Keep Your Socks On

Yet another Brain/Sex post.

From LiveScience :

New research indicates that parts of the brain that govern fear and anxiety are switched off when a woman is having an orgasm.

In the first study to map brain function during orgasm, scientists from the Netherlands also found that as a woman climaxes, an area of the brain that governs emotional control is also heavily deactivated.
[...]
The volunteers laid on a scanning machine bed and were injected with a dye that shows changes in brain function on a scan. For the men, the brain scanner tracked activity during rest, during erection, during manual stimulation by their partner and then during ejaculation, brought on by the partner's hand.

For the women, the scanner measured brain activity during rest, while they faked an orgasm, during manual stimulation by their partner, and while they experienced genuine orgasm.

Holstege said he had trouble getting reliable results from the study on men because the scanning machine needs activities lasting at least two minutes to record an activity. But the men's climaxes didn't last anywhere near that long, meaning he could not reliably compare the scans before climax and during.

However, for women, the results were clear, he said.

Implying that theirs lasted at least 2 minutes.... a mind-boggling concept for a male to ponder upon.

From the Times Online article on the same subject :

Men and women experience sexual pleasure in strikingly different ways, the first brain scans taken during orgasm show.

While male brains focus heavily on the physical stimulation involved in sexual contact, this is just one part of a much more complex picture for women, scientists in the Netherlands have found. The key to female arousal seems rather to be deep relaxation and a lack of anxiety: direct sensory input from the genitals plays a less critical role.

The scans show that during sexual activity the parts of the female brain responsible for processing fear, anxiety and emotion start to relax and reduce in activity. This reaches a peak at orgasm, when the female brain’s emotion centres are effectively closed down to an almost trance-like state.
[...]
This suggests that for men the physical aspects of sex play a much more significant part in arousal than they do for women, for whom ambience, mood and relaxation are at least as important.

No surprise to any female readers, here. But here's one very useful snippet of information :

The experiments also revealed a surprising fact: both sexes found it easier to have an orgasm when they kept their socks on. Draughts in the scanning room left couples complaining of “literally cold feet”, and providing a pair of socks allowed 80 per cent, rather than 50 per cent, to reach a climax while being scanned.

So girls, the next time he wants you to wear high heels during certain healthy and relaxing activities, make sure they're warm ones.

From the Times Health Section :

The subjects’ heads were restrained in the PET scanner during the procedure, as it only works if the body area being scanned remains still. The dimensions of the scanner and the need for stillness also explain why the researchers were unable to study intercourse itself.

In both sexes, activity in the amygdala, which processes fear and anxiety, was reduced during stimulation. Women, but not men, showed lower activity in the hippocampus, important for memory, as well.

In men, greater activity was seen in the insula, which deals with emotion, and particularly in the secondary somatosensory cortex, which rates the significance of physical sensations. This suggests that the sensory input coming from the genitals is being judged highly important and pleasurable by the brain.

Women, however, show very little increased brain activity, and only in the primary somatosensory cortex - which registers purely that a sensation in the genitals is there."In women the primary feeling is there, but not the marker that this is seen as a big deal," Dr Holstege said."For males, touch itself is all-important. For females, it is not so important."

As orgasm lasts much longer in women than in men, it is easier to study using PET - male ejaculation is over so quickly it is hard to get a reliable reading. The scans showed that in the female orgasm, activity is reduced across all the brain regions - conscious and subconscious - that handle emotion, including the amygdale, medial prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex.

"What this means is that deactivation, letting go of all fear and anxiety, might be the most important thing, even necessary, to have an orgasm," Dr Holstege said.

In other words, when you're with someone you trust and love, just relax and let it happen....

His and Hers

From Slashdot via TexasBestGrok :

HER DIARY:

Saturday, May 21st 2005

Saw him in the evening and he was acting really strangely. I went shopping in the afternoon with the girls and I did turn up a bit late so thought it might be that. The bar was really crowded and loud so I suggested we go somewhere quieter to talk. He was still very subdued and distracted so I suggested we go somewhere nice to eat. All through dinner he just didn't seem himself; he hardly laughed and didn't seem to be paying any attention to me or to what I was saying. I just knew that something was wrong. He dropped me back home and I wondered if he was going to come in; he hesitated but followed. I asked him again if there was something the matter but he just half shook his head and turned the television on. After about 10 minutes of Silence, I said I was going upstairs to bed. I put my arms around him and told him that I loved him deeply. He just gave a sigh and a sad sort of smile. He didn't follow me up but later he did, and I was surprised when we made love. He still seemed distant and a bit cold, and I started to think that he was going to leave me and that he had found someone else. I cried myself to sleep.

MAN'S DIARY:

Saturday, May 21st 2005

Apple switched to Intel.

Absolutely gutted.

Got a shag though.

The 5 Minute Battlestar Galactica Miniseries

Is here.

Snippets:

Kellan Brody: Today we have with us Dr. Gaius Baltar to share his views on modern technology. Doctor?

Baltar: Thank you. I believe our paranoia regarding artificial intelligence and advancing computer technologies is antiquated and unfounded. It's been decades since we've encountered the Cylons, and it's not like they're walking among us, disguised as humans, just waiting for the perfect time to strike.




CAG: Two Cylon raiders incoming.

Pilot 1: (over the comm) Oh frack! My onboard computer just froze up! I've got nothing but a blue screen!

Pilot 2: (over the comm) Hey, me too!

CAG: Everybody, just stay calm and press Ctrl-Alt-Del!

Pilot 1: I'm trying, I'm trying!

(BOOM!)

Bad Move. As I told the Melbourne Age in 2002, In space no one can press Control/Alt/Delete.

Robot Runs Amok!

Refuses to leave room when asked! Oh well, it was designed to fail-safe. If this is the worst a medical therapy robot can do when it goes completely haywire, someone has done some good design work.

From the San Francisco Examiner :

Waldo the pill-dispensing robot apparently went berserk this past week at UCSF Medical Center, sending a doctor and patient running for cover.

Whacked-out Waldo is one of three battery-operated, rolling robots that dispense pills at the hospital. The other two are named Elvis and Lisa Marie.

All three are about the size of a large TV and are programmed to roam from floor to floor, distributing medications to nursing stations.

At the end of their rounds, the robots are supposed to roll into the basement pharmacy for refills.

But Tuesday, Waldo shot past the pharmacy and barged uninvited into the examination room in the radiation oncology department, where -- according to an anonymous caller -- a doctor was examining a cancer patient.

According to the caller, Waldo wouldn't leave, and the startled doctor and patient felt obliged to flee the room.

UCSF spokeswoman Carol Hyman said she didn't know anything about any doctor and patient having to beat feet -- but confirmed that the wandering Waldo did wind up in an examination room.

"This is the first time anything like this has happened," Hyman said. "Our technology folks are going to have to take a look."

Anyone can make a system that, when things are going as expected, will work and work well. But it takes art as well as science to make something that fails gracefully.

We Really Did Dodge a Bullet at the Ballot

As described in previous posts, I have never been a fan of Mark Latham.

Tex over at Whacking Day has a picture that shows why.

To quote Steve Edwards at the Daily Slander :

Charming fellow. Never worked a day in his life, wrecks the finances of a local council, gets kicked upstairs into a safe seat and proceeds to heap slanderous abuse on many of his erstwhile allies under parliamentary privilege, loses an unloseable election by a landslide, and now he has the gall to label Beazley a dud leader.

If not before, 47.3% of the Australian electorate must be now wondering what possessed them to preference this maniac.

Exactly.

Lesbian Poetry

Now that I have your attention... from the Guardian, courtesy of Cumudgeons' Corner :

A newly found poem by Sappho, acknowledged as one of the greatest poets of Greek classical antiquity and seen by some as the finest of any era, is published for the first time today.

Written more than 2,600 years ago, the 101 words of verse deal with a theme timeless in both art and soap operas; the stirrings of an ageing body towards the nimbleness, youth and love it once knew.

The poem is the rarest of discoveries. Sappho's pre-eminent reputation as an artist of lyricism and love is based on only three complete poems, 63 complete single lines and up to 264 fragments.

These are all that have survived of the writings of a woman who the Greek philosopher Plato said should be honoured not merely as a great lyric poet but as one of the Muses, the goddesses who inspire all art.

On hearing one of Sappho's poems sung, the sixth century BC Greek ruler Solon, a contemporary of hers, asked for someone to teach him the song "because I want to learn it and die".

The poem which is now her fourth to survive had a tortuous and not unromantic discovery. It was found in the cartonnage of an Egyptian mummy, the flexible layer of fibre or papyrus which was moulded while wet into a plaster-like surface around the irregular parts of a mummified wrapped body, so that motifs could be painted on.

Last year two scholars, Michael Gronewald and Robert Daniel, announced that a recovered papyrus in the archives of Cologne University had been identified as part of a roll containing poems by Sappho.

Researchers realised that parts of one poem corresponded with fragments found in 1922 in one of the great treasure troves of modern classical scholarship - the ancient rubbish tips of the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus.

The completed jigsaw is today published in an 1,500- word article with commentary and translation in the Times Literary Supplement by Martin West, emeritus fellow of All Souls, Oxford, a renowned translator of Greek lyric poetry, described by the British Academy as "on any reckoning the most brilliant and productive Greek scholar of his generation".

