Good Reads

[Laurel]

Damn, i posted that in the wrong spot.

:hangs head:

I think it's perfect

Growing up in the Yukon, Melanie Klassen had seen numerous bicycle tourists pedaling the Alaska Highway, but never one with a canine companion running behind him.

"I thought it was odd until I saw the panicked look on the biker's face - as though he was about to be eaten," she said in a telephone interview.

"That wasn't a dog; it was a wolf."

The cyclist, William "Mac" Hollan, 35, of Sandpoint, Idaho, verified Klassen's observation of Saturday's incident: "At this point I realized I might not be going home, and I began to panic at the thought of how much it was going to hurt."​

- read the full article Idaho cyclist recalls scary Alaska Highway wolf chase (from Anchorage Daily News)​

 

[Joeybagadonuts]

The Third Jesus ~ Deepak Chopra

 

[Laurel]

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/implantable-sensor-640x353.jpg

A team of scientists at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have developed the world’s smallest medical implant to monitor critical chemicals in the blood. The 14mm device measures up to five indicators, including proteins like troponin, that show if and when a heart attack has occurred. Using Bluetooth, the device can then transmit the data to a smartphone for tracking. The device can also track levels of glucose, lactate, and ATP, providing valuable data for physiologic monitoring during activity, or in possible disease conditions like diabetes. As far as tricorders go, this device may be the one you have been waiting for, provided you are on board for the implant.

Outside the body, a battery patch provides the 100 milliwatts of power that the device requires by wireless inductive charging through the skin.(See: How wireless charging works.) Each sensor is coated with an enzyme that reacts with blood-borne chemicals to generate a detectable signal. For patient monitoring, a device like this would quickly become indispensable once introduced. In cancer treatment for example, exact dosing is critical. Numerous blood tests are often required to calibrate the treatment according the to the patient’s particular ability to break down and excrete the drug. Often these parameters change when the disease, or the therapy, directly affects the organs involved in these processes — typically this would mean the liver and the kidneys.​

- read the full article World’s smallest blood monitoring implant tells your smartphone when you’re about to have a heart attack (from Extreme Tech)​

 

[Laurel]

One emotion inspired our greatest achievements in science, art and religion. We can manipulate it – but why do we have it?

When I was growing up in New York City, a high point of my calendar was the annual arrival of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus — ‘the greatest show on earth’. My parents endured the green-haired clowns, sequinned acrobats and festooned elephants as a kind of garish pageantry. For me, though, it was a spectacular interruption of humdrum reality – a world of wonder, in that trite but telling phrase.

Wonder is sometimes said to be a childish emotion, one that we grow out of. But that is surely wrong. As adults, we might experience it when gaping at grand vistas. I was dumbstruck when I first saw a sunset over the Serengeti. We also experience wonder when we discover extraordinary facts. I was enthralled to learn that, when arranged in a line, the neurons in a human brain would stretch the 700 miles from London to Berlin. But why? What purpose could this wide-eyed, slack-jawed feeling serve? It’s difficult to determine the biological function of any affect, but whatever it evolved for (and I’ll come to that), wonder might be humanity’s most important emotion.
...
In this respect, science shares much with religion. Gods and monsters are wondrous things, recruited to explain life’s unknowns. Also, like science, religion has a striking capacity to make us feel simultaneously insignificant and elevated. Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has found that awe, an intense form of wonder, makes people feel physically smaller than they are. It is no accident that places of worship often exaggerate these feelings. Temples have grand, looming columns, dazzling stained glass windows, vaulting ceilings, and intricately decorated surfaces. Rituals use song, dance, smell, and elaborate costumes to engage our senses in ways that are bewildering, overwhelming, and transcendent.

Wonder, then, unites science and religion, two of the greatest human institutions. Let’s bring in a third. Religion is the first context in which we find art. The Venus of Willendorf appears to be an idol, and animals on the walls of the Chauvet, Altamira and Lascaux caves are thought to have been used in shamanic rites, with participants travelling to imaginative netherworlds in trance-like states under the hypnotic flicker of torchlight. Up through the Renaissance, art primarily appeared in churches. When in the Middle Ages Giotto broke free from the constraints of Gothic painting, he did not produce secular art but a deeply spiritual vision, rendering divine personages more accessible by showing them in fleshy verisimilitude. His Scrovegni Chapel in Padua is like a jewel-box, exploding with figures who breathe, battle, weep, writhe, and rise from the dead to meet their God beneath an ethereal cobalt canopy. It is, in short, a wonder.​

- read the full article How wonder works (from Aeon Magazine)​

 

[Laurel]

This surprised me!

