“People can experience the benefits of the water whether they’re near the ocean, a lake, river, swimming pool or even listening to the soothing sound of a fountain,” marine biologist and author of the 2014 book Blue Mind, Wallace Nichols, tells Quartz. ”Most communities are built near bodies of water not just for practical reasons, but because as humans, we’re naturally drawn to blue space…but even if you aren’t in an area where there is easy access to water, you can still experience [its] emotional benefits.”
Author: Dr. Dean
Walking on sunshine
8.27.18 (Northwest)
8.27.18 (Southwest)
Kids are so over-scheduled that doctors are being told to prescribe play
“Play is not frivolous,” the report says. Rather, research shows that play helps children develop language and executive functioning skills, learn to negotiate with others and manage stress, and figure out how to pursue their goals while ignoring distractions, among other things. The report warns that parents and schools are focusing on academic achievement at the expense of play, and recommends that pediatricians attempt to turn the tide by prescribing play during well visits for children.
“At a time when early childhood programs are pressured to add more didactic components and less playful learning, pediatricians can play an important role in emphasizing the role of a balanced curriculum that includes the importance of playful learning for the promotion of healthy child development,” write the authors, led by Michael Yogman, chairman of the AAP committee on psychosocial aspects of child family health.
Deep Agriculture
Maybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem
The conventional wisdom is that morning people are high achievers, go-getters, while late risers are lazy. But what if going to bed in the wee hours is actually an advantage?
COME ON LUCKY SEVEN!!!!!
According to Dr. Walker, about 40 percent of the population are morning people, 30 percent are evening people, and the remainder land somewhere in between. “Night owls are not owls by choice,” he writes. “They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hard wiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.”
Tell me more …
And I have it fairly bad. My body naturally wants to go to bed around 2 a.m. and rise around 10 a.m. Whenever I try to adjust to an early schedule, my brain is like mush. Conversely, I light up like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree around 9 p.m., and for the next few hours I am my most me: alert, clever, inspired to create.
Me too, but writing peaks about 11.
“Here’s to all 180 million of you late risers, night crawlers and can’t-get-to-sleepers,” the voice-over says, as Eric Clapton’s “After Midnight” swells in the background. “Because the ones who truly change the world are the ones who are still at it when everyone else is fast asleep.”
I like how this ends.
These Economists Think Guns, Not the Crack Epidemic, Drove the ’90s Murder Boom
New research contends that a surge in handgun production and possession propelled murder rates in American cites — until new restrictions on firearms reversed the trendlines.
Huh?
The Arctic Is Warming And We’re All Screwed
In the midst of the Michael Cohen/Paul Manafort/Donald Trump news bonanza this week, some important news got buried. Okay, the Trump news isn’t unimportant, but we’re talking “important” in terms of the long-term survival of the human race in the face of climate change. And recent signs from the Arctic shows that those chances of surviving aren’t great. Here’s what’s going on
Hint: It’s not good!
There Was A Child Went Forth Every Day
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, Or for many
years or stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass and white and red morning glories, and white and red clover,
\and the song of the phoebe-bird,
And the Third-month lambs and the sow’s pink-faint litter,
and the mare’s foal and the cow’s calf, . . .
—WALT WHITMAN
I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.
—A FOURTH-GRADER IN SAN DlEGO
Epigraph, Last Child In The Woods — Richard Louv
‘Risky’ Playgrounds Are Making a Comeback
“The take-home message for municipalities is: Stop setting your bar at the level of the most anxious parent. If you do that, you’re guaranteed to produce boring and dull playgrounds,” said Tim Gill, a London-based researcher and advocate who recently authored a white paper on faulty assumptions about risky playgrounds. “If you set your bar at the level of the average parent or maybe even at the level of the parents … who do want some more excitement and challenge in their kids’ lives, then, things start to look different.”
Go Outside And Play!
Dean’s List 