Books I'd like to read .

The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic
Phenomena by Dean Radin, Ph.D.
It seems to me that one of the most important discoveries of our time
has gone basically unnoticed. Dean Radin has managed to pull it all
together into one book, and still it’s been ignored by society at large. A t
the time The Conscious Universe was published, Radin was the director
of the Consciousness Research Laboratory at the University of
Nevada, Las Vegas. As such, he led one of the three most important
parapsychology programs in academia (Princeton and the University
of Edinburgh house the other two). He has also done parapsychological
research for corporations and the US government. Radin’s message
is this: Psi phenomena have been scientifically proven to exist.
Addressing each aspect of psi separately, he shows that decades’
worth of controlled, replicable scientific experiments have yielded
positive, significant results for telepathy, perception at a distance,
perception through time, mind-matter interaction, mental interactions
with living organisms, and field consciousness (which is basically
mind-matter interaction on a large scale). For each phenomenon,
he carefully shows how the experiments have been constantly
redesigned, often ingeniously, to control for confounding factors and
otherwise make them as rigorous and unassailable as possible. He
then reviews the meta-analyses and performs his own meta-analyanalyses
on these experiments, boiling all the results from thousands and
thousands of trials down to the bottom line.
For example, to analyze the results of people trying to mentally influence
a random number generator, Radin crunched the results of
832 studies performed over almost 30 years. He found that for the
controls (i.e. people who weren’t trying to influence the numbers),
the results were right at the chance level of 50 percent. But when
people tried to influence the numbers, the numbers did indeed
change. So much so, in fact, that the odds of those results happening
by chance are more than a trillion to one.
S i m i l a r l y, Radin crunched the numbers from 148 experiments in which
people tried to influence the toss of dice. These experiments were
done over a 50-year period and involved more than 2,500 people trying
to influence 2.6 million dice throws. Overall, the dice throws in the
control group matched chance (specifically, 50.02 percent). However,
among people trying to influence the dice, the hit rate was 51.2 per cent. As Radin says, “This does not look like much, but statistically it
results in odds against chance of more than a billion to one.”
Radin also addresses and refutes the criticisms that have been leveled
against the experiments and meta-analyses, including charges
of selective reporting. He goes on to discuss some theoretical
aspects of psi phenomena and what all this implies for biology, psychology,
medicine, business, and other areas. Interestingly, he looks
at all the corporate research that’s being directed toward parapsychology.
Such giants as Sony, Bell Labs, AT&T, and the gambling
industry have poured money into it, not to mention the research of
governmental entities, including the CIA, FBI, the US military, the
British Army, and Japan’s Science and Technology Agency.
Q u o t e: “The evidence for these basic phenomena is so well established
that most psi researchers today no longer conduct ‘proof-orie
n t e d ’ experiments. Instead, they focus largely on ‘process-oriente
d ’ questions like, What influences psi performance? and How
does it work?” [p 6]
Quote: “Honorton and Ferrari surveyed the English-language scientific
literature to retrieve all experiments reporting forced-choice precognition
tests. They found 309 studies, reported in 113 articles published
from 1935 to 1987, and contributed by sixty-two different
investigators. The database consisted of nearly two million individual
trials by more than fifty thousand subjects. The methods used in
these studies ranged from the use of ESP cards to fully automated,
computer-generated, randomly presented symbols...“The combined result of the 309 studies produced odds against
chance of 1025 to one—that is, ten million billion billion to one. This
eliminated chance as a viable explanation.... Further analyses
showed that twenty-three of the sixty-two investigators (37 percent)
had reported successful studies, so the overall results were not due
to one or two wildly successful experiments. In other words, the precognition
effect had been successfully replicated across many different
experimenters.” [p 114]
HarperSanFrancisco (HarperCollins) • 1997 • 366 pp • hardcover •
$25 • ISBN 0-06-251502-0 • <www.harpercollins.com>

 

Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women
by Christina Hoff Sommers
Almost all attacks against feminism, not surprisingly, come from the
right. But Christina Hoff Sommers is herself a feminist, which
makes her a spy in the house of estrogen. Sommers draws some
crucial distinctions within feminism, though. The feminists of the
1800s and early 1900s were the admirable “classically liberal feminists,”
who based their ideas on the principles of the Enlightenment
and fought to get women the rights men took for granted. The New
feminists, or “gender feminists,” as Sommers calls them, are “divisive,”
“gynocentric,” and “chronically offended.” They don’t think of
women and men as equal members of the human race working for
the same goals; rather, women are a constantly attacked, suppressed
class who must be hostile to the brutal, selfish patriarchal
system that victimizes them.
Although several chapters show how intolerant the gender feminists
are and how they’ve taken over academia to the detriment of all
other viewpoints, the book’s most powerful parts are the ones that
utterly destroy the supposed facts that are touted by mainstream
feminism. In fact, Sommers opens the book by immediately showing
one claim to be outright false. The statistic that 150,000 women and
girls die of anorexia each year in the US has become accepted wisdom
after being trumpeted by Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf, and Ann
Landers, among others. Sommers decided to do what none of them
did—actually check the facts behind this “hidden holocaust” against
females. She finally traced it back to the American Anorexia and
Bulimia Association. She personally talked to the group’s president,
who flatly said that they had been misquoted. The statistic came
from a newsletter they published in 1985 which said that 150,000 to
200,000 females suffer from the disorder. Government stats show
that, in reality, around 100 females die each year from anorexia. Of
course even one death from self-starvation is upsetting, but something
that causes 100 deaths annually is hardly comparable to
something that cause 150,000 deaths annually.
From there, Sommers plows through the other commonly-quoted
“facts” and “figures” that mainstream feminism uses. She eviscerates
the two heavily-flawed, hard-to-find studies that are the source
for the idea that girls have their self-esteem crushed at school.
Among the other things she reveals regarding the claims of feminism:
Domestic abuse of pregnant women is not responsible for
more birth defects than all other causes combined; Super Bowl
Sunday is not “the biggest day of the year for violence against
women;” the phrase “rule of thumb” did not originate because of an
English law that allowed men to beat their wives with a stick no bigger
around than their thumb; the claim that one of four women will
be raped is undoubtedly way too high; the idea of a “backlash” (as
espoused by Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf) is unfounded; and 40
percent of women do not suffer from severe depression.
Sommers looks at the claims of domestic abuse, noting that the
guesstimates range from the Department of Justice’s figure of
626,000 women (married and single) per year to 18 million married women per year (cited by the National Coalition Against Domestic
Violence). Furthermore, few outlets are willing to relay the fact that
women are physically abusive (in minor and major ways) towards
their partners at a rate equal to men. And when it comes to rates of psychological abuse against women, some statistics include heated
exchanges between couples. (For more of Sommers’ work, be sure
to read her second book, The War Against Boys: How Misguided
Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (Simon & Schuster, 2000).)
Quote: “The Wellesley study [on self-esteem] gives lots of attention
to how girls are behind in math and science, though the math and
science test differentials are small compared to large differentials
favoring girls in reading and writing....
“Almost twice as many girls as boys participate in student government,
band and orchestra, and drama or service clubs. More girls
work on the school newspapers and yearbooks. More are members
of honor and service societies. Boys far outnumber girls in sports,
but that gap is narrowing each year.” Boys are also more likely to cut
classes, not do homework, and drop out of high school. Although
girls are more likely to attempt suicide, boys are equally more likely
to actually kill themselves. [pp 160-1]
Q u o t e: “Recently several male students at Vassar were falsely
accused of date rape. After their innocence was established, the
assistant dean of students, Catherine Comins, said of their ordeal:
‘They have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would have necessarily
spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration.
“How do I see women?” “If I did not violate her, could I have?”
“Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?” These are
good questions.’ Dean Comins clearly feels justified in trumping the
common law principle ‘presumed innocent until proven guilty’ by a
new feminist principle, ‘guilty even if proven innocent.’” [p 44]
Touchstone (Simon & Schuster) • 1994 • 320 pp • softcover • $13 •
ISBN 0-684-80156-6 • <www.simonandschuster.com>

The Book Club

Books I've read in after joining the ship.

Fight Club-Chuck Palahniuk (cult classic at its best)

Kurt Vonnegut(He's a genius par none)

Breakfast of Champions
Cat's cradle

Haruki Murakami-Norwegian Wood

Neil Gaiman(One of my favourite writers)

Anansi Boys
Stardust
Snow, glass, apples
Good Omens

The Bleachers-John Grisham(What ?No Lawyers ?)

The Cell-Stephen King(King is good)

Dan Brown(Once you read one of his books you understand his formulaic plot and can well anticipate the twists and turns.Yet very informative and well paced)

Angels and Demons
Digital Fortress.

Indian Authors.

The Alchemy of desire -Tarun Tejpal(One of the best books I've read in the last four months.)

Q & A-Vikas Swarup

The Inheritance of loss-(A book that makes you sad.Well written)

Shalimar the clown-Salman Rushdie.His prose soars all over .

Age of Shiva-Manil Suri(A heavy meticulous book.Well written)

English August-I don't know why this book is touted as a good book.I                           didn't find it that good.
God of Small Things-Bah ! Give an author an award and suddenly                                     everybody thinks that the author is good.

Also read comics - the classic Death and resurrection of Superman                              series and Wolverine -The End and Fantastic Four                              -The end.

Non Fiction

Physics of Superheroes-James Kakalios(A Fun book written by a                                    physics professor that discusses the gravitational pull of planet krypton or the tensile     strength of spidey's web )

The Brainwashing manual-The same author went on to start                               Scientology.Scary !

Acting for film-To improve my body language.

Concept rich mathematics-Not at all helpful.Do not waste your time reading this.

George Leonard-Mastery-Important book to read if you want to                                           understand the pitfalls in the path to mastery.

You are being lied to (The Disinformation guide)-A compilation of                                            articles that try to bring out the truth.
Also try reading  : 50 things you are not supposed to know( 1 & 2)

The God delusion-Richard Dawkins is God.(he'd consider this an insult)

The Master key-Rumored to have inspired Bill gates.

Why do men have nipples - fascinating medical trivia.

Techniques of the professional pickpocket - How does Criss Angel steal wrist watches right off peoples arms ?Read this book.

The body language of Sex,Power and Aggression-Julius Fast- Not very useful in practical situations.

