1. The search to find cures for the annoying aches and pains that are part of everyday life can be found in the recorded histories of every culture.
2. The use of hot peppers, mustard, radishes and sugar are among the many food items central to the art of healing found throughout history. Researchers have begun to study some of these ancient methods of pain relief. In particular, scientists are examining the ability of certain foods to reduce pain.
3. Do foods such as these work as pain relievers or are their effects simply physiological? Researchers say that the results of several studies indicate the pain relief is real. It is believed that certain foods stimulate the body's natural pain-killer called endorphins. Sugar appears to be one such food.
4. Infants given sugar water, before having their fingers pricked to obtain a blood sample, cried 50 percent less than those given plain water. Hot substances, such as peppers, are believed to fool the body into thinking it's in pain. They irritate the tongue causing a searing sensation; tears come into the eyes. Your body thinks it is being hurt. Endorphins flood into the body and you start to feel better.
5. While no one is suggesting replacing aspirin with hot peppers, the research does indicate that there is more to some of the ancient cures than we suspected. New studies indicate foods high in needed minerals such as copper and manganese act to block the pain or reduce it frequency.
6. The gravity of such findings is clear. Certainly the prospect of stimulating the body's natural pain-control system, as a means of reducing the reliance on pills, would be a positive achievement.
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Thursday, December 4, 2008
Don't Interrupt Others or Finish Their Sentences
Don't Interrupt Others or Finish Their Sentences
It wasn't until a few years ago that I realized how often I interrupted others and/or finished their sentences. Shortlly thereafter, I also realized how destructive this habit was, not only to the respect and love I received from others but also for the tremendous amount of energy it takes to try to be in two heads at once! Think about it for a moment.
When vou hurry someone along, interrupt someone, or finish his or her sentence, you have to keep track not only of your onn thoughts but of those of the person you are interrupting as well. This tendency (which, by the way, is extremely common in busy people), encourages both parties to speed up their speech and their thinking.
This, in turn, makes both people- nervous, -irritable, and annoyed. lt's downright exhausting. lt's also the cause of many arguments,because if there's one thing almost everyone resents, it's someone who doesn't listen to what they are saying. And how can you really listen to what someone is saying when you are speaking for that person?
Once you begin noticing yourself interrupting others, you'll see that this insidious tendency is nothing more than an innocent habit that has become invisible to you. This is good news because it means that all you really have to do is to begin catching yourself when you forget.
Remind yourself (before a conversation begins, if possible) to be patient and wait. Tell yourself to allow the other person to finish speaking before you take your turn. You'll notice, right away, how much the interactions with the people in your life will improve as a direct result of this simple act.
The people you communicate with will feel much more relaxed.around you when they feel heard and listened to. You'll also notice how much more relaxed you'll feel when you stop interrupting others. Your heart and pulse rates will slow down, and you'll begin to enjoy your conversations rather than rush through them. This is an easy way to become a more relaxed, loving person.
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How Dictionaries Are Made?
"How Dictionaries Are Made?
1. The task of writing a dictionary begins with the reading of vast amounts of the literature of the period or subject that it is intended to cover. As the editors read, they copy on cards every interesting or rare word, every unusual or peculiar occurrence of a common word, a large number of common words in their ordinary uses, and also the sentences in which each of these words appears, thus:
pail
The dairy pails bring home increase of milk
Keats, Endymion
I,44-45
2. That is to say, the context of each word is collected, along with word itself. For a really big job of dictionary writing, such as the Oxford English Dictionary (usually bound in about 25 volumes), millions of such cards are collected, and the task of editing occupies decades.
3. As the cards are collected, they are alphabetized and sorted. When the sorting is completed, there will be for each word anywhere from two to three to several hundred illustrative quotations, each on its card.
4. To define a word, then, the dictionary editor places before him the stack of cards illustrating that word; each of the cards represents an actual use of the word by a writer of some literary or historical importance.
5. He reads the cards carefully, discards some, rereads the rest, and divides up the stack according to what he thinks are the several senses of the word. Finally, he writes his definitions, following the hard-and-fast rule that each definition must be based on what the quotations in front of him reveal about the meaning of the word.
6. The editor cannot be influenced by what he thinks a given word ought to mean. He must work according to the cards or not at all.
7. The writing of a dictionary, therefore, is not a task of setting up authoritative statements about the "true meanings" of words, but a task of recording, to the best of one's ability, what various words have meant to authors in the distant or immediate past.
8. The writer of a dictionary is a historian, not a lawgiver. If, for example, we had been writing a dictionary in 1890, or even as late as 1919, we could have said that the word broadcast means "to scatter" (seed and so on) but we could not have decreed that from 1921 on, the commonest meaning of the word should become "to disseminate audible messages, etc., by wireless telephony."
