Vasopressin
Ok, now for the male version.
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I’ll do this one later. Time to watch John Adams on HBO and wash clothes for tomorrow.
Oxytocin Side Searches
Ok, how ’bout a little treat on this one. These are the relevant Oxytocin side searches I came up with. You can see how far and wide searching can go quickly and why I loved tabbed browsing.
A lot of German, definitely non-American, origins on these papers. That’s of interest, because American media does not read a lot of non-English. I’ve notice similar search results where the science was all in Brazil, Italy, or somewhere else.
Oxytocin and the Mentrual Cycle
There is a very common pic. Wikipedia has a good example. Oxytocin isn’t on it. One study could not find a linear correlation with the other significant menstrual hormones. It is related to lubrication. This study found elevated levels at mid cycle, but not related the other hormones, in monkeys.
What’s in a Birth Control Pill
Combination hormonal birth control methods (pills, patch, or ring)
Estrogin, Progesterone, and sugar(placebo) varying by week or day.
Oxytocin and Birth Control Pills
Oxytocin to Treat Depression
A New Way to Treat Depression, Time Magazine 12/8/2005
Social phobia, anxiety, depression, and even some aspects of autism are influenced to varying degrees by amygdala activity. A long-acting oxytocin-like medication could, in theory, provide some relief from all of these disorders, and do so faster than, for example, anti-depressants.
Does a side-effect of SSRIs, releasing oxytocin make them work? It is suggested that oxytocin release is an important aspect of the pharmacological actions of SSRIs, and this could be an important contributory factor for the clinical profile of this group of antidepressants with particular efficacy in disorders of psychosocial origin. This unfortunately, does not seem to be a current use, though this hormone is available pharmacies, at least in other countries.
Oxytocin in Foods
Maybe, in oysters? Unfortunately, this is obscured by Oxytocin’s role in hunger suppression.
Ok, some of these I have difficulty writing or pasting. Go look them up if you’re interested.
Oxytocin and Sex
The Role of Oxytocin in Relation to Female Sexual Arousal
Oxytocin Hormone: The Cuddle Hormone is the Body’s Own Love Potion
Oxytocin
I’ve known about oxytocin for a long time. High school biology classes described it’s use as a hunger suppressant. Oxytocin is the link between you brain an stomach. Notice the delay after eating a lot and feeling full. It takes time for the hormone levels to change in the blood stream. It’s relation to pregnancy; triggering the uterine birth contractions and activating breast milk production. What they left out are it’s effects on emotions. Perhaps, Love Potion No. 9 is Oxytocin.
Hmmm.. So, what would happen with a Ecstasy/Oxytocin cocktail? The potion that will make him/her fall for someone “against” their will?
Oxytocin: A hormone for Love MorganWelt.de by Irina Bosse
But love consists of something else as well… emotions that have nothing to do with physical lust.
In interviews, loving couples demonstrated that love takes on a whole new dimension, once the “high” of the first exhilaration has subsided. Many named security, closeness and trust as the common denominators for their feelings in a longstanding partnership. Researchers now believe that even this deep bond is a hormonal predilection, instilled in us to safeguard long-term family planning.
Professor Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist at Rutgers University (NY) is convinced that a distinct chemical system is responsible for our varying love feelings: “We know that libido in men and women is primarily governed by testosterone, and also by estrogen in many animals. Close bonding, the third crucial emotion, has to do with oxytocin and vasopressine. These are substances in the brain that impart the feeling of deep affection.”
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Quite by accident, it was discovered that oxytocin also directly influences our sexual behavior. The hormone was administered as a nasal spray in the course of a study on memory. It was thought that it would improve powers of memory, and that is exactly what was being tested. The results were not quite what the researchers had expected. Instead of outstanding feats of memory, many test persons reported a slightly different side effect: an erection.
The hormone researchers found this phenomenon no less interesting. In a further experiment which purposely stimulated the unexpected side effect, they were able to decipher the connection. After giving blood, volunteers were asked to masturbate with sexual aids of their choice, all in the name of science.
The blood samples provided insight into individual oxytocin levels before, during and after the erection. The results were unequivocal: during an erection, oxytocin levels rose to three times their normal level within seconds. Prior to the next measurement series, the test persons were given a drug that blocked oxytocin production. The astounding result: they still got an erection, but this time without any sensation.
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Cuddle Hormone by Susan Barker
In China, which enjoys a far lower birth-related morbidity rate than the United States, cool showers, which would stimulate the nipples and cause the brain to release its own oxytocin, are advised when labor needs a boost. In the United States, too, midwives have long known the benefits of applying ice to the nipples of women whose labor is stalled, Witt said.