A mens liberation guide to Women-An antifeminist book that goes  overboard with its rhetoric.

How to have a XXX sex life(By the vivid girls)- A glossy overhyped book                                   full of bullshit.Ideal as a conversation piece.

The Three Second Fighter- Practical book on surviving attacks.

As a man thinketh -You've read one , you've read them all.

The Full facts of Cold Reading - Now I am a mind reader.I see good   things happening to you.You will come across great money, but there is peril ahead...Blah blah

Mobile Mentalism - I can guess what card you have chosen.(Hint.Its not the queen of hearts)

Rich dad, Poor dad- Risky real estate, risky ventures are the way to                               money.But you have to be intelligent enough.

The 80/20 Rule -A book on how to apply Pareto's principle in various                       
 aspects of life.

Vagina Monologues- Only feminists can find this book beautiful.
I'm on the other hand, mortified to find out that Women are so fucked up                              
 from inside.Glad to be a man , even if it means I'm called a                          
                         male Chauvinist Pig.

Stumbling upon Happiness -A book not to be missed.

101 Healing Stories for Kids and Teens - Using Metaphors in Therapy -                                                           - Good Book.

Peanuts(Art of Suffering )

Is suffering necessary for one to become a Great artist/writer/anything ?

Yes

 

 4

No

 

 2

A simple yes or no wont do justice to the particular question.I'll write about it in my blog.

 

 0

You’re a Good Prop, Cruel Muse

By RANDY KENNEDY


THE cult of the suffering artist, that gaunt, rheumy-eyed creation of Romanticism, was all about introspection and isolation, so it didn’t exactly bequeath a handbook.

                     If it had, a few artists probably would have been cited as examples to emulate. Van Gogh, of course, as the depressive in chief. “The more I am spent, ill, a broken pitcher,” he wrote shortly before the earlobe incident, “so much more am I an artist.” Rimbaud, with his description of the artist as he who “exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences,” would have been included. And even such late entries as the novelist Ford Madox Ford, who wore his artistic hair shirt extra scratchy, piling up miseries and misdeeds: bankruptcy, depression, incarceration, agoraphobia and infidelity (with his wife’s sister, no less). He described his youth as a period of “moral torture.”

To make room on this list for Charles M. Schulz, hugely wealthy and long famous creator of a beloved bunch of cartoon kids and their zany beagle, might seem like a stretch, or a gag from “Peanuts” itself. But since Mr. Schulz’s death seven years ago — in fact even while he was alive — the image of him as an unhappy, lonely and bitter man who drew deeply on his discontent to create his comic strips has gained ground. And with the publication this week of a highly anticipated biography by David Michaelis, “Schulz and Peanuts,” that examines seemingly every disappointment and slight (real or perceived) in Mr. Schulz’s 77 years, his reputation as tormented creative soul seems poised only to grow.

The book was written with the cooperation of Mr. Schulz’s family, but in the weeks leading up to its release, some family members have criticized it, saying that it overemphasizes his melancholy and chilly side at the expense of other aspects of his personality — his generosity, his sense of humor, his love of family and, in many ways, his resolute normalness.

“It’s not a full portrait,” Jean Schulz, his second wife, told The New York Times last week. Monte Schulz, his son, called it “preposterous.” Mr. Michaelis has defended himself, saying that after years of research and hundreds of interviews with those who knew the cartoonist best, “this was the man I found.”

Such arguments are nothing particularly new in the world of biography. Writers and loved ones often end up staring each other down across a big chasm separating substantially different versions of a subject both claim to know intimately. But in the case of Mr. Schulz, the dispute seems to bring up a more fundamental question, whether almost two centuries after outlaws like Byron and Chateaubriand linked suffering and creativity, a connection that probably would have baffled Shakespeare or Swift, we still have a deep-seated need to believe in the idea of the tortured artist, to think that the only enduring ones are the really unhappy ones, even if we’re talking about syndicated cartoon-strip artists.

While Mr. Schulz took pains to say that he did not see his cartoons as serious art, critics and writers have tended to disagree, some comparing his career to that of Balzac in scope. The short-story writer George Saunders has said that “Peanuts” prepared him for Beckett. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that the man behind that work was a Balzac or a Beckett, or more than a very talented and insightful popular entertainer. And this is the ground in which Mr. Michaelis has gone to work, depicting Mr. Schulz as a much more self-aware and autobiographical artist than has been understood previously, a conduit for his times and the timeless subjects of art: longing, love, heartbreak, disappointment, distrust. (One strip, drawn when Mr. Schulz’s first marriage was breaking up and his wife, suspicious of an affair, was questioning his phone bills, shows Charlie Brown yelling at a lovesick Snoopy: “And stop making those long-distance phone calls!”)

Looked at simply as a narrative problem, it is not hard to see why any biographer would want a strong framing device in trying to tell the story of Mr. Schulz. He was a homebody workaholic whose passions, other than his strips, were golf and hockey. He was a Sunday school teacher who was not only a teetotaler but disdainful of drinking and those who did it. His favorite ice cream was vanilla. A woman who knew him at the height of his early fame described him as a “genius at becoming invisible.”

In trying to mine the sources of a lifelong gloom it’s not easy to figure out where his demons might have come from — except a naturally oversensitive and crabby personality.