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3114/3112966305_2b3d9eaa0d.jpg

I didn’t know what I was going to write about today.

When this happens, normally I grab a coffee to help get the ideas flowing, but for the last few days in Montreal, no one’s been allowed to drink the water due to a bacteria leakage, which also means, no coffee.

So instead, I grabbed the next best thing to help me get going - a beer.

This got me wondering about coffee and beer and which one would actually help me be more creative and get work done. Hopefully, this will help you decide when it’s best to have that triple shot espresso or ice cold brew.​

- read the full article Coffee vs. beer: which drink makes you more creative? (from Medium.com/What I Learned Today)​

 

[girlsmiley]

"While alcohol may not be the drink of choice when you need to be alert and focused on what’s going on around you, it seems that a couple drinks can be helpful when you need to come up with new ideas."

The barriers come down. You're more open to conversation and ideas on the grog I think. Because you aren't focussed on all the bullshit. You kinda switch off. You aren't thinking in a straight line. Relaxed. It's hard to explain... Let me just add that not all ideas are good ideas.

"Oh, that's just ridiculous."
"Hang on, mate. You think about it."
"Actually, you could be on to something there."

 

[Laurel]

http://a.espncdn.com/photo/2011/1211/nfl_u_jameshts_576.jpg

If the sport of football ever dies, it will die from the outside in. It won't be undone by a labor lockout or a broken business model — football owners know how to make money. Instead, the death will start with those furthest from the paychecks, the unpaid high school athletes playing on Friday nights. It will begin with nervous parents reading about brain trauma, with doctors warning about the physics of soft tissue smashing into hard bone, with coaches forced to bench stars for an entire season because of a single concussion. The stadiums will still be full on Sunday, the professionals will still play, the profits will continue. But the sport will be sick.

The sickness will be rooted in football's tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency. Although estimates vary, several studies suggest that up to 15 percent of football players suffer a mild traumatic brain injury during the season. (The odds are significantly worse for student athletes — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly 2 million brain injuries are suffered by teenage players every year.) In fact, the chances of getting a concussion while playing high school football are approximately three times higher than the second most dangerous sport, which is girls' soccer. While such head injuries have long been ignored — until recently, players were resuscitated with smelling salts so they could re-enter the game — it's now clear that these blows have lasting consequences.​

- read the full article The Fragile Teenage Brain: An in-depth look at concussions in high school football (from Grantland)​

 

[Laurel]

http://www.pocketberry.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/blackberry-babes.png

I clicked on YouTube’s play button and waited for the stylish, sassy, sometimes scary clique of upwardly mobile Nigerian women known as the BlackBerry Babes to load on my laptop. And then I waited. And waited. At the time, I was working for an NGO in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, where Internet connections rival Canadian dial-up speeds circa 1995.

Finally, the popular Nollywood film series appeared on the screen. Produced in 2011 and 2012, the six low-budget BlackBerry Babes instalments chronicle the absurd social aspirations of four middle-class Nigerian women—a kind of Sex and the City Goes to West Africa. Instead of shoes, though, the women covet Canada’s fashionable hand-helds. In one memorable scene, the incredulous Keisha breaks up with her cash-strapped boyfriend because he won’t buy her the gadget she wants: “Without you buying me the BlackBerry phone, there is no basis for this relationship right now.”

The storylines can seem far-fetched to a Canadian in 2013, but the cultural phenomenon they parody is real enough. While North American business stories have been reporting on RIM’s spectacular decline, Africa has fallen hard for the Waterloo, Ontario, tech giant. RIM, now known simply as BlackBerry, is Africa’s number one smart phone vendor, and it is now the preferred brand in both South Africa and Nigeria, two cultural leaders for the continent. Second only to Asia’s mobile market, Africans already use 735 million cellphones.​

- read the full article BlackBerry’s Boom: How the Canadian smart phone became a Nigerian status symbol (from The Walrus)​

 

[Laurel]

http://www.wired.com/opinion/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/worldstream-gelernter_rosspatton.gif

People ask what the next web will be like, but there won’t be a next web.