Sappho - writing on the isle of Lesbos, apparently for a court of younger women - is treated as the patron saint of love between women. She has become "a litterateurs' Lorelei, a feminist icon, a scholars' maypole", writes Dr West.

Ostensibly at least, the craving in the final image of the new poem is for love from young men - with a cautionary note. Tithonus was a youth so beautiful that the dawn-goddess took him as husband. At her request Zeus granted him immortality. But she forgot to ask for eternal youth.

So Tithonus grew old and feeble, having eventually to be shut in his room "where he chatters away endlessly but barely has the strength to move", Dr West says.

Medical Puzzlements

I got the chromosome analysis results back today, and they were absolutely astonishing.

Perfectly normal 46,xy.

Which means that the last possible medical explanation for my condition that anyone has been able to find in the literature is now exploded.

There's the possibility of a malignant hormone-secreting tumour, but if so, the primary site is currently inactive or has been zapped by my immune system, all the glands have been checked. And that still wouldn't explain more than 10% of the weirdness, by body had lots of the wrong hormone, but not *that* much. The changes that happened in 2 weeks were about what you'd expect after 3-6 months with 10 times as much. Then there's the Cholesterol level.... and various skeletal and other abnormalities I've had since childhood.

Well, it's always nice to be the first at something, "to boldly go" etc etc, but what it means to me is tests, tests, and more expensive tests, more travel to see specialists (possibly some overseas), and with no guarantee that they will find out anything before the autopsy (which, I hope, will be a long time in the future). And no treatment till they find out what's wrong.

Quelle Bummer.

The Biter, Bit

From Information Week :

Online vigilantes are taking matters into their own hands, and defacing some phishing sites to warn off the naive, a U.K. Web monitoring firm said Thursday.

According to Netcraft, a phishing site that posed as PayPal.com was recently defaced with a page created using the open-source OpenOffice application suite. The page read "WARNING -- THIS WAS A SCAM SITE" and "site killed courtesy of sickophish."

And from another article on the iNFj profile :

INFJs are champions of the oppressed and downtrodden. They often are found in the wake of an emergency, rescuing those who are in acute distress. INFJs may fantasize about getting revenge on those who victimize the defenseless. The concept of 'poetic justice' is appealing to the INFJ.

Yes, they got that right. Though not so much "revenge" as "retribution" and a not-so-subtle hint to "go thou and sin no more". Revenge as such corrodes the soul.

Personality Update

In more ways than one. With the new hormone-induced changes to my brain structure (scary, but what can you do? lie back and accept it) I thought it would be interesting to see what my new (improved?) personality traits look like.

Once a Geek, always a Geek.

So I took the Jung Typology Test.

Results :
Introverted : 56 Intuitive : 100 Feeling : 50 Judging : 11

Making me a Counselor Idealist iNFj

Compare and contrast with previous results from October 2004 INTP and March 2005 iNTj.

At the same time, friends who have known a Counselor for years may find sides emerging which come as a surprise. Not that they are inconsistent; Counselors value their integrity a great deal, but they have intricately woven, mysterious personalities which sometimes puzzle even them.

You can say that again.

How much of this is objective, and how much of it is subjective? We all tend to see what we want to see, rather than what is really there. We read into the results what we expect to see. But yes, the changes in personality are consistent with my feelings and thoughts. Objectively, I find it far more easy to read emotions than I did even a few months ago, what was once a mysterious and unknown world is now so completely obvious, I wonder how things could ever have been different. Hopefully this is just a new ability to add to my personality, and without loss of previous capabilities. But if not, not. At least now, if somone is upset, I can't help but sense it and can go and give them a much-needed physical or virtual hug. And thereby minutely decrease the world's sorrow quotient. Joys shared are doubled : Sorrows shared are halved. Such a gift would be worth giving up a lot for.

But then, feeling as I do, I would think that, wouldn't I? (Smile)

Obligatory Friday Cat Post

Also yet another one on Brains, and Sex. From the Sunday Times :

They may look like lovable pets but Britain’s estimated 9m domestic cats are being blamed by scientists for infecting up to half the population with a parasite that can alter people’s personalities.

The startling figures emerge from studies into toxoplasma gondii, a parasite carried by almost all the country’s feline population. They show that half of Britain’s human population carry the parasite in their brains, and that infected people may undergo slow but crucial changes in their behaviour.

Infected men, suggests one new study, tend to become more aggressive, scruffy, antisocial and are less attractive. Women, on the other hand, appear to exhibit the “sex kitten” effect, becoming less trustworthy, more desirable, fun- loving and possibly more promiscuous.

UPDATE : I see Evil Pundit spotted this one ahead of me.

The Brain, Genes, Gender and Sex

From WorldScience.net :

Scientists say they may have found genes that help explain why a tiny percentage of men see themselves as women, cruelly trapped in the wrong body.

The researchers say the findings are very preliminary and should be “interpreted with the utmost caution,” due to the small sample size used in their study.

Nonetheless, they say, the results might shed some light on the rare condition, transsexualism. It is estimated to afflict about one in 30,000 men, some of whom follow through on their sense of their correct gender by getting sex-change operations.

More broadly, the research could help clarify one of the most contentious and poorly understood questions in biology: what creates “gender identity ”—the sense most people have that they are either a man or a woman.

The feeling is normally rather deep-seated; people don’t need to examine their body shapes to confirm it. It is also considered distinct from the issue of whom a person is sexually attracted to.

OK, so what is Gender? From Transgendercare.com :

From research and observation, I have developed a list of five semi-independent attributes of gender, as a map to help you to understand this complex often hotly emotional issue of gender. Consider sexual identity/behavior (gender) springing from five semi-independent attributes:

Genetic Gender — Our chromosomal inheritance.

Physical Gender — Our primary and secondary sexual characteristics.

"Brain Gender" — Functional structure of the brain, along gender lines.

"Brain Sex" — Love/sex Patterns, How we relate to others on a social and interpersonal as well as sexual level. "Love Maps."

Gender Identity — Our subjective gender, our sexual Self-Map, how we feel ourselves to be: male or female.

Genetic gender can be rather mixed. Most people are 46,xy (male) or 46,xx (female) : but some are 47,xxy (Klinefelter male), some 45,xo (Turner Female), and then there's mosaics and chimerae.

Physical gender usually follows the pattern laid down by the genes, but mutations such as Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome can turn genetic males into phenotypical females, and Congenital Adrenal Hypreplasia the reverse.

Brain gender is reflected in behavioural differences measureable even in the earliest days of childhood :

Even a few hours after birth, significant behavioral differences are noted between morphologically "normal" boys and girls. Newborn girls are much more sensitive to touch and sound than their male counterparts. Several day old girls spend about twice as long looking back at an adult face than boys, and even longer if the adult is speaking. A girl can distinguish between the cries of another infant from other extraneous noises long before a boy. Even before they can understand language, girls do better at identifying the emotional context of speech.

These behavioural differences are because there are significant morphological differences between male and female brain structures.

Brain Sex - Chicks dig Romance, Guys dig Big er, are more concerned with physical appearance.

Female brained individuals cannot and do not separate how they feel about a person (good, bad, nice, boring, etc.) and how they see them sexually. They must feel positive about a person as an individual in order to sexually desire them. Male brained individuals have a distant disconnect between feelings about a person as an individual and as a sex object. Males can easily, sometimes preferably, have sex with a person they don't know, don't like or even actively dislike. Love and sex are two different worlds for the male brained. These two worlds can come together, and for most this is preferred, but it is not necessary, and for some, not even desired.

Gender Identity -

The last of our five attributes, Gender Identity, is the last to be identified, and the least understood and researched. Gender identity is one's subjective sense of one's own sex. Like pain, it is unambiguously felt but one is unable to prove or display it to others. One's subjective gender is just as real and immalleable as one's physical gender but unfortunately not recognized in our culture. When one's Gender Identity does not match their Physical Gender, the individual is termed Gender Dysphoric. Like minority Sexual Orientation, Gender Dysphoria is not pathological, but a natural aberration occurring within the population, like blue eyes. As with minority sexual orientation, the percentage of the population having gender dysphoria is in dispute, with estimates ranging between one in 39,000 individuals up to three percent of the general population. My experience leads me to feel that the higher figure (3%) is closer to the actual prevalence.

But how would you know? A man born into a female body, but adjusted to the situation is unlikely to tell his son and his husband "Oh by the way, mommy is actually a guy", and certainly not if he's a stunning blonde with a curvaceous figure and an acting career. It's only if the Gender Dysphoria becomes too much to be borne that this all comes out - and the individual concerned often gets Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS), where their tissues are modified to more closely approximate the body they should have had.

It is this phenomenon, Gender Identity, that the research shows may in fact be genetically determined.

I'm still waiting on my chromosome analysis results - which amongst other things, should tell me what genetic sex I am. Because you never can tell just by appearances.

What the Heck... An Announcement.

I had a good look in the mirror, and it's now time to face the bleedin obvious.

I'm in a situation not unlike that of Schroedinger's Cat. Until the chromosome analysis results are in, neither I nor the doctors are sure exactly what sex(es) I am.