He had, by conventional measures, what George Plimpton (speaking of himself) called a “non-unhappy childhood.” His father, an industrious barber in St. Paul, had work throughout the Depression. His mother could be aloof and withholding and died when he was 20. But it was she who took him to his first comics show; she knew he was smitten.

   Stacked up against the sundry misfortunes that were courted by or fell on the heads of history’s best-known tortured artists — prostitute mothers (Jean Genet); drug addictions (Coleridge); physical deformities (Toulouse-Lautrec) — those that Mr. Michaelis describes in Mr. Schulz’s youth sound tame and sometimes a little silly. His father used to give him funny haircuts; he had to sleep in a room with his grandmother, who snored; he was afraid of girls and had a crushing Norwegian sense of humility; he was terrorized by schoolyard bullies, though those who knew him at the time can’t remember an instance of him actually being walloped by any.

Patricia Hampl, a memoirist and poet who grew up in St. Paul and teaches at the University of Minnesota, suggested that our desire to think of good artists as fundamentally troubled stems from a need even now — perhaps particularly now, in the age of entertainment’s dominance — for art to be something separate from our quotidian lives, something almost spiritual.

“People don’t want to believe that someone like them could just sit down at a typewriter or a desk and create something great or timeless,” she said. “It’s got to be the product of a lot of misery and angst.” She compared the impulse to that of conspiracy theorists and their reluctance to believe in the banality of evil: “It’s hard to accept that a guy could just go up into a building and shoot the president.”

Morris Dickstein, a professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said he believed that despite the cliché of the suffering artist, pain still deserved a whole lot of credit as a catalyst for creativity. “People who have always had a happy life and lived on an even keel and haven’t had a lot of misfortune really don’t tend to be creative people,” he said. (Though of course there are many contemporary examples of successful writers and artists who seem to have gotten by with fairly contented lives: John Updike? Jeff Koons?)

Perhaps in today’s era of acute awareness of our depressions and neuroses, Mr. Schulz’s, as mild as they might have been, were simply enough to qualify him for membership in the modern miserable artists’ club. Or, as Mr. Dickstein suggested, maybe there wasn’t a need for a monumental amount of misery but for just enough to fit the funny pages.

“It got filtered into a medium that we don’t think of as deep,” Mr. Dickstein said, “and certainly not as being dark.”

And yet in its own way “Peanuts” could make a bit of newsprint as forlorn as a set for “Waiting for Godot” (with a kite, of course, caught in the naked tree and a doghouse somewhere in the distance). As Mr. Schulz himself summed it up: “All the loves in the strip are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; the Great Pumpkin never comes; and the football is always pulled away.”

So , Why are you FAT ?: The Real Reason.

So , even after all that dieting , why haven't you LOST weight ? Is it because you were predisposed to be fat ? Do genes make you fat ?

Read below the surprsisng findings from half a century ago...

It was 1959. Jules Hirsch, a research physician at Rockefeller University, had gotten curious about weight loss in the obese. He was about to start a simple experiment that would change forever the way scientists think about fat.

Obese people, he knew, had huge fat cells, stuffed with glistening yellow fat. What happened to those cells when people lost weight, he wondered. Did they shrink or did they go away? He decided to find out.

It seemed straightforward. Dr. Hirsch found eight people who had been fat since childhood or adolescence and who agreed to live at the Rockefeller University Hospital for eight months while scientists would control their diets, make them lose weight and then examine their fat cells.

The study was rigorous and demanding. It began with an agonizing four weeks of a maintenance diet that assessed the subjects’ metabolism and caloric needs. Then the diet began. The only food permitted was a liquid formula providing 600 calories a day, a regimen that guaranteed they would lose weight. Finally, the subjects spent another four weeks on a diet that maintained them at their new weights, 100 pounds lower than their initial weights, on average.

Dr. Hirsch answered his original question — the subjects’ fat cells had shrunk and were now normal in size. And everyone, including Dr. Hirsch, assumed that the subjects would leave the hospital permanently thinner.

That did not happen. Instead, Dr. Hirsch says, “they all regained.” He was horrified. The study subjects certainly wanted to be thin, so what went wrong? Maybe, he thought, they had some deep-seated psychological need to be fat.

So Dr. Hirsch and his colleagues, including Dr. Rudolph L. Leibel, who is now at Columbia University, repeated the experiment and repeated it again. Every time the result was the same. The weight, so painstakingly lost, came right back. But since this was a research study, the investigators were also measuring metabolic changes, psychiatric conditions, body temperature and pulse. And that led them to a surprising conclusion: fat people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.

Before the diet began, the fat subjects’ metabolism was normal — the number of calories burned per square meter of body surface was no different from that of people who had never been fat. But when they lost weight, they were burning as much as 24 percent fewer calories per square meter of their surface area than the calories consumed by those who were naturally thin.

The Rockefeller subjects also had a psychiatric syndrome, called semi-starvation neurosis, which had been noticed before in people of normal weight who had been starved. They dreamed of food, they fantasized about food or about breaking their diet. They were anxious and depressed; some had thoughts of suicide. They secreted food in their rooms. And they binged.

