So I was listening to this episode about anger and what the Bible says about it. It's not always sinful, and in fact, Ephesians says be angry and do not sin. The episode explores anger through neuroscience, psychology, and scripture, and it's really interesting. Apparently, anger is often a protective emotion, and there's a difference between feeling anger and acting on it.
The brain has a specific response to injustice and unfairness, and suppressing anger can actually make it worse. The prefrontal cortex plays a big role in emotional regulation, and the episode looks at some research on anger and emotional regulation. It also examines Jesus' righteous anger and how other biblical figures like Jonah and David dealt with anger.
The episode aims to help people understand how God designed emotions and how to process anger in a healthy, biblical way. It's not just about avoiding or suppressing anger, but about learning to deal with it in a way that's consistent with scripture. There are some practical steps and scripture declarations that can help with emotional healing.
It's a really thoughtful and nuanced exploration of anger, and it's not just about feeling guilty or trying to get rid of anger altogether. Instead, it's about learning to understand and manage anger in a way that's healthy and biblical. The episode references some studies on the neuroscience of anger, including one by Klimecki and colleagues, which found that different brain areas are involved in anger versus punishment during social interactions.
Overall, it's a really helpful and insightful episode, and it's definitely worth listening to if you've struggled with anger or resentment. The host, Dr. April Joy, is knowledgeable and compassionate, and she provides a lot of practical advice and guidance.
So I was reading this piece about self-reflection and growth, and it started with the author describing their morning routine and feeling overwhelmed by thoughts about their goals and aspirations. They look out the window and notice a maple tree, and it strikes them that trees don't apologize for taking up space - they just grow and reach for the sun without hesitation. This gets the author thinking about how humans often do the opposite, shrinking themselves down to fit in or avoid inconvenience.
The author reflects on how this tendency to shrink ourselves can hold us back from pursuing our dreams and demanding more from ourselves. They mention feeling uncertain about their decision to become a content creator, and how the tree's example makes them wonder why they can't be more confident and ambitious. It's a pretty relatable sentiment, and it makes you think about how we often prioritize others' comfort over our own needs and desires.
The piece doesn't offer any groundbreaking insights or solutions, but it's a thoughtful and personal exploration of the author's thoughts and feelings. It's more of a gentle nudge to consider our own tendencies and behaviors, and to think about how we can be more like the tree - unapologetically taking up space and pursuing our goals. The author's tone is conversational and introspective, making it feel like you're reading a letter from a friend.
The main idea is that we should be more confident in taking up space and pursuing our goals, rather than shrinking ourselves down to fit in. This is based on a personal reflection, rather than a scientific study or expert opinion.
Overall, it's a short and contemplative read that might make you think about your own approach to personal growth and self-expression.
most people live the same year 75 times and call it a life. 75 summers. 75 winters. if you’re lucky. that’s it. that’s the whole run. when you put it like that, it doesn’t really seem like a lot does it. a lot of people spend a significant portion of those 75 years misjudging how many they have left. operating like there’s always more time. always another monday to start and always a later version of themselves who will get around to it. in 200 years the year will be 2226. you, me, and everyone reading this will be dead. our friends, our families, the people we love, all of them gone. unless you go on to be written into textbooks or change something at a civilizational scale, which i genuinely hope you do, no one will remember we existed. think about who invented the stop sign. you probably can’t tell me. i can’t either. an invention used millions of times every single day across the entire planet, quietly shaping the movement of billions of people, and the person who created it has been entirely absorbed by time. that’s proof enough that even if do something remarkable or build something that outlasts you, time will consume you to. your great great grandchildren will eventually not know your name. i don’t know the names of my great great grandparents. they are the direct reason i exist on this earth and i have zero information about who they were. to be forgotten is part of life. to want desperately to be remembered is your ego speaking. it’s the part of you that hasn’t made peace with the reality that this is temporary. i would be lying if i said it wasn’t a scary thought. but it’s also the most freeing one available. nobody will remember your achievements or failures. nobody will remember the moment you hesitated, the risk you didn’t take, the embarrassment you were afraid of, the opinion you worried too much about. so why the fuck are you spending so much time worried about what people think of you right now? life is not about being remembered or liked. it’s about living. and there’s a specific reason why most people don’t. why they spend their one run on this planet existing instead of experiencing. that’s what this post is about. rainy day today. first in a while. i went outside earlier anyway. the moment you step out into that kind of air, the smell hits you instantly. petrichor, that