From & To Sathish #6 - Page 199

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/linguistic-siblings-14-pairs-of-words-with-surprisingly-shared-etymologies?utm_medium=email&utm_source=pocket_hits&utm_campaign=POCKET_HITS-EN-DAILY-SPONSORED&PAVED-2024_11_04=&sponsored=0&position=10&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=83e9aca6-812c-4e10-bfc4-8762f3303d27&url=https://getpocket.com/explore/item/linguistic-siblings-14-pairs-of-words-with-surprisingly-shared-etymologies

Find out what connects ‘galaxy’ to ‘lactose’ and ‘sarcasm’ to ‘sarcophagus.’

*The Sound of Silenced Letters*

We know the letter B doesn’t belong in subtle

But what has the letter C got to do in a muscle?

The role of the D in Wednesday we can’t define

Why should G be present in a gnat or in a sign?

To be honest, does the H in rhyme ring a bell?

And can the J in marijuana anybody smell?

Who knows why the K in knee won’t knock

And why the L in walk or in calf would not talk

The first M in mnemonic is hard to understand

Would the damned N in the column ever stand?

We can’t say the P in psalm or in psychology

And S alone gets tossed out from the debris

Is the T heard when you listen to a whistle?

W is not write, it’s wrong, don’t try to wrestle

X is the mistake in a faux pas, get the clue?

Hush, no rendezvous with Z, goodbye, adieu!

Just couldn't resist sharing this, it .may be of interest to the English language teachers and writers !!

*Here are three amusing short stories to share with everyone with deep meaning and worth keeping in mind*.

*1. "Profound"*

I saw a little kid eating ice cream in the elevator. Out of concern, I casually said, "It's such a cold day; you'll get sick eating that!"

The kid replied, "My grandma lived to be 103."

I asked, "From eating ice cream?"

He said, "No, because she never meddled in other people's business!"

How profound! I finally understand why I'm aging so fast—too much unnecessary meddling.

*2. "Exhausted"*

Scammers are everywhere these days. I just saw on the news about people's savings mysteriously disappearing—tens of thousands of dollars gone without a trace.

Panicking, I rushed to the bank on my bike, inserted my card, entered my password, and checked my balance. Thankfully, my $8 was still there. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Whew, that was nerve-wracking! I swear I’m never watching the news again— too stressful!

As I left the bank, I was even more exhausted: my $8 was safe, but my bike was gone.

*3. "Hold Back"*

A young lady boarded a train and saw a man sitting in her seat. She politely checked her ticket and said, “Sir, I think you’re in my seat.”

The man pulled out his ticket and shouted, “Look closely! This is my seat! Are you blind?!”

The girl carefully checked his ticket and stopped arguing. She quietly stood beside him.

After the train started moving, the girl leaned over and softly said, “Sir, you’re not in the wrong seat, but you’re on the wrong train. This is heading to Shanghai, and your ticket is for Harbin.”

There’s a kind of restraint that leaves people regretting their actions. If yelling solved everything, banshees would’ve ruled the world long ago.

These three funny short stories are too good to keep to yourself—why not share the laughter with others?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87CnFuCLHGo

இதெல்லாம் உங்களுக்கு தேவையா கோபி.. 😒 | Baakiyalakshmi | Episode Preview | 3rd February 2025

I don’t want children. I do want children. What should I do?

How can you know if you truly want to be a parent?

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a new framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions. This unconventional column is based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Here is a Vox reader’s question, condensed and edited for clarity.

I’m at an age where I feel like I need to decide whether I want to have kids, but I’m very ambivalent about it and don’t know how to know whether I want them. I don’t dream of parenthood or filling my days with caregiving for a young child. But, does anyone?! That doesn’t seem like a good way to decide whether I truly want to be a parent. But then what is? The main place my mind goes is that I fear my life would be sad and depressing when my partner and I are 70 and childless. I like the thought of having well-adjusted adult children to spend time with when I’m old. That seems like a misguided and selfish reason to have kids.

A better reason might be that I think my partner and I have good values, and I’d like to bring more people into the world who have those values, but that also seems selfish because there’s no guarantee that a child will embrace your values, and your duty as a parent is to let them flourish as whoever they want to be. I worry that I would be the kind of parent who struggles to support my kid if they rebel against everything I believe in. But I also feel like you just can’t know what you would be like in that situation until you’re in it. How do you decide that such a life-altering decision is right for you, let alone its ethical implications for a person who doesn’t exist yet?