The Rockefeller researchers explained their observations in one of their papers: “It is entirely possible that weight reduction, instead of resulting in a normal state for obese patients, results in an abnormal state resembling that of starved nonobese individuals.”

Eventually, more than 50 people lived at the hospital and lost weight, and every one had physical and psychological signs of starvation. There were a very few who did not get fat again, but they made staying thin their life’s work, becoming Weight Watchers lecturers, for example, and, always, counting calories and maintaining themselves in a permanent state of starvation.

“Did those who stayed thin simply have more willpower?” Dr. Hirsch asked. “In a funny way, they did.”

One way to interpret Dr. Hirsch and Dr. Leibel’s studies would be to propose that once a person got fat, the body would adjust, making it hopeless to lose weight and keep it off. The issue was important, because if getting fat was the problem, there might be a solution to the obesity epidemic: convince people that any weight gain was a step toward an irreversible condition that they most definitely did not want to have.

But another group of studies showed that that hypothesis, too, was wrong.

It began with studies that were the inspiration of Dr. Ethan Sims at the University of Vermont, who asked what would happen if thin people who had never had a weight problem deliberately got fat.

His subjects were prisoners at a nearby state prison who volunteered to gain weight. With great difficulty, they succeeded, increasing their weight by 20 percent to 25 percent. But it took them four to six months, eating as much as they could every day. Some consumed 10,000 calories a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard to believe, were it not for the fact that there were attendants present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.

Once the men were fat, their metabolisms increased by 50 percent. They needed more than 2,700 calories per square meter of their body surface to stay fat but needed just 1,800 calories per square meter to maintain their normal weight.

When the study ended, the prisoners had no trouble losing weight. Within months, they were back to normal and effortlessly stayed there.

The implications were clear. There is a reason that fat people cannot stay thin after they diet and that thin people cannot stay fat when they force themselves to gain weight. The body’s metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep weight within a narrow range. Gain weight and the metabolism can as much as double; lose weight and it can slow to half its original speed.

That, of course, was contrary to what every scientist had thought, and Dr. Sims knew it, as did Dr. Hirsch.

The message never really got out to the nation’s dieters, but a few research scientists were intrigued and asked the next question about body weight: Is body weight inherited, or is obesity more of an inadvertent, almost unconscious response to a society where food is cheap, abundant and tempting? An extra 100 calories a day will pile on 10 pounds in a year, public health messages often say. In five years, that is 50 pounds.

The assumption was that environment determined weight, but Dr. Albert Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania wondered if that was true and, if so, to what extent. It was the early 1980s, long before obesity became what one social scientist called a moral panic, but a time when those questions of nature versus nurture were very much on Dr. Stunkard’s mind.

He found the perfect tool for investigating the nature-nurture question — a Danish registry of adoptees developed to understand whether schizophrenia was inherited. It included meticulous medical records of every Danish adoption between 1927 and 1947, including the names of the adoptees’ biological parents, and the heights and weights of the adoptees, their biological parents and their adoptive parents.

Dr. Stunkard ended up with 540 adults whose average age was 40. They had been adopted when they were very young — 55 percent had been adopted in the first month of life and 90 percent were adopted in the first year of life. His conclusions, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1986, were unequivocal. The adoptees were as fat as their biological parents, and how fat they were had no relation to how fat their adoptive parents were.

The scientists summarized it in their paper: “The two major findings of this study were that there was a clear relation between the body-mass index of biologic parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that genetic influences are important determinants of body fatness; and that there was no relation between the body-mass index of adoptive parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that childhood family environment alone has little or no effect.”

In other words, being fat was an inherited condition.

Dr. Stunkard also pointed out the implications: “Current efforts to prevent obesity are directed toward all children (and their parents) almost indiscriminately. Yet if family environment alone has no role in obesity, efforts now directed toward persons with little genetic risk of the disorder could be refocused on the smaller number who are more vulnerable. Such persons can already be identified with some assurance: 80 percent of the offspring of two obese parents become obese, as compared with no more than 14 percent of the offspring of two parents of normal weight.”

A few years later, in 1990, Dr. Stunkard published another study in The New England Journal of Medicine, using another classic method of geneticists: investigating twins. This time, he used the Swedish Twin Registry, studying its 93 pairs of identical twins who were reared apart, 154 pairs of identical twins who were reared together, 218 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared apart, and 208 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared together.

The identical twins had nearly identical body mass indexes, whether they had been reared apart or together. There was more variation in the body mass indexes of the fraternal twins, who, like any siblings, share some, but not all, genes.

The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples’ weights may be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition, including mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease.

The results did not mean that people are completely helpless to control their weight, Dr. Stunkard said. But, he said, it did mean that those who tend to be fat will have to constantly battle their genetic inheritance if they want to reach and maintain a significantly lower weight.

The findings also provided evidence for a phenomenon that scientists like Dr. Hirsch and Dr. Leibel were certain was true — each person has a comfortable weight range to which the body gravitates. The range might span 10 or 20 pounds: someone might be able to weigh 120 to 140 pounds without too much effort. Going much above or much below the natural weight range is difficult, however; the body resists by increasing or decreasing the appetite and changing the metabolism to push the weight back to the range it seeks.

