• Heal your eyes - The Chinese claim to have discovered a simple free tool to combat the growing number of people suffering from myopia.  Intelligent Optimist Magazine.  Complement with Dr. Mercola: How to Improve Your Eyesight Naturally

• An MIT climate change study released Sunday indicates the cost of slashing coal-fired carbon emissions would be offset by reduced spending on public health. Cutting emissions might lower health spending so drastically that the US could end up saving ten times more than it would cost to implement carbon reductions, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change.  Christian Science Monitor

• The Easy Secret to Making Yourself Better at Anything.  A very interesting way to put yourself in a proactive mind frame.  The Daily Muse.

• How Meditation Can Help Your Career Through Inaction.  According to a recent study published in the journal Psychological Science, people make more decisive and rational business decisions after just a 15-minute meditation session. Those who practice mindfulness also receive higher performance ratings and are less likely to quit.  BigThink.com

• The Learning Myth: Why I'll Never Tell My Son He's Smart, by Sal Khan of The Khan Academy.  

• Social Networks Diminish Personal Well-Being, Researchers Say.  A two-year survey of 50,000 people determined that a lack of face-to-face contact in interactions online-especially on social networks like Facebook and Twitter-reduced feelings of personal well-being.  Truthdig.com

• The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection.  It won't be long before people fail to remember a world without the internet. Michael Harris explores what that means in his new book The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection.  Farnam Street Blog.

• Sweden Recycling 99 Percent Of Garbage, Edging Closer To Zero-Waste. They are even importing waste from other countries in order to keep their recycling systems fully deployed!  There is hope yet...

• 150 MOOCS Getting Started in September: Enroll in One Today - See the list at OpenCulture.com

• Secrets from Great Minds by John McMurphy.  I was fortunate to take a class based on this book with John Murphy at the University of Dallas in 1990 while I lived in Texas in the late 80's and early '90's.  The book is a great overview of the core thinking of some of the great minds over the last few thousand years and it explains the particular process or thought pattern they used to come up with their individual insights. The books is loaded with interesting quotes from great minds and provides short easy to do exercises to get you thinking along the same lines as the big thinkers from history.  

• The Power of Empathy (and One Surefire Way to Know If You're Missing It).  Mindful Magazine

• Physicist Nassim Haramein, author of the award-winning paper "The Schwarzschild Proton," has developed a Unified Field Theory that unveils a specific geometric array to explain creation and the vacuum that connects all things. - His movie, Black Whole, uncovers scientific proof that we are one by providing insight into the structure of space-time and a new coherent model of the universe.  An easier introduction to his work and how to apply it to day to day life can be found in these two Gaiam TV episodes: Haramein Unification Theory, Part One;  and Haramein Unification Theory, Part Two. 

• Break Your Bad Mood in 3 Minutes.  The practice of mindfulness teaches us a different way to relate to our thoughts, feelings, and emotions as they arise.  Mindful Magazine

• STOP STEALING DREAMS: Seth Godin at TEDxYouth@BFS.  Seth Godin speaking of his manifesto on how to change the current school system to one that actually teaches kids how to think, not just memorize and take tests.  Read the written manifesto here.

• How to do a full body workout with dumbells - from Mercola.com's fitness team.  Very well done 8 minute video.   

• Ingenious: Robert Sapolsky - The primatologist and neurologist talks turbulence-teens, stress, and the information age.  We have 2 teens in our home.  I now understand...

• Edward Tufte Wants You to See Better.  NPR Science Podcast with Data Visualization expert Edward Tufte.  "Most of my work has been secretly about trying to make people smarter. And it means smart both in terms of science and seeing and information and art. The science and art, at least at a high level, have in common intense seeing, bright-eyed observing and deep curiosity...The thinking eye must always ask: How do I know that? That's probably the most powerful question of all time."

• Martin Berkofsky - "Visions" PIANO WORKS - American pianist Berkofsky who passed away this past December, was a master interpreter of Liszt.  This solo piano album shows off his skills beautifully.  

• Various Artists - Remember Shakti - Guitarist John McLaughlin and Tabla Master Zakir Hussain illuminate the universe with this one...

• Rickie Lee Jones - The Devil You Know  (2012) - the first track is a cover of the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil - must listen.  

•  "We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success" -  Henry David Thoreau

•  "The roosters may crow, but the hens deliver the goods." - former Texas governor Ann Richards (...definitely true in my family.)

• "Each of us makes his own weather, determines the color of the skies in the emotional universe which he inhabits." - Fulton J. Sheen

• "Successful thinking integrates several radically different models while preserving the thinker's ability to act decisively. The successful thinker is an integrator who can quickly and effectively abstract the best qualities of radically different ways of seeing and representing; in doing so, that person develops 'a better lens' on the bewildering phenomenon we call the 'world.'" - Roger Martin, author of Diaminds, Decoding the Habits of Successful Thinkers

You are receiving this newsletter because you signed up at www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com