These natural means of releasing oxytocin have several advantages over intravenous injections of the hormone, Witt said.
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In addition, studies show that oxytocin in females, as well as the closely related vasopressin in males, is key to pair bonding.
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“What’s behind it?” she added. “It could be oxytocin.”
Since the release of oxytocin can be classically conditioned, after repeatedly having sex with the same partner, just seeing that partner could release more oxytocin, making you want to be with that person all the more, and you bond, she said.
But just as oxytocin is linked to the positive aspects of bonding, Witt thinks there’s every reason to suspect that pathological conditions - situations in which bonding breaks down or is established inappropriately -might well be linked to oxytocin, too.
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The Science of Love
And finally … how to fall in love
* Find a complete stranger.
* Reveal to each other intimate details about your lives for half an hour.
* Then, stare deeply into each other’s eyes without talking for four minutes.
York psychologist, Professor Arthur Arun, has been studying why people fall in love. He asked his subjects to carry out the above 3 steps and found that many of his couples felt deeply attracted after the 34 minute experiment. Two of his subjects later got married.
TC: Music Tax
Mike Arrington has a great write up w/o the ranting I would have put out.
The Music Industry’s New Extortion Scheme
Musicians themselves may just be crazy, but the music labels are dangerously stupid, and need to be stopped before they can do any further damage to the music industry. Case in point: Warner Music, fully aware that the days of charging for recorded music are coming to an end, is now pushing for a music tax.
This isn’t the first time someone has called for a music tax. Peter Jenner argued for it in Europe in 2006. Trent Reznor said the same thing last year (as did the Songwriters Association of Canada). Mathew Ingram has other examples.
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The goal? $5 per month from everyone, or fees of $20 billion per year. That’s double the current size of the recorded music industry ($10 billion).
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Where’s the freakin’ comma?
“We wish you the best happiness, joy and blessings.” I see this all the time and it bugs the shit out of me. There is a comma between “happiness” and “joy”. Where’s the comma between “joy” and “and”? This sentence indicates that happiness is one item and joy+blessings are another item. If the intention is to express a list of three things the sentence should include a comma between each item in the list. So, “We wish you the best happiness, joy, and blessings.”
This was pointed out in high school and CompSci explained the why. Natural language parsing is hard. English has lots of and awful rules. Computer spell checkers can’t tell when the sentence should use “joy, and” or “joy and”. So, it never suggests the comma and lets writers get away with out it. Now, ten years have passed and everyone thinks this is the correct grammatical rule. It isn’t. If you go back and add the comma the spell checker doesn’t say anything.
Why is this a pet peeve? Because I crave consistency and this sentence is the simplest case. It’s easy to understand with or without the comma. I want one rule for them all. All the cases no matter how complex should follow the same behavior otherwise you end up with something like the confusing mess named English.
Try this one, “Our farm has two sheep, 5 hens and a cock, a horse and a couple of cows.” vs “Our farm has two sheep, 5 hens and a cock, a horse, and a couple of cows.” Which is easier to read? The first one kind of runs on and you are left wondering if the horse and cow are related to one another like the hens and cock.
Sentences can get more complex than this. Just read Bertalanffy. Without the sign posts of grammar it’s easy to leave the reader floundering. Have a heart. Be kind. Show the comma some love.
CNN: Fancy computers spell trouble for 2010 census
Are you kidding me? There is no way this costs even $600 million unless some people are making a lot of profit or theft. $2 billion would be criminal. Seriously, it goes beyond being fired and into jail time.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Big worries for the nation’s first high-tech census should have been obvious when tests showed some of the door-to-door headcounters couldn’t figure out their fancy new handheld computers.
Now, officials say, technology problems could add as much as $2 billion to the cost of the 2010 census and jeopardize the accuracy of the nation’s most important survey.
Census officials are considering a return to using paper and pencil to count every man, woman and child in the nation.
At an initial cost of more than $11 billion, the 2010 census was already the most expensive ever. Officials now are scrambling to hold down costs while trying to ensure the count produces reliable population numbers — figures that will be used to apportion seats in Congress and divvy up more than $300 billion a year in federal and state funding.
Work Laptop
So, I got a laptop for work now. When I get the security key and VPN setup I can work from home. I have mixed feelings about this, which is why I never pushed real hard for it. One thing I really look forward to is jamming out on the home stereo. And my chair and desk are so much better. I also have that new 28″ monitor. It’s not too bright. It’s not too cold. The Internet connection doesn’t run through the corporate servers. So, I can feel free to play Pandora internet radio.
Unlike most of my coworkers, no one is at home. There’s no one to pester and get pestered by. That’s good and bad. I like the personal contact. It would be nice to work at home 1 or 2 days a week.