Dear Fencesitter,

Ah, parenthood ambivalence. So many of us can relate. And, like you, so many of us try to answer the question “Do I want to have kids?” by looking inward for the answer. We introspect, we ruminate, we dig through childhood traumas. We consider what makes us happy now in hopes of predicting whether kids would make us happier or more miserable later. We assume the answer is there within us, a buried treasure waiting to be unearthed.

That’s understandable: Most advice for people considering parenthood encourages us to do just that. Countless articles, books, and yes, advice columns are premised on the idea that the answer exists as a stable fact within us. So is the parenthood ambivalence coach Ann Davidman’s online class, the “Motherhood Clarity™ Course” which opens with a mantra: “The answers will come because they never left … It’s all within me.”

But there are a few problems with that approach. For one, you could spend your entire adult life auditing your soul for the answer and still end up looking like the shrug emoji. That’s because introspection is an unbounded search process: You’ve got no way to know when you’ve searched enough.

Another problem is that this approach centers you and your desires too much. As you pointed out, bringing a kid into the world can’t only be about its costs and benefits for you.

Finally, you’re just not well-positioned to predict whether kids will make you happier or more miserable! As the philosopher L.A. Paul notes, you can’t quite know what it’ll be like to have a kid until you have one, and besides, the “you” might become transformed in the process, so that the things that make you happy now are not the same as the things that will make you happy as a parent.

So, what I suggest is a radically different approach: If you want to arrive at a decision, you have to go beyond your own interiority. You have to turn your gaze outward and ask yourself: What is it that you find awesome, thrilling, and intrinsically valuable about being in the world?

I’m not asking because I think the key is deciding which values you want to transmit to your kid. Like you said, there’s no guarantee that your kid will embrace your values. Instead, I’m asking because this is the basis on which you can make a choice — not “find the answer” but make a choice — about whether to have kids.

Up until now, you’ve been thinking of the kids question as an epistemic one — you say you “don’t know how to know” — but I would think of it as an existential one instead. The existentialist philosophers argued that life doesn’t come with predefined meaning or fixed answers. Instead, each human has to choose how to create their own meaning. As the Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y Gasset put it, the central task of being human is “autofabrication,” which literally means self-making. You come up with your own answer, and in so doing, you make yourself.

A decade ago, just for fun, my friend Emily sat me down in a park and had me do an exercise that would turn out to be extremely impactful: It was, believe it or not, an online quiz. It listed dozens and dozens of different values — friendship, creativity, growth, and so on — and instructed me to select my top 10. Then it made me narrow it down to my top five. I found that brutally hard, but it was revealing. My number one value turned out to be what the quiz called, somewhat idiosyncratically, “delight of being, joy.”

I return to that again and again (my mind preserves the punctuation, so I regularly find myself talking to people about “delight-of-being-comma-joy!”) when I have to make tough decisions. It captures a core fact about me: I love being alive in this world! Whenever I snorkel with impossibly colorful fish, or experience deep connection with another human being, or stare up at all the galaxies we’ve barely begun to understand, I feel so grateful that I get to participate in the grand mystery of being.

And that’s what made me decide I want to be a mom one day. Choosing to have a child feels like one of the biggest ways I can say YES to life, at a time when many doubt the worthiness of perpetuating human life on this planet. It’s a way to affirm that being alive in this world is a gift, one I want to pass along to others.

So allow me to be your Emily. Let me present you with an inventory of values (one of many similar inventories available online) and urge you to select your top five. Then ask yourself: Would having a kid be a good way to enact my values — or is there another way to enact my values that feels more compelling to me? Which path is the best fit for you personally, given your specific talents and your physical and psychological needs?

This depends a lot on the individual. Imagine three women who all rank “personal growth” as their top value. They might still arrive at totally different conclusions about kids. For one woman, that value may feel like a great reason to have a kid, because she believes childrearing will help her grow as a person and that she’ll get to guide a new person in their development. The second woman might say her primary mode of growth is art-making, so she wants to focus on that while being an active auntie to her friends’ kids on the side. A third woman might feel that, for her, the most promising path is to become a nun. All three are completely valid!