I could either be a mildly intersexed male who's becoming more radically intersexed over time, or I could be a terribly intersexed female so badly intersexed she could and did father a child, but who is becoming less intersexed as time goes by. It's happened before, rarely.

Bear in mind that due to selection against abnormal cells during cell division, intersexed people tend to become less intersexed over time. The amount of extra oestrodiol in my system from berserk adrenals wasn't that high - 192 pMols/Liter - but I had physical effects in two weeks that male-to-female transitioners only get after months, suggesting that at least some of my cells have too many oestrogen receptors to be considered male.

A consultant I saw at the Gender Center in Sydney said that she'd seen this rare phenomenon before in "several other transsexual women".

My bet's a 46xx/46xy/47xxy mosaic, which means my genetic sex will depend on exactly which cell you happen to pick. But if it turns out 46xy (male), I must have some really weird stuff going on in the somatic chromosomes. The same if I'm 46xx (female), since my son is, well, a son. There must be a Y-like structure somewhere.

Most people who are intersexed aren't transsexual (that is, they don't have a body/brain mismatch), only 5-10%, though quite a few consider themselves neither Male nor Female in the conventional sense.

In my head I've always been somewhat Female, but was never fanatical about it. Boy, Girl, both roles I could play equally well, or rather, equally badly. Or so I thought. Being intersexed means you can't quite be wholly either, but you can come close enough for most purposes. Enough to lead a relatively normal life, fall in Love, and find true happiness, even if you're not fully equipped for "normal" male/female sex. For a lucky few, they can even become biological parents (usually with technical help), though this is rare. I lucked out, and Carmel was strong enough to endure the many miscarriages before we finally had Andrew.

I had the body of a Footballer, definitely not a Cheerleader, so male it was for me, despite my brain's wiring (the gender of which is set 4 weeks later in pregnancy than the rest) and a few female body features. It's not as if I was ever attracted in any way to guys, I'm still, well, I can't say homophobic any more, but if I'm female, I'm lesbian. 30 years of testosterone pumped into the system will bend any girl's gender, no matter how straight she might have started.

But "had" a body like a Footballer not a Cheerleader is the operative word, right now, I look about halfway in between, and middle-aged to boot.

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Seriously, we're talking a Yuk factor off the scale here. Breasts of a 13 year old girl, an increasingly voluptous hourglass figure, a male ribcage with spread ribs from having them broken playing Rugby and not taped, a 5 O'clock shadow and middle-aged wrinkles, chest and back hair, arms thick enough for a weightlifter.... Ewwwwwwwwww.

Time to face the fact that I'm not a male slightly psychologically screwed up by a very mild degree of intersex, but something else entirely. I've already got enough testosterone in my system so that a lot is excreted, adding more will not change my situation. I already have some chest developments, but more importantly, I have a female skin tone now, and am slowly getting a female body fat distribution, despite oestrodiol levels which have settled down to high-normal for a male. In other ways, from the size and shape of my pelvis and hands, I've always been closer to female norms than male ones. To me, I still look male, but to others.... I've been told that I could pass as either, if I got the face hair removed. As long as I wore baggy clothing to conceal the curves.

It's likely that the change will continue. Unlike transsexuals who are transitioning from male to female, I can't stop the process by aborting hormone therapy, nor like transsexuals transitioning from female to male, reverse it by having my ovaries removed and taking testosterone. I don't have ovaries (yes, that has been checked recently), and the evidence is inconclusive as to whether I've ever had any (just suspicious scars and odd memories, which probably are mere coincidence).

If you think it's bad for me, (it isn't, my brain's device drivers are definitely set up for female peripherals, as I've recently found out), consider my wife and love-of-my-life, Carmel. Her husband was never terribly macho, but now he's turning into a she, or something close to it. And how to explain to Andrew, 4 next month, that Daddy is turning into a Mummy?

And now a political announcement:

I am as God made me. My condition is not man-made. Although dividing all people into categories of "Male" and "Female" is a good first approximation, there are somewhere between 8 and 17 per thousand who are hormonally, chromosomally, or physically intersexed (most of them mildly, often they don't know it). That's not counting the 0.2 per thousand who have another congenital problem, a brain-body gender mismatch. (That's a minimum : those are the ones who present for treatment, there are no reliable estimates about how many have come to terms with it, like I had).

(This post left unpublished until Jan 2007)

Brain Size, Lachs and Bagels

Courtesy of Yet Another Weird SF fan, this article from the Virginia Commonwealth University about Brain Size and Intelligence :

People with bigger brains are smarter than their smaller-brained counterparts, according to a study conducted by a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher published in the journal “Intelligence.”

The study, published on line June 16, could settle a long-standing scientific debate about the relationship between brain size and intelligence. Ever since German anatomist and physiologist Frederick Tiedmann wrote in 1836 that there exists “an indisputable connection between the size of the brain and the mental energy displayed by the individual man,” scientists have been searching for biological evidence to prove his claim.

“For all age and sex groups, it is now very clear that brain volume and intelligence are related,” said lead researcher Michael A. McDaniel, Ph.D., an industrial and organizational psychologist who specializes in the study of intelligence and other predictors of job performance.

The trouble is, that much of the human brain is devoted to motor control, rather than thought or perception. The bigger you are, the more processing power you need to keep the same degree of co-ordination and intellect, so direct comparisons of brain volume without taking into account musculature will be erroneous. But all other things being equal - a rare state that - yes, the larger the brain, the higher the intellect.

In another related post, it's provide conclusively that lachs and cream cheese are perfect foods for increasing brainpower. The role of bagels (toasted or otherwise) is not mentioned, but you have to get the calories from somewhere.

Quiet Heroes

I've recently been all wrapped up in my own little narcissistic world, considering my own medical problems, and reaching out for help to others.

You may have noticed from recent entries on this blog.

But three people who I contacted recently have their own, rather more serious problems. One has prostate cancer, another is still awaiting an emergency ultrasound after an abnormal mammogram, and the third recently lost her husband to Lung Cancer.

None have paraded their own problems in public, nor made a big deal of them, they're just doing whatever they can, and living life to the fullest.

Just walk down the street, odds are of the hundreds of people you walk past, some will have recently lost a daughter, or a husband, or been diagnosed with Cancer, or had some other tragedy befall them. But they carry on regardless, not making a fuss.

Here's to them, the Quiet Heroes, I wish them Joy in the Future, and the strength to carry on until then.

A 2-ton Wind-Powered Walking-Machine

Every home should have at least one. The Animaris Rhinoceros Transport - though there doesn't appear to be any room in it for many rhinos.

Another Blog worth visiting

Opinion Dominion.

For example, the post on the Popular Mechanics article on Robert Heinlein's House. 1950's functional architecture at its finest.

All it needs are some Douglas-Martin power screens.

Hostage Rescued

Updating a previous post, from the BBC :

Last Thursday, staff found a Dalek plunger arm and a ransom note on a doorstep.

The note read: "We are holding the Dalek captive. We demand further instructions from the Doctor."

But in Tuesday's phone call, the thieves said it had become "too hot to handle" and had been placed on Glastonbury Tor.

An operation to re-attach the victim's severed, er, limb is expected shortly.

Oh yes, and from the ABC :

Australian hostage Douglas Wood has been rescued in a military operation in Iraq, Prime Minister John Howard says.

"I am delighted to inform the House that the Australian hostage in Iraq, Mr Douglas Wood, is safe," Mr Howard told Parliament.

"Mr Wood was recovered a short while ago in Baghdad in a military operation that I am told was conducted by Iraqi forces in cooperation in a general way with force elements of the United States."

It's unlikely that anyone connected to the Iraqi allies who rescued him will read this: nonetheless, Ta, Mates. Thanks also to the Usual Suspects who gave a helping hand.

The Age of Aquarius

From Exoplanets.org :

Arlington, Va.. Taking a major step forward in the search for Earth-like planets beyond our own solar system, a team of astronomers has announced the discovery of the smallest extrasolar planet yet detected. About seven-and-a-half times as massive as Earth, with about twice the radius, it may be the first rocky planet ever found orbiting a normal star not much different from our Sun.

All of the nearly 150 other extrasolar planets discovered to date around normal stars have been larger than Uranus, an ice-giant about 15 times the mass of the Earth.

"We keep pushing the limits of what we can detect, and we're getting closer and closer to finding Earths," said team member Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Today's results are an important step toward answering one of the most profound questions that mankind can ask: Are we alone in the universe? said Michael Turner, head of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation, which provided partial funding for the research.

The newly-discovered super-Earth orbits the star Gliese 876, located just 15 light years away in the direction of the constellation Aquarius. This star also possesses two larger, Jupiter-size planets. The new planet whips around the star in a mere two days, and is so close to the star's surface that its temperature probably tops 400 to 750 degrees Fahrenheit (200 to 400 degrees Celsius) oven-like temperatures far too hot for life as we know it.

Nevertheless, the ability to detect the tiny wobble that the planet induces in the star gives astronomers confidence that they will be able to detect even smaller rocky planets in orbits more hospitable to life.

Heavy, man. A high-g place, anyway. And too hot for it to be terraformed until we have rather better technology than is required just for getting there in a reasonable time. But it bodes well.

You Might be a Redneck Jedi if...

