Green Bank, West Virginia, a tiny town nestled in the Allegheny Mountains, is the subject of Michael J. Gaynors recent piece in Washingtonian, The Town Without Wi-Fi. Green Bank lacks not only Wi-Fi but also cell-phone service and all other signal-emitting technologies, because it is home to a hyper-sensitive telescope whose reception is disturbed by any extraneous electronic noise. As a result, the town has become something of a mecca for electrosensitivesthose who suffer from sometimes debilitating physical symptoms that they attribute to nearby electronic signals. (The condition is controversial, and its causes are as yet unknown.) Many longtime Green Bank residents are resentful of the presence of this unusual community, and of its demands for a further reduction in the towns technology (including the removal of the local churchs fluorescent lights). Gaynor provides a fascinating account of how the increased prevalence of technology in the outside world has affected life in this tech-free bubble.

In the Californian publication Boom, Marta Maretich has written a moving and delicate essay about the passage of time in another townBakersfield, California, where she grew up. Maretich writes about the experience of going back to Bakersfield to clean out her parents old house after many years of living in Europe. She is struck particularly by the evolution of the once folksy local dump into a full-scale landfill. She reconnects with old friends and neighbors and meditates on the things that change and the things that stay the same, while observing the movement of objects through our lives.

The latest installment in Politicos profile series is Glenn Thrushs piece on the newly reelected Speaker of the House, John Boehner, which bears the grim title The Prisoner of Capitol Hill. Through surprisingly frank interviews with Boehner and other D.C. insiders, Thrush depicts the treacherous political terrain that Boehner must navigateunable to please the far-right members of his own party, on the one hand, and unable to achieve compromises across the aisle on the other. But the Speaker seems to approach this intractable situation with what Thrush calls a nicotine-induced zen. I dont do angry, Boehner says, chain-smoking his way through the halls of power and into another term of what, Thrush writes, is a job so thankless that its hard to see why anyone would want it.

In the Guardian, Tobias Jones writes about the 2010 murder of a thirteen-year-old girl in Italy, and the extraordinarily complicated and fraught investigation that has followed. Yara Gambirasio left her home one November evening to meet her gymnastics instructor at a gym near her house. She never returned, and her body was found three months later. With no immediately plausible suspects, the police threw a wide net, taking thousands of DNA samples from people who might have been in the area at the time. Eventually they found a close match, but, rather than cracking the case, the DNA evidence complicated things furthergeneticists believed that the man whose DNA raised the alarm had to be the brother of the killer, but none of his known siblings was a perfect match either. So the investigators were left to untangle a web of relationships and secrets stretching back decades to try to discover who the missing sibling, and the killer, might be.

Read the original:
Weekend Reading: A Tech-Free Town, Boehners Zen, and More

Give yourself an hour of aerobics every evening after school/college/work. Benefits of aerobics are well known it opens your body, gives you flexibility, energises your day and helps you lose weight. Long term benefits of aerobics include good rounded health and weight control. Join Delhi Dance Academy and meet like-minded people in a friendly and healthy environment with some of Delhis finest aerobics instructors. All studios are air conditioned, have filtered drinking water, wash rooms and changing rooms. We also provide steps, dumbbells and yoga mats or you can bring your own yoga mats (required for some lie down exercises).

EVENING:(5 days) Monday to Friday from 5pm to 6pm. Space Available, almost full.(5 days)Monday to Friday from 8pm to 9pm.Space Available.

Call 9910222770 (Arjun) or 9953835088 (Anant) for details.

E-238 & E1, Amar Colony, Lajpat Nagar. Nearest Metro: Kailash Colony/Moolchand. Opposite Tagore International School and near Lady Sriram College (LSR College).

At Delhi Dance Academy, our Aerobics classes are taken by Instructor Jai Singh (2nd runner up of Delhis toughest obstacle race Devils Circuit), an expert in Aerobics, Yoga, Diet and general fitness. He usesdumbbells, dance and floor mats and steppers to give you an overall workout aimed at losing weight, reducing the tummy/thigh and gaining stamina and agility. Come try an aerobics class for Rs 300 which will be adjusted with your fee if you join. We have had excellent reviews from our students for our Aerobics classes in South Delhi.

Both Aerobics and Zumba are great fitness workouts and which one is best for you depends on your body and on what you want your fitness workout to deliver for you. If youre looking for rock solid abs, muscle training and fat loss at the same time, then go for Aerobics, whereas if youre looking for an overall lean, fit body and no particular emphasis on muscle building, then go for Zumba. Aerobics is 5 times and week and Zumba is thrice a week, which means Aerobics will burn more fat during the week and may be a better idea for people who want to lose weight rapidly. Here is a small article that will help you decide which one is best for you Zumba vs Aerobics.