There are some technical details to work out. I use a huge external drive at work and I don’t want to carry it around. I still want an external drive, preferrably RAID, at home to have good backups. The 150 gig on the laptop is nice, but I’ve come to rely on 300 and I have 5 20 gig VMs.
The RAID solution is expensive and no created yet. The whole computer thing at my house is on pause. The two Windows boxes died and I’m just not interested in putting them back together right now. My little MacBook rocks. I don’t think it’s been rebooted this year. Should have gone this way 2 yr ago.
Anyway, work from home yay for me.
The Last Starfighter
The Last Starfighter is showing on HBO. I don’t know who would be familiar with this movie. It has rather an unusual genre. About a teenage boy that plays a flight sim video game, early 80’s, and the game turns out to be a trainer/testor for an alien race that’s at war. All the native pilots are masquered in a meteor attack on their base before they can take off. And this kid is the only one that is trained and away at the time. Of course, he turns back the main assault in a souped up fighter just like in the game.
This movie holds a special place for me. I actually got something out of my dad from it. This was very rare. Dad just didn’t do a lot of nice things like family activities. Anyway, this movie was playing in the theaters and I got the book. It was ~300 pages or something. And he said if I finished the book we could see the movie. There was no movie theater in Canadian at the time. So, a trip to Amarillo was required and a movie was very rare indeed. This was a brand new, super duper computer generated, ultra realistic, movie about a kid in a no-name trailer park who becomes a hero. What geek wouldn’t find this appealing?
I struggled with the book. It was good, but that was a lot of pages. I never read that many pages before. It just didn’t seem possible to finish it all. Somehow, I did and Dad had to pay up. Going to the movies was a big deal.
Equally significant was finishing my first big book. After this I started going through my Dad’s collection, oldest first. Starting with Jules Verne, HG Wells, Tom Swift books, and moving towards Asimov, Clark, Ben Bova, Niven, etc.
The reason I’m writing this is that I just noticed the copyright date for the movie was 1984. At that time I was 8 or 9. So, if you ever wonder about my pronunciation or my vocabulary just imagine a 9 or 10 yr old reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in 80 Days, Mysterious Island (one of my favorites), War of the Worlds,.. What is that like 4th grade? I was using Kindergarten pronunciation rules on words that no one around me spoke.
<cut here, but I’ll leave in for now>
Over the years, I learned a lot more from science fiction books than you would think. Vocabulary and concepts like anti-matter. Each author seemed to have a fetish for explaining some particular detail or the story would revolve around it. There would be 3 pages of science slipped into the action right when you are the most interested.
Later, when we had English in High School I resented it a great deal. I read more books than they proscribed and had been doing so for years. Being forced to read this or that. And you know what most of them were crap. Utter crap. I have taken to going back and reading some of the “seminal” works. And I call “bullshit”. What’s the one with the kids on the island that kill Porky or whatever? I believed everything then and I did NOT believe this.
Let’s talk about the influences on George Orwell as he aged. Yeah, because we don’t want to live like that book 1984. He was British by the way and they have more cameras per capita than anywhere on the planet. Were was Jules Verne or Alexandre Dumas (3 Musketeers, the Count of Monte Cristo,..) or Arthur C Clark predicting satellites?
Anyway, the last part is a rant that you an ignore. 
Meditation Room Update
I took photos today of the closets. The baseboards are in for both closets now and one closet has bamboo q round and the other is half done. Just one stick short. Tape is pulled, contrary to the pick. The shoe holders are painted the same brown as the master bedroom. In the main room, the trim and doors are painted. The nail holes are painted over, though I might dab around again tomorrow. The wood filler is particularly dark.
Funny thing.. Christopher should find this particularly interesting. So, I’m putting in baseboard in the last closet. Remember, the shoe holders were built in and I just pulled the trim off the front. The hold trim went above the old vinyl tile, 1/8″ thick, and fit perfectly. I added a 1/8″ of vinyl tile and we laid the flooring on that. The we laid the flooring, which is 5/8″. I though I would have to router the baseboard down, but I didn’t. Amazingly, the new baseboard is 3/4″ shorter then the original and fit in front of the shoe holders w/o any modification. I put in the other one yesterday and didn’t event notice. That is so cool. No routering. Just nail it on.
To do.. Is pull the painters cloth over the whole room and get the spots on the ceiling I missed. Put down one more stick of q round in the closet and trim paint and fill all those nail holes. Some of the walls need a second coat of light green and the baseboard/wall needs a touch up dark green. It is very close. I’m to the point were I need a list, because it’s just little disjointed things here and there and I could forget one really easily.
