Points of Interest, Vol 2, #5

Hello and welcome to my roundup of the best of mind, body and soul as found by my spending entirely too much time surfing the internets.  Today I have sleep deprivation and madness, power and trust, gratitude in the midst of recession, helpful herpes, failed antioxidants, and the power of peanut flour, to name just a few.  Dig in and enjoy the most excellent posts-

Friday Funnies: a volatile combination.

It Pays to Play

     It is a strange thing to sit at the end of a very long, very intense road that is training to be a physician and take a look back on the winding, arduous road I took to get here.  I am now endeavoring to prove I have done all of it by gathering documentation of the past 15 years of my life in excruciating detail.  With just one final test to go, my neurology boards,  I have become an absolute master at the ubiquitous modern knowledge measuring tool, namely I can fill bubbles on a scan sheet in completely, inside the lines with a no. 2 pencil, choosing only one answer and always guessing if I don’t know.

   It is amazing how standardized tests have become the mainstay of education these days.  Colleges and medical schools use them to differentiate students, nations use them to compare their system to other nations, and No Child Left Behind uses them to set minimum standards for funding our schools.   We use them to prove we can drive in most states.  We use them to measure IQ’s all over the internet.  We use them to poll current public opinion.  We use them to test marketing for the latest breakfast sandwich.  Mensa and the triple nine society determine your eligibility for geniushood by these tests.  Everyone can be boiled down to how they fill out these neat little bubbles. 

Come and see

  The 64th edition of the neuroscience carnival encephalon has arrived at the Neurocritic.  Head on over there for the best of the web including me, myself.  Of course you could just scroll down for my article but then you would miss all the other good stuff.

     Also, the latest Grand Rounds carnival is up at Emergiblog.  They did not include me because I did not submit anything.  However, you still can’t miss with an awesome Napolean Dynamite theme–Gosh.  So go and enjoy the best of the medical blogosphere.

Oh my Wordle!

So I went ahead and made one of these for my site because I can’t think of anything to actually write and I have to say looking at it, I still don’t quite know what my blog is about.  I guess you can’t complain I don’t have variety.  The key if you were wondering is…. a Thesaurus.  Which reminds me, that “regarding” is too darn big  hmm… what else to use….. relating to, about,…. what else is there?

Points of Interest, vol. 2 #4

In an effort to return to a regular weekend schedule, I present the creme de la creme of my web browsing put together in a mere five days time, and still overflowing with thoughtful, touching, funny and poignant goodness.  Today I have peer support, intuition, schizophrenia, salience, religiosity, spirituality, diet soda, cotton candy, and a bunch of other vaguely defined subjects.  So pull up a chair, sit down and dig in to the absolute best I could find on the internet-

Temperamental journey

 

   Way back in the 1940s Jerome Kagan performed a classic study on personality in which he formed a core concept that rooted at least part of the mind in biology.  This was an incredible breakthrough in understanding that certain perceptions and reactions can be rooted in inherited traits.  What Dr. Kagan did was observe a bunch of children as eight month old infants.

points of interest, vol 2, #3

And we’re back.  It is time once again for my semi-regular offering of the choicest gems I found scouring the internet for all things mind, soul, and body.  Today I have virtual reality, depression, doctors, some crucial playing around, the endowment of power, medicinal goats milk, courage, one ton snakes, how one can actually buy happiness, and child brought into an alternate reality by his neighborhood dentist, to name just a very few.  So dig in and enjoy the very best of the internets-