Momentum

"The [afterburn] hypothesis goes something like this: When you exercise, you rev up your body's metabolism. Because things in motion want to stay in motion, even after you stop exercising, your body's engine continues to rev for some time following the workout. Thus, even once you stop running, you continue to burn up more fuel for some period following exercise. The only problem with this hypothesis is that it hasn't always held up in research studies. Some have found no post-exercise effect. Others obtained results that were negligible. Yet others identified significant afterburn - to the tune of hundreds of extra calories."—Adam Cohen and Dr. Stephen Prescott, The Oklahoman, "Is exercise 'afterburn' real?" 24 May 2011. (link)

"This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall. […] Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.”—James Vlahos, New York Times, "Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?" 14 April 2011. (link)

"The brain is ravenous. Though just 2 percent of the body’s mass, it uses 20 percent of its resting energy, and the body’s other main sources of energy—amino acids, which are broken down from proteins, and fatty acids and glycerol, which are broken down from fats—cannot power the brain. This is a bother, because we store pound on pound of fat, which most of us would just as soon burn for fuel, whereas we store only a few ounces of glycogen. Our brains are thus on a nearly constant prowl for sugar. There is, however, a fallback: ketone bodies, which are highly acidic compounds created when fatty acids are broken down for energy. The best-known ketone is acetone, as in the clear flammable liquid used to remove nail polish and scour metal surfaces before painting. Once thought to be waste products, ketones are in fact fuel—and fuel that can power the brain.—Steve Hendricks, Harper's Magazine, "Starving your way to vigor." (page 51)

Baseline

"It was not meaningful to [Shin] that North Korea in the dead of winter is ugly, dirty, and dark, or that it is poorer than Sudan, or that, taken as a whole, it is viewed by human rights groups as the world's largest prison. His context had been twenty-three years in an open-air cage run by men who hanged his mother, shot his brother, crippled his father, murdered pregnant women, beat children to death, taught him to betray his family, and tortured him over a fire."—Blaine Harden (page 121)

"Suicide is a powerful temptation for North Koreans plucked out of ordinary lives and subjected to the labor camps' regime of hard labor, hunger, beatings, and sleep deprivation. […] The Party [said Kang Chol-hwan] saw suicide as an attempt to escape its grasp, and if the individual who had tried the trick wasn't around to pay for it, someone else needed to be found. […] North Korea's National Security Agency warns all prisoners that suicide will be punished with longer sentences for surviving relatives…"—Blaine Harden (page 72)

"But South Koreans struggle mightily to fit into their own success-obsessed, status-conscious, and education-crazed culture. […] South Koreans work more, sleep less, and kill themselves at a a higher rate than citizens of any other developed country…"—Blaine Harden (page 172)

Ignorance

"The United Arab Emirates has been heavily criticized by rights groups, which say it condones sexual violence against women. Human Rights Watch has called its record "shameful," saying it must change the way it handles such cases. In December 2012, a British woman reported being raped by three men in Dubai. She was found guilty of drinking alcohol without a license and fined. In January 2010, a British woman told authorities she was raped by an employee at a Dubai hotel. She was charged with public intoxication and having sex outside of marriage. An Australian woman reported in 2008 that she was drugged and gang-raped. She was convicted of having sex outside marriage and drinking alcohol, and she was sentenced to 11 months in prison."—Nicola Goulding and Phil O'Sullivan, "Norwegian woman: I was raped in Dubai, now I face prison sentence" (link)

"In 1984, when Calvin Burdine was awaiting sentencing for allegedly stabbing his gay lover to death, the prosecuting attorney encouraged the jury in his closing remarks to award Burdine the death penalty, rather than life in prison, on the grounds that sending a gay man to prison was akin to sending a kid to a candy store. After 17 minutes of deliberation, the jury obliged and sentenced Burdine to die. His death sentence was later overturned (mostly because Burdine's public defender had slept through much of his trial), but the homophobic thinking – that prison is some kind of paradise for gay men – lingers on."—Sadhbh Walshe, "The grim truth of being gay in prison" (link)

St. Julien: I know about the Johns Committee, but could you give me an idea of your impressions of it and what you heard about it?
Deer: It put a terrible damper on the University [of South Florida]. I am terribly aware of this. There was a fellow in English, the one that Charlie Johns really descended on, who incidentally is now a very distinguished scholar in the New York State University System. He is the head of one of the New York State University colleges. This is who Charlie Johns descended upon. And of course what made my husband and I both go into a panic was that he got in trouble for teaching an essay that we booked standard and used on the subject of pornography. It was just absolutely standard. It really put a damper on what people felt that they were free to do and say. We lost not only that guy, but we lost an extremely good philosopher at that time.—Harriet Deer (page 30)

Biblical

"The origins of homosexuality are obscure, as is the question of whether it is sin or sickness. […] Rather than review the multitudinous theories, conclusions, contentions and claims advanced through the years to “clarify” consideration of homosexuality, we have contented ourselves with presenting as an appendix to this report as complete and responsible a bibliography on the subject as we believe can be compiled, and leave to each individual the prerogative of selecting the authority and theory that most nearly jibe with his own views. We would, however, suggest that the Biblical description of homosexuality as an “abomination” has stood well the test of time."—Johns Committee Report (page 9)