What weve seen generally is that people with good body-music co-ordination, or people who can dance are able to pick up Zumba pretty easily. Aerobics can be taken up by absolutely anyone without any experience in dance.

Aerobics actually means to live in air. In 1968, an American doctor studied the important role of oxygen in keeping the human body fit. His resultant book was called Aerobics and it lead to the creation of a new form of exercise where all elements of a healthy body muscular strength, flexibility or cardio-vascular fitness were enhanced. Aerobics consists of some important elements which make the learner physically fit and competent. These elements include jumps and leaps, flexibility, kicks, balance, dynamic and static strength. In addition to these elements, aerobics may sometimes also involve stunts like push ups, splits, supports and balances, etc. All these elements help in improving the learners creativity and task execution power.

Visit link:
Aerobics Classes in Delhi - Aerobics Fitness Workout in Delhi

Thank you for your interest in this teleseries. Below you will find the biographical sketches of the amazing (and diverse!) guests who participated in this historic series of conversationsa veritable Whos Who of evolutionary Christian thought and practice. (Click HERE to see them categorized by affiliation.

UPDATE: The entire set of 38 downloadable audios, transcripts, study guides, leaders manual, topical index, and guidelines for reflection and journaling can be found HERE.

Ian Barbour is an American scholar on the relationship between science and religion. He has been credited with creating the contemporary field of science and religion.

He received his B.Sc. in physics from Swarthmore College, his M.Sc. in physics from Duke University in 1946, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1950. He earned a B.Div. in 1956 from Yale Universitys Divinity School. Barbour taught for many years at Carleton College, with appointments as professor of religion and as Winifred and Atherton Bean Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology and Society. He has held emeritus honors there since 1986.

In his 1966 groundbreaking book, Issues in Science and Religion, Barbour laid out a series of well-crafted arguments involving issues in epistemology, language, and methodology. Together, these arguments provided a bridge between science and religion. He has explored these arguments in detail since then.

From the outset, Barbour used the term critical realism to stand for the specific set of arguments he first developed in 1966. Most scholars in the field have adopted the term.

Barbour gave the Gifford lectures from 1989 1991 at the University of Aberdeen. These lectures led to the book,Religion in an Age of Science. In 1999 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, in recognition of his efforts to create a dialogue between the worlds of science and religion.

For videos of interviews with Ian Barbour conducted by Robert Kuhn for PBS, go to: http://www.closertotruth.com and in the Search box on the top right, type Ian Barbour.

Here is the original post:
Evolutionary Christianity || Speaker Bios and Topics

Originally published January 10, 2015 at 3:01 PM | Page modified January 10, 2015 at 7:18 PM

SALT LAKE CITY At the push of a button, the gurney holding Auriel Peterson slides slowly into the pale blue glow of a magnetic resonance imaging machine. Soon, all thats visible are the shins of her black track pants and the chartreuse-and-white soles of her running shoes, angled like the fins of a torpedo.

Behind a window in an adjacent room, a splayed-out cauliflower pattern appears on a computer screen in black-and-white. Its Petersons brain. And its probably the last thing about this exercise that will be so simply shaded.

From Petersons perspective, the next hour will be spent in service, like the day she packed donated eyeglasses to send to Zimbabwe. But the ardent Mormon also knows she could be adding to a centuries-old debate about God and science. So she says a silent prayer: I hope they get what they need.

Religious cognition

Other animals have hierarchies, organized behaviors, even a semblance of norms. Only humans have religion and science. And the two have seldom been on civil terms.

Jeff Anderson and Julie Korenberg, neuroscientists at the University of Utah, want to change that. Theyre among a growing number of scientists aiming their fields most sophisticated machinery at religious cognition.

It amazes me how one of the most profound influences on human behavior is virtually completely unstudied, Anderson said. We think about how much this drives peoples behavior, and yet we dont know the first thing about where in the brain thats even registered.

The researchers want to see more than religions registry on the brain. They want to know whether it differs across religions or by intensity of belief. They want to see what genes it activates, what hormones it releases and how it relates to social behaviors. Can the same basic circuitry produce Mother Teresa and Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta? If so, how?

To approach even speculative answers to such questions, the researchers have to capture what goes on in the brain of a believer during a religious moment.

See the rest here:
Scientists seek religious experience in their subjects brains