Finding silence online is difficult, but the pursuit is worthwhile

Dr. Dean

(The Verge)

What silence looks like online is hard to describe, because it’s necessarily individual: I have a different threshold than you, for example, for dealing with Twitter trolls or rogue Instagram commenters. But I do think there are a few rules. First, quiet is found in considered spaces — think @everycolorbot or #cloudtwitter. Second, if silence is found through listening, then peaceful places online are more generative (like Glitch or Codecademy, or one of my favorites, Twine) and, generally, focused on maintaining small, healthy communities (like Metafilter). Silence pools like the tides. It’s hard to find at high tide, and immediately obvious where the pools are when the tide are out.

True silence​ online​ can only be found at Zombocom

A Really Good Day

Dr. Dean

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I read this as a follow up to Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind.  It covers a lot of the same gound, though Ayelet Waldman comes at if from a diferent place.  Pollan has an emersive journalistic and perhaps a “betterment of well people” perespective. Which is perfectly vaild.  Waldman, in the presentation I will post below, says that her book is “about microdosing.  It’s a book about the history of psychodelics.  It’s a book about the criminal justice system, and its a memoire about my own struggles with mental illness, my marriage my children.”

My big take away from A Really Good Day. is twofold. First, if what you know about drugs and drug abuse comes from casual media consumption you are porbably horribly worng about everything you hold to be true  Second, whatever harm you think the “war on drugs” has done to American culture — it’s far, far, worse.

Inside the Far-Out World of Dream Therapy

Dr. Dean

(Medium) 

Dream interpretation often gets lumped into the same kind of pop mysticism as tarot cards and astrology, deemed a useless attempt to assign meaning to what is widely believed to be nothing more than the random firing of neurons in the brain. . .

Tarot and Astrology are forms of “divination” not “mysticism.”

“As soon as we start paying attention to our dreams, we begin to understand that there is an intelligence there,” says Rubin Naiman, PhD, a psychologist and sleep and dream expert with the the University of Arizona’s Center for Integrative Medicine. “There’s a wisdom. There’s a compassion. There’s depth, and it can open our hearts to seeing life in a whole different way.”

Naiman is one of a burgeoning group of psychologists around the world modernizing the work of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud by incorporating dream therapy into his practice. But Naiman is more than just a dream therapist — he’s a dream crusader on a mission to fix the “epidemic of dream loss” he believes we’ve found ourselves in that has left us, well, psychically constipated.

“Dreaming digests. It metaphorically chews on, swallows, assimilates, filters through, and it decides what it’s going to excrete,” Naiman says. “We’re nourished by daily experiences, and if we’re no longer digesting new experiences, we become psychologically malnourished. People who don’t dream well are not receiving nourishment on a daily basis from new experiences.”

Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First

Dr. Dean

(Bloomberg Businessweek)

Miami-Dade is built on the Biscayne Aquifer, 4,000 square miles of unusually shallow and porous limestone whose tiny air pockets are filled with rainwater and rivers running from the swamp to the ocean. The aquifer and the infrastructure that draws from it, cleans its water, and keeps it from overrunning the city combine to form a giant but fragile machine. Without this abundant source of fresh water, made cheap by its proximity to the surface, this hot, remote city could become uninhabitable.

Huh!

Margret Fuller “Trans Activist”

Dr. Dean

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Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman. “Trans Activist” Margret Fuller 1845

Attention, Shoppers: Kroger Says It Is Phasing Out Plastic Bags

Dr. Dean

(NPR) 
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Kroger includes major chains such as Ralphs, Harris Teeter, Food 4 Less, Pick ‘n Save and, of course, Kroger. As of 2017, the company says it owns more than 2,700 supermarkets in 35 states and Washington, D.C.

That phase-out will start with the Seattle-based supermarket chain QFC, which should transition away from plastic by 2019.

“We listen very closely to our customers and our communities, and we agree with their growing concerns,” Mike Donnelly, Kroger’s executive vice president and COO, said in a statement. “That’s why, starting today at QFC, we will begin the transition to more sustainable options.”

What about straws? Are they getting rid of straws?

The Incredible, Rage-Inducing Inside Story of America’s Student Debt Machine

Dr. Dean

(Mother Jones)

Meanwhile, in early June, Republican legislators were trying to find votes for a sweeping and massively unpopular higher-education bill called PROSPER that would get rid of many grant programs as well as loan subsidies and PSLF. Trump’s 2018 and 2019 budgets also proposed axing the PSLF program. Congress has so far rejected the idea, but if the efforts succeed they would remove what was a very small sliver of hope for a generation underwater.

​Blue Mind science proves the health benefits of being by water

Dr. Dean

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(Quartz)

“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.”