specific scent of rain on dry earth, one of the most universally recognized smells in human experience. it did what smell always does. pulled me back somewhere specific. i couldn’t tell you exactly where but it was warm and childhood-adjacent and gone before i could hold it. smell is one of the most powerful emotional triggers we have. which is why a scent can transport you faster than any other sense. it felt like a different time for about four seconds. then i came back inside. candle lit. black coffee steaming on the desk. the rain ticking against the window steadily, a different kind of white noise than silence. this is one of the better conditions i’ve found for thinking about difficult things. let’s think about some difficult things. "It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it." — Seneca stick with me here because this is going to get slightly strange before it gets useful. we use a lot of language to describe time. months, years, specific hours. january, february, march. monday, tuesday, wednesday. 3:43am. 6:23pm. 2026. 1956. 1845. an enormous vocabulary of labels we use to mark the passage of something. but strip all of those labels away and there are really only two moments in any human life. you are born. there is a gap of existence where you do things. then you die. every label we put on time is just a way of creating measurement points within that gap. a way of categorizing change. of saying this much has passed. this much remains. the philosopher immanuel kant understood time as something a priori. meaning it’s not something we discover out in the world. it’s something we bring to the world. a framework we impose on experience to be able to make sense of it. when we encounter objects and events, we put our time frame onto them. without that frame, there is no past or future. there is only the undifferentiated flow of existence. which means time, as we understand it, is partly a human construction. and here’s where it becomes a little bit of a mind-fuck. time is also relative in the physics sense. it is provably relative. the light currently hitting your eyes from the sun left the sun approximately eight minutes ago. you are not seeing the sun as it is. you are seeing it as it was eight minutes in the past. the stars you see at night are further away. some of the light reaching your eyes left its source thousands of years ago.
Over the past year, Smart Is Sexy has grown from a small corner of the internet into a community of hundreds of thousands of readers around the world. But this note isn’t for all of them. It’s for you. The people who chose to support this publication, invest in themselves, and help build what Smart Is Sexy is becoming. In a world optimized for speed, distraction, and surface-level thinking, you’ve chosen something different. You’ve chosen to slow down long enough to think. To read. To question your assumptions. To become more intelligent, more self-aware, more ambitious, and more intentional. That mindset is exactly what Smart Is Sexy was built for. As a small thank you, I’ve put together the first collection of Smart Is Sexy phone wallpapers, along with a few other resources and surprises that will continue to grow over time. Think of this as the beginning of our Inner Circle. A place for the readers who aren’t just consuming ideas, but actively applying them.
On this day almost four centuries ago, the father of modern science was forced to bow to political and religious pressure to save his life The post Today Was the Day Galileo Caved appeared first on Nautilus.
The most controversial part of last week’s article on the Midjourney ultrasound scanner was medical experts’ recommendation against whole-body screening (including existing whole-body screening technology using MRI). Isn’t this crazy? Whole-body screening can save lives by detecting serious diseases like cancer. The experts counterargue that it finds so many false positives - minor zit-like imperfections that would never have caused problems, but which cost patients time, money, anxiety, and side effect burden to investigate - that it ends up net negative. But isn’t this just a problem of setting thresholds correctly? Can’t you commit to only investigating the most obviously bad things, then ignore the rest? This seemed like an interesting problem to investigate in more depth, so I’ve tried to get numbers. These are rough estimates loosely based on parameters extracted from unsatisfactory studies1 - please don’t take them seriously as exact values, just as right-order-of-magnitude estimates. We’ll focus on whole-body MRIs, since this is a well-studied existing technology, then speculate later on how the results might generalize to whole-body ultrasound. For every 1,000 seemingly-healthy people who get whole-body screening MRIs: 680 look fine and no follow-up is needed. 300 have mildly concerning findings. They’re told to follow-up with specialists, get further tests, or come back for more imaging later. 