1. Your Jedi robe is a camouflage color.

2. You have used your light saber to open and cook a can of pork and
beans.

3. You think the best use of your light saber is picking your teeth.

4. At least one wing of your X-Wing fighter is primer-colored.

5. There is a blaster rack in the back of your landspeeder.

6. You have bantha horns on the front of your landspeeder.

7. You can easily describe the taste of Ewok.

8. You can find no grammatical errors in the way Yoda talks.

9. You think that the Stormtrooper Elite Guards are just KKK members
with really good sheets.

10. A peaceful meditation session is one without gas.

11. You can levitate yourself using a force from within, but not The
Force.

12. Your master has said, ''My finger you will pull..hmmm?''

13. You have had an X-wing up on blocks in your yard.

14. You have lost a hand during a light-saber fight because you had
to spit.

15. The worst part of spending time on Dagoba is the dad-gum
skeeters.

16. Wookies are offended by your B.O.

17. You have used The Force to get yourself another beer so you
didn't have to wait for a commercial.

18. You have used The Force in conjunction with fishing/bowling.

19. You have used a light saber to clean fish or open a non-twist-
off , bottle of beer.

20. Your father told you, ''Shoot, son come on over t' the dark
side...it'll be a hoot.''

21. You've had your R-2 unit use its self-defense electro-shock
thingy to light a bar-b-que.

One False Move

...and the Pepperpot gets it. From the BBC, via reader Sean :

Book Meme

From Hak Mao, I've been Book Memed.

Number of books I own Judging from the volume they're taking up, approximately 1.5 tonnes, perhaps 5000. Not including the collections of SF magazines in book format, another thousand or so.

Last book I bought Just blew $185 at Galaxy Bookshop, last one on the receipt was "Darwin's Watch (The Science of Discworld III)" by Pratchett Et Al. in hardcover.

Last book I re-read Herodotus : the Histories

Five books that mean a lot to me

1. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
2. Earth by David Brin
3. The History of the Second World War by Sir Winston Churchill
4. The Screwtape Letters by C.S.Lewis
5. I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein again

Now *this* is funny

I'll quote this verbatim. First, the Intro:

I'm a geeky girl and my social circle is geeky boys and girls, as a result the 'being cute' kind of flirting dosn't work with these boys. THEY'RE NERDS. Of course the stereo type of 'Oh my god! Girls! What do we do?" "Somebody role for initiative!" isn't true, they arn't likely to initiate contact with a girl. They arn't likely to just walk up and say 'Hey.' They'll at best, use any excuse to be at the same event as the girl they're interested and become her friend but not beyond that, untill he can get a clear and definate signal from her as to weather or not she's interested in him. Basicly, most of the guys in my peer group are quite afraid of rejection. So I just ask them out but I make it look like it's their idea. :D

So I act all inniocent and ask him to guide me to the down town comic shop, wound up spending about four hours with him that afternoon and a date with him to the new war musuem next week. (He thought it was cute when I got my arm stuck in a 105mm tank gun.)

Now for the bit that's hilarious.

It's worked fine in other instances. I once literally walked up to a boy and said "I'm a moderatly attractive geeky female and you're a 21 year old beta male who would be happy as a clam to have anything with breasts that's of legal age talk to you. Want to go to the commons and get something to eat?" He said YES. Granted, the way I said it was half-way a joke in itself... Even if it was a realistic analysis of the situation.

Any Unattached Geek Beta Male who didn't fall for that one, coming from a bright-eyed, moderately attractive and definitely fun Geek Girl has to be Gay. And even Gay Geeks would probably fall for it.

Oh yes, the bittersweet punch line :

Just gotta stop them from dumping me after I tell them I'm trans. :/

Of course, to a true Geek, that would make her even more interesting... and besides which, if she's fun, vivacious, and moderately attractive, why should that make any difference?

Love and the Brain

From the New York Times :

New love can look for all the world like mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia and obsession that cuts people off from friends and family and prompts out-of-character behavior - compulsive phone calling, serenades, yelling from rooftops - that could almost be mistaken for psychosis.

Now for the first time, neuroscientists have produced brain scan images of this fevered activity, before it settles into the wine and roses phase of romance or the joint holiday card routines of long-term commitment.

In an analysis of the images appearing today in The Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers in New York and New Jersey argue that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal.

It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection. As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment.

The research helps explain why love produces such disparate emotions, from euphoria to anger to anxiety, and why it seems to become even more intense when it is withdrawn. In a separate, continuing experiment, the researchers are analyzing brain images from people who have been rejected by their lovers.
[...]
In the study, Dr. Fisher, Dr. Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and Dr. Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, led a team that analyzed about 2,500 brain images from 17 college students who were in the first weeks or months of new love. The students looked at a picture of their beloved while an M.R.I. machine scanned their brains. The researchers then compared the images with others taken while the students looked at picture of an acquaintance.

Functional M.R.I. technology detects increases or decreases of blood flow in the brain, which reflect changes in neural activity.

In the study, a computer-generated map of particularly active areas showed hot spots deep in the brain, below conscious awareness, in areas called the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental area, which communicate with each other as part of a circuit.

These areas are dense with cells that produce or receive a brain chemical called dopamine, which circulates actively when people desire or anticipate a reward. In studies of gamblers, cocaine users and even people playing computer games for small amounts of money, these dopamine sites become extremely active as people score or win, neuroscientists say.

Yet falling in love is among the most irrational of human behaviors, not merely a matter of satisfying a simple pleasure, or winning a reward. And the researchers found that one particular spot in the M.R.I. images, in the caudate nucleus, was especially active in people who scored highly on a questionnaire measuring passionate love.

OK, so some people might think that's taking all the romance out of it. But I disagree. It illustrates once more that things happening "inside our head" are not just "in the mind", they often have definite physical causes, and physical effects. Falling in love can alter your brain structure, permanently. So what happens when you love, and lose?

In a series of studies, researchers have found that, among other processes, new love involves psychologically internalizing a lover, absorbing elements of the other person's opinions, hobbies, expressions, character, as well as sharing one's own. "The expansion of the self happens very rapidly, it's one of the most exhilarating experiences there is, and short of threatening our survival it is one thing that most motivates us," said Dr. Aron, of SUNY, a co-author of the study.

To lose all that, all at once, while still in love, plays havoc with the emotional, cognitive and deeper reward-driven areas of the brain. But the heightened activity in these areas inevitably settles down. And the circuits in the brain related to passion remain intact, the researchers say - intact and capable in time of flaring to life with someone new.

You don't burn out. Everyone is capable of finding love, even after heartbreak. You want romance? That is romance.

Now would be a good time for me to say that my marriage with the love of my life has been going strong for nearly 25 years. I have no idea how she's put up with me, but I'm looking forward to the next 25 years, as I'm still head-over-heels in love with her. And wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, she still feels the same about me.

Yet More Portents of the Singularity

From New Scientist :

An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched on Monday.

The “Blue Brain” project, a collaboration between IBM and a Swiss university team, will involve building a custom-made supercomputer based on IBM’s Blue Gene design.

The hope is that the virtual brain will help shed light on some aspects of human cognition, such as perception, memory and perhaps even consciousness.

It will be the first time humans will be able to observe the electrical code our brains use to represent the world, and to do so in real time, says Henry Markram, director of Brain and Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytecnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.

It may also help in understanding how certain malfunctions of the brain’s “microcircuits” could cause psychiatric disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and depression, he says.

Until now this sort of undertaking would not be possible because the processing power and the scientific knowledge of how the brain is wired simply was not there, says Charles Peck, IBM’s lead researcher on the project.

“But there has been a convergence of the biological data and the computational resources,” he says. Efforts to map the brain’s circuits and the development of the Blue Gene supercomputer, which has a peak processing power of at least 22.8 teraflops, now make this possible.

Teaching it to think is going to be a problem though, one possibly not solvable. But even if not, that will each us a lot too.

There's also an ethical problem. This thing will never be human, absent some massive change in our understanding of how our minds work, so we can superimpose a human template on it. But it may just be intelligent. It may feel.

Hat Tip : Fred Kiesche of The Eternal Golden Braid.

Chemistry

Courtesy of reader Mags:

Why do white bears dissolve in water? Because they're polar.

Did you hear about the industrialist who had a huge chloroform spill at his factory? His business went insolvent.

What kind of ghosts haunt chemistry faculties? Methylated Spirits

Q: What do chemists use to make guacomole?
A: Avogadros.

Q: How many atoms in a guacamole?
A: Avocado's number.

Q. What do you do when you find a dead chemist?
A. Barium.

Q. What is the purpose of a doctor?
A. Helium.

Organic chemistry is the study of carbon compounds; biochemistry is the
study of carbon compounds that wriggle.

There once was a girl named Irene,
who lived on distilled kerosene.
But she started absorbin'
A new hydrocarbon,
And since then has never benzene!

Though that one had a familiar ring to it....

A Pot Pourri

Cooking combines the art and science of programming, along with sensuous pleasure.

Too bad I'm on a diet. Oh well, when I get off it, I'll try some of the recipes over at Chef's Secrets.

