My parents gave me the latest iPod Nano for Christmas. What a cool little device it is! Its chief purpose is to play music, of course, but it also takes video, and a few hours ago while fooling with the video, I accidentally pressed a button that took me to a special effects menu I didn't even know existed. So... here's my room on a sunny Sunday around noon, and here's what some of the effects do to it. (The original Nano videos are bigger and clearer; Blogger compresses them.)
Normal:
Twist
X-ray
Film Grain:
Infrared
Tunnel of Light
Kaleidoscope
Cyborg
Cyborg is definitely my favorite, and Film Grain comes in second. Imagine if someone from the Twenties, when film really looked like that, could see my Nano.
Oh my goodness, people! In ten years we'll be in the Twenties again, and then I'll have to say "Nineteen Twenties" to clarify what I mean! How can that be? How could the Twenties ever mean something entirely unrelated to flappers and Prohibition and the stock market crash? Tempus fugit....
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Interesting effects of the Pill
I was in college when I first heard about the sweaty t-shirt research. Our immunology professor was teaching us about MHC genes, which code for proteins that present foreign antigens to immune cells as part of protecting our bodies from invading viruses and such. Theoretically it's advantageous to procreate with someone whose MHC genes are dissimilar from yours, to give your children a robustly diverse set of immune genes with which they can tackle a greater variety of potential threats.
So, scientists had a group of men wear t-shirts for a while, and then they gave the shirts to women to smell. The women picked out the men they thought they'd be attracted to, based only on their scent. And it turned out they'd picked men with dissimilar MHC genes to their own. Isn't that crazy? They could tell by the smell!
Well, more recently I found out what happened when those same women starting dosing themselves with the hormones in the birth control pill. They began to pick the wrong men:
And women aren't the only ones influenced in this way. Men are more attracted to women who are ovulating, and the scent of them triggers a testosterone surge. Pill users don't get that invisible pheromonal advantage in the middle of the month, since the Pill stops ovulation. This has a bearing on the next article too, in which a scientist speculates that the Pill is responsible for the shift from the masculine movie stars of the sixties to the baby-faced stars of today. Women prefer more masculine-looking men when they're ovulating, so it's a reasonable theory that a nation with more Pill usage and fewer ovulating women would begin to prefer less masculine-looking movie stars. I wonder if that's also why beards have fallen so far out of fashion?
Even the environment is affected by all this. Male fish in our rivers are becoming feminized, and studies have linked this to all the female hormones in the Pill that eventually seep into the water supply. Which leads to a disturbing question: if all the extra estrogen does that to male fish, what is it doing to male humans? According to research I remember but am too lazy to look up, infertility is a much greater problem than it used to be, even after accounting for the higher average age of marriage, and the human male sperm count has been dropping for decades.
Environmental problems and t-shirt studies aside, I wouldn't use the Pill not only because it's a contraceptive but because it's an abortifacient. That is, it not only acts to prevent ovulation (and thus conception), but when breakthrough ovulation occurs anyway and the resulting egg is fertilized, it's unable to implant in the womb because of how the Pill's hormones affect the lining of the uterus, so the embryo dies instead. That information needs to become much better known, since it's very pertinent to the decision of anyone who believes that life begins at conception!
But anyway, I find all this research fascinating. How do you like knowing how much you're affected by your hormones? Or better yet, by invisible, odorless pheromones, wafting from someone else's body, right up into your nose? I've encountered this whenever I live with other young women and we find our cycles synchronize... and it's just weird!
So, scientists had a group of men wear t-shirts for a while, and then they gave the shirts to women to smell. The women picked out the men they thought they'd be attracted to, based only on their scent. And it turned out they'd picked men with dissimilar MHC genes to their own. Isn't that crazy? They could tell by the smell!
Well, more recently I found out what happened when those same women starting dosing themselves with the hormones in the birth control pill. They began to pick the wrong men:
After taking the pill, women shifted toward preferring genetically similar men. Women who did not take the pill slightly increased their preference for genetically different men....
The question, of course, is what happens when a woman taking birth control pills marries a man to whom she's attracted -- and then stops taking the pill.
Herz says marriage counselors who have never heard about these studies tell her that the No. 1 complaint among women no longer sexually interested in their husbands is that they can no longer stand how he smells.
And women aren't the only ones influenced in this way. Men are more attracted to women who are ovulating, and the scent of them triggers a testosterone surge. Pill users don't get that invisible pheromonal advantage in the middle of the month, since the Pill stops ovulation. This has a bearing on the next article too, in which a scientist speculates that the Pill is responsible for the shift from the masculine movie stars of the sixties to the baby-faced stars of today. Women prefer more masculine-looking men when they're ovulating, so it's a reasonable theory that a nation with more Pill usage and fewer ovulating women would begin to prefer less masculine-looking movie stars. I wonder if that's also why beards have fallen so far out of fashion?
Even the environment is affected by all this. Male fish in our rivers are becoming feminized, and studies have linked this to all the female hormones in the Pill that eventually seep into the water supply. Which leads to a disturbing question: if all the extra estrogen does that to male fish, what is it doing to male humans? According to research I remember but am too lazy to look up, infertility is a much greater problem than it used to be, even after accounting for the higher average age of marriage, and the human male sperm count has been dropping for decades.
Environmental problems and t-shirt studies aside, I wouldn't use the Pill not only because it's a contraceptive but because it's an abortifacient. That is, it not only acts to prevent ovulation (and thus conception), but when breakthrough ovulation occurs anyway and the resulting egg is fertilized, it's unable to implant in the womb because of how the Pill's hormones affect the lining of the uterus, so the embryo dies instead. That information needs to become much better known, since it's very pertinent to the decision of anyone who believes that life begins at conception!