9. To regard the dictionary, as an "authority," therefore, is to credit the dictionary writer with gifts of prophecy which neither he nor anyone else possesses. In choosing our words when we speak or write, we can be guided by the historical record afforded us by the dictionary,
10. but we cannot be bound by it, because new situations, new experiences, new inventions, new feelings, are always compelling us to give new uses to old words. Looking under a "hood," we should ordinarily have found, five hundred years ago, a monk; today, we find a motorcar engine.
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1. The task of writing a dictionary begins with the reading of vast amounts of the literature of the period or subject that it is intended to cover. As the editors read, they copy on cards every interesting or rare word, every unusual or peculiar occurrence of a common word, a large number of common words in their ordinary uses, and also the sentences in which each of these words appears, thus:
pail
The dairy pails bring home increase of milk
Keats, Endymion
I,44-45
2. That is to say, the context of each word is collected, along with word itself. For a really big job of dictionary writing, such as the Oxford English Dictionary (usually bound in about 25 volumes), millions of such cards are collected, and the task of editing occupies decades.
3. As the cards are collected, they are alphabetized and sorted. When the sorting is completed, there will be for each word anywhere from two to three to several hundred illustrative quotations, each on its card.
4. To define a word, then, the dictionary editor places before him the stack of cards illustrating that word; each of the cards represents an actual use of the word by a writer of some literary or historical importance.
5. He reads the cards carefully, discards some, rereads the rest, and divides up the stack according to what he thinks are the several senses of the word. Finally, he writes his definitions, following the hard-and-fast rule that each definition must be based on what the quotations in front of him reveal about the meaning of the word.
6. The editor cannot be influenced by what he thinks a given word ought to mean. He must work according to the cards or not at all.
7. The writing of a dictionary, therefore, is not a task of setting up authoritative statements about the "true meanings" of words, but a task of recording, to the best of one's ability, what various words have meant to authors in the distant or immediate past.
8. The writer of a dictionary is a historian, not a lawgiver. If, for example, we had been writing a dictionary in 1890, or even as late as 1919, we could have said that the word broadcast means "to scatter" (seed and so on) but we could not have decreed that from 1921 on, the commonest meaning of the word should become "to disseminate audible messages, etc., by wireless telephony."
9. To regard the dictionary, as an "authority," therefore, is to credit the dictionary writer with gifts of prophecy which neither he nor anyone else possesses. In choosing our words when we speak or write, we can be guided by the historical record afforded us by the dictionary,
10. but we cannot be bound by it, because new situations, new experiences, new inventions, new feelings, are always compelling us to give new uses to old words. Looking under a "hood," we should ordinarily have found, five hundred years ago, a monk; today, we find a motorcar engine.
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Plants
Plants
Why do some desert plants grow tall and thin like organ pipes? Why do most trees in the tropics keep their leaves year round? Why in the Arctic tundra are there no trees at all? After many years without convincing general answers, we now know much about what sets the fashion in plant design.
Using terminology more characteristic of a thermal engineer than of a botanist, we can think of plants as mechanisms that must balance their heat budgets. A plant by day is staked out under the Sun with no way of sheltering itself. All day long it absorbs heat. If it did not lose as much heat as it gained, then eventually it would die. Plants get rid of their heat by warming the air around them, by evaporating water, and by radiating heat to the atmosphere and the cold, black reaches of space. Each plant must balance its heat budget so that its temperature is tolerable for the processes of life.
Plants in the Arctic tundra lie close to the ground in the thinlayer of still air that clings there. A foot or two above the ground are the winds of Arctic cold. Tundra plants absorb eat from the Sun and tend to warm up; they probably balance most of their heat budgets by radiating heat to space, but also b warming the still air that is trapped among them. As long as Arctic plants are close to te ground, they can balance their heat budgets. But if they should stretch up as a tree does, they would lift their working parts, their leaves, into the streaming Arctic winds.Then it is likely that the plants could not absorbed enough heat from the Sun to avoid being cooled below a critical temperature. Your heat budget does not critical temperature. You heat budget does not balance if you stand tall in the Arctic.
Such thinking also helps explain other characteristics of plant design. A desert plant faces the opposite problem from that of an Arctic plant -----the danger of overheating. It is short of water and so cannot cool itself by evaporation without dehydrating. The familiar sticklike shape of desert plants represents one of the solutions to this problem: the shape exposes the smallest possible surgace to incoming solar radiation and provide the largest possible surface from which the plant can radiate heat. In tropical rain forests, by way of contrast, the scorching Sun is not a problem for plants because there is sufficient water.
