Re -Train Your Brain To Happiness

October 01, 2015

Frederic Remington: The Man Who Helped Bring The West To Life

I have always loved Remington's work be it a paining or sculpture.There is so much movement in each work.
I suppose I am lucky that I have a copy of "Cheyenne".

Above:The Mountain Man depicts a dramatic moment in the daily life of a frontier trapper, in which he and his mount work together to descend a precarious slope.

Cast by New York’s Roman Bronze Works foundry in the lost-wax technique, the earliest "Mountain Man" statuettes are sharply delineated with a rich variety of textures, from the fringed buckskin garment to the animal’s hairy coat to the rocklike base.

The Metropolitan Museum purchased this statuette—and three others—from Remington in 1907.

With many thanks to The Met

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The Rare ‘Blue Moon’ Diamond Is All Set To Become The Most Expensive Jewel, When It Goes Up On Sale

A rare blue diamond also named as the Blue Moon that weighs nearly 12.03 carats, is regarded as one of the largest cushion-shaped stone which is to appear at an auction.The fancy vivid blue diamond has already created a buzz and is speculated to sell for approximately $55 million when it goes up for auction in November 2015.

The unique diamond was discovered last year at the Cullinan mine in South Africa.The gem originally weighed around 29.93 carats before it was transformed. Cullinan is the regarded as the main source that produces world’s most rare blue diamonds. It is also said that, the Cullinan mine is expected to produce more than one million carats per year over the next 30-40 years.

The rare precious stone “Blue Moon,” will be showcased in Hong Kong, London and New York before it will be put up for an auction in Geneva on 11th November 2015.
Sotheby’s, the auction house has already tagged the estimate sale price of the precious stone to be somewhere around $33-$55 million. If the Blue Moon is sold at $55 million then it would beat the Zoe Diamond, which was sold last year for $32.6 million, making it the most expensive diamond ever sold.

The sale of the above rare Blue Moon diamond will take place on November 11, 2015 at Sotheby’s Geneva in Switzerland.

By Avinder Vij
Wit many thanks to Billionaires Newswire

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Rod Stewart Says He Is A Pretend Songwriter, Wants The Faces To Play Glastonbury

Rod Stewart has always tortured himself when it comes to his songwriting abilities.

The Scottish singer has had a hugely successful career, first with The Jeff Beck Group and then Faces before becoming a solo artist. With hits such as Maggie May and Sailing under his belt, anyone would think Rod had confidence in his songwriting, but in reality his view is the complete opposite.

‘I’ve always tortured myself and thought, ‘You’re a pretend songwriter. You’re a performer,’ he confessed to Rolling Stone.

But working on his autobiography in 2012 set him on a path to reconnecting with his craft. Soon, the 70-year-old had penned enough songs for his 2013 record Time and following its success, he will soon release another album of his own material, Another Country.
‘I’d done the Great American Songbook albums,” he explained. “I’d done a soul album. I’d done a rock [covers] album. I backed myself into an alley because there’s not much left to do except write.”

It doesn’t mean Rod is bored of singing his biggest hits though. The star will return to Las Vegas next year (Mar16) to resume his residency at Caesar’s Palace and will happily take a trip down memory lane.

While he told the outlet in 1977 that he didn’t want to be singing Da Ya Think I’m Sexy past the age of 50 and become a parody of himself, Rod still belts out the hit on a regular basis.
‘You have to be able to laugh at yourself,” he added. “You just have to.”

Joking aside, Rod is just glad he is able to continue doing his dream job. Having lost his voice in 2000 for a number of months after surgery to remove a cancerous growth, the singer does everything he can to protect his instrument now.

‘I treat my voice like it’s the crown jewels,” he said. “It isn’t not working, I ain’t happy. If I lost it forever, it would be a huge void in my life. Being up on that stage is highly addictive. There’s no drug like it in the world.”

With many thanks to Noise 11

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Rod Stewart Wants The Faces To Play Glastonbury

The 70-year-old singer has called on the festival’s founder, Michael Eavis, to get in touch with the band – which recently reformed with remaining members Ronnie Wood and Kenney Jones, because it”s the one gig they never got to do.

Rod pleaded: “I just wish someone would phone us up from Glastonbury and ask us to do that. They have never done it. We would be up for it. There are only three of us standing now.”