The space-based web we currently have will gradually be replaced by a time-based worldstream. It’s already happening, and it all began with the lifestream, a phenomenon that I (with Eric Freeman) predicted in the 1990s and shared in the pages of Wired almost exactly 16 years ago.

This lifestream — a heterogeneous, content-searchable, real-time messaging stream — arrived in the form of blog posts and RSS feeds, Twitter and other chatstreams, and Facebook walls and timelines. Its structure represented a shift beyond the “flatland known as the desktop” (where our interfaces ignored the temporal dimension) towards streams, which flow and can therefore serve as a concrete representation of time.

It’s a bit like moving from a desktop to a magic diary: Picture a diary whose pages turn automatically, tracking your life moment to moment … Until you touch it, and then, the page-turning stops. The diary becomes a sort of reference book: a complete and searchable guide to your life. Put it down, and the pages start turning again.

Today, this diary-like structure is supplanting the spatial one as the dominant paradigm of the cybersphere: All the information on the internet will soon be a time-based structure. In the world of bits, space-based structures are static. Time-based structures are dynamic, always flowing — like time itself.

The web will be history.​

- read the full article The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It (from Wired)​

 

[Laurel]

http://www.codinghorror.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b01630520e71a970d-800wi

Despite popular assertions to the contrary, science tells us that money can buy happiness. To a point.
...
For reference, the federal poverty level for a family of four is currently $23,050. Once you reach a little over 3 times the poverty level in income, you've achieved peak happiness, as least far as money alone can reasonably get you.

This is something I've seen echoed in a number of studies. Once you have "enough" money to satisfy the basic items at the foot of the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs pyramid – that is, you no longer have to worry about food, shelter, security, and perhaps having a bit of extra discretionary money for the unknown – stacking even more money up doesn't do much, if anything, to help you scale the top of the pyramid.
...
You may also recognize some of the authors on this paper, in particular Dan Gilbert, who also wrote the excellent book Stumbling on Happiness that touched on many of the same themes.

What is, then, the science of happiness? I'll summarize the basic eight points as best I can, but read the actual paper (pdf) to obtain the citations and details on the underlying studies underpinning each of these principles.

1. Buy experiences instead of things

Things get old. Things become ordinary. Things stay the same. Things wear out. Things are difficult to share. But experiences are totally unique; they shine like diamonds in your memory, often more brightly every year, and they can be shared forever. Whenever possible, spend money on experiences such as taking your family to Disney World, rather than things like a new television.

2. Help others instead of yourself

Human beings are intensely social animals. Anything we can do with money to create deeper connections with other human beings tends to tighten our social connections and reinforce positive feelings about ourselves and others. Imagine ways you can spend some part of your money to help others – even in a very small way – and integrate that into your regular spending habits.​

- read the full article Buying Happiness (from Coding Horror)​

 

[Laurel]

http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2011/09/13/testosterone-7d78ca687af3d2592aea6d099867cd3854ca07d0-s3.jpg

It turns out daddies are losing more than just sleep after a child arrives. New fathers also experience a sharp decline in levels of the male sex hormone testosterone.

At least that's what scientists have concluded from a long-term study of more than 600 men in the Philippines.

The scientists found that single men who started out with relatively high testosterone levels were more likely than other men to become fathers. But once a baby arrived, testosterone levels plummeted.

And fathers who reported spending at least three hours a day with their kids had even lower testosterone levels than other dads, the researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.​

- read the full article One Price Of Fatherhood: Low Testosterone (from NPR)​

 

[Laurel]

http://www.tor.com/images/stories/blogs/11_09/Dali%20Clocks3.jpg

In the intersections between mainstream literature and genre fiction, certain fanciful concepts seem to translate better than others. Ghost stories drift in and out of a variety of genres, haunting us in Victorian romances, scaring us out of our wits in traditional horror, as well as showing up in contemporary urban fantasy.