20 have extremely concerning findings and get immediate biopsies (surgeries to collect tissue samples from the area). Of those 20 people who got biopsies, 10 turn out to really have some serious disease. This is usually cancer, and for simplicity we’ll focus entirely on cancer going forward. Of those 10 cancer patients, 4 end up living longer and healthier lives because their cancer was detected early. The other six either have such slow-growing cancers that they would never have noticed before dying of something else, or such deadly cancers that detecting them early doesn’t help, or would have been found by standard screening so soon afterward that the extra screening didn’t buy meaningfully more time. Meanwhile, the 300 people who followed up with specialists and got extra tests will spend some number of years seeing more doctors and getting more tests and waiting and seeing, and eventually for 4 of them this will result in detecting some dangerous condition in a way that causes them to live longer and healthier lives. So in total, 8 of the 1,000 people have benefited. The average benefit among those 8 people is 4 quality-adjusted life-years, so the total benefit from the scans is ~32 QALYs. What’s the total cost? The original 1,000 scans cost about $2K each, and each takes about 3 hours of patient time (one hour for the scan itself, but we add two hours for driving, waiting, arranging the appointment, etc). The 300 patients who follow up each cost about another $2K in extra scans, tests, and doctor visits, and let’s say this takes them each ten hours (probably over the course of several years; some of what they’re doing is waiting and seeing whether the anomaly gets bigger vs. goes away). Rare and minor side effects of the testing might contribute -0.005 QALYS per person. Additionally, these people are anxious. 29% of them report “moderate” or “severe” distress. It’s easy to trivialize this and round it off to meaningless, but it’s doesn’t feel trivial when it’s happening to you or a loved one. In my day job as a psychiatrist, I sometimes encounter patients having mental breakdowns (the polite term is “adjustment disorder”) over potential cancers that they’ll have to wait six months to retest. The literature quantifies this as an average cost of 0.01 QALYs per uncertain test result. The 20 biopsies each cost about $5K and take about 10 hours. Biopsies are pretty minor as surgeries go, but there’s always some risk of post-surgical complication, and in the end these probably cost 0.04 QALYs each. Add the extra 0.01 for anxiety, and it’s a total of 0.05. We’ll very optimistically assume that there’s no extra cost to being diagnosed with a cancer that doesn’t require extra early treatment. The doctor says “You have cancer, but it’s a very slow cancer that will take thirty years to harm you, and you’re eighty years old, so this doesn’t matter. Just be chill.” This doesn’t always work in real life, but we’re trying to imagine a best-case scenario. We’ll very optimistically assume that after enough tests, the smartest doctors can distinguish cancers that should be treated and cancers that shouldn’t be treated with 100% accuracy, or at least that the number of cancers caught according to the above statistics is at some threshold where falsely identifying a cancer as treatable is rare. We’ll assume that the extra cost of treating the treatable cancers is zero.
On this day almost four centuries ago, the father of modern science was forced to bow to political and religious pressure to save his life The post Today Was the Day Galileo Caved appeared first on Nautilus.
Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has slashed budgets for hundreds of its basic science programs for the remainder of this fiscal year, according to an 18 June memo obtained by Science. The memo informs program managers within a unit of NSF’s math and physical science directorate that their budget for this fiscal year, ending 30 September, has been cut by 30% from the FY2025 level, which was $260 million. The memo also asks NSF program managers to “pull back any award recommendations in the queue,” and refrain from informing potential and current principal investigators (PIs) and other grantees about the changes: “Please do not communicate anything to PIs,” the memo states. Comparable cuts were made within many other NSF units, including the biology directorate, which received a budget cut of $200 million. Sources who preferred not to be named told Science they suspect that the budget cuts are part of an effort to make funds available for a new NSF initiative called X-Labs. The new initiative is a $1.5 billion program that would award “independent teams of researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs” funding to “tackle challenges that were difficult to pursue in conventional academic and industry labs,” a May announcement about it states. NSF will fund X-Labs through a mechanism called Other Transaction Authority, which allows the agency to issue funding outside of standard grants or cooperative agreements. The overall FY2026 budget did not contain funding for X-Labs; NSF officials expanded the program and accelerated its launch. The cuts to basic science programs come during a time of turbulent changes at NSF. This fiscal year, the agency has awarded roughly half the number of awards it had by this time in FY2025 (and just an eighth of the total number of new grants awarded in FY2025), despite the overall NSF budget being just 3% less, according to Grant Witness. These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at [email redacted].
The sandfish lizard moves very efficiently through the sands of the Sahara desert, and not surprisingly, it doesn't use wheels to do so. Scientists have now copied the reptile's swimming motion in an experimental Mars rover that outperforms others in sandy soil. Category: Robotics, Engineering Tags: locomotion, Biomimicry, Wheel, Rover, Mars
After packaging full fire-starting capabilities neatly inside a 2-oz (57-g) capsule that doubled as a high-pitched whistle, Outdoor Element is now integrating that same spark-flicking capability into a more useful everyday tool: the common pen. Whether your 9-to-5 job involves a rare combination of manual record keeping and precarious wilderness travel, or your idea of outdoor recreation includes journaling your day while remaining at the ready for whatever nature hurls at you, the all-new Pen-metheus equips you for it all. Category: Knives and Multitools, Gear, Outdoors Tags: Multitools, Multi-functional, firestarter, Fire, Survival, EDC, Everyday Carry, Kickstarter, Outdoors and Camping, Camping, Backpacking
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