From Orange Quark :

The BBC is carrying a nice little story about the "Millenium Run", a supercomputer simulation of cosmological structure formation, in which the dynamics of 10 billion dark matter particles were tracked over 13 billion years of cosmological evolution. Numerical simulations are a crucial part of modern cosmology, allowing us (where by "us" I mean people like me, but who know how to write huge, complicated N-body codes) to understand how well-defined interaction rules between dark matter particles, acting in an expanding cosmos, lead to the wonderfully rich, complex, and structured universe we see today.
...
Carlos Frenk, who is one of the world's leaders in this area, is quoted in the BBC story, saying

"We have learned more about the Universe in the last 10 or 20 years than in the whole of human civilisation"

This is a big bold claim, but I think it is entirely fair. The tremendous progress in cosmology in the last couple of decades has given us a coherent picture of the universe; more detailed than many cosmologists had thought would ever be possible. This data is going to continue to flood in over the next few decades, further focusing attention on the fascinating question of how the observed cosmos connects to our theories of fundamental physics. It's a daunting task, but oh so much fun to be faced with.

And for every Quark, there's an Antiquark, a blog so good I'm adding it to my blogroll forthwith.

Brain Structure

In the course of doing research on hormonal changes to the body, I've come across a lot of data about a relatively minor change, but one with the most profound societal impacts. This post is about the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc), a collection of cells in the hypothalamus. And about Identity and Society.

From GenderPsychology.Org: :

For most laymen the idea that experience can alter the structure of the brain may seem unlikely, but for over 30 years neuroscientists have provided demonstrations that this idea is quite correct. At Berkeley, David Krech, Mark Rosensweig and colleagues found that when rats were raised in enriched environments (with toys and other rats) rather than caged alone, the animals showed many reliable changes in brain structure. Shortly after, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel of Harvard demonstrated that depriving kittens of visual stimulation to an eye would alter connections between the eye and the brain. Such demonstrations of experience altering brain structure have been extended to monkeys and, in recent years, to humans. For example, a human who had lost his hand as an adult showed clear evidence that the side of the brain controlling that hand was reorganized less than a year after the accident (Yang, T.T., Gallen, 0., Schwartz, B., Bloom, F. E., Ramachandran, V.S., & Cobb, S. Sensory maps in the human brain. Nature, 386, 592-593, 1994 [letter]). As noninvasive imaging techniques are perfected we can expect to see further demonstrations that experience can alter the adult human brain. Why am I so confident that there will be more such demonstrations? I'm well aware of how much humans can learn, how much they can alter their behavior, and how frequently they do so. All of this behavioral plasticity requires that something in the brain remain plastic, too.

All well and good, and utterly non-controversial. It then continues:

But there is another important feature of the recent work with transsexuals that we can all ponder. Whether these men were born with a small BSTc which caused them to become transsexuals, or whether these men became transsexuals which then caused them to have a small BSTc, the fact remains that their brains are physically different. And that difference is not trivial, because any difference we can detect with our primitive understanding of neuroanatomy is, by definition, not trivial. Thus we might regard transsexuality as a deep, abiding conviction. Presumably these adults could no more set aside their feelings about which sex they are than you or I could. So perhaps the report of Zhou et al. will make it easier for our society to accept and tolerate transsexuality.

I wouldn't bet on it. When people's long-cherished ideas of religion or morality are concerned, any inconvenient reality that challenges these beliefs is likely to be ignored. And in this case, the Jury is still out, anyway. From Anne Lawrence :

A recent paper by Chung et al. (2002) has demonstrated a most unexpected finding: In humans, unlike the rat and perhaps other species, BSTc volume does not become sexually dimorphic until well into adulthood. However, most MtF transsexuals report that they experienced gender dysphoria beginning in childhood, often from the time of their earliest memories. It is hard to imagine how BSTc volume could be a marker for gender identity if BSTc volume has not yet become sexually dimorphic at a time when gender identity has already been firmly established.

Oh yes, I'm having a brain MRI scan tomorrow, concentrating on the Pituitary gland.

Fly Me To the Moon

...and let me play amongst the stars...

From the author of Cumudgeons's Corner, a Brief History of Lunar Exploration.

Many people ask, because of its perceived cost, why explore the Moon? Many scientists believe that the Moon contains many of the secrets of the early solar system and that a geological and geophysical study of that world would yield many of those secrets. Other scientists believe that the far side of the Moon, shielded from the Earth, would be a perfect place for a radio and an optical observatory to explore the universe.

The official rationale for returning to the Moon in the current Vision for Space Exploration, proposed by President Bush, is that it would serve as a dress rehearsal for expeditions to Mars. Technologies and techniques that would be used to explore the Red Planet could be tested out on the Moon, just three days journey away from Earth.

One of the more compelling reasons for returning to the Moon is that it may be a source of limitless energy. Over billions of years, solar winds have deposited an isotope called Helium 3 on the lunar surface. The reason that Helium 3 is important is that, when fusion reactors become commercially practicable, it can be used as fuel with little or no radioactive byproducts

There's more than one reason.

But we may have to be a little bit careful out there. From Space Daily :

The solar flare, which occurred at 2 a.m. EST, tripped radiation monitors all over the planet and scrambled detectors on spacecraft. The shower of energetic protons came minutes after the first sign of the flare.

This flare was an extreme example of the type of radiation storm that arrives too quickly to warn interplanetary astronauts.

"This flare produced the largest solar radiation signal on the ground in nearly 50 years," said Dr. Richard Mewaldt of the California Institute of Technology. He is a co-investigator on NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft.

"But we were really surprised when we saw how fast the particles reached their peak intensity and arrived at Earth."

Normally it takes two or more hours for a dangerous proton shower to reach maximum intensity at Earth after a solar flare. The particles from the January 20 flare peaked about 15 minutes after the first sign.

"That's important because it's too fast to respond with much warning to astronauts or spacecraft that might be outside Earth's protective magnetosphere," Mewaldt said.

"In addition to monitoring the sun, we need to develop the ability to predict flares in advance if we are going to send humans to explore our solar system."

15 minutes to peak means very little time for interplanetary astronauts to get into a shelter. This means trouble.


Hat Tip yet again to reader Shaun

How Thoughtful Of Them

From OS News :

Intel is adding DRM capabilities to its new Pentium D chipsets, but as with AMD, they're not that keen on talking about it. Aside from DRM, there's also this gem: Additionally, AMT also features what Intel calls "IDE redirection"...allow administrators to remotely enable, disable or format or configure individual drives and reload operating systems and software from remote locations, again independent of operating systems.

To simplify, DRM - Digital Rights Management - is s system to make sure that no matter where you are in the world, you comply with that particular company's interpretation of US copyright laws. But all that does is prevent you playing music and accessing other intellectual property you may have a right to.

IDE allows the chip make to do whatever they want to your computer, whenever they want to. Of course, it's for your own good, and we can all be quite sure that no-one not authorised to use this feature would be able to do so for at least the first few weeks.

Still, it could be worse. Mother Nature's doing a pretty thorough job of giving me a field upgrade to my own biological hardware, whether I like it or not. Looked at objectively, yes, it's an improvement (so far, anyway), even one I would have welcomed if offered the choice. But choice didn't come into it.

Hat Tip to reader Shaun

Music Meme

In response to the Currency Lad's Music Meme Challenge, here's what I'm listening to.

1. The total volume of music on my pc:
About 200 Mb, free samples and tracks from CDs I own.

2. Songs playing right now:
"Stay With Me" by Shakespeare's Sister

3. Last album I bought:
"A Shoggoth on the Roof" (Sound track of the theatre production)

4. Five songs I've been listening to a lot:

"Hazy Shade of Winter", the Bangles cover version is even better than the original Simon & Garfunkel one. Just right for Canberra in June.

"The Night Santa Went Crazy", by Weird Al Jankovic. As you do. Just in case I start taking life too seriously.

"I am a Rock", the original Simon & Garfunkel version, to help me uncover painful memories long buried, but which I now need to retrieve to provide clues to long forgotten medical problems of relevance today. At one time in my life, it was my theme tune, and I derived great comfort from it. I wish I could go back in time, and tell the me that was that I was actually going to live happily ever after, after all. Miracles sometimes happen, and of three impossible dreams I had, one has come true, one came true enough, and the most improbable of all may yet be coming true.

Maybe it's because of the hormonal mood swings I'm having that I'm reminded of puberty. And what I had was a helluva lot worse than the usual Teenage Angst.... brrrr. (Time to start counting my lucky stars once more).

"Wouldn't it be Nice", by the Beach Boys. As an antidote to the heartwrenching loneliness of the previous song, this was my theme song after meeting my wife-to-be. Though for the first few weeks of that period, I thought with good reason that I only had a short time to live, and it was wistful, rather than expectant. But I got better. So did my life.

"Heaven Can Wait", by Meatloaf. That's my theme song now, and has been since the day we got married, almost 25 years ago.

And as a bonus:

"Rocket Man", not the Elton John version, nor the Kate Bush one, but a trance version by a female vocalist who I haven't been able to trace.

When I hear it, I automatically substitute a few changes:

"And all the Science, yes I understand
Not just a job, five days a week..."

And yet I am reminded of that kid back in 1972, rocking back and forth in his bedroom and whispering "And an Island never cries" with tears silently streaming down her face. (No, not a misprint, try googling "Intersex" : 1.5% of the population, by some estimates)

Puberty Sucks for everyone, but for some it's worse than others. I have got good medical reasons to believe that mine was probably worse than most. 98.5% in fact. The Chromosome test results are still pending, but a number of ultrasound exams of my pelvic region in the next few days should show the extent of the problem. Like the psychic wounds, probably just scar tissue by now, but you never know.