The message is so at odds with the popular conception of weight loss — the mantra that all a person has to do is eat less and exercise more — that Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at the Rockefeller University, tried to come up with an analogy that would convey what science has found about the powerful biological controls over body weight.

He published it in the journal Science in 2003 and still cites it:

“Those who doubt the power of basic drives, however, might note that although one can hold one’s breath, this conscious act is soon overcome by the compulsion to breathe,” Dr. Friedman wrote. “The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty. This is the feeling the obese must resist after they have lost a significant amount of weight.”

This is an excerpt from Gina Kolata’s new book, “Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss — and the Myths and Realities of Dieting” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

The Game

The Game

In The Game, Strauss tells the tale of his transformation into "Style," a pickup artist under the tutelage of Mystery. The book charts two years in his life. In addition to documenting his experiences with pickup artists like Mystery and Ross Jeffries, it also describes his interactions with celebrities including Britney Spears, Tom Cruise, and Courtney Love. Strauss writes of his distrust of pickup artists "Tyler Durden" and "Papa," the founders of Real Social Dynamics. In promoting his book, Neil appeared on various TV shows, including The View^[4] and ABC Primetime. ^[5]

 The seduction community

In the seduction community, Strauss is known by the pseudonym "Style" (also known as "Chris Powles"). Three years after he had joined the community, he published an article in the New York Times about his experiences^[6]. Strauss retired as a pickup artist and settled with a long-term girlfriend Lisa Leveridge, who plays guitar in Courtney Love's all-female band The Chelsea.^[7] An article in the Sunday Mirror, however, suggested that Leveridge broke up with Strauss in February 2006 to date Robbie Williams.^[8] A more recent article in Ireland Online seems to indicate that she has broken up with Williams as well.^[9] Strauss has yet to comment. Strauss did however include this piece in one of his recent emails (12th of November) "Lisa still hasn't forgiven me for saying she had a U-shaped smile.  :-)".

At the end of 2005, Strauss passed his knowledge, which he has titled the "Annihilation Method", to 5 selected followers at a three-day seminar at his California home. He recently sold 375 exclusive copies of the "Annihilation Method" program to those who arrived first on his website, only375.com. Strauss completed an interview with the popular seduction blog The Attraction Chronicles in mid-June 2006 that helped to give members of the community a glimpse into his goals and future influence in the seduction community.^[10]

 Stylelife Challenge

On May 31, 2006, through Neil Strauss' VIP mailing list, Strauss announced the Stylelife Challenge [1]. The challenge was for those who have trouble with women to get a date in 31 days or less. During the entire month of July 2006, participants were given daily challenges on the Stylelife website[2]. These challenges were designed to help men change their look and overcome their fears and hopefully get a date within the allotted time limit. While the primary goal was simply for participants to get a date, the most improved won a week-end in San Diego with the famous guru 'Hypnotica' (see 'Rasputin' in the Game). The Grand prize winner was "Taste".

Stylelife Academy

On March 10, 2007, through Stylelife's mailing list, Strauss announced the Stylelife Academy[3]. The Stylelife Academy is the first online school for self-improvement and attraction. Enrolled students study a variety of subjects ranging from mind-shaping, to body language, to story telling, to being a good conversationalist in daily online classes.

 

Also try out his homepage :  http://www.neilstrauss.com/

The Secret

The Secret

By Rhonda Byrne

Book Description
Fragments of a Great Secret have been found in the oral traditions, in literature, in religions and philosophies throughout the centuries. For the first time, all the pieces of The Secret come together in an incredible revelation that will be life-transforming for all who experience it.

In this book, you'll learn how to use The Secret in every aspect of your life -- money, health, relationships, happiness, and in every interaction you have in the world. You'll begin to understand the hidden, untapped power that's within you, and this revelation can bring joy to every aspect of your life.

The Secret contains wisdom from modern-day teachers -- men and women who have used it to achieve health, wealth, and happiness. By applying the knowledge of The Secret, they bring to light compelling stories of eradicating disease, acquiring massive wealth, overcoming obstacles, and achieving what many would regard as impossible.

From the Publisher
The Secret is truly the most outstanding book to date that we have published. I am so pleased that Rhonda Byrne was able to bring together this life-changing information so masterfully. She first did it for the movie of the same name that she produced, which has been a phenomenon in its own right. She then added, in only ones month's time, incredible additional content to the transcript of the film that brings even more clarity to the reader. This is absolutely a book that people from all walks of life can read and then "get" the concept of The Secret. It allows them to then take it and apply it to their lives. Children, teenagers and adults of all ages are reporting miraculous stories of positive changes as a result. Rhonda Byrne is dedicated to maintaining the integrity of The Secret and to making sure that now, finally, the whole world knows about The Secret. You will want to share this with your friends and family and they will be grateful for it. This book gives hope for what many have been waiting for-- a shift in the way the world thinks. Its a very exciting time that we are living in, and I as well as everyone at Beyond Words and Atria Books are grateful to be a part of it.

--Cynthia Black, President, Beyond Words Publishing

To visit their official site:

http://thesecret.tv/home.html

More Sex Is Safer Sex

I had no intentions of buying this book , so I basically speed-read it and finished it in about 35 minutes.

Here is the opening chapter of this controversial book by an economist.

