Just as we need to keep our body health, we also need to keep our brain healthy. Here are some books on improving and maintaining brain health.
Brain Longevity: The Breakthrough Medical Program that Improves Your Mind and Memory
Author Dr. Dharma Singh Khalsa is a holistic healer that combines Eastern and Western medicine. He believes cortisol plays a major factor in brain aging. He explains the four pillars to brain health: diet, exercise, stress reduction, and supplements.
The Better Brain Book
This book is all about improving memory and sharpness as well as slowing brain aging. Dr. David Perlmutter talks about nutrition, supplements, lifestyle changes, removing toxins, and brain workout. Book includes a “brain audit” as well as four recommended medical tests.
Dr. Daniel G. Amen, founder of Amen Clinics, is a physician, psychiatrist, and brain imaging specialist who had been featured on Public Television specials. He has a few books on brain health including Change Your Brain, Change Your Life and Magnificent Mind at Any Age.
The earth’s magnetic North pole moves (sometimes as much as 40 miles to 50 miles a year).
Note that this is the magnetic North pole, the north that you compass points to. It is not the geographic north pole, which is the north end of the earth’s axis of rotation.
This causes issues for us and devices that rely on the magnetic north pole’s position. In one instance, a Florida airport had to repaint it directional signs because of the shift.
In fact, in the Earth’s geological past, the magnetic poles has in fact reversed (the north pole became the south pole, and vice versa).
On a light side, here are some humor books to lighten your day…
Piled Higher and Deeper: A Graduate Student Comic Strip Collection
Comics about life in academia. The comics are smart, some of which are science related. Written and drawn by Jorge Cham who did his Ph.D in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University.
Dairy of a Wimpy Kid
Funny comics and story of protagonist Greg Heffley in his pre-teen years. These series of book inspired an movie based on it.
The Best of The Joy of Tech comics
Selection of the best humor from The Joy of Tech online series by Nitrozac and Snaggy which provides you with a humorous look at the tech world.
Sunny Side Down: A Collection of Tales of Mere Existence
Book by Lev Yilmaz who had done YouTube comic drawing videos that was a great hit on the Internet. For example, see his video about procrastination.
Have you ever seen a tech tee shirt with technical saying or equation but didn’t know what it meant? It is almost as if someone is having an inside joke. Well now, here are some explanations of some of those tee shirts.
Caffeine Molecule Tee-shirt: You know how much people likes caffeine when you see them wearing a picture of the caffeine molecule on their tee-shirt.
PI Tee shirt – PI is a mathematical constant which has the numeric value that is infinitely long and starts out with 3.1415… This tee-shirts has the numeric value of PI written out to some length. The shading shows that of the Greek letter PI which is used to denote this numeric value.
Get Real, Be Rational The “i” is an imaginary number which is told by “pi” to “be real”. “pi” is an irrational number, which is told by “i” to “be rational”.
Binary People – The tech tee-shirt says “There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understands binary and those who don’t.” The “10” is the number two in the binary number system. So the sentence is really saying that there are two types of people. But that is only apparent to those who understands binary enough to realize that “10” is the binary number for “2”.
SQL Query tech tee shirt – It shows a SQL query: “SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0”. A SQL query is a database query to retrieve records from the database. Loosely translated, the query is trying to find users that have a clue. Then the tee-shirts shows the answers of that query to be “0 rows returned”. Translated it means “There are no users that have a clue.” Or to put it in another way, all users are clueless.
Geek Love Poem T-Shirt: This shirt shows … ROSES ARE #FF0000 VIOLETS ARE #0000FF ALL MY BASE ARE BELONG TO YOU. #FF0000 is the hex color code for red. And #0000FF is the hex color code for blue.
No place like 127.0.0.1 tee shirt: This tee-shirt says “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1”. It is a play on the phrase, “there is no place like home”. The IP address 127.0.0.1 refers to home because that is the IP address of “localhost” or your own home server.
