Gleanings of the Week Ending March 19, 2016

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Eyeglasses that can focus themselves are on the way – I’m not sure whether this is the technology that will actually do it….but I sure would like glasses that adjusted to my needs rather than the static versions we have now.

Thickly Layered Paintings Literally Pop Off Artist’s Canvas – Bright and colorful….good paintings to pair with a spring day!

Down the Drain: Here’s why we should use rainwater to flush toilets – Good rationale but it seems like the retrofit for an existing house would be expensive. Our house had 3.5 bathrooms and they are not close together. The logistics of getting the collected rainwater to the toilets would take some design work.

Time to rethink your vegetable oil? – Research about what is good about linoleic acid. The study was funded by NIH (better than if it had been funded by lobbyists pushing grapeseed oil).

World Average Temperature Could Rise by 1.5 Degrees as Early as 2020 – This is close enough to be in the lifetime of the majority of us.

On-the-spot diagnosis of certain cancers and other diseases is closer to becoming a reality thanks to sensitive biosensor – If this technology is effective and done for a lot less cost than current methods (mammograms, colonoscopies, ultrasound, x-rays, biopsies, etc) – it will be quite a boon for patients. But will the vested interests of our medical system allow it to replace all that infrastructure in place for diagnosis?

An Interactive Timeline of the History of the Earth – A resource listed for the Big History Course I am taking. After landing on the page – click on the red triangle on the left of the screen and the timeline beginning with the Big Bang appears. Click and drag the triangle to the right and see more details on the progression along the timeline. When the triangle gets to 1 billion years ago, another bar will appear below with a new triangle on the left. Continue in this mode to the present. The page gets very busy!

Potential new therapeutic target for hypertension may offer less side effects – This therapy seems to be focusing on something closer to the ‘cause’ for age related hypertension which is very appealing. The more we understand about the body as a biological system, the more therapies will be of this type.

These 27 Solutions Could Help the U.S. Slash Food Waste – When I saw the picture of the food scraps at the top of the article – I realized how far I’ve come in the way I prepare food. Some of those green ‘scraps’ (stems and green leaves) looked good enough to go into a stir fry or soup! If everyone learned to use the produce they buy more completely – there would not be as much waste to deal with.

Facebooks is a growing and unstoppable digital graveyard – In 2012, 30 million users with Facebook accounts had died…some estimates claim that 8,000 users die each day. Just as Facebook has changed the meaning of ‘friend’ and ‘like’….it leaves digital legacy of its users.

Learning Log – February 2016

There are so many ways that we learn new things. Since I started logging something new I learn every day – I am more conscious of how varied what I’m learning and the way I am learning it really is.

Observation is a way to learn new things. Birds were very active in February in our area and two ‘new to me’ observations were mourning doves making and geese climbing from open water up onto ice!

Experience. Several items on my learning log fit this category: 1) I started experimenting with not wearing my glasses and discovered that I rarely need them when I am working at my computer…and the neck/shoulder discomfort I had started to feel sometimes later in the day has completely disappeared. 2) Another learning experience this month was having a thyroid nodule biopsy; it was not bad but I really am not keen to have another one. 3) I learned to use a laminator (to make a tree identification guide more durable). It isn’t a big thing but was ‘new to me.’

Books. I started looked at the Hathi Trust collection of online books; there are so many items there is it overwhelming; botanical prints are my first ‘theme’ for browsing. On the physical book side, I read several books about Wild Life Refuges and have already started applying what I read to vacation planning; we’re going to visit the 4 National Wildlife Refuges on the Eastern Shore (of Maryland and Virginia) in March: Eastern Neck, Blackwater, Prime Hook and Chincoteague. In the Internet Archive arena my theme for browsing in February was ‘wallpaper’ with particular focus on wallpaper catalogs from the year I was born!

Udemy’s Photography Masterclass: Your Complete Guide to Photography). I finished as much of the class as I was interested in. I learned a few things but realized that I am spoiled by the quality of the courses I’ve taken on Coursera and Creative Live. The 4 Udemy courses I have taken are just not up to the same standard in terms of production or content.

Coursera’s Soul Beliefs (Unit 1). I finished the 11 ‘weeks’ of lectures for this portion of the course and will start on the Unit 2 lectures in March.

Coming up in March – there are already some other types of learning coming up: travel and ‘live’ classes.

Different in 2016

Now that we are more than a month in to 2016 – I am getting serious about what habits I want to tweak this year. They are a little different than a ‘resolution’ or a goal because of the way I am thinking about them as habits. Habits are the things I do almost without thinking and there are strategies for changing them that apply.

The most significant one I am changing (not the optimism) is to stop drinking soft drinks entirely. Late last year I stopped using artificial sweeteners (and didn’t start using sugars) except for those in the Diet Pepsi. It’s time to stop the soft drink habit both because there is no nutritional benefit (and may harm), they are some of the heaviest items in my grocery bags, and the plastic bottles are a significant contributor to the recycle ‘trash’ bulk. I tried the strategy of just stopping suddenly and that didn’t work very well. I fell off the wagon after a few weeks. Now I am color coding the days on my calendar: red if I have a soft drink, green if I don’t. We’ll see if that works. Concurrently – I am developing drinks (water with a little black cherry juice is my current favorite) that I can have in lieu of a soft drink. So I am applying habit changing strategies:

• Make is conscious rather than automatic by calling attention to it (color coding my calendar)
• Develop a substitute habit (another drink choice)

Another habit that I am changing is when I wear my glasses. I have worn glasses or contact lenses virtually all my waking hours since I was in third grade. In the past few years, I have noticed that I am very comfortable reading on my tablet without my glasses. Just recently, I’ve discovered that quite a lot of what I do on my computer can be done without my classes. I tried it because I noticed that I was holding my head at an angle (to look through the part of the lenses for the best computer distance vision) that lead to quiet an ache in my neck and shoulders by the end of the day. The neck and shoulder problem is totally resolved by not wearing my glasses as much when I am at my computer so – we’ll see if I continue to like using the computer without glasses…. or whether I get some glasses specifically made for use at the computer.

Giving up soft drinks and not wearing my glasses as often are going to be challenging…just as breaking any long duration habit always is. I don’t think I could tackle 10 things like this…but 2 – I should be able to focus enough to change these habits.