A lot of people struggling with parenthood ambivalence say they’re scared that if they don’t have a kid, they’ll miss out on something sui generis — a completely unique experience, a sort of love to which nothing else compares. It sounds like this FOMO is playing a role for you, too; you mentioned that you fear your life would be sad and depressing when you and your partner are 70 and childless.

But there are plenty of parents who will tell you that, while they adore their kids, the kid-parent relationship is not magically more meaningful than anything else in their life. In the excellent new book What Are Children For? by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, the former writes:

While the relationship between a parent and child is doubtless unique, what if I told you that, phenomenologically speaking, it is not really grand and tremendous? That it’s not even particularly extraordinary? … To love your child isn’t like nothing you’ve ever known. It isn’t unimaginable. If you have known love, you have also known it, or something like it … What is so special about this love isn’t how exotic, mysterious, or astounding it is but how simple and familiar.

So, if you just like the thought of having children because you want lovely people to spend time with when you’re old, try first experimenting with other ways to get that same need met. You might find that it’s not something that only a child can provide. As the author (and my friend) Rhaina Cohen documents beautifully in The Other Significant Others, some people find that deep friendships meet their need for connection perfectly well, with no child-shaped hole or partner-shaped hole left over.

But even if you believe having a child is a sui generis experience, the point I would make is: Other things are too! An artist might tell you there’s nothing that compares to the creative thrill of painting. Someone involved in political work may tell you there’s nothing quite like the feeling of fighting for justice and winning. Lots of things in the world are unique and incommensurably good.

So don’t be pushed around by societal narratives of what the ultimate good looks like. Let your choice flow from your own sense of what’s most valuable about human life. Whereas what makes you feel happy or miserable can change a lot over time, core values are relatively stable, so they form a more enduring basis for making major decisions. Yes, it’s conceivable that even those values might shift a little over the decades, but making a choice that flows from your values means you will at least be confident that you had a very solid reason for doing what you did — no matter how you end up feeling about it in the future.

And as for the future? You really can’t control it. So, your goal is not to control every possible outcome. Your goal is to live in line with your values.

Sigal Samuel is a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic.

https://www.self.com/story/what-protein-does-in-your-body

How Much Protein Do You Need in a Day?And what exactly is protein, anyway?

https://www.self.com/story/9-foods-you-think-are-high-protein-but-actually-arent?utm_medium=email&utm_source=pocket_hits&utm_campaign=POCKET_HITS-EN-DAILY-SPONSORED&PAVED-2024_11_05=&sponsored=0&position=7&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=453ae120-92c9-42c5-8dc5-4c25887f7569&url=https://www.self.com/story/9-foods-you-think-are-high-protein-but-actually-arent

9 Foods You Might Think Are High in Protein, but Actually Aren’tConsider them helpful sidekicks to reach your daily goal.

https://www.self.com/gallery/foods-with-more-protein-than-egg

15 Foods That Have More Protein Than an Egg

Be Kind to Your Gut Now, and the Older You Will Thank You

Experts on the microbiome explain how to eat for health and longevity.

Welcome to Gut Check, our column dedicated to the complex, ever-evolving relationship between food and our bodies. Whether you’re curious about mindful eating or want to understand what makes picky eaters picky, read on and let award-winning journalist Betsy Andrews answer all your burning questions.

For my 60th birthday, I threw a massive party. I set up a sprawling taco and burrito bar with an absurd variety of homemade fillings and fixings. After dark, I was outside grilling sausages and rib-eye steaks. In the wee hours, I served midnight pasta to the stragglers. Food is my love language. I overindulge myself, and I overindulge my crowd.

But there’s another crowd I’ve been thinking about lately: the one in my gut. My microbiome. One hundred trillion strong, this collection of as many as 5,000 microbe species—and I’m still wrapping my mind around this—is not human. It lives symbiotically with us, affecting and being affected by our behavior. I’ve been paying attention to it lately because, as I get older, it’s been nagging at me. “Could you let up a little?” my gastrointestinal system seems to be saying. “Do we have to eat like this again today?”

So, I am listening. Determined to at least tweak my ways, I contacted a few experts to understand the connection between gut health and aging, and to learn how we should all take care of the crowd within, for the sake of our health as our lives progress, no matter our age.