More Sex Is Safer Sex

The economic case for promiscuity. By Steven E. Landsburg

It's true: AIDS is nature's awful retribution for our tolerance of immoderate and socially irresponsible sexual behavior. The epidemic is the price of our permissive attitudes toward monogamy, chastity, and other forms of sexual conservatism.

You've read elsewhere about the sin of promiscuity. Let me tell you about the sin of self-restraint.

Suppose you walk into a bar and find four potential sex partners. Two are highly promiscuous; the others venture out only once a year. The promiscuous ones are, of course, more likely to be HIV-positive. That gives you a 50-50 chance of finding a relatively safe match.

But suppose all once-a-year revelers could be transformed into twice-a-year revelers. Then, on any given night, you'd run into twice as many of them. Those two promiscuous bar patrons would be outnumbered by four of their more cautious rivals. Your odds of a relatively safe match just went up from 50-50 to four out of six.

That's why increased activity by sexual conservatives can slow down the rate of infection and reduce the prevalence of AIDS. In fact, according to Professor Michael Kremer of MIT's economics department, the spread of AIDS in England could plausibly be retarded if everyone with fewer than about 2.25 partners per year were to take additional partners more frequently. That covers three-quarters of British heterosexuals between the ages of 18 and 45. (Much of this column is inspired by Professor Kremer's research.

If multiple partnerships save lives, then monogamy can be deadly. Imagine a country where almost all women are monogamous, while all men demand two female partners per year. Under those conditions, a few prostitutes end up servicing all the men. Before long, the prostitutes are infected; they pass the disease to the men; and the men bring it home to their monogamous wives. But if each of those monogamous wives was willing to take on one extramarital partner, the market for prostitution would die out, and the virus, unable to spread fast enough to maintain itself, might die out along with it.

Or consider Joan, who attended a party where she ought to have met the charming and healthy Martin. Unfortunately Fate, through its agents at the Centers for Disease Control, intervened. The morning of the party, Martin ran across one of those CDC-sponsored subway ads touting the virtues of abstinence. Chastened, he decided to stay home. In Martin's absence, Joan hooked up with the equally charming but considerably less prudent Maxwell--and Joan got AIDS. Abstinence can be even deadlier than monogamy.

If those subway ads are more effective against the cautious Martins than against the reckless Maxwells, then they are a threat to the hapless Joans. This is especially so when they displace Calvin Klein ads, which might have put Martin in a more socially beneficent mood.

You might object that even if Martin had dallied with Joan, he would only have freed Maxwell to prey on another equally innocent victim. To this there are two replies. First, we don't know that Maxwell would have found another partner: Without Joan, he might have struck out that night. Second, reducing the rate of HIV transmission is in any event not the only social goal worth pursuing: If it were, we'd outlaw sex entirely. What we really want is to minimize the number of infections resulting from any given number of sexual encounters; the flip side of this observation is that it is desirable to maximize the number of (consensual) sexual encounters leading up to any given number of infections. Even if Martin had failed to deny Maxwell a conquest that evening, and thus failed to slow the epidemic, he could at least have made someone happy.

To an economist, it's clear why people with limited sexual pasts choose to supply too little sex in the present: Their services are under priced. If sexual conservatives could effectively advertise their histories, HIV-conscious suitors would compete to lavish them with attention. But that doesn't happen, because such conservatives are hard to identify. Insufficiently rewarded for relaxing their standards, they relax their standards insufficiently.

So a socially valuable service is under-rewarded and therefore under-supplied. This is a problem we've experienced before. We face it whenever a producer fails to safeguard the environment.

Extrapolating from their usual response to environmental issues, I assume that liberals will want to attack the problem of excessive sexual restraint through coercive regulation. As a devotee of the price system, I'd prefer to encourage good behavior through an appropriate system of subsidies.

The question is: How do we subsidize Martin's sexual awakening without simultaneously subsidizing Maxwell's ongoing predations? Just paying people to have sex won't work--not with Maxwell around to reap the bulk of the rewards. The key is to subsidize something that is used in conjunction with sex and that Martin values more than Maxwell.

Quite plausibly, that something is condoms. Maxwell knows that he is more likely than Martin to be infected already, and hence probably values condoms less than Martin does. Subsidized condoms could be just the ticket for luring Martin out of his shell without stirring Maxwell to a new frenzy of activity.

As it happens, there is another reason to subsidize condoms: Condom use itself is under-rewarded. When you use one, you are protecting both yourself and your future partners, but you are rewarded (with a lower chance of infection) only for protecting yourself. Your future partners don't know about your past condom use and therefore can't reward it with extravagant courtship. That means you fail to capture the benefits you're conferring, and as a result, condoms are underused.

It is often argued that subsidized (or free) condoms have an upside and a downside: The upside is that they reduce the risk from a given encounter, and the downside is that they encourage more encounters. But it's plausible that in reality, that's not an upside and a downside--it's two upsides. Without the subsidies, people don't use enough condoms, and the sort of people who most value condoms don't have enough sex partners.

