Moments of Awareness

Roanoke, Va. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Raymond Verdaguer BED is a medicine," instructs an Italian proverb. Increasingly, Americans are inverting that counsel by ingesting sleeping pills to speed their slumber. With complaints of insomnia mounting, and marketing by drug companies becoming ever more ubiquitous, we are turning in increasing numbers to drugs like Ambien and Lunesta. According to a recent report from the research company IMS Health, pharmacists in the United States filled some 42 million prescriptions for sleeping pills last year, a rise of nearly 60 percent since 2000. Are we running too quickly to the medicine cabinet? Or is insomnia genuinely reaching epidemic proportions, a consequence perhaps of the frenetic pace of modern life? In all likelihood, we have never slept so soundly. Yes, the length of a single night's sleep has decreased over the years (upward of 30 percent of adults

Looking for mixing? Mastering? Post-production? Hit me up! Discounts for [ Anti-Nonsense Networking ] members! Kevin Byrne Posted via email from Moments of Awareness

We listen to music and talk to people. Watch on cable channel 11 in the Boise area or on-line at TVCTVOnline.org. Watch previous shows here , and check out the backgrounds here . Join us at MOA's Facebook page  for discussion throughout the week. :) Band info at  reverbnation.com   Posted via email from Moments of Awareness

On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy , which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google's other products. This protection was especially important because search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future. Here's how you can do that: [...] Full article at  eff.org Just FYI in case you care. (Kinda interesting, too, to see all the stuff you've searched. :D)

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The uncertainty principle posits, for instance, that if you make a measurement to find out the exact position of an electron around an atom, you will only be able to get a hazy idea of how fast it's moving. CREDIT: Dreamstime View full size image One of the most often quoted, yet least understood, tenets of physics is the uncertainty principle. Formulated by German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927, the rule states that the more precisely you measure a particle's position , the less precisely you will be able to determine its momentum, and vice versa. The principle is often invoked outside the realm of physics to describe how the act of observing something changes the thing being observed, or to point out that there's a [...] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You can follow LiveScience senior writer Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ ClaraMoskowitz . For more science news, follow LiveScience on twitter  @livescience . Full article at  livescience

by  Mark Zuckerberg  on Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 10:39am I founded Facebook on the idea that people want to share and connect with people in their lives, but to do this everyone needs complete control over who they share with at all times. This idea has been the core of Facebook since day one. When I built the first version of Facebook, almost nobody I knew wanted a public page on the internet. That seemed scary. But as long as they could make their page private, they felt safe sharing with their friends online. Control was key. With Facebook, for the first time, people had the tools they needed to do this. That's how Facebook became the world's biggest community online.  We made it easy for people to feel comfortable sharing things [...] Full article at  blog.facebook.com   Posted via email from Moments of Awareness

Facebook You can pout and you can shout, but there's no avoiding it: You'll soon be forced to use a new profile page design — better known as the Timeline — on Facebook . It'll be alright though, because I'm here to (virtually) hold your hand through this big life change. Woah! Wait! What is this Timeline thing? Odds are that you've already heard about  the Facebook Timeline , but let's have a quick review for the sake of those who might've been on a really long vacation or have a (dangerous) tendency to tune out Facebook-related news. [...] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Want more tech news, silly puns, or amusing links? You'll get plenty of all three if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on  Twitter , subscribing to her  Facebook  posts, or circling her  on  Google+ . Full article at  digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com I don't actually find the Timeline heinous. I like the idea behind it, find it sometimes

The Heartland Institute — a self-described “think tank” that actually serves in part as a way for climate change denialism to get funded — has a potentially embarrassing situation on their hands. Someone going by the handle “Heartland Insider” has anonymously released quite a few of what are claimed to be internal documents from Heartland, revealing the Institute’s strategies, funds, and much more. [UPDATE: Heartland has confirmed that some of the documents are real, but claims the strategy document, which I quote below about teaching strategy, is faked. This claim has not yet been confirmed or refuted. DeSmogBlog has more info .] [...] Full article at  blogs.discovermagazine.com Personally I believe that the climate is changing and that humans are having some effect on that change, but that our effect is like a small-to-medium drop in a fairly large ocean; we make some ripples, but the climate has been, is, and will continue to be changing throughout the lifetime o

The reason for Stonehenge's construction is unknown. CREDIT: Albo , Shutterstock View full size image Theories about the purpose of Stonehenge range from a secular calendar to a place of spiritual worship. Now, an archaeologist suggests that the Stonehenge monument in southern England may have been an attempt to mimic a sound-based illusion. If two pipers were to play in a field, observers walking around the musicians would hear a strange effect, said Steven Waller, a doctoral researcher at Rock Art Acoustics USA, who specializes in the sound properties of ancient sites, or archaeoacoustics. At certain points, the sound waves produced by each player would cancel each other out, creating spots where the sound is dampened. [...] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You can follow LiveScience   senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas .  Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience   and on Facebook . F