix asking if you have experienced drugs. He said that this song was not necessarily about drugs, but about being at peace with yourself. Guitar, bass, and drums were all played backward as part of the effects.

At Peace With Yourself

How in the hell does one go about finding peace within one's self?  Some people find it with drugs, some find it with alcohol, some find it with sex, some find it with faith and religion, some find it through meditating, and there are others who find it through working 18+ hours a week.

However, each of those ways is merely a crutch and a false sense of satisfaction that you have, in fact, found peace.

Peace can only be achieved through an inner awareness of self and how one's self interfaces and/or harmonizes with nature and the environment in which they currently exist.  Meditation can relax you and eliminate stress but it does not necessarily result in finding an inner awareness.

Achieving inner awareness oftentimes requires a lifetime of preparation.  Part of your preparation will come from acquiring all of the riches that life has to offer.  Part of the preparation will come from realizing that you must give all of those up.  Part of the preparation is learning how to void your mind and think of nothing at all...  thinking of nothing at all is not as easy as it sounds.  You cannot void your mind at a restaurant, a community center, or even at a beach resort as you stare out at the ocean waves coming into the shore.

Try thinking of nothing.

Close your eyes.

Plug your ears.

Put yourself inside a cardboard box an close the top.

OR...

lay in a pool of water on your back.

the water almost covers your face.

your body floats.

you disassociate yourself with time.

there is no movement of time.

YOU THINK OF NOTHING

But, the act of thinking of nothing means you are thinking of something...

Inner Awareness permeates your body without attraction

You experience the beginning and end of time

Your body no longer belongs to you

You move from one consciousness to another consciousness

You become united with the essence of life

You see inside your soul

You see inside your mind

You see inside your feelings and sensations even though you have none

You have nothing

You are nothing

You need nothing

You become nothing

You are inside the womb of your awareness seeing yourself as creation sees you

YOU ARE AT PEACE

Alexa...

Qualilty of Life - Part III

 

There are serveral key terms in the quality of life description from Part I...  and, we explored three of them in Part II, and now we will explore the remaining ones: 

1. Position in life
2. context of culture
3. context of value systems
4. goals
5. expectations
6. standards
7. concerns

Note:  Goals, expectations, standards, and concerns will change substantially over one's lifetime whether intended or not simply because of age and the condition of our health which could be altered immediately and without provocation.

Goals

Basically, goals are what one wants to achieve during one's lifetime.  However, we seldom think about the goal of retirement when we are 20 years old.  Initially our goals are to graduate from high school and pursue a career.

We might go into the military, college, trade school or simply attempt to find employment.

Our goals change when we get married and again when we have children and again if we were to experience a divorce.

Having goals is what motivates us each day to go to work in whatever capacity and strive to move up the ladder and generate more income for ourselves and for our families.

Middle age changes our goals both mentally and physically as we realize we cannot do those activities that were easily done before.

Consequently our Quality of Life changes...

Expectations

Similar to goals are our expectations and these change in direct relationship to our age.

When we are 20, we can double our age twice from 20 to 40 to 80 and our expectations for our quality of life are large and plentiful.  but once we turn 4o, we can only double our age twice, and we begin to develop a different perspective of our expectations and whether or not they are even realistic or not.

At 50, 60, 70, 80 and above we can no longer double our age and our mental expectations begins to decline as well as our quality of life...  we begin to measure our quality of life day by day...  in other words, what is my quality of life today?

Standards

When we our young, our standards are high as we feel like we can mentally and physically do any damn thing we want to do...  quality of life is therefore high as well...  and life is seen not just as a dream but as a reality that we created.

Age changes those standards as we lose our physical and mental capabilities and that loss impacts our quality of life.  

We no longer want to drive anywhere for a week's vacation like we used to do...  it was commonplace to drive 8-12 hours in one day to get there and return.  And, we may or may not have the finances to fly there...  and if we did, we would still have to rent a vehicle...

Our quality of life changes dramatically when we look at our standards...

Additionally, we would be willing to spend the night in a motel room at 20 that we would not even consider once staying in at 40 or 50...  if for no other reasons than for health concerns...  which brings me to my last subtopic.

Concerns

Quality of life is directly related to concerns and concerns is directly related to finances and health.

• Do we have enough money to do this?
• Have we saved enough money?
• How healthy are we?
• What are COVID?
• What about terrorism?
• What about crime and violence?

TO BE CONTINUED...