The Escapist

This is my new addiction.

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 13:28:11 -0400

This is my new addiction.

Mantra potential.

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 03:15:05 -0400

Mantra potential.

awelltraveledwoman: love this. This summer, I will be here.

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 03:13:53 -0400

awelltraveledwoman:

love this.

This summer, I will be here.

theatlantic: In Focus: The Nenets of Siberia In arctic...

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 03:09:43 -0400

theatlantic:

In Focus: The Nenets of Siberia

In arctic northern Russia, industrialized resource extraction and climate change are presenting a double threat to the Nenets, an indigenous people native to Siberia. The Nenets depend heavily on their reindeer herds, using them for food, clothing, tools, transportation, and more as they migrate more than a thousand kilometers across the tundra every year. Photographer Steve Morgan recently traveled to the Yamal Peninsula to document the Nenets and their threatened way of life — here is a selection of his photos.

See more. [Images: Steve Morgan]

When someone steals the covers

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 03:09:10 -0400

whatshouldwecallme:

She’s my hero.

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 16:39:45 -0400

She’s my hero.

This. This is making it.

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 16:37:05 -0400

This. This is making it.

now i'm hungry: a culinary adventure: Steph and Tal: The San Francisco Edition

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 03:21:21 -0400

now i'm hungry: a culinary adventure: Steph and Tal: The San Francisco Edition:

nowimhungry:

This week I’m counting myself as a very lucky girl. Not only have I picked up an awesome part-time job teaching tiny children how to play soccer, but I have not one but TWO of my best friends visiting SF!

I have been counting down the days until Steph’s arrival since she bought her tickets a…

Nothing like a weekend visit with good friends and good food. I think I may have fallen in love with Cowgirl Creamery’s Fromage Blanc.

What Should I Do With My Life?

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:41:03 -0400

We make certain presumptions about how the world works, and then make decisions guided by those presumptions. Well, it all goes wrong when those basic presumptions are inaccurate. Those are presumptions more about how we want the world to work, rather than how it actually does. Here are four wrong presumptions, which we have wrongly accepted as true:

(1) That money is the shortest route to freedom.

(2) That we can think (or analyze) our way to an answer of where we belong.

(3) That we are autonomous from the environment that surrounds us.

(4) That our biggest obstacles are external, rather than internal.

— Po Bronson, author of “What Should I Do With My Life?”

Photo

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:17:58 -0400

Photo

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:14:06 -0400

"Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on..."

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:12:56 -0400

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

- Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (via hamburglr)

I’ve always wanted to have a “sitting clause”...

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 20:01:55 -0500

I’ve always wanted to have a “sitting clause” in my relationships, where once a week we both sit down together to talk about the big stuff.

This would be the perfect setting.

WANT.

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 20:00:55 -0500

WANT.

When I'm listening to my ipod walking to class

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:59:55 -0500

What I feel like:

What I actually look like:

Need a laugh? Click here!

jtotheizzoe: The Forgetting Pill: Can We Erase Painful...

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 19:51:26 -0500

jtotheizzoe:

The Forgetting Pill: Can We Erase Painful Memories?

If you could take a pill that would erase any memory, would you take it? Traumatic memories can be painful, debilitating baggage, persisting for decades and often difficult to control. Previous therapies involved discussing traumatic memories in detail, but new models of the elastic and networked basis of memory have demonstrated that this isn’t effective. Jonah Lehrer writes in Wired:

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have imagined memories to be a stable form of information that persists reliably. The metaphors for this persistence have changed over time—Plato compared our recollections to impressions in a wax tablet, and the idea of a biological hard drive is popular today—but the basic model has not. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.

None of this is true. In the past decade, scientists have come to realize that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant. Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all.

However, a “memory” is not a “thing”, in the usual sense of the word. It is an experience, in our brain, that we replay.

We have new understanding that the formation of memories is utterly dependent on biological processes, on proteins that help write new connections in our neural network. When we “re-fire” this network, we “recall” a memory. What if we could block the proteins that write the connections? Could we truly forget?

New research is getting close to just that. In rats, drugs can block the function of a key protein (PKMzeta) involved in strengthening memory synapses. The effect is preventing experiences from being reinforced. In a sense, one can forget that small neural web, and the memory that it encodes.

When we begin to view memory as relative, as dependent on a constant flux of neural networks, it calls into question what is “true”. And the ethics of taking a “forgetting” pill are just as murky. It turns out that our assumption that we can’t choose what to remember or forget is wrong, and soon we might have the power to make that choice. Would you?

For more, check out Jonah Lehrer’s full article, and this series on PKMzeta from Ed Yong.

(via Wired Magazine, image by Dwight Eschliman)

Photo

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 19:50:49 -0500

Photo

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 19:50:12 -0500

inthemiddleoftheblue: Turtle Flats, Harvard Glacier, Chugach...

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:42:35 -0500

inthemiddleoftheblue:

Turtle Flats, Harvard Glacier, Chugach Range, Alaska by Floris Van Cauwelaert on Flickr.

good: Boys Will Hire Boys: The Media Is Male and Getting...

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:41:50 -0500

good:

Boys Will Hire Boys: The Media Is Male and Getting Maler

Women are still highly underrepresented in media both on and off the screen.

The good news: In 2011, women held 40.5 percent of newsroom jobs, compared to the 36.6 percent they occupied in 2010. The bad news: By almost every other measure, media remains overwhelmingly male, and it’s getting maler.

Read More on GOOD