Lady in the Van
I finished reading this today. It is very good. The crazy lady’s behavior is oddly familiar in family members, particularly Grandpa.
The author has a very long career in British TV. He allows a homeless lady to live in an immobile van next to his house. The book is from entries in his diary over the 15 yr she lived there. It is touching that he was worried about her and in the end allowed her to move in there.
She is very obviously mentally unbalanced. Trying to study to be a nun and ending up in various mental hospitals and running away until she could live homelessly on her own.
Her living space was full of half-eaten food, clothes, and general trash. This is not too unlike the way Grandpa lived in the Pink house and the house in the country. Though Grandpa always had Chihuahua inside and maybe a Chow outside. There was dog pooh everywhere.
In the end, the author lived near her almost more than anyone else. Her death is so neat as to appear staged. As she aged and began using a wheelchair, she developed a friend who arranged for professional care. They came and picked her up, bathed her, and put fresh clothes on. That night she escaped one last time to return to the van where she died that night. As if she knew it was time and found a bath and clean clothes to prepared herself.
Meditation Room Update
I’m really tired today and sore all over. The room is great. Lots of little things to clean up; caulk, wood putty, trim painting,.. There’s little clean up all over. Extra cut flooring, cut underlayment, boxes, things not in their right place, etc. And the floor in the whole house needs to be mopped. We tracked sawdust all over the place yesterday.
It’s almost done. Just not today.
BTW, bamboo chair rail seems really hard to find.
Looking for Bamboo Chair Rail
JMX Bamboo has chair, base shoe, stair, etc. $16/6′ The stair could be used as a shelf @ $69.
Bamboo n More has basic moldings like quarter round and reducer.
JMX shows up a lot. Not many choices so far.
Meditation Room Update
BIG update. We laid the bamboo flooring today, including the trim and quarter round in the room. It is fabulous, but don’t take my word for it. The pictures are here. This morning it was clean concrete and tonight it is a finished floor. Including closets. The change is so spectacular.
Chris n Staci got here about 12:30 and we got started about 1:10. They left about 9:30. So, about 8 hours to rough in everything. The main floor took about 4 hours and the last row took easily an hour. It included lots of custom cuts around three doors.
I need to find a wood filler that is the color of bamboo to get all the finish nail holes. A bead of caulk in lots of places for tiny gaps on the baseboard. The closets don’t have baseboard or quarter round.
And Christopher gave me a great suggestion. To use a bamboo chair rail to really set it off. This is a fantastic idea. Now, I just have to find some online, because locally they have reducer, T molding, and quarter round only.
Anyway, I love the floor. Yay!
The Lady in the Van
I need to get this off Audible.com. “The Lady in the Van”, Alan Bennett, c1989.
Book Review
In The Lady in the Van Alan Bennett describes his very odd long-term relationship with “Miss Shepherd”. Miss S. first came to the attention of Bennett in the late 1960s. She and her perpetually stalled van (or rather: a succession of such vans) could be found in his Camden Town neighborhood, parked ever-closer to Bennett’s home. Eventually he allowed her to keep it in his own driveway, giving her sanctuary in his garden, as he describes it. It remained there — with Miss S. living first there and then in a lean-to at the side of his house — until her death in 1989.
Bennett and Miss S. made for an odd couple. They were, in a sense, landlord and tenant, but other than some peace of mind (knowing Miss S. was “at least out of harm’s way”) Bennett didn’t appear to benefit much from the arrangement. Miss S. wasn’t the easiest person to deal with: “One was seldom able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation.”
Miss S. wasn’t quite right in the head, but she got on well enough. Amazingly, between the social state and the beneficence of some of the locals, she fared well and happily enough, puttering about in her own little world, selling self-written tracts and pencils, doing pretty much as she pleased. She had a healthy if unusual philosophy, typified by her reaction to Bennett’s boiler bursting, flooding his basement: “Miss S.’s only comment is ‘What a waste of water.’”
In his 1994 postscript Bennett describes The Lady in the Van as being condensed from “some of the many entries to do with her that are scattered through my diaries.” It is a small book, picking from some two decades worth of material, with a focus on the beginning and then especially the end. Still, Bennett charts this touching, difficult relationship very nicely. There is hardly any closeness between the two — they remain fairly formal towards one another, and it is only the fact that they live in such proximity that really makes them a part of one another’s lives. Still, her presence obviously affected him, and he manages a nice portrait of this figure. (His presence — and his generosity in tolerating her — no doubt also helped to preserve her from getting completely lost.)
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Meditation Room Update
Everyone should have pneumatic nailer. It is so fun.