The Biodiversity Inside

“Microbes have inserted themselves into so much of our body,” marvels gastroenterologist Dr. Will Bulsiewicz, aka Dr. B. “That’s obvious when we talk about digestion, where they allow access to nutrients that affect physiology.” The microbes in your gut influence everything: your hormones, metabolism, immune system, cognition, and even mood.

The more diverse those microbes, the better they are at helping you stay healthy. “I liken the microbiome to a rainforest,” says gut expert Dr. Nabeetha Nagalingam, lead scientist at Omed Health and Owlstone Medical. “The more kinds of microbes you have doing important functions, the better, because if you lose one species, others perform their functions.”

That’s one drawback of hitting 60: The diversity in my gut, which rose in my teen years and leveled off in middle age, is now on the decline. As certified nutritionist and registered dietitian Nancy Mazarin, who holds a Master of Science in Nutrition, points out, this decrease in diversity is linked to chronic and neurodegenerative conditions in aging people. Conversely, centenarians, i.e., those folks who are surviving well into old age, appear to have particularly diverse guts.

So if I want to stay hale and hearty, I ought to protect my gut’s biodiversity. According to Kristina Dunkley, a registered dietitian who earned a Master of Science in Foods and Nutrition with a specialty in geriatric nutrition, a gut microbiome that’s “well-fed, flourishing, and changing throughout our lifespan helps with mobility, beneficial blood chemicals, lowering chronic diseases, and overall function.”

I like Nagalingam’s recipe for gut biodiversity: Reduce stress, because your nervous system and gut are interconnected; exercise, because it boosts your mood, releasing endorphins and other good chemicals that communicate with your gut; avoid antibiotics, unless you really need them, because they deplete your microbiome; and most importantly, eat a varied diet.

It’s never too early to prioritize the latter. Diverse fruits, vegetables, whole grains—“The better we eat throughout our life will affect our overall outcome in aging,” says Dunkley. In fact, the longer you wait to change your diet, the less responsive the gut becomes. “We have the ability through our choices to manipulate and shape our microbes,” says Bulsiewicz. But because we metabolize what we eat more slowly as we age, “it will take longer if we’re older. There are small changes that are sustainable that you can do for years to come, and those benefits will continue to grow.”

For Bulsiewicz, who authored the book Fiber Fueled, the chief recommendation for gut health is obvious.

Ramp Up Fiber

You’ve probably met somebody who swears by prunes or Metamucil to stay regular, but it turns out that the fiber in those dried plums not only aids in digestion; it also feeds the bacteria in the colon, which in turn produce crucial nutrients. Those prune-eaters are an enlightened bunch, since fiber increases our odds for longevity. “Ninety-five percent of Americans are deficient in fiber,” says Bulsiewicz. “We used to think fiber just gets pooped out,” he explains. “But some comes into contact with your gut bacteria, which changes it into short-chain fatty acids.” Short-chain fatty acids are dietary superheroes: They protect brain function and maintain muscle mass. They’re anti-inflammatory, cancer-suppressing, and immunoregulatory; they act in preventing obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

There’s evidence of fiber’s benefits in our DNA. Our chromosomes are protected from aging by protein caps called telomeres, which work like aglets on shoelaces, keeping DNA strands from fraying. Shorter telomeres are associated with age-related diseases—and fiber keeps telomeres from shrinking. One study of the telomeres of nearly 6,000 people ages 20 to 85 found that the quartile consuming the least fiber exhibited up to six more years of cell aging than the quartile that consumed the most.

Bulsiewicz’s conclusion? Eat more plants. “People who eat more varieties of plants improve the health of their microbiome.” These include those long-lived folks in the world’s Blue Zones. Do as they do: Eat your veggies. Have them fresh, frozen, even canned. Turn your pasta sauce into a vehicle for getting veggies into your meal. Nosh on nuts, legumes, and whole grains. They’re the best way to get good carbs.

“Carbohydrates encompass the whole plant kingdom,” says Mazarin. “The fact that we are overeating carbohydrates is a different issue. We are overeating processed carbohydrates: breads, pastas. But there’s no overeating peas, beans, lentils, brown rice, potatoes.”