The notion of a ghost might be the most mutable of all fantasy concepts, a survivor among genre tropes. But what else? Do certain imaginative ideas have a greater ability to sneak into mainstream literature than others? In terms of crossover potential, the conflict can be clearly defined between time travel and the space travel. “Regular” literature seems to like time travel a whole lot more than space travel. But why?

Ghosts are important in understanding why time travel crosses over into the mainstream more frequently than its cousin, space travel. As far back as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar or Hamlet, ghosts are hogging a portion of the narrative spotlight. In older stories like these, ghosts tend to encourage living characters to do or not do something or warn them of some kind of past mistake or impending doom. In this way, ghosts are a bit like time travel insofar as they exist outside of a story in a non-linear way. While Hamlet can’t go back in time and literally talk to his father, his father can travel forward in time as a ghost and speak to Hamlet. When you tilt your head a certain way, ghosts are perpetual time travelers, traveling into a future beyond their deaths.​

- read the full article Genre in the Mainstream: Time Travel Yes. Spaceship? No. (from Tor.com)​

 

[Laurel]

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/newsroom/img/mag/2012/01/murphy/mag-article-large.jpg?m8tlfp

The new science of interrogation is not, in fact, so new at all: “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation” and “waterboarding” all spring directly from the practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The distance, in both technique and ideology, between the Inquisition’s interrogation regime and 21st-century America’s is uncomfortably short—and provides a chilling harbinger of what can happen when moral certainty gets yoked to the machinery of torture.​

- read the full article Torturer’s Apprentice (from The Atlantic)​

 

[Laurel]

http://www.wired.com/design/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/firstaidkit8.jpg

Oftentimes, first aid kits are really just boxes of first aid stuff–glorified lunch pails stuffed with some Band-Aids, gauze, and maybe an Ace bandage if you’re lucky. Gabriele Meldaikyte, a product design student at the Royal College of Arts in London, thought we could do better, and her concept for an at-home first aid kit makes a pretty convincing case that we can. The designer’s compact first aid box unfolds to reveal an entire suite of salves, not only giving you the things you need to treat cuts, scrapes and burns, but offering guidance on how to treat them, too. And the best part? You can use the entire thing with just one hand.

The concept cleverly brings together a few key improvements over whatever kit is likely collecting dust in some long-unopened kitchen cupboard. The first comes with the presentation. Unlatch the clean white box and you’ll find three distinct compartments, one dedicated to burns, another to scratches, and a third for more serious cuts. Right away, we’re doing better here. By organizing the contents by injury, the design takes all the ambiguity out of treatment. You don’t have to figure out how to best use this kit; it tells you.​

- read the full article Brilliant First Aid Kit Provides One-Handed Relief (from Wired)​

 

[Laurel]

http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/mg21328461.900/mg21328461.900-1_300.jpg

We need dark matter. For starters, it is a form of cosmic glue that binds our galaxy together and provides the necessary gravitational force for galaxies to cluster around one another. If dark matter does not exist, it means that our understanding of gravity on the largest scales is wrong. This is unthinkable to most astronomers, who continue to pin their hopes on dark matter and use observations of the way galaxies move and rotate to help pin down its properties.

What's more, dark matter is the missing link in our attempts to move beyond the standard model of particle physics. The standard model cannot explain the masses of ordinary particles, and while it can describe three forces of nature as an exchange of "messenger" particles, it has failed to do so with the fourth, gravity. To allow it to do these things, theorists postulate as yet undiscovered particles that would have played a big part in the interaction of ordinary matter in the extreme temperatures just after the big bang, but now loaf around, having lost most of their potency.​

- read the full article Dark matter mysteries: a true game of shadows (from New Scientist)​

 

[Laurel]

http://24.media.tumblr.com/b0cfbf8f5e9a6174ed82766832a33bc7/tumblr_mpthrw4pam1s4endoo1_500.jpg

Onkyo A-9030 - Knob Feel Review
Onkyo! This is a great Knob! The input selector has been downsized it seems to accomodate the enormity of the mammoth volume Knob. I have no problem with this. The Bass, treble and balance are all average. The input selector has a nice little clicky rotation. The star of the show is clearly the volume Knob here, with minimal axial skew, a big thanks goes out to Onkyo for making it so!​