But anyway, I find all this research fascinating. How do you like knowing how much you're affected by your hormones? Or better yet, by invisible, odorless pheromones, wafting from someone else's body, right up into your nose? I've encountered this whenever I live with other young women and we find our cycles synchronize... and it's just weird!
Four fun videos
My cat's scared of a tiny dog half her size, but this cat runs off a bear:
Clever bottlenose dolphins hunting for fish-- though my mom points out this is no more amazing than birds building nests or spiders weaving webs; it's just that this is a new behavior we're not used to seeing from childhood.
David Niven, trying to present an Oscar, is interrupted by a streaker. I love how Niven keeps his British cool, but you have to appreciate the streaker's timing too!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IIl3zSYL8k
A digital reconstruction of Captain Sullenberger's flight and landing in the Hudson River.
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=tE_5eiYn0D0#t=109
Clever bottlenose dolphins hunting for fish-- though my mom points out this is no more amazing than birds building nests or spiders weaving webs; it's just that this is a new behavior we're not used to seeing from childhood.
David Niven, trying to present an Oscar, is interrupted by a streaker. I love how Niven keeps his British cool, but you have to appreciate the streaker's timing too!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IIl3zSYL8k
A digital reconstruction of Captain Sullenberger's flight and landing in the Hudson River.
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=tE_5eiYn0D0#t=109
Friday, January 29, 2010
7 Quick Takes Friday, smog and Candlemas edition
---1---
The recent rain washed all the smog out of L.A.'s sky, for a day or so. It reminded me of this well-known incident: An L.A. man had some out-of-town friends visiting him, and he took them on a drive up into the mountains. The car climbed the winding roads until they were above the smog line. They parked in a turnout with a nice view of the valley and ate their lunch while looking down on the dome of brownish haze that enfolds all Los Angeles in its smoggy arms. Suddenly the L.A. man began to have difficulty breathing. He wheezed, gasped, clutched his throat, whispered, "I need air... please..." and then collapsed to the ground. Fortunately he had quick-thinking friends. One of them ran to start up the car, and the other seized one of the brown paper lunch bags. He held the bag over the car's tailpipe until it was full of exhaust, then rushed to the side of his unconscious friend and held it over his mouth and nose. The L.A. man inhaled and revived.
In L.A. we don't trust any air we can't see.
---2---
In this video a soccer player collapses from cardiac arrest. After four seconds, an implanted defibrillator restarts his heart-- you can see his legs jerk when it happens. He got up feeling fine and asked to get back in the game!
What awesome stuff humans invent! God made us in His likeness-- He is creative, and so are we. Okay, some of us more than others. Okay, I never invented anything. Except some brownie madeleines I'll post about sometime.
---3---
On my nightly walks I'm still seeing about four houses around the neighborhood with Christmas lights on. Can they not bear to let Christmas go? Are the lights set to go on automatically and no one's noticed yet? Or are they deliberately waiting for the traditional end of the Christmas season on February 2?
---4---
Remember when Christmas was the only holiday we had colored lights for? Now I see orange and purple lights in October, and last night I saw a house all lit in red and white and realized the lights were little hearts.
Hurry and buy some all-green lights at a post-Christmas sale! You can market them as St. Patrick's Day lights in March. I want a ten percent cut for giving you that idea.
---5---
The Jewish law in Jesus' day was that every son had to be brought to the temple in Jerusalem when he was forty days old (girls at eighty days-- no one knows what the difference was about), and the parents had offer sacrifice for him. So Mary and Joseph offered two doves for their baby son Jesus. This is the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, and it falls on February 2, forty days after December 25.
---6---
The feast is also called Candlemas becaue of the custom of blessing candles on that day.
"Down with the rosemary, and so
Down with the bays and misletoe ;
Down with the holly, ivy, all,
Wherewith ye dress'd the Christmas Hall"
— Robert Herrick (1591-1674), "Ceremony upon Candlemas Eve"
---7---
February 2 is also Groundhog Day, when the groundhog sticks his head of his burrow and if he sees his shadow, we'll have six more weeks of winter, but if the day is cloudy we'll have an early spring. It's no coincidence that Groundhog Day is the same day as Candlemas. Check out this old rhyme:
If Maries purifieng daie, Be cleare and bright with sunnie raie, The frost and cold shalbe much more, After the feast than was before.
[1584 R. Scot Discovery of Witchcraft xi. xv.]
Mary's purifying day is February 2, same feast. By Jewish law the mother was considered ritually clean and able to enter the temple forty days after the birth of a son. There's an interesting echo of this in the old but not extinct custom of the churching of women... but I've already gone on too long for quick takes.
Monday, January 25, 2010
I was trying to pick an airline...
...for a flight I was booking, and the cheapest tickets were for United Airlines. Second-cheapest were Southwest. Usually I fly Southwest and it's fine; I didn't know about United. So I went to Google and typed in "What's it like to fly United Airlines?" and quickly found this chart from which I learned that United has the lowest customer satisfaction scores and Southwest has the highest. That was an easy decision!
I'm just posting this to say how much I like the internet. I remember being stressed out in eighth grade when I had lots of homework to get done and I needed the encyclopedias but the library was about to close... and now all the information is accessible any time, right at our fingertips!
Unrelated cute picture someone forwarded to me. The email said that these two are best buds and live at the T.I.G.E.R.S. sanctuary in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Look, they're holding hands-- er, feet!
I'm just posting this to say how much I like the internet. I remember being stressed out in eighth grade when I had lots of homework to get done and I needed the encyclopedias but the library was about to close... and now all the information is accessible any time, right at our fingertips!
Unrelated cute picture someone forwarded to me. The email said that these two are best buds and live at the T.I.G.E.R.S. sanctuary in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Look, they're holding hands-- er, feet!
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