Now for 3 others to pass the meme along to:

Norman Geras, Michele Catelano, and Ninme

My All Time Favourite Dr Who Companion

May I present Wendy Padbury, alias Zoe Herriot.




I might add that at over 50, she's still my favourite.

Another Day, Another Blood Test

The Human Pincushion, that's me. Though I'm starting to have doubts about the "human" part. But seriously folks, MRI and Ultrasound exams don't come cheap, especially when they have to be repeated because the initial results were "ambiguous" or inconclusive, something I've gotten used to all my life.

Signed up for another $800 out-of-pocket's worth (after rebates, insurance deductions etc) this week. But still, considering the technology, the degree of training required etc, quite a bargain.

At least I may find out whether a 32 year history of peculiar medical conditions is merely a long and improbable series of unrelated coincidences, or excusably misdiagnosed signs indicating a root cause even more improbable (though not that uncommon for some subcategories: about 1 in 83,000). If the results are still ambiguous, then the next step is probably "fine needle" biopsies of various glands, with "fine" being a relative term. Maybe even a reverse-flow analysis of the urinary tract, which is as undignified as it sounds.

Oh Joy.

Still, this is something like a detective story, something like a crossword puzzle, and quite fascinating in its own right. The fact that the doctor on my last visit suggested the exact set of tests I'd thought would have been most useful from my own research was enormously psychologically comforting. Hopefully we'll get to the bottom of this, no matter what. Just have to shackle all the free variables, then analyse the data. Then decide on the best therapy.

In the meantime, I must just relax, and let the hormones flooding my system do their work. So far, the only loss I have is that I can no longer multitask quite as well, listening with half an ear and carrying on a conversation while simultaneously doing a task involving logical analysis and eye-hand co-ordination. Which may indicate some re-wiring of the speech centers. I also feel the cold more, due to re-location of body fat (and talking of which, I could still stand to lose another 20 Kg).

I can't prevent what's happening, any outside interference now could be quite dangerous should it be a malignant neoplasm (most unlikely, but can't be ruled out yet).

The changes are also permanent, neither easily nor wholly reversible, and for the most part, not harmful but objectively speaking quite beneficial. Chance of some cancers may be slightly increased (though possibly not, they were always higher than I'd imagined, it's just that now we know about it), chances for many others sharply reduced, and a very greatly decreased chance of Coronary Heart Disease. The skin problems I've had for decades have all gone, and I look and feel years younger.

Psychologically speaking, it will take years and some therapy to get used to the idea of looking different, even in minor ways. Eye colour is the one thing that has suprised me, there's nothing in any of the literature that suggested this as a possibility, though hormonal eye colour changes in puberty happen quite regularly. I've also become a lot more concerned with my personal appearance, which could be hormone-induced brain re-wiring, or just psychological effects with no biological cause.

But enough of the boring narcissism.

While I've been busy navel-gazing, Tony Blair has been re-elected, the French have said NON to the EU referendum, and there's a heap of new blogs worth looking at. I'm still catching up, but for now, please go take a look at Advanced Maternal Age.

And here's a picture I got forwarded by reader Shaun : the Dragon Storm on Saturn.




The Universe is indeed a strange and wonderful place.

Someone Always Doesn't Get The Word

From Hak Mao, an article on aftershocks of WW II. :

Discovered after a chance encounter with a Philippines businesswoman who had friends in Japan, the men reportedly have documents that show they were attached to the army's 30th Division. Until yesterday they had been listed among Japan's war dead.
...
The men are Yoshio Yamakawa 87, and Tsuzuki Nakauchi, 85.

They made contact with the outside world through a 93-year-old former military doctor, Kyodo News reported.

"I also want to go back to Japan but we are worried about a court martial," the doctor reportedly said.

A Red Letter Day

6 Red Letters, in fact.

I have mixed feelings - my son was caught spray-painting his name in red paint on a garbage bin. At least he spelt it correctly. A N D R E W

Lots of parents have the same problem, you try to bring up your kids to do the right thing, but they end up graffiti artists anyway.

Why the mixed feelings? Andrew turns 4 in July.

Oestrogen and the Female Brain

Due to having all sorts of interesting problems with various hormones circulating in my system, probably caused by some genetic weirdness, I've been doing a bit of research.

But this one comes from Mags, a good friend of mine over in Adelaide, and it's too good not to blog, being about both Hormones and Brains.

From Science Daily :

University of Minnesota researchers have demonstrated how estrogen affects learning and memory. They found that estrogen can activate particular glutamate receptors within the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for many aspects of learning and memory. Glutamate is the primary excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain, allowing for fast communication between neurons. By examining hippocampal neurons from rats, researchers also observed that estrogen only activated the processes related to learning and memory in the brains of female rats and not males. While it has been well documented that estrogen influences other behaviors beyond reproduction, including learning and memory, the mechanism has remained elusive. The findings of this research are in this week's Journal of Neuroscience.

"We believe this is an important first step in understanding not just how estrogen affects learning and memory, but also a variety of non-reproductive behaviors," says Paul Mermelstein, Ph.D., assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Minnesota and lead researcher. "Estrogen activation of glutamate receptors within other brain regions could also potentially account for the well-documented actions of this hormone on female motor control and pain sensation."

Marissa Boulware, a University of Minnesota neuroscience graduate student who performed the studies states, "Every day post-menopausal women face the dilemma of taking estrogens to improve their cognitive abilities, knowing it may pose a potential heath risk. By better understanding how estrogen acts upon our brain, one day we may develop novel therapies using non-steroidal drugs to mimic the specific actions of estrogen on processes related to learning and memory, affording the cognitive benefits of estrogen without any detrimental side effects."

Note that males miss out on the benefits. Perhaps it's just as well, the side-effects of an excess of oestrogen on a male phenotype are better imagined than described.

Of course, there'd be some technogeeks who wouldn't mind being more well-endowed than their girlfriends if it meant they'd gain in learning and memory.

Perhaps this explains why Kleinfelter males, those with 47,xxy chromosomes rather than the usual 46,xy, (between 1 in 500 and 1 in 1000 of the general population) are over-represented in the IT industry. A fruitful topic for research, anyway.

And no, it's unlikely that I'm a Kleinfelter male, even though I'm taller than my male relatives, have weird thin-walled back teeth, am relatively infertile, have large hips, had dyslexia when young, am in IT, have a rounded face, most but not all of the classic signs in fact.... or if I am Kleinfelter, that's not the only weirdness. Mere 47,xxy wouldn't explain the stuff going on in my endochrine system, especially with the bizarre Cholesterol levels. But I'll find out as soon as the Chromome Analysis results come in.

Spot the Brain Cell

From Discover Magazine, via Mythusmage Opines :

Turns out some brain cells may be capable of pattern recognition. That these brain cells are computers of a sort in and of themselves. This complicates things for people working on artificial intelligence, replication/recording of personality and brain functioning. It may well mean that 'uploading' a person's mind, his personality, into a computer is either more difficult than we thought, or downright impossible.

I'd plump for "tricky" rather than "infeasible due to the laws of physics" here.

How individual brain cells work is not known. Here we have a problem that may well take some time to puzzle out. We could well learn that the brain, all types of brains, are not organic computers, but aggregations of billions of individual computers.

So it has Internet-nature, no surprise.

It also raises the question, what about neurons outside of the brain? Are the nerves in your body protoplasmic computers. If so, how capable are they?

As minimally capable as they have to be. Does the personality change when a finger is anaesthetised? Not noticeably. The fact is that it's convenient to Ma Nature to use the same basic template for everything, activating capabilities as needed. Hence stem-cells being able to adopt whatever role is needed for their environment, be it heart muscle or liver cell.

The computational complexity of a single brain cell also adequately explains the apparently complex behaviour of certain people - televangelists, bureaucrats - who probably have only one brain cell (working part-time) still functional in their cerebral cortex anyway.

The Uncertain Future of the Y Chromosome

Or : males an endangered meta-species? From Nature :

At the present rate of decay, the Y chromosome will self-destruct in around 10 million years. This has already occurred in the mole vole, in which the Y chromosome (together with all of its genes) has been completely lost from the genome.
Accelerated degeneration of the Y chromosome is found in the 5–15% of severely infertile men whose infertility is caused by wholesale deletions of parts of this chromosome. Because mutations that cause infertility cannot be inherited, the relative abundance of Y-chromosome deletions in male patients suggests an extremely high rate of spontaneous DNA damage. Even microdeletions on the Y chromosome de-stabilize its transmission, frequently causing it to be lost during gamete production.

It's therefore a good job that we're steadily gaining ground in our knowledge of genetics. Perhaps the reason so many Men go into the Sciences is simply out of an unconscious desire for self-preservation?

Nah.

In the long term, absolute selection against males with deletions that confer sex reversal or sterility will create strong pressure either to retain (and amplify) fertility genes, or for any fertile variant that replaces it. Could
the present race of humans eventually be replaced by a new variant (or several independent variants that cannot cross-hybridize) with an alternative sex-determining/differentiation system? Such a new hominid race could differ from present humans in many other characteristics, depending on the gene pool of the new variant’s handful of founders.