- read the full article on KnobFeel, a site which reviews technology "based purely on the feel of the knob"​

 

[Laurel]

http://www.texasmonthly.com/sites/default/files/styles/story_hero/public/stories/images/01-12-Hanna-Overton-680x382.jpg

In October 2006 a four-year-old from Corpus Christi named Andrew Burd died mysteriously of salt poisoning. His foster mother, Hannah Overton, was charged with capital murder, vilified from all quarters, and sent to prison for life. But was this churchgoing young woman a vicious child killer? Or had the tragedy claimed its second victim?​

- read the full article Hannah and Andrew (from Texas Monthly)​

 

[Laurel]

As China and India boom, the world's 'center of light' is shifting southeast.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/international/korealights.jpg

Fans of North Korea news might be familiar with the now-ubiquitous nighttime satellite image of the Korean peninsula, its dividing line clearly demarcated by a stark difference in light. South Korea buzzes with electricity in the dark, but its impoverished neighbor to the north is an empty, blackish-blue expanse.

Now, scientists at ETH Zürich, an engineering and science university in Switzerland, have used the same principle to uncover which other world regions are booming and which are suffering a downturn.

The U.S. Defense Meteorological Satellite Program has monitored night light levels around the world continuously since the mid-1960s. Using the program's data to examine 160 countries between 1992 and 2009, the researchers found that the center of all the world's nighttime light emissions has been moving in a southeast direction as the economies of China and India have grown over the past several decades.​

- read the full article These Incredible Light Photos Tell Us Which Economies Are Growing (from The Atlantic)​

 

[Laurel]

http://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/tour-de-france-featured.png?w=880

The Tour de France has seen better days.

A spate of recent doping scandals in the cycling world has severely undercut the sport’s credibility, starting with the discovery of a French team’s rolling pharmacy in 1998's Tour and culminating in Lance Armstrong’s televised admission to using performance enhancers. Either because of doping or the pitch of the recession, large international sponsors are becoming rarer at the Tour.

But in the long run, doping may not be the Tour de France’s biggest problem. Another looming—and arguably less fixable—threat to the world-class competition: climate change.​

- read the full article Climate change is a bigger threat to the Tour de France than doping (from Quartz)​

 

[Laurel]

http://media.smithsonianmag.com/images/Glow-In-Dark-Trees-flash-631.png

San Francisco-based entrepreneur Antony Evans has come up with a radical idea for curbing power usage: “What if we use trees to light our streets instead of electric street lamps?”

Evans and his colleagues, biologists Omri Amirav-Drory and Kyle Taylor, want to create plants that literally glow. Evans was inspired by transgenic organisms, plants or animals with genes of other species in their own DNA, which have been used to fill many human needs. A gene from the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis is routinely introduced to corn and cotton, for instance, to make the crops insect-resistant. In one method called “pharming,” scientists have inserted human genes into plants and animals so that these hosts can produce proteins for pharmaceuticals. Others have added a gene from the crystal jelly responsible for creating green fluorescent protein to animals such as cats and pigs; this way, they can determine if a disease has been transmitted from one generation to another, just by seeing if the offspring glows in the dark.​

- read the full article Creating a New Kind of Night Light: Glow-in-the-Dark Trees (from Smithsonian Magazine)​

 

[trysail]

...But in the long run, doping may not be the Tour de France’s biggest problem. Another looming—and arguably less fixable—threat to the world-class competition: climate change.​

- read the full article (from Quartz)​

Beyond stupid and on into head-shaking disbelief territory. With all due respect, this is a candidate for the single dumbest article I've ever run into.


A Complete List Of Things Caused By Global Warming


There has now been no significant warming (as in zero, zilch, zip, nada, none, bupkis) for 16 years. The professional climate scaremongers are currently running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to come up with explanations for their horribly inaccurate doomcasts.

 

[Laurel]

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/files/2013/07/mosquito.jpg

You come in from a summer hike covered with itchy red mosquito bites, only to have your friends innocently proclaim that they don’t have any. Or you wake up from a night of camping to find your ankles and wrists aflame with bites, while your tentmates are unscathed.