The Stay With Me hitmakers tried to reform for a string of dates in 2010 and 2011 but chose to go with Simply Red”s Mick Hucknall on lead vocals instead of Rod and Ronnie previously blamed Rod”s management for the delay in making the full reunion happen.

The Ooh La La crooners, whose bassist Ronnie Lane passed away in 1997, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012 where they were set to reunite but Rod pulled out of the performance due to illness.

The rockers finally reunited last month, but Rod admitted it went by in a flash. He told BBC Radio London: “It is like sex sometimes. It goes by too fast.”

With many thanks to Noise 11

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The Brains Of High Achievers Are Wired Differently, Study Finds

Scientists in the UK say they’ve found a strong correlation between a particular set of connections in the brain and a person’s likelihood of displaying positive lifestyle and behaviour traits.

Brain scans revealed that positive traits such as vocabulary, memory, life satisfaction, income, and years of education were linked to higher connectivity in certain areas of the brain, while negative traits, such as anger, rule-breaking, substance use, and poor sleep quality, were linked to lower connectivity.

"We’ve tried to see how we can relate what we see in the brain to the behavioural skills we can measure in different people," lead author Stephen Smith from Oxford University’s Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain told Steve Connor at The Independent. "In doing this, we hope to able to understand what goes on 'under the bonnet' of the brain."

Smith's team worked with data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) - a US$40 million brain imaging study of 1,200 people launched in 2010, one of the goals of which is to identify the networks that are active when the brain is idle, which "are thought to keep the different parts of the brain connected in case they need to perform a task," says Sara Reardon at Nature Magazine.

The HCP has so far released data from 461 of those subjects, aged between 22 and 35 years old, and Smith and his team analysed the connections in their brains, then compared these to 280 behavioural and demographic measures, such as age, personality traits, history of drug use, socioeconomic status, and performance on several intelligence tests.

"The quality of the imaging data is really unprecedented," said Smith in a press release. "Not only is the number of subjects we get to study large, but the spatial and temporal resolution of the fMRI data is way ahead of previous large datasets."

Publishing in Nature Neuroscience, Smith and his colleagues describe how they mapped the processes in each participant’s brain to come up with personalised 'connectomes'. These connectomes mark the connections between neurons in 200 separate regions in the brain and measure how effectively they communicate between each other and where the strongest connections lie, based on the amount of nerve signalling going on.

"You can think of it as a population-average map of 200 regions across the brain that are functionally distinct from each other," says Smith. "Then, we looked at how much all of those regions communicated with each other, in every participant."

Next, the researchers took 280 different behavioural and demographic measures for each subject and performed a 'canonical correlation analysis' for the two data sets. This basically means they used a lot of complex maths and computer models to identify relationships between two large sets of complex variables.

"The team was surprised to find a single, stark difference in the way brains were connected," Reardan reports for Nature. "People with more 'positive' variables, such as more education, better physical endurance and above-average performance on memory tests, shared the same patterns. Their brains seemed to be more strongly connected than those of people with 'negative' traits such as smoking, aggressive behaviour or a family history of alcohol abuse."

While it’s not yet clear if these correlations are truly reflective of a physical connection between personality and behaviour traits and physical characteristics of the brain, but in identifying them, the researchers could help future efforts to confirm or discount this possibility.

"It may be that with hundreds of different brain circuits, the tests that are used to measure cognitive ability actually make use of different sets of overlapping circuits," says Smith. "We hope that by looking at brain imaging data we'll be able to relate connections in the brain to the specific measures, and work out what these kinds of test actually require the brain to do."

By Bec Crew

With many thanks to Science Alert

Pink Diamond Could Fetch $28 million

A pink diamond the size of a postage stamp is going on the auction block and it could fetch as much as $US28 million ($A40.01 million).

The 16.08-carat gem could set a record for a cushion-shaped fancy vivid pink diamond when it's offered at Christie's in Geneva on November 10.

The auction house says it's the largest diamond of its kind to come to auction.

A smaller, 8.72-carat pink diamond of the same shape and fancy vivid pink grade sold for $US15.9 million at auction in May.

Fancy vivid pink means the hue is of the purest and strongest saturation.

Christie's says the seller purchased it 10 years ago as an investment.

A 25-carat emerald-cut pink diamond holds the auction record for any diamond. It sold for $US46 million in 2010.

With thanks to Sky News

Thanks to JR for sending me this!

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