In other words, men must Mutate now and avoid the Rush.

Of course all this assumes that having males around is a good idea, and I know some who would argue that point.

It doesn't matter though. Long before the 10-million year deadline is past, possibly within the next century, our understanding of the situation will have improved so dramatically, and our ability to take action at the cellular level increased so markedly, that the problem will be solved.

Assuming you think it is a problem, of course.

Go Forth And Multiply

From an e-mail to me via the ever-readable Evil Pundit, a story via Reuters:

Scientists at the Cornell University in Ithaca, New York have created small robots that can build copies of themselves.

Each robot consists of several 10-cm (4 inch) cubes which have identical machinery, electromagnets to attach and detach to each other and a computer program for replication. The robots can bend and pick up and stack the cubes.

"Although the machines we have created are still simple compared with biological self-reproduction, they demonstrate that mechanical self-reproduction is possible and not unique to biology," Hod Lipson said in a report in the science journal Nature on Wednesday.

Memo to budding robo-psychologists: Re Mechanical self-reproduction : never ever tell an entity capable of this to go F... itself, or you might be surprised. Someone better tell Maureen Dowd about the usefulness of males though.

Things You Don't Want To Hear Your Doctor Say

"You know that you have an appointment in 4 hours time? Well I'd like to see you for an extended time, and absolutely as soon as possible."

That was at 0900 on Friday.

"In my entire career specialising in this area, I've never seen blood test results like this before. I've searched the literature, and it appears no-one else has either."

That was just after 1230.

Always knew I was a mutant. Quite literally, and had the proof for about 10 years.

Fortunately, the news was good. The last time something like this happened, about ten years ago, my Chlesterol count indicated I had the mutation for Familial Hypercholesterolemia (FH). Well, not so much indicated as jumped up and down blowing a whistle, waving a flag, and letting off pyrotechnics. Using Australian standard units, where 95% of the population has levels ranging from 5.5 (go on a diet) to 3.5 (healthy living and you're naturally non-fatty), and where 6.5 or so is only achievable by a (considerably shortened) lifetime of eating supersized fatty fast food, mine was 11.5.

That's about 450 is the US units. 600 has been recorded (rarely) amongst people with the heterozygotic (1 copy) form of the mutation, and nearly double that for homozygotes (2 copies). But those unfortunates are all dead by 30, and often are dead before age 10.

The protective HDC (High Density Cholesterol) that helps against heart attacks was below normal too, and this has not changed over the intervening period.

"Probably dead before 40" is not the type of thing you want to hear at age 37 (or at any other age, for that matter).

Diet and exercise had taken it down to just under 7, but the medications of 10 years ago had no effect. The best I could have hoped for was a reduction to 4.5, and with the damage already done, no plaque would be removed from my arteries, it just wouldn't be growing at such a dangerous rate.

Anyway, the cholesterol level in my blood was starting to edge up again with age, so the doctor tried a new medication at just above the minimum recommended dose, half the full dose, and yet another blood test.

Cutting to the chase... the result this time was an astonishing 2.2 (about 80 in US units). This is possibly dangerous the other way, too low, and is inexplicable. The medication just plain can't do that, even at ridiculously high dosages, several packets per hour.

Yes, they'd repeated the out-of-tolerance assays, and still got the same results.

I may not be heading for a heart attack any minute after all, an event I've been resigned to having occur sooner rather then later for about 10 years. I still have the family history of FH, even have a few cholesterol deposits around my eyelids (Xanthelasmas) like my mother and maternal aunts and uncles, but also have a really screwy metabolism. Not The Average Mutant.

Might be my claim to fame, "Patient X" in a medical research paper.

Just about all the rest (about a hundred measurements) was within 1 standard deviation of the norm, except for one section, whose results were just plain weird, but which would account for the symptoms I'd originally presented with. Some of the possibilities are so totally bizarre I might discuss them in a later article, showing that if you peek in musty old medical volumes, you'll find the Human Species can vary in ways sometimes comical, sometimes tragic, but always fascinating. Get less probable than 1 in 100,000, and things can get quite strange.

We're all eagerly awaiting the results of my Chromosome Analysis to find out just exactly what outrageous combination of mutations I may have. In the meantime, I'm getting yet more blood tests done regularly, concentrating on the weird areas, to see if there's any cyclical variation over time. This is quite common, women have oestrodiol (Female sex hormone) variations on a monthly cycle, for example.

Things are going to be very interesting for awhile. Apart from the human pincushion effect from the tests, the most disquietening thing is that my eyes have changed colour since the 4th of May, from a homogenous dark brown to light brown shading to green, with pronounced rings. Something that usually only happens in adolesence. I wasn't aware of it until the doctor noted that my eyes had changed since the last visit, but now it's unmistakeable.

But now would be an excellent time to thank readers for their generousity. I'd no sooner hinted at having some medical problems than my tip jar started overflowing. Some of the donations were quite substantial, and all of my out-of-pocket medical expenses so far have been covered by them.

It seems the most abundant substance in my readers is one thing the blood tests had no assay for : the milk of Human Kindness. It makes me proud to be genetically associated, however distantly, with such a noble species. Thanks.

Just Read This

The Second Most Objectionable Vice

Thought For Today

Thinking bout this later, I decided that it seems quite a reasonable model that Friendship is the state of being unable to work out who is indebted to whom. And then remembering that you don't care.
- Mags

Maybe I'm Doing Something Right

My e-mail box is getting saturated by bounced e-mails containing Neo-Nazi tripe, that some spammer is sending out in my name.

Now it could just be I'm an innocent victim of a mailing-list harvester. After all, the type of person who would condone Auschwitz isn't likely to cavill at being a spammer too. They're on an upper level of Hell after all. But I fondly hope that I've pissed off someone of that peculiar viewpoint enough so that they're attempting to make trouble for me.

If so, I must be doing something right. Moreover, from the pattern of the bounces, I know just exactly how their spambot is misconfigured. Knowing that I could have easily fixed it for them so their filth gets through, but never would in million years, gives me a warm inner glow of pleasure. The fact that I'm getting the bounces, so they can't know exactly what the problem is, is a double bonus. Life's little everyday joys.

More Good News

Thanks to reader Laserlight, here's a little item from MIT with great potential significance :

A colony of cells cooperates to form a multicellular organism under the direction of a genetic program shared by the members of the colony. A swarm of bees cooperates to construct a hive. Humans group together to build towns, cities, and nations. These examples raise fundamental questions for the organization of computing systems:

How do we obtain coherent behavior from the cooperation of large numbers of unreliable parts that are interconnected in unknown, irregular, and time-varying ways?
What are the methods for instructing myriads of programmable entities to cooperate to achieve particular goals?

These questions have been recognized as fundamental for generations. Now is an opportune time to tackle the engineering of emergent order: to identify the engineering principles and languages that can be used to observe, control, organize, and exploit the behavior of programmable multitudes.

We call this effort the study of amorphous computing.

The objective of this research is to create the system-architectural, algorithmic, and technological foundations for exploiting programmable materials.

In other words, Self-assembling machines. Anyone interested in safety-critical systems and software, like yours truly, is naturally concerned with the issues of self-repair and introspection: how much a system can know about itself. But we don't usually take it to the next level: how systems self-organise from scratch.

Good News !

From the Karolinska Institutet via ScienceBlog :

Moderate alcohol consumption over a relatively long period of time can enhance the formation of new nerve cells in the adult brain.

And while we're on the subject of Brains and the Karolinska Insititutet, here's another interesting article from them, this time via the New York Times :

Using a brain imaging technique, Swedish researchers have shown that homosexual and heterosexual men respond differently to two odors that may be involved in sexual arousal, and that the gay men respond in the same way as women.

The new research may open the way to studying human pheromones, as well as the biological basis of sexual preference. Pheromones, chemicals emitted by one individual to evoke some behavior in another of the same species, are known to govern sexual activity in animals, but experts differ as to what role, if any, they play in making humans sexually attractive to one another.

The question is though, is the brain set up as female leading to the person being attracted to men regardless of outside shape, or does psychological preference lead to changes in the brain? Or can either happen, and is it a feedback loop?

Having just had my system bombarded by all sorts of hormones from a berserk thyroid, I could believe either, er, both, er, all three. But then again, I figure I must be a lesbian anyway...

Your Virtual Body

Well, I think it's a better name for the site than My Virtual Model.

Back On Line

Well, after a short break, back to the blog.

Thanks to all who have left comments or e-mails sending good wishes. I finally found a doctor specialising in the area, and after the next ( quickly counts ).... 12 individual blood tests, a complete androgen sensitivity series, and a chromosome analysis, he'll know exactly what the next battery of tests should be, and so on. Until then, anti-cholesterol medication only.

I'd mention some of the many hundreds of websites I've traversed trying to get a handle on this thing, but right now, until the tests are in, 99% of it is irrelevant, and mainly both deeply technical and terminally boring.

One I will mention: Sickle Cell Anaemia , a condition I definitely don't have, but which is still relevant. :

The sufferers of the illness have a reduced life span. It is believed that carriers (sickle cell trait) are relatively resistant to malaria. Since the gene is incompletely recessive, carriers have a few sickle red blood cells at all times, not enough to cause symptoms, but enough to give resistance to malaria. Because of this, heterozygotes have a higher fitness than either of the homozyogotes. This is known as heterozygote advantage.