You’re not alone. An estimated 20 percent of people, it turns out, are especially delicious for mosquitoes, and get bit more often on a consistent basis. And while scientists don’t yet have a cure for the ailment, other than preventing bites with insect repellent (which, we’ve recently discovered, some mosquitoes can become immune to over time), they do have a number of ideas regarding why some of us are more prone to bites than others. Here are some of the factors that could play a role:​

- read the full article Why Do Mosquitoes Bite Some People More Than Others? (from Smithsonian Magazine)​

 

[Laurel]

http://images.theage.com.au/2013/07/15/4571377/picasso-353-20130715121039605430-300x0.jpg

More than 400 artworks by Pablo Picasso have been stolen from the home of his stepdaughter, she has claimed, in what appears to be one of the most audacious art thefts of recent times.

Catherine Hutin-Blay, the only daughter of the painter's second wife Jacqueline, believes that as many as 407 works by the Spanish artist were stolen from her home over many months by a former handyman.

The thefts, which she suspects took place between 2005 and 2007, only came to light two years ago when one of the pieces was recognised after it was offered for sale by a Paris gallery.
​

- read the full article 400 Picasso artworks stolen by handyman, claims stepdaughter (from The Age)​

 

[Laurel]

Potentially offering hope to millions of Americans struggling with psychological and emotional problems, a study published this week in The New England Journal Of Medicine found that test subjects were capable of fully resolving their anxiety by thinking about it very intensely.

The study, which followed 1,200 adults suffering from mild unease to chronic anxiety, confirmed that focusing continuously and exclusively on one’s own specific sources of distress to the point that one’s mental and physical health began to suffer was associated with the complete elimination of anxiety from patients’ lives and their subsequent return to happiness and emotional well-being.

“Of the hundreds of individuals we studied, those who thought about their feelings of dread and apprehension at every moment of every day—including throughout their workdays, at home, and in social outings—were able to effectively cure themselves of anxiety in 100 percent of cases,” said psychiatrist and lead researcher Rajiv Menon of the University of Virginia. “Whether someone is feeling overwhelmed at the office or constantly pondering whether their relationship might be falling apart, it appears that incessantly agonizing over this source of stress is all that’s required to eliminate your feelings of tension about this subject altogether and leave you feeling untroubled and fully satisfied with your life.”

“The results are clear,” Menon continued. “The more you obsessively worry about something bad that has already happened or about something bad that may happen in the future, the better you’ll feel.”​

- read the full article Study: Anxiety Resolved By Thinking About It Real Hard (from The Onion)​

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Potentially offering hope to millions of Americans struggling with psychological and emotional problems, a study published this week in The New England Journal Of Medicine found that test subjects were capable of fully resolving their anxiety by thinking about it very intensely.

The study, which followed 1,200 adults suffering from mild unease to chronic anxiety, confirmed that focusing continuously and exclusively on one’s own specific sources of distress to the point that one’s mental and physical health began to suffer was associated with the complete elimination of anxiety from patients’ lives and their subsequent return to happiness and emotional well-being.

“Of the hundreds of individuals we studied, those who thought about their feelings of dread and apprehension at every moment of every day—including throughout their workdays, at home, and in social outings—were able to effectively cure themselves of anxiety in 100 percent of cases,” said psychiatrist and lead researcher Rajiv Menon of the University of Virginia. “Whether someone is feeling overwhelmed at the office or constantly pondering whether their relationship might be falling apart, it appears that incessantly agonizing over this source of stress is all that’s required to eliminate your feelings of tension about this subject altogether and leave you feeling untroubled and fully satisfied with your life.”

“The results are clear,” Menon continued. “The more you obsessively worry about something bad that has already happened or about something bad that may happen in the future, the better you’ll feel.”​

- read the full article Study: Anxiety Resolved By Thinking About It Real Hard (from The Onion)​

And that's nutz, and the craziest blabber I've stumbled over lately.

Obsession is helpful and useful for worthy endeavors like grad school or finding your kidnapped child or inventing a cure for mini-peepees, but stewing and fretting and crying over spilled milk and relentlessly wallowing in the mire of life is a waste of the time you coulda spent doing something enjoyable or profitable or helpful to your crippled mom. I think it was de Maupassant who covered this already in THE NECKLACE.