All these problems--along with the case for subsidies--would vanish if our sexual pasts could somehow be made visible, so that future partners could reward past prudence and thereby provide appropriate incentives. Perhaps technology can ultimately make that solution feasible. (I envision the pornography of the future: "Her skirt slid to the floor and his gaze came to rest on her thigh, where the embedded monitor read, 'This site has been accessed 314 times.' ") But until then, the best we can do is to make condoms inexpensive--and get rid of those subway ads.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The book also tells us how taller men get more money and recognition as compared to their shorter counterparts and how a woman suffers financially because of her ugliness or obesity.

The shocking revelation by the author is how female children are the reason for divorces should be read by everyone.It seems that if a family has a male child , it is more stable. I simply think that this is sad.

For more , try this link...http://www.slate.com/id/2033/

Virgin: The Untouched History

Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank (Author)

 

 

 

Starred Review. By any material reckoning, virginity does not exist," writes Blank in this informative, funny and provocative analysis of one of the most elusive—and prized—qualities of human sexuality. Blank, an independent scholar, has pieced together a history of how humans have constructed the idea of virginity (almost always female and heterosexual) and engineered its uses to suit cultural and political forces. Blank has no shortage of fascinating facts: since Western virginity was symbolized by the color white, missionaries viewed nonwhite peoples as sexually immoral; late medieval and Renaissance moralists thought they could detect whether a woman was a virgin by examining her urine ("a virgin's was clear, sparkling, and thin"). Blank also has a pleasing, highly readable style that allows her to convey large amounts of information with wit and agility. But she becomes most animated, and political, when she probes contemporary ideas about virginity. Taking on a range of questions—why is virginity considered sexy? how does the idea of virginity fuel violence against women?—she makes the case that contemporary culture is as obsessed with, and benighted about, virginity, as those of the past. Thoroughly researched, carefully argued and written with a sly sense of humor, this is a bright addition to the popular literature of women's and cultural studies. (Mar.)

 

Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Men in South Africa say they cheat instead of taking second or third wives, Americans lament that love has died in their marriages, and the Japanese believe ex-marital sex isn't adultery if they pay for it.

These are just a few of the cultural excuses for cheating on one's spouse as recorded by Pamela Druckerman, author of a new comparative look at infidelity titled "Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee."

On a world scale, men in African countries from Togo to Mozambique were most likely to have taken another sexual partner in the last 12 months, with as many as 37 percent saying they had been unfaithful in that time, according to data compiled by Druckerman.

While the French may be the first to eroticize illicit sex in movies and books, only 3.8 of married men and 2 percent of women in France admitted to having affairs.

They were outdone by the strait-laced citizens of the United States, where acknowledged rates of cheating came to 3.9 percent of men and 3.1 percent of women. But on a national average, U.S. adulterers were much more likely to beat themselves up over it.

A former Wall Street Journal reporter who has worked in Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, U.S. expat Druckerman was struck by her own strong reactions against the idea of infidelity as compared to more cavalier attitudes abroad.

"I thought you could often understand a country better by looking at the rules in people's private lives. It really reveals the values of a culture," Druckerman said in an interview.

"Americans have gotten more tolerant on practically every major sexual issue from having a child out of wedlock to divorce ... and homosexuality," she said. "We're more accepting of all these issues except infidelity, where we've gotten stricter."

Even more telling were views on the evils of adultery. While some 6 percent of Americans in one survey said it was acceptable to cheat in some or all circumstances, nearly 40 percent of Russians polled saw no problem with it.

On a broad scale, men in poorer countries were the most likely to cheat, or in places rife with political and economic upheaval such as Russia or China.

But within countries, rates of cheating varied hugely within sub-cultures or even city neighborhoods, Druckerman's found.

"Much more important than any religious law or law of the land is what your friends and colleagues are doing," she said.

Filled with titillating anecdotes -- including the story of a 1950s housewife who would arrange double dates with her husband, her lover and his wife -- Druckerman most closely compares her findings overseas with U.S. mores.

In particular, Americans seem to adhere to a well-defined script on adultery in which sex outside the marriage amounts to the ultimate act of dishonesty, one that could require years of repentance and therapy to resolve, Druckerman said.

"The message is even a one-night stand can paralyze a marriage," she said. "Then you have this idea in America that you're sort of bursting with this knowledge of the affair and can never be whole until you confess."

"I tend to be sympathetic to the French idea that some truths are better left unspoken."

 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal now living in Paris, Druckerman offers an anecdotal rather than a scholarly exploration of the international etiquette of adultery. From American prudishness about the subject to French discretion, and from Russian vehemence about the obligatory affair to Japanese adherence to the single marital futon, one factor rings true in all cases: people lie about sex. Druckerman interviews numerous adulterers, starting with the conflicted Americans who "gain status by radiating an aura of monogamy" while sneaking around on the side; guilt more often than not brings them to confession and absolution by therapy. Druckerman is at pains to uncover reliable statistics about infidelity where such research is suppressed, such as in Islamic countries or those formerly Communist; in contrast, Finland demonstrates the best sex research, e.g., clearly half of men there enjoy "parallel relationships." Druckerman concludes from one study that people in warmer climes cheat more (Scandinavia is the exception), while people in wealthy countries tend to cheat less than those in poor countries (exception: Kazakhstan). Druckerman found that the rules of sexual cultures differ widely: adultery is the least dangerous social evil in Russia, while in Japan, buying sex doesn't count as cheating. Druckerman's work is quirky, digressive and media quotable. (Apr.)