This working model allows us to connect the general characteristics of the forms of plants in different habitats with factors such as temperature, availability of water, and presence or absence of seasonal differences. Our Earth is covered with a patchwork quilt of meteorological conditions, and the patterns of this patchwork are faithfully reflected by the plants.
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Why do some desert plants grow tall and thin like organ pipes? Why do most trees in the tropics keep their leaves year round? Why in the Arctic tundra are there no trees at all? After many years without convincing general answers, we now know much about what sets the fashion in plant design.
Using terminology more characteristic of a thermal engineer than of a botanist, we can think of plants as mechanisms that must balance their heat budgets. A plant by day is staked out under the Sun with no way of sheltering itself. All day long it absorbs heat. If it did not lose as much heat as it gained, then eventually it would die. Plants get rid of their heat by warming the air around them, by evaporating water, and by radiating heat to the atmosphere and the cold, black reaches of space. Each plant must balance its heat budget so that its temperature is tolerable for the processes of life.
Plants in the Arctic tundra lie close to the ground in the thinlayer of still air that clings there. A foot or two above the ground are the winds of Arctic cold. Tundra plants absorb eat from the Sun and tend to warm up; they probably balance most of their heat budgets by radiating heat to space, but also b warming the still air that is trapped among them. As long as Arctic plants are close to te ground, they can balance their heat budgets. But if they should stretch up as a tree does, they would lift their working parts, their leaves, into the streaming Arctic winds.Then it is likely that the plants could not absorbed enough heat from the Sun to avoid being cooled below a critical temperature. Your heat budget does not critical temperature. You heat budget does not balance if you stand tall in the Arctic.
Such thinking also helps explain other characteristics of plant design. A desert plant faces the opposite problem from that of an Arctic plant -----the danger of overheating. It is short of water and so cannot cool itself by evaporation without dehydrating. The familiar sticklike shape of desert plants represents one of the solutions to this problem: the shape exposes the smallest possible surgace to incoming solar radiation and provide the largest possible surface from which the plant can radiate heat. In tropical rain forests, by way of contrast, the scorching Sun is not a problem for plants because there is sufficient water.
This working model allows us to connect the general characteristics of the forms of plants in different habitats with factors such as temperature, availability of water, and presence or absence of seasonal differences. Our Earth is covered with a patchwork quilt of meteorological conditions, and the patterns of this patchwork are faithfully reflected by the plants.
rb
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Columbus and the Arawak Indians
Golumbus and the Arawak Indians
When Christopher Columbus landed in the islands of the Caribbean, about 40 million people lived in North and South America. But Columbus did not know that he had discovered a new land.- Indeed, he thought he had landed in India, so upon seeing the natives, he called them -lndians.- Today they are known as Native Americans. One of the many tribes that lived on these islands was the Arawaks.
- The Arawaks were quite different from any people that Columbus had ever seen-and indeed, Columbus and his men. arriving on the huge ship wearing their outlandish clothing, were quite unlike anything the Arawak had ever seen.
- But despite the language barriers, the Arawak and Columbus were able to communicate in a friendly way. Columbus learned that they could take the poison out of a root called manioc (MAN-ee-ock).
- They then ground this up and combined it with other ingredients to make bread. The Arawak also ate fish. sharks, turtles, and yams. The Arawaks were impressed bv Columbus' ships, the Nina, th.e Pinta and the Santa Maria, on which Columbus sailed.
- The Arawak had never even envisioned such crafts, but they did have giant canoes that could hold up to 100 people. (There were about 40 people on the Pinta.) They made these canoes by chopping down huge trees and then lighting small fires in the logs.
- After burning out the middle, they used stone tools to scoop out the ashes. Ther fashioned huge oars from the limbs of the trees. The Arawak were skilled in guiding the canoes and, with many rowers, could get up good speed.
- Columbus learned many things about the Arawaks. One thing that surprised him was that, like the Europeans, the Arawaks also played games for fun. The Arawaks played a game called batey (bah-Tay). Which was lots a lot like soccer.
- It was played with rubber balls, with participants kicking the ball across a huge field. Instead of just playing for fun, the Arawaks played batey to settle problems without fighting. The Arawak did not have any metal items such as knives or guns.
- As Columbus traveled throughout the C-aribbean, he met many other Native American tribes. Some of these he treated with respect and some he took as prisoners to be brought back to Spain.
- Columbus made four voyages to the New World, but he died without ever knowing that he had found a land previously unknown to the Europeans. He always thought that he was just sailing around islands near what must be China or India.
- He never set foot on what is now the United States. Columbus was really looking for a route to the east (China) and for gold. What he found were two entirely unknown continents that contained fascinating people who had been living there for thousands of years.
by Mary Rose
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