Tee shirt of a Capsaicin Molecule – This T-shirt basically says “Hot”. The capsaicin molecule shown is the active ingredient of hot chili peppers.
“What Would Joel Do” T-shirt: The shirt says “WWJD? What would Joel do?” Joel Spolsky is know in the tech circles as the programmer who write the blog JoelOnSoftware.com and the book “Joel On Software” which has a really long sub-title of “And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity”
Sudo Tech Tee Shirt: This shirt shows a cartoon where one person asks another to make a sandwich. But the other refuses. Until the first precedes the command with “sudo”. And that worked. The other must comply. Afterall, he did use the “sudo” command, which in UNIX is command that allows users to run programs with the security privileges of another user such as a super user. Many times programmer will run a command which fails and then immediately run the same command using sudo and it works.
Don’t Drink and Root: Don’t drink and type Unix commands. Otherwise, you might accidentally type the command on the T-Shirt. Please do not type the command to see what it does. It is a dangerous command. I tell you what it does. It deletes everything from your server recursively using super-user privilege (and without asking for confirmation). That’s why people who knows this command and sees it on the T-shirt thinks it is really funny.
I ate some pie: This T-Shirt basically says “I ate some pie, and it was delicious”. The square root of -1 is “i” the imaginary number. The number 2 to the 3rd power is “8”. The greek sigma symbol is often used to denote “sum”. And then you have the irrational number “pi”.
I wear this shirt periodically Because it shows a “periodic table”.
There are three kinds of people: T-shirt says the three kinds of people are “those who can count, and those who can not”. Obviously, the person wearing the T-shirt belongs to the latter.
Things just got real: Okay, this T-Shirt requires some real knowledge of math. When you take the square root of negative things, you get an imaginary number. But then when you square it, you get a real number back.
Glass is completely full Technically speaking, it is 50% air and 50% water.
You’re pointless: The triangle (which has three points) says to the circle “You’re Pointless”. Because the circle has no points.
Alcohol is a solution
In Chemistry, a solution is “a liquid mixture in which the minor component (the solute) is uniformly distributed within the major component (the solvent).”
This is a funny video about procrastination. It was drawn and made by Lev Yilmaz of ingredientx.com, where you can watch more of his comics and videos.
Watch an excerpt from the documentary “Ants! Natures Sceret Power” as scientists excavate an ant colony. This was done by pouring concrete into an abandoned ant colony and then excavating away the earth. This reveals an incredible an efficient structure that has highways and sideroads. The ants had to remove 40 tons of dirt in order to build this structure.
In another different ant colony that was not abandoned, scientists measure the air coming into and out of the ant tunnels and determined that it is analogous to an air-conditioned system where there are different shafts for incoming fresh air and outgoing carbon dioxide air.
Most of us wants to live longer. But how? The most like answer is lifestyle changes. Here are a couple of books that will show us what types of lifestyle changes we can make to help increase our longevity.
Longevity Made Simple: How to Add 20 Good Years to Your Life: Lessons from Decades of Research
“Made Simple” is correct. This practical book is short and easy to read without long lengthy technical dissertations. This makes it simple to understand and follow the advice of the authors, who are a father-daughter team.
The Forever Young Diet and Lifestyle The Forever Young Diet and Lifestyle
This book is written by husband and wife team of cardiologist and dietitian. Chapters includes “Chapter 10: Prescription Drugs That Improves Longevity”, “Chapter 12: Exercise: The Fountain of Youth”, and “Chapter 18: Longevity with Spirit”.
The “sleepwalk” in his title refers to his real-life sleepwalking condition where he jumped out of a two story building while in his sleep.
Mike is also the comedian that slept in a Macy’s window for a week during a Downy promotion for Clean Sheet Week. See on Facebook and on YouTube. It is a bit ironic since he does have a sleep walking problem and this is a window that is in public view.
If you don’t have time to read the whole book, read the front flap. It’s funny. If you have more time, read the back flap also which is about Mike Birbiglia. That’s funny too.