Harry Potter House Test
I've already taken a few, but I found this one and it seems pretty in depth. So much so I haven't found the gumption to take it yet. But here it is, for future and your use :)
Let me see your war face!!!
Ahhahahahahahahahaha Cute.
Ahhahahahahahahahaha Cute.
"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2" Trailer 2
I'm not going to cry, i'm not going to cry. Okay I'm going to cry. Probably through the whole thing.
I'm not going to cry, i'm not going to cry. Okay I'm going to cry. Probably through the whole thing.
J. K. Rowling's Announcement
What does it mean? I don't have a clue.
“If one dream should fall and break into a thousand pieces, never be afraid to pick one of those pieces up and begin again.”—Flavia Weedn (via julie911)
I like how frank this writer is. Original article over at bnet.com
It used to be that graduating from college was a sign that you had entered adulthood. But really, let’s get serious. It also used to be thought that a bar mitzvah ushered in adulthood, and we now all know the bar mitzvah thing is really just a sign that you are starting regular wet dreams.
So let’s debunk the college grad thing: Today college graduation is just a stepping stone to the time of life when you will feel the most lost. Forget all that solemn advice about what to do after college; that was appropriate in another era, when people in their 20s were considered adults. Now that period of life is called “emerging adulthood.” A New York Times magazine piece popularized the term to describe this new stage of life between adolescence and actual adulthood. The idea took off so quickly that the writer got a book deal offers just days after the piece ran.
Which just confirms what we all know: college graduation does not mean the entrance into adulthood. It is more like pre-adulthood. If life were Alice in Wonderland, which maybe it is without the pedophile undertones, then life in your 20s is falling through the rabbit hole.
Here are five things you should keep in mind after you graduate from college.
1. Being lost is good.
The great thing about adult life today is that there are no more rules, no more paths. There are lots of opportunities and not a lot of trodden paths among those opportunities. The way to figure out which opportunities are best for you is to learn more about yourself. The way to figure out who you are and what you want is to try new things.
What does this process look like? You, spinning your wheels, having no idea where you are, making everyone around you worried sick that you’re a failure. But what if you don’t do this process? You will not learn enough about yourself to understand how to navigate hard choices. There are no clear paths. There is no one who can run your life but you. There is no way to find yourself before you accept that you’re lost. (And, parents, stop worrying your kid is lost.)
2. Change jobs. A lot.
You will change jobs eight times before you turn 30. If you are the statistical norm. This is a good thing. Daniel Gilbert at the Harvard psychology department has spent a lifetime showing how humans have evolved to be terrible at predicting what we’d like. It’s what keeps us focused on finding food and a mate, over and over again. So since we’re terrible at guessing what we’d like to do, we have to just try stuff. And we have to accept that we’ll be wrong most of the time.
People who change jobs build their skills and their network faster than people who stay in jobs in the name of loyalty or sticking it out. Job hopping in your 20s creates long-term, stable careers.
3. Skip graduate school.
Graduate school only benefits people who absolutely cannot live their life in fulfillment without doing a job that requires a graduate degree. For the most part, this applies to very few people. In general, graduate school does not increase your earning power. Graduate school is merely a tool to elongate the process of being treated like a child by teachers who tell you what to learn and then reward you for learning what they want you to learn.
Do you love to learn? Get a job like the rest of the adult world and then read after work. You can learn whatever you want in the eight hours a day you do not need to work or sleep. And anyway, the most important skill to develop as an adult is how to support yourself. They don’t teach that in grad school. Get that skill in your 20s, and you’ll feel better about yourself than ten PhD’s would make you feel.
4. Move home with your parents.
Among generation Y, more than 70% of college grads move back with their parents at one time or another. If you can stomach your parents, or some other adult who owns a big house, move in with them. If you don’t need to pay rent then you will have flexibility to take jobs that pay low but open high-reaching doors to you in the future.
Living with your parents gives you flexibility to turn down bad jobs which puts you on even footing with people like Paris Hilton and Jared Kramer who were born into wealth and connections. A key career stepping stone is to revisit your old twin bed.
5. Be nice.
Your network is going to be the most important thing in your adult life. It’ll determine who is available to you to work with, to marry, and to gain support from when you’re down. The Framingham Heart Study shows that who you choose to hang around is the biggest influencer of what you will be like - fat, thin, happy, sad, healthy, obese, etc. So be nice. All the time.
Be nice to other people, be nice to yourself, be nice to your mom and to your enemies. If you are nice, you attract nice people and nice people are happier, more successful, and have more self-knowledge than everyone else. Adult life is not a competition for money or a big house or a big title. Adult life is a collaboration to figure out how to make the world a nicer place.
Awe they were so cute! I'm sad to see Harry Potter go, but truthfully I said goodbye a long time ago when the last book was published. I'll still cry during the last film.
Willpower plays a role in dieting. But keeping the weight off after you've lost it? This is where our physiology can get in the way. Research suggests that hormone shifts that follow weight loss play a role in changing the way our brain responds to food.You can find the original article at npr.org
"After you've lost weight, you have an increase in the emotional response to food," says Columbia University Medical Center researcher Michael Rosenbaum, who studies the body's response to weight loss. He says you also see "a decrease in the activity of brain systems that might be more involved in restraint."
