Sunshine Tuesday

Workout notes yoga, then 2000 yard swim. The swim went ok, though I did forget my combination to my lock. Grrrr….

That was plenty for today.

Humor Jackie and Dunlap lament that they don’t have Hillary Clinton to kick around anymore.

Politics

This is Elizabeth Kucinich.

Her husband introduced Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush.

Of course, the Constitution says that the President can be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors; that is, if for the President committing a crime which is related to and abusive of their office.

Sure, I don’t like him, but the fact is that this country elected him, and I don’t see a specific act where someone can say “he violated law X right here”; then again I have no training in law.

I do know that impeachment is not some sort of parliamentary system where we can rid ourselves of mistakes by recalling a president that we regret electing, and this seems to smell like that.

How is the election going? It is way too early, but the election futures look good:

Barack Obama D 62.00 +0.200
John McCain R 35.20 -0.700

But, what is even more telling, check out this car commercial:

This is for an area on the outskirts of Dallas; a predominately white, Republican area! If Obama is considered to be a positive image here, well, McCain is in deep trouble.

Even better: check out the McCain girls!

I wonder if Obama is paying them to do this.

As I type this, I am listening to this Obama speech:

Obama is proposing yet another rebate from the government (stimulus check). I have to disagree with that, at least for those at our income level. I’d agree with that if the checks only went to the poor or lower middle class.

I like his college service plan.

If anyone thinks that his campaign is all about empty rhetoric, listen to this. It is full of specifics.

Science
What makes our brains work so well (relative to the other animals): the complexity of our synapses.

What keeps us from being more violent and angry? One big factor is a brain chemical called serotonin.

Molly Crockett at the University of Cambridge, UK, and her colleagues gave volunteers a drink that temporarily lowered their levels of serotonin, a brain ‘neurotransmitter’ linked to happy mood. They then had them play ‘the Ultimatum Game’, which involves accepting or rejecting offers of money. Those with lower serotonin levels showed increased retaliation to offers that they perceived to be unfair. “We’ve suspected for years that there’s a link between serotonin and impulsive aggression and emotional regulation,” says Crockett. “Until this study it wasn’t clear whether serotonin was playing a causal role.”

I wonder if fatigue (say, from an ultra) reduces one’s serotonin levels; I do know that there is a relation between these levels and chronic fatigue syndrome, but that is a different ball of wax.

Body odors: play a role in human relationships; certain odors can reveal certain health problems, and they can indicate other things.

It is fascinating to think that people detect complex, subtle chemical signals hidden in body odors without even noticing that they’re doing so. “Our brain is so sensitive to chemosignals from body odors that it can detect even
 minute genetically-based differences, which in turn guide our behavior,” says Johan N. Lundström, Ph.D., an olfactory scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. Lundström recently used PET scanning to show that body odors are processed by a neuronal network separate from that which processes common odors, and that people can accurately smell the difference between a stranger and a friend. The smell of a stranger’s body odor actually activated the area of the brain associated with fear and danger. This is perhaps a mechanism to ensure that it grabs our attention, Lundström said.

Other work from his lab has shown that women who are fertile are more sensitive to androstadienone, a social odor produced by men, than are nonfertile women. And research from other labs has shown that men preferred the underarm aroma of women who were ovulating (and fertile) compared to those who were menstruating (and less likely to be fertile). Furthermore, studies have revealed that people generally prefer the smells of those with immune genetic complexes different from their own, a useful mechanism for avoiding inbreeding.

These findings, along with others from the field of olfaction research, make it clear that we underestimate the sense of smell at our own risk. Olfaction is far more sophisticated than we give it credit. The course of our lives is probably far more swayed by body odors than we would ever imagine — or like to admit. We might even be masking body odor at our own risk. • 3 June 2008