The malaria parasite has a complex life cycle and spends part of it in red blood cells. In a carrier, the presence of the malaria parasite causes the red blood cell to rupture, making the plasmodium unable to reproduce. Further, the polymerization of Hb affects the ability of the parasite to digest Hb in the first place. Therefore, in areas where malaria is a problem, people's chances of survival actually increase if they carry sickle cell anaemia.

Due to the above phenomenon, the illness is still prevalent, especially among people with recent ancestry in malaria-striken areas, such as Africa, the Mediterranean, India and the Middle East. In fact, sickle-cell anaemia is the most common genetic disorder among African Americans; about 1 in every 12 is a carrier.

Basically, one mutated gene, Hurray, you have resistance to malaria! Two, and you've got the resistance, but also have other problems.

I don't have sickle-cell. What I may have - and I may have other things in addition or instead of - is a similar mutation that protects against Bubonic Plague. Also many other nasties, even HIV and possibly Ebola. But I don't want to test those hypotheses, thanks very much.

Up to 20% of the population of Sweden carry the mutation, and my parents both came from an area of the UK where the rate is probably comparable. One, you're resistant to the Black Death - which I think would be cool. Two, and it can completely screw up the conversion of cholesterol to other useful chemicals.

We shall see.

In the meantime, whatever it is, symptoms are now tolerable, and so on with the motley.

UPDATE : For more, Ask a Geneticist. Let's just say that for some people who are homozygous (2 copies) the side effects can be interesting under the right circumstances. There's a reason why such an obviously beneficial mutation, providing some protection from Plague, Smallpox, Haemmoragic Fevers, and HIV, hasn't spread wider. With such wonderful Swings, you can bet there are sometimes some pretty spectacular gotchas on the Roundabouts.

Normal Service Will Be Resumed As Soon As Possible

Personal health problems have meant I've had to be away for a few days, but things should get back to normal soon.

I've come to the conclusion that Doctors here in Australia, Specialists and GPs, don't charge very much at all for their services, thank goodness.

Morphing and Menace

File these two under Interesting URLs.

Here's a very disturbing website anyway. Facial Transformations. Try it and see what may be reality in the Universe Next Door.

And then there's Darth Vader's Blog. In the comments see what happens when he gets a 419 scam :

I discovered an abandoned deposit in my company owned by one of our Outer Rim customers who died along with his entire family as a result of an landspeeder crash. He actually deposited this funds amounting to IC12,000,000,000.00 (Twelve billion Imperial Credits), for safe keeping in my company here in Mos Eisley....

Some things don't bear thinking about.

Hat Tip : Dantravels

Another Harbinger of the Singularity

From the Bath University RepRap Project :

universal constructor is a machine that can replicate itself and - in addition - make other industrial products. Such a machine would have a number of interesting characteristics, such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, increasing in number exponentially, and being extremely low-cost.

The project described in these pages is working towards creating a universal constructor by using rapid prototyping, and then giving the results away free under the GNU General Public Licence to allow other investigators to work on the same idea. We are trying to prove the hypothesis: Rapid prototyping and direct writing technologies are sufficiently versatile to allow them to be used to make a von Neumann Universal Constructor.

More via The Speculist.

Recent research under my supervision at Bath has developed a new additional technique that allows electrical conductors to be simply and directly incorporated in rapid-prototyped components made on conventional RP machines. This permits complete mechanisms to be created that contain their own control chips, electric motors, and sensors, all without any need for printed circuits.

This prompts the intriguing idea that it should be possible to design an RP machine that is capable of making nearly all its own component parts. Such a machine would have a number of novel characteristics. For example, it does not matter how much the first machine costs. The second and all subsequent machines will only cost as much as their raw materials and their assembly.

Once a company (or an individual) had acquired one self-copying RP machine they could make any further number that they wanted for themselves or others. This could make RP economic as a production, as opposed to a prototyping, technology.

In addition to having the capacity to create wealth exponentially (within resource limits), a self-replicating RP machine will also be subject to artificial selection. This is because the CAD designs for the machine have to be supplied with it for it to copy itself. Most people will use those designs as they stand; a few people will improve them. Some improvements will be made public on the Internet and will therefore spread, coming to predominate over less-good earlier designs.

Rapid Prototyping - RP - machines have only been developed in the last few years. CAD/CAM (Computer Aided Design /Computer Aided Manufacture) systems have been in common use for two decades, as have the industrial robots they command. But those were large industrial plants. The systems referred to here are "3D Printers", instead of printing a flat image on a page, they "print" a solid object.
For example, the ZCorp 310, which "printed" the Brain model shown on the right :

Z Corporation’s proprietary software accepts solid models in STL, VRML and PLY file formats as input. ZPrint software features 3D viewing, text labeling, and scaling functionality. The software runs on Microsoft Windows* NT, 2000 Professional and XP Professional.

Not that long ago, a really good quality print could only be made by a large offset press or linotype machine. Now a few hunderd dollars will get you a colour laser printer that will do the same thing, and fits on a desktop.

The same thing is happening with MicroFactories. We're close to making ones that can replicate, and when that happens, the price becomes very low indeed. As they grow in sophistication, with the ability to make ever more complex objects, the world will change at least as much between 2005 and 2025 as it did between 1985 and 2005. Probably more, and possibly vastly more.

The Singularity is not something that will happen overnight, or even over a year or decade. It's something that will creep up on us, and may take a century or more to really get going. Just Signs and Portents so far, but with more to come in the next 5 years. I think by 2015 the process will be far more widely recognised than it is now.

A Spider Called Rasputin

Or at least, it should have been.

From the ABC :

British hospital staff have released one of the world's deadliest spiders on hospital grounds, after the chef it bit on the hand took it with him when seeking treatment.

Hospital staff in Somerset released the brazilian wandering spider, deadlier than a black widow and known for its speed and aggression, after mistaking it for an everyday garden-variety arachnid.
[...]
Mr Stevens, 23, photographed the spider with his mobile phone, thinking it dead after it had fallen in the freezer and been stunned by the cold.

Just to make sure, he poured boiling water over the spider and placed it in a jar, a report in The Times newspaper said. Later he also cooked the spider in the microwave.

But by the time Mr Stevens was taken to hospital in Somerset, dizzy and shaking and with his hand badly swollen, the spider had shaken off the ill treatment and was up and moving again, struggling to get out of the jar.

It was taken with Mr Stevens to the hospital, and then inadvertently released.
[...]
Officials at the hospital said the brazilian wandering spider was unlikely to pose a risk to public health since it "would have died very soon after being released" because of the cold.

As did Rasputin after having been poisoned with cyanide, shot several times, beaten with a dumbell, and being dumped in a freezing river.

2004, A Space Odyssey

Thanks to reader Shaun, here's an interesting site about Saturn's enigmatic moon, Iapetus.

It's also about how the human mind works. We constantly seek to find patterns in the world, and when confronted with something which doesn't conform to our expectations, we may see patterns that aren't really there.



As you can see, there's something there that doesn't add up. The "seam" along the equator. The picture isn't a fake, either, it came from the Cassini probe on 31 December 2004.

The most unique, and perhaps most remarkable feature discovered on Iapetus in Cassini images is a topographic ridge that coincides almost exactly with the geographic equator. The ridge is conspicuous in the picture as an approximately 20-kilometer wide (12 miles) band that extends from the western (left) side of the disc almost to the day/night boundary on the right. On the left horizon, the peak of the ridge reaches at least 13 kilometers (8 miles) above the surrounding terrain. Along the roughly 1,300 kilometer (800 mile) length over which it can be traced in this picture, it remains almost exactly parallel to the equator within a couple of degrees. The physical origin of the ridge has yet to be explained.

Curiouser and Curiouser. As for that huge crater slap-bang in the middle of the picture, just above the centre, it looks rather more hexagonal than circular.

From these pieces of hard evidence, and rather a lot more that are distinctly "iffy", Richar Hoagland, the author of the "interesting site" has managed to construct a whole history of the solar system, involving a doomed civilisation on Mars, and an artificial moon.

Some, on reading, have become intrigued. Others are repelled. And some, typified by this truly wondrous comment on "Coast to Coast AM" a few nights ago – "This time Hoagland has really walked off the cliff!" – are simply, as the phrase goes, "out to lunch."

Count me in with the luncheoners. I still think the "seam" is unexplained, and I certainly can't think of any conventional explanation more plausible than Hoagland's wild hypothesis. I'd bet there is one though. I also think that it's definitely worthwhile having a second, closer look, as until we get more data, we really can't say anything much apart from "WOW! Something REALLY Inexplicable!", which is the one thing guaranteed to get a Scientist really excited. It's one of Ma Nature's Mother Lodes, chock-full of scientific goodness that may just cause us to revise a lot of what we think we know.

I recommend you go view Richard Hoagland's site. It's easy to sort out the speculation from the evidence, and he has done a very sound job of collating the facts. I may disagree with the interpretation, and sometimes he sees patterns that I don't, but it's still worth a look. Personally, I see his hypothesis as being similar to Saint Malachy's Prophecy of the Popes. Seeing patterns that aren't really there.



Nah.