And there's another factor making weight loss maintenance tough, too: a slower metabolism. When you lose weight, the body adapts to conserve energy, so it just doesn't need as many calories.
One of the hormones that play a role in controlling appetite in the body is called leptin. After significant weight loss, leptin levels drop. This seems to signal to the brain a need to seek more food.
Rosenbaum and his colleague Joy Hirsch, a neuroscientist at Columbia University Medical Center, designed an experiment to better understand the relationship between the brain, leptin and weight-loss maintenance.
They recruited overweight volunteers who agreed to a calorie-restricted diet aimed at shedding 10 percent of body weight. Using fMRI scans, the researchers looked at how the volunteers' brain responses to seeing food changed after weight loss.
Still Emotionally Attached
During their study, Hirsch and her colleagues found some interesting patterns of neural activity in their volunteers after they'd lost weight.
For instance, there was more blood flow to areas of the brain known to be involved in the emotional control of food intake, such as the brainstem and parahippocampal gyrus.
But here's the fascinating part: When they restored leptin to these volunteers by giving them injections of the hormone, the brain response changed. When they saw food, there was more activity in brain areas associated with conscious decisions.
"It's a feedback mechanism," says Rexford Ahima of the University of Pennsylvania. Leptin signals the brain; when there's a deficiency of the hormone, the areas of the brain associated with reward-seeking become more active.
This evolutionary programming is out of sync with what's healthiest for our bodies. The signal evolved over thousands of years when food was scarce. It was the brain's way of telling the body to seek food and protect fat stores. Many people — particularly those who are prone to gain weight easily — have retained more genes that program us to seek food.
As for the role of leptin, researchers say it's clear that leptin is not an anti-obesity hormone — it won't help you lose weight.
But Ahima says the most recent research suggests that leptin — or drugs that would stimulate leptin signaling — could potentially facilitate the maintenance of weight loss. So far, this has only been tested in experimental trials.
My Brain's Response To 'The Food Parade'
Researchers tested subjects, including NPR's Allison Aubrey, by showing them a mirror image of the real foods displayed above. They compared their brain response to food with the brain activity when it viewed mundane household objects.
The researchers invited me to their lab at the Neurological Institute at Columbia to see exactly how the experiment works. Curious about how my brain would respond to food, I agreed to an fMRI scan.
As I lay in the scanner, I watched through a mirror as research assistants passed all kinds of foods — from carrot sticks and apples to Hershey's Kisses and cookies — through my line of sight.
"Think of it as a food parade," explained Hirsch. After 20 minutes of watching food, the researchers began analyzing my brain responses.
"You will see a very specific circuit in your brain that's associated with the appreciation of foods," explained Hirsch.
Hirsch says the patterns in my brain images were similar to those of test subjects with restored leptin. She pointed to areas in my parietal and frontal lobes that had activated as I watched the "food parade."
"This is the executive part of the brain," says Hirsch. "You're responding like somebody in a homeostatic [stable] state." This means that when I saw the images of food, my brain activated decision-making areas, and there wasn't nearly as much activity in the emotional, reward-seeking parts of the brain. Hirsch also pointed out that my brain showed lots of stimulation in areas related to visual processing.
Researchers spotted drastic difference in Aubrey's brain activity when she looked at foods, as compared to mundane objects like a cell phone. Areas of the brain associated with visual stimulation really lit up.
Of course my brain response could change. The brain images captured just a snapshot in time. But it was fascinating to see that I didn't have a very emotional response to food. By comparison, images they'd shown me of mundane household objects — such as a cell phone — didn't evoke nearly as much activity in the areas associated with executive function or visual processing.
Hirsch and Rosenbaum's findings were published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. They're now working on follow-up studies to figure out if people's behavior maps with what they're seeing in brain scans.
"It's a work in progress," says Hirsch. But she thinks this research is showing that our physiology tends to set the brain in one of two modes:
The "regain" mode, which nudges us, emotionally, to seek food. Or the "retain" mode, which helps us maintain a steady weight. Researchers are following up with more studies to see if people's eating behaviors mirror their brain response to food.
Coming to a Website Near You: Google ‘+1′ Sharing Button
By Ryan Singel
Add the button to your site by going to google.com/webmasters
By Ryan Singel
Google expanded on Wednesday the reach of its new sharing button, dubbed “+1″, introducing a version that companies can add to their websites, alongside Facebook and Twitter’s now ubiquitous Like and Tweet This buttons.Read more at wired.com
The button has little benefit currently, but it’s clearly part of the infrastructure for a bigger project — Google’s long-rumored social networking competitor to Facebook. It’s like putting a way to fill your cart before the cart and horse.
The button allows signed-in Google users to recommend the page to their friends and contacts, who can see the vote and a thumbnail photo of the voter if the page shows up in search. Early partners include media outlets such as Bloomberg, Reuters, The Washington Post and Mashable, and the widely used sharing plug-in ShareThis, which makes a sharing toolbar bloggers and publications can just drop into their site. Extending that reach, the button will also be on YouTube videos, next to apps in the Android Market, on Blogger blogs, and on its shopping search site...
Add the button to your site by going to google.com/webmasters
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