For eaters like me who are sensitive to beans, Bulsiewicz suggests starting with canned chickpeas or lentils. “They are sitting in water, which helps pull off the stuff that can upset your stomach—a rinse makes them even gentler—then consume them in moderate amounts,” he says. Like a muscle, the gut “can be trained and made stronger,” he adds. “Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to eat a can of chickpeas. Now I can.”

Choose the Right Proteins

“‘Plant-based’ doesn’t mean only plants. It’s flexitarian,” Mazarin says. “Some meat is okay, but not rich steaks every day.” Red meat is high in saturated fats, which are universally accepted as bad for your heart. A diet heavy in red meat also increases your risk of colon cancer.

“Most people over 60 have diverticulosis, or diverticular pouches,” says Dunkley, referring to pouches that form in the walls of the large intestine that can become inflamed; a condition associated with the consumption of red meat. “Fiber helps clean those out, keeping bacterial infection at bay.”

Where does this leave us with protein intake? “As we age, we lose muscle mass,” Dunkley says, which means there’s less cushioning if, say, you take a fall. That’s one reason elderly people are more susceptible to broken hips. Translation: You should increase protein intake as you age.

But as most of us know by now, protein doesn’t have to come from red meat. Leaner animal proteins and those high in omega-3 and -6 fatty acids have additional heart-healthy benefits. That’s why Dunkley tells her patients to eat cold-water, fatty fish such as Arctic char and salmon—in addition to nuts, black beans, and chia seeds.

It turns out, many fiber-rich plants also pack a protein punch. “That’s an argument for lentils,” says Bulsiewicz, which “hit two birds with one stone.” The beauty of legumes is, they’re nutritious and inexpensive.

Avoid Processed Foods

Ultra-processed foods make up 58 percent of the American diet. The rate is even higher among those ages 2 to 19, whose diet is 67 percent processed foods. “This is not the way we ate before. We didn’t snack all day, and our diet was not heavily processed,” says Mazarin.

“You are what you eat,” says Dunkley, “and if you’re having foods that are highly processed and high in sugars and fats, it does increase the risk of inflammation.” Cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity—inflammation can trigger a host of health problems as we age.

Therefore, “in general, we should avoid highly refined foods linked to inflammation of the gut,” says Nagalingam, who notes that aging bodies become less tolerant of ingredients like sugar that are prevalent in processed foods because of the immune response that our gut has when we eat them. She suggests keeping a food diary to monitor and avoid things you eat that inflame your gut. Bloated? What did you eat? Write it down. “Knowing your individual rhythms and how your individual gut reacts to certain foods is important.” You can minimize the bloating and constipation that come with aging if you know which foods worsen those conditions for you.

Less Is Probably More

processed food is implicated in another change in the American diet that worries Mazarin: snacking. The organisms in our microbiome “only have access to what we feed them. And what’s changed in the last 100 years is that we eat all the time … Manufacturers sold snacking to America,” she says.

As we age, we just can’t eat as much. Our metabolism slows. And many of us don’t move as much. “If we eat more than the energy we can use, we gain weight,” says Mazarin. Weight gain, in turn, can lead to reduced mobility and increased risk of conditions associated with ill health. But she’s a realist: “You can be in good health and have high blood pressure that’s managed well, and you’re doing the best you can with diet and exercise. That’s fine.”

Do Your Best

Sociocultural factors can also shape your microbiome. As I’ve gotten older, for instance, my gut’s tolerance for spicy foods has decreased. But I’m a North American of Eastern European descent. As Mazarin points out, there are cultures in which people eat dishes blazing with chiles their entire lives with no problems. In fact, studies show that capsaicin-rich diets improve the health of the microbiome. Socioeconomics also plays a significant role: Dunkley’s lower-income patients, particularly those who are BIPOC, have “end-of-life outcomes that are much worse” than their white, more-monied counterparts.

Yet each microbiome is distinct. “If you had an identical twin, meaning you share a genetic code, you might grow up in the same home, eating the same food, and yet only share 30 percent of the same microbes,” says Bulsiewicz. So we each need to take responsibility for our guts as we age. That includes checking in with it often. “If you think something’s not right, go with your gut and see a healthcare professional,” says Nagalingam.

But vigilance shouldn’t mean stress or depriving ourselves of the good things in life. For my part, I won’t stop throwing parties, but I am going to cut down on the foods (and portion sizes) that mess with my gut. That way, the crowd within stays happy, too.