I was thinking… I have learned a lot of things from many bloggers, but what have I done to thank them? E-mails and comments just aren’t enough for the amount of high quality information they’ve thought me (and not only me). So here I am, writing a top 5 list of my favorites. These are bloggers which inspire me for the better, both in my life and work.

A big “Thank you!” to all of them

1. Darren Rowse. The father of problogging. I have a lot of respect for Darren. I love what he’s doing for the blogging community, I love his articles (learned a lot from him), and I also love the writing style he has. It’s warm, comfortable and personal. I feel I can easily relate to it. I also love the fact that he’s putting a lot of soul into what he’s doing. I consider him to be my on-line father. Let’s have a big round of applause for Darren!
2. Yaro Starak. This may seem a surprising choice, but it’s motivated. He is a relatively new figure in the blogging world, and has grown really fast into a respectable blogger. He’s on my second position because the number one was already reserved for Darren… just joking. Seriously now, he occupies this position in my top because his style is much like Darren’s (warm, personal, comfortable), and also because he’s my blogging mentor (through the Blog Mastermind program). He managed to gain a lot of knowledge about the blogging field over a short period of time. Skilled, talented guy.

According to Wikipedia, the handshake definition is this: a short ritual in which two people grasp their right or left hands, often accompanied by a brief shake of the grasped hands. It is initiated when the two hands touch. Handshaking is commonly done upon meeting, greeting, parting, offering congratulations, or completing an agreement.

The purpose of a handshake is to convey trust, balance, and equality.

Many of us use it very often on a daily basis, but only a few know that a handshake holds many secrets…

For instance, handshaking can offer clues about the country provenience of a person. Handshakes differ in many cultures.

In Africa for example,a handshake is done using very little energy and can last for up to a few minutes (time used to exchange attentions and talk about their relatives). In western Africa, handshakes include ornamental gestures, such as snapping the fingers as the hands part.

The evolution of handshaking in the Afro-American population is mostly an effect of the central role played by it in the African communities.

Although the English exported this gesture in many parts of the world, in the XVII-century it was used solely for sealing agreements. Only later it became a greeting and started to spread in other countries.

The handshake is a gesture exported by the English to France, where it became known as “le handshake” (according to Theodore Zeldin, author of “The French”). Today’s french people are very attached to this gesture.

The Germans and the British tend to use handshakes very rarely, but the french shake hands multiple times daily, and so do the Russians, Italians and Spanish people.

The french handshake is a short energetic shake, while the Italian one lasts longer.

The social rules that assign who shakes who’s hand differ from country to country. If in France handshake used by both sexes, in England it is used mostly by males, and less times between females or males and females.

There are 8 types of handshakes:

1. Vice. Strong grasp of the other person’s hand. It’s often used unconsciously, but most of the times it has the intention to express power. People who want to Show that they’re not weak and inefficient as others may believe often use it as a form of compensation.
2. Dead hand. The opposite of the vice, a totally relaxed hand. The ones who employ this type of handshake don’t connect to the other person. Their attitude, just like their hand, remains passive. Often met at persons with big egos, but also at people who have to shake lots of hands. It’s also influenced by the cultural background (African handshake). Still, the dead hand is often used for other reasons: women wanting to leave the impression of languishing femininity or by strong men use to underline their power (Mike Tyson had a dead hand handshake).

Music and science may seem to have nothing in common. But that’s only at the first look.
Recent neuroscientific studies show that there are very strong connections between music and science.

Here’s an interview with professor Norman M. Weinberger, Ph.D., who teaches and studies neurobiology and behavior at the University of California at Irvine.
The interview was taken by Nancy K. Dess, Ph.D., who is a professor of psychology at Occidental College and senior scientist at the American Psychological Association in Washington, D. C..

Interview source: Psychology Today

Nancy K. Dess: Is music in our genes?

Norman M. Weinberger: Music exists in every culture, and infants have excellent musical abilities that cannot be explained by learning. Mothers everywhere sing to their infants because babies understand it. Music seems to be part of our biological heritage.

NKD: So our brains evolved to process it?

NMW: Not in the sense that a particular chunk of brain is musical. It’s complex, because music has many elements–rhythm, melody and so on. For example, certain cells in the right hemisphere respond more to melody than to language.

NKD: Music’s complex representation in the brain must make it hard to study.

