Professor Eugen Weber, The Western Tradition

This show (The Western Tradition) rocks and I was never that much of a history buff. … (See ***)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Weber

http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/learn/instructional/western.html

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No scraping please….

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*** via a recent commenter (Michael),

I add the following link to

http://www.learner.org

Click the “View Programs” tab

then toward the bottom you will see “The Western Tradition”

I just tried the free VOD (Video On Demand).

Looks like you could order a DVD set as well.

Very awesome!  Thanks again Michael.

Heart Disease… The Charlie Rose Science Series (PBS)

A very interesting show on 9/19/2007 with a panel from the medical research community.

A few things that jumped out at me were:

– the things we already know to reduce our risk factors that aren’t being implemented well.
(ie Make sure you are getting a reasonable amount of exercise. I know I am guilty of putting off exercising, yet my eating stays on track or increases.)

– almost no mention of “heart attacks” before 1900? (That ties to the exercise that people had to get before we had all of our “modern conveniences” So we’ve traded less physical work for more stress and it’s killing us. Awesome. Less axe swinging and more phone jabbering and computer blogging huh… See one of my other posts…
https://mrobvious.wordpress.com/2007/09/01/make-a-log-cabin-you-wimps-and-babies/

– the importance of people being more knowledgeable about CPR and that some hand chest compressions (even if not perfect) was better that not doing it when someone had a heart attack.

– the idea was discussed about requiring some amount of CPR training (say in 9th grade) as some other countries have done to get people to be more knowledgeable and less afraid of trying to help someone with cardiac arrest.

– the wider availability of portable defibulator machines and the difference in survival if that is quickly done when someone’s heart has gone into that fibulation and blood isn’t flowing.

– some re-examination of using stints and focus only on narrowing arteries. They were noting that heart attack often doesn’t happen at the place where narrowing of the artery, but in other places because the plaques are throughout.

Check out the clips on… (after you get off your butt and exercise first…)

https://mrobvious.wordpress.com/2007/02/25/charlie-rose-talkshow-pbs/
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Make a Log Cabin You Wimps and Babies!

Can you imagine if I could talk to my great great grandfather? Beyond the “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” part, if he handed my sorry out of shape self an axe and said…boy fell that tree yonder! And I’d take two or three good swings and break a vigorous sweat and declare time for a break.

Can you imagine that a man came into the wilderness without any power saws and used his axe and took down, then stripped and cut down enough trees to build a log cabin before winter set in. If he was lucky, maybe there was another family or two traveling with them. And…if you were unsucessful, winter would set in and you could freeze to death or just be eaten by bears.

Honestly, even with a few power tools, I’m not sure at all that I could make a log cabin that would be safe to live in.

We won’t even embarrass ourselves reflecting on raw human power in making the pyramids of Egypt or the Mayan pyramids.

So, with all our power tools and computers…the average person should have outdone his predecessors…right?

Err no. We are weak, fat and less of darn near everything.

But we talk a lot more…O yeah..cause talk…is cheap….

Adam Carolla noted on one of his free-fm radio shows that we’ve run out of real problems (or for the most part) like malaria and mumps and chicken pox and measles and polio and the plague that you had to stay toughened up to survive.

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