Radio Garden, “Stealing” Images, and Mighty Fungi

Posted on July 8, 2026 by marylbrandt

Radio Garden

Radio Garden. This amazing website lets you spin a globe to randomly land on live FM stations over the entire planet. So cool.

Check Your Instagram Settings!

This seems important. You can read more about it here, but Meta’s new stealth policy sounds particularly dangerous for physicians and other healers.

“All someone has to do is tag your account’s profile in a prompt—if it’s public—and they can use Meta AI to generate an image using your likeness.”

Here’s how to tune this off..

“Open the Instagram app, tap your profile, and then tap the three lines in the top-right corner of the screen. Then, scroll down to the Sharing and reuse tab. Here is where you should see a section labeled Allow people to use your content on Instagram and with AI features on Meta, with a toggle for Posts and one for Reels.”

Mighty Fungi

AM (arbuscular mycorrhizal) fungi were in the news last week because of a beautiful study that determined there are “621 trillion miles of fungal pathways containing around 300 megatons of carbon within Earth’s topsoils”.

This week AM fungi were in the news again. It’s possible that the current lack of fertilizer (thanks to the Iran war) could lead to a good outcome – the regrowth of depleted AM fungal networks.

“The answer is not to abandon fertilizers but to find a balance between fertilizer use and nurturing the living soils and the billions of microbial communities that quietly sustain American and global agriculture.”

AM fungi is a really good example of something very small and quite amazing that I’ve never paid attention to before. Good lesson.

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement…to get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal;everything is incredible;never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.
Abraham Joshua Hershel

Medicine for hard times, Al dente music, and Pasta heresy

Posted on March 4, 2026 by marylbrandt

Medicine for your soul

Music, poetry, and art can be medicine for unsettling, violent times. Take a moment to seek beauty today (and every day). It will help to settle your soul in the face of what we are all experiencing right now.

Free access to 60,000 works of art in the National Gallery. They also have a wonderful Chrome extension that randomly chooses a piece of art to display anytime you open a new tab on your computer.

Poem of the day from the Poetry Foundation

#CareForTheHealers, a playlist started during COVID but that seems appropriate now, too.

Al dente pasta

Today’s delightful trivia… Barilla has Spotify playlists for each type of pasta they make that can be used as a timer for that specific pasta.

While we are on pasta….

Since good food (and especially pasta) can also be good medicine… Have you discovered this technique?

You can cook pasta in the sauce (or just a little water) without having to boil a huge pot of water.

Click here for the recipe – Jamie Oliver’s one pan pasta al limone

Click here for the recipe – Single Skillet Spaghetti

Cardio Workouts That Aren’t Boring

Posted on July 10, 2010 by marylbrandt

To maintain your fitness (and to be able to eat without gaining weight) it’s best to shoot for a minimum of 3-4 cardio workouts a week. To be effective, the workouts should be 30 minutes or longer. But – consistency is more important than intensity. If all you have is 10 minutes, then do one of these 10 minute workouts or go for a fast 10 minute walk in the hospital. If you can do three separate 10 minute workouts in a day, it is just as effective (at least for maintenance of fitness) as a 30 minute session.

Some people have incredible discipline about this (and the rest of us hate them.) For mere mortals who basically have to really work at this, you have to have a different strategy….

The first thing you have to do is choose what kind of cardio you want to do. The trick here is feeling like you are playing, not working. Dancing counts… so does jumping rope. You have to look for fun ways to exercise

American College of Sports Medicine exercise guidelines for healthy adults

www.life123.com Examples of aerobic exercise

www.60in3.com cardio options

www.livestrong.com list of cardio exercises

For many people, music is the difference between feeling like you are playing during a workout vs. working. Use music to create your own “Fartlek” workout. Fartlek workouts are also called “speed play” – the idea is to incorporate random intervals of speed work into your workout so you don’t just plod along at the same rate. One way to do this is to put your music on a random shuffle, or find a good (and free) music source that you can stream. Change your speed and intensity based on the song, or part of the song you are listening to. If the song is slow, decrease your speed (but increase the resistance if you are on a machine). If the song is fast, move with it – increase your effort (e.g sprint if you are running) to keep in time with the music.

Have fun! Go out and play!

Internet music sites:

http://www.pandora.com– internet radio that lets you design your own radio stations or choose from a large selection
http://www.folkalley.com– singer songwriters, irish music, bluegrass, etc
I’m sure there are a lot of other sites… if you have any that you use, comment below or email me.

Information on Fartlek workouts