NMW: It does. One tack is to start with basics. For example, a fundamental aspect of music perception is recognition of a melody in different keys; each note’s meaning depends heavily on its context. In one study, we exposed animals to three simple melodies with the same middle tone. Almost every neuron responded differently to that middle tone in the different contexts. This type of research helps us find out how musical processes with deep evolutionary roots differ from those appearing later in life–culture-specific preferences, for instance.

NKD: Are sound patterns recognized innately, or are they learned?

NMW: Neurons learn to prioritize some sounds. When a tone becomes important–because it signals food, for instance–the cells’ response to that tone increases. This finding revolutionized thinking about brain organization by showing that learning is not a “higher” brain function but rather one that occurs in the sensory systems themselves.

NKD: Does musical experience shape the human brain?

Is it good to gamble or play the lottery?

No! Definately not. And I will motivate my opinion.

Gambling isn’t good because there is only one winner (or maybe a few), and many players.

To enter, everybody needs to spend some money, and they all expect to win in return.

But since there’s only one winner, there are many losers - and they tend to get angry, become frustrated, depressed, and sometimes curse the ones who win… all these things are leading to even more negative effects.

Money won by gambling or playing the lottery aren’t good money because they don’t require any work. Each one of the participants dreams to get extremly rich, just by luck.

These easy-earnings lead only to some really bad things.

Gambling is a serious addiction for some. There are some gamblers who are so hooked on their vice that it can even lead them to suicide.

More, gambling fosters a “something for nothing” attitude and promotes materialism and destroys the work ethic.

The gambling’s get-rich-quick appeal is mocking capitalism’s essential values: disciplined work habits, thrift, prudence, adherence to routine, and the relationship between effort and reward. Gambling replaces these values with greed and selfishness.

Gambling is also a major cause of family neglect.

This is how advertisers think:

What do we sell here? We sell temptation, desire, animal instincts… We want to show the true nature of man. He is a savage. He needs food and fire. He hunts and gathers. What does he get? He gets a hot dog. We are pagans. We love rituals. When our team scores, we become noisy. What do we want? We want a hot dog. Children – little angels. No they’re not. They are monsters. We give them tuna sandwich. They don’t want tuna sandwich. They want hot dog. We need women. Mothers… we want their daughters. Do you know what a women wants? Do you? We do. A woman wants hot dog. We need sex. We need a dangerous food, a food full of sin. That’s what we want. What is that food? It’s a hot dog.

These lines illustrate the most common strategy employed by ads in order to sell – they convince the viewers to buy a product because the ad stirs up their sexual desires.

Sexual images have been a staple of advertising since the very birth of the industry. Women’s faces and bodies adorned Coca-Cola calendars back in the 1890s and have been employed to sell virtually everything since. But in recent decades, sexual imagery in advertising has become more common, more explicit, more exploitative, and more violent. According to the New York Times, “Sexual themes… are being used as never before to cut through the commercial clutter and grab the consumer’s attention.

Hedonist [see bottom of the page] messages can be found everywhere these days. We’re witnessing a global brainwashing campaign, and the advertising industry is one of the main players involved the process.

Whether we choose to buy products supported by hedonist ad campaigns or not, we must face the fact that they are part of our lives. They can be seen not only on TV and on the Web, but also everywhere in the offline world.

Some ad campaigns are sending their messages without camouflage. Like Keanu Reeves said in Sweet November: “We need sex…”.
The thing with these ads is that they put pressure on our minds, even if we’re not aware of this. This pressure may not be strong, but it lasts for years… maybe even for a lifetime.

If continue to go this way, we’ll soon see ads depicting completely naked models advertising for bottled water, or toys for our kids…

The use of women’s bodies in ads is essentially a cheap trick that marketers use instead of making more thoughtful arguments on behalf of their products. The mechanism used in these ads is quite simple: Attractive bodies are employed to grab attention and stimulate desire, which advertisers hope will then be transferred to the product. Buy the beer, get the girl. In this way, women’s bodies are equated with commodities, presented as the rewards of consumption.

Now let me tell you something more about the pressure that I was talking about. You may not realize it, but it is real and it will affect you when you’re feeling weak, lonely, bored, depressed… resulting in increased chances of you buying a product that has ads with sexual connotations.

Recently, the advertising industry has managed to drop to a new low.