"Whether it be with youth or with older individuals, homosexuality is unique among the sexual assaults considered by our laws in that the person affected by the practicing homosexual is first a victim, then an accomplice, and finally himself a perpetrator of homosexual acts."—Johns Committee Report (page 14)

"Incarceration is not a satisfactory answer in many cases, for indeed prison life produces its own specialized brand of deviates, known as “institutional homosexuals,” who would not, in freedom, consider homosexual activity, but in prison turn to it in search of escape from sexual tensions. The Florida Legislature in 1963 recognized this problem and enacted legislation directing the Division of Mental Health and Division of Corrections of the State to plan for the construction of facilities at the prison system’s new receiving and treatment center “for the care of child molesters and criminal sexual psychopaths.”—Johns Committee Report (page 17)

What

"PETA, [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] considered by many to be the highest-profile animal rights group in the country, kills an average of about 2,000 dogs and cats each year at its animal shelter [in Norfolk, Virginia]."—Michael Winerip (link)

"…we also experience food through a third sensory system called chemesthesis, which is based on touch and is perceived by the face’s trigeminal nerve. Branches of this nerve go to the eyes, nose, tongue and teeth, where they sense pain, irritation and temperature. This includes the burning sensation of chili peppers and the cooling sensation of a minty mouthwash. (Some people have argued that these perceptions should also be considered basic tastes.) Fat is perceived through the trigeminal nerve, which sends signals to the brain that our mouth is experiencing something viscous, slippery or (as in the case of ice cream) creamy."—Julie Wan (link)

"According to Amtrak, the major passenger rail provider in the United States, and a World Resources Institute (WRI) study, trains produce an average of 0.21 kg of carbon per passenger mile. This is compared to 0.35 kg of carbon per passenger mile for car transport and 0.48 kg of carbon per passenger mile for air transport."—Brendan McGuigan (link)

Place

"The diminutive scale of the early models of the cosmos resulted from the assumption that the earth sits, immobile, in the center of the universe. If the earth does not move, then the stars do: the starry sphere must rotate on its axis once a day in order to bring the stars trooping overhead on schedule, and the larger the sphere, the faster it must rotate. Were such a cosmos very large, the speed mandated for the celestial sphere would become unreasonably high. The stars of Ptolemy's universe already were obliged to hustle along at better than ten million miles per hour, and were the celestial sphere imagined to be a hundred times larger it would have to be turning faster than the velocity of light. One did not have to be an Einstein, or even to know the velocity of light, to intuit that was too fast—a point that had begun to worry cosmologists by the sixteenth century. All geocentric, immobile earth cosmologies tended to inhibit appreciation of the true dimensions of space."—Timothy Ferris (page 34)

"But just as Darwin and Copernicus and the biological scientists and physical scientists have removed us from our special perch, they've also done something else: they've connected us to the rest of life, connected us to the rest of the planet, and connected us to the cosmos beyond. To me, that's a very profound gift." —Neil Shubin (link)

"…biologists and geologists have learned a priceless lesson: by bringing natural phenomena into time, by making them dynamical and contingent, we make possible a more complete and more rational understanding of them. What I am proposing is that a similar shift must take place in our understanding of physics and cosmology. The laws of nature themselves, like the biological species, may not be eternal categories, but rather the creations of natural processes occurring in time. […] a theory of a whole universe, if it is to be consistent with what we know of quantum theory and relativity, must be a theory of a complex, self-organized universe."—Lee Smolin (pages 18-19)

Boss

"It turns out that Newton's laws aren't fundamental, they are emergent; that is, they are what happens when quantum matter aggregates into macroscopic fluids and objects. It is a collective organizational phenomenon. The thing is, you can't predict Newton's laws from observing the behavior of atoms, nor the behavior of atoms from Newton's laws."—Michael Gazzaniga (page 125)

"The key to understanding emergence is to understand that there are different levels of organization. My favorite analogy is that of the car. If you look at an isolated car part, such as a cam shaft, you cannot predict that the freeway will be full of traffic at 5:15 P.M. Monday through Friday. In fact, you could not even predict the phenomenon of traffic would ever occur if you just looked at a brake pad. You cannot analyze traffic at the level of car parts. Did the guy who invented the wheel ever visualize the 405 in Los Angeles on Friday evening? You cannot even analyze traffic at the level of the individual car. When you get a bunch of cars and drivers together, with the variables of location, time, weather, and society, all in the mix, then at that level you can predict traffic. A new set of laws emerge that aren't predicted from the parts alone."—Michael Gazzaniga (page 136)

"…a unique language, which has yet to be developed, is needed to capture the thing that happens when mental processes constrain the brain and vice versa. The action is at the interface of those layers. In one kind of vocabulary it is where downward causation meets upward causation. In another vocabulary it is not there at all but in the space between brains that are interacting with each other. It is what happens at the interface of our layered hierarchical existence that holds the answer to our quest for understanding mind/brain relationships. How are we to describe that? That emergent level has its own time course and is current with the actions taking place. It is that abstraction that makes us current in time, real and responsible. The whole business about the brain doing it before we are conscious of it becomes moot and inconsequential from the vantage point of a different level of operation. Understanding how to develop a vocabulary for those layered interactions, for me, constitutes the scientific problem of this century."—Michael Gazzaniga (page 220)