Category: Miscellaneous babble

Leaving work yesterday, I noticed the groundskeepers aerated some of the lawns on campus. You know, when they take this machine that yanks little plugs of dirt out of the ground and leaves little holes so that air can get into the soil. Supposed to be good for the lawn or something.

Anyway, it reminded me of the times the yard of my elementary school got aerated. Of course back then, I had no idea what it was all about. I’d just walk to school one morning, and see all these holes in the ground along with what looked to be dog poo scattered all over. I never got any closer than the edge of the side walk, because I didn’t want to step in a field covered in poop. That’s just gross, you know. So I would crouch down at the edge of the field and visually inspect the poo (trying to figure out just what the heck it was), and look down the little holes to see if I could spot whatever creature made them. It didn’t smell like dog poo though, and eventually I figured out they were just little plugs of dirt mysteriously dug up sometime after we had left school.

Even now, to this very day, I always stay off freshly aerated lawns, because you never can tell when one piece is just a lump of dirt, or if it really is dog poo.

Having sex really does help, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Or at the very least, it doesn’t hurt.

From the Yahoo! News article:

Sexual activity does not cause prostate cancer, and men who ejaculate frequently may even be protecting themselves against the disease, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.

I suspect it’s probably not a good idea to use this to conpersuade your wife (or girlfriend, or SO or whatever) into getting it on. You’ll probably end up getting a bottle of lube thrown at you.

Abstract:

Ejaculation Frequency and Subsequent Risk of Prostate Cancer

Michael F. Leitzmann, MD; Elizabeth A. Platz, ScD; Meir J. Stampfer, MD; Walter C. Willett, MD; Edward Giovannucci, MD

JAMA. 2004;291:1578-1586.

Context Sexual activity has been hypothesized to play a role in the development of prostate cancer, but epidemiological data are virtually limited to case-control studies, which may be prone to bias because recall among individuals with prostate cancer could be distorted as a consequence of prostate malignancy or ongoing therapy.

Objective To examine the association between ejaculation frequency, which includes sexual intercourse, nocturnal emission, and masturbation and risk of prostate cancer.

Design, Setting, and Participants Prospective study using follow-up data from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (February 1, 1992, through January 31, 2000) of 29 342 US men aged 46 to 81 years, who provided information on history of ejaculation frequency on a self-administered questionnaire in 1992 and responded to follow-up questionnaires every 2 years to 2000. Ejaculation frequency was assessed by asking participants to report the average number of ejaculations they had per month during the ages of 20 to 29 years, 40 to 49 years, and during the past year (1991).

Main Outcome Measure Incidence of total prostate cancer.

Results During 222 426 person-years of follow-up, there were 1449 new cases of total prostate cancer, 953 organ-confined cases, and 147 advanced cases of prostate cancer. Most categories of ejaculation frequency were unrelated to risk of prostate cancer. However, high ejaculation frequency was related to decreased risk of total prostate cancer. The multivariate relative risks for men reporting 21 or more ejaculations per month compared with men reporting 4 to 7 ejaculations per month at ages 20 to 29 years were 0.89 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.73-1.10); ages 40 to 49 years, 0.68 (95% CI, 0.53-0.86); previous year, 0.49 (95% CI, 0.27-0.88); and averaged across a lifetime, 0.67 (95% CI, 0.51-0.89). Similar associations were observed for organ-confined prostate cancer. Ejaculation frequency was not statistically significantly associated with risk of advanced prostate cancer.

Conclusions Our results suggest that ejaculation frequency is not related to increased risk of prostate cancer.

According to Slashdot and Starwars.com, Episode III is scheduled for release just over a year from now on May 19, 2005. That makes it almost 18 years after the release of the first Star Wars and 7 years since Episode I were released.

Hope it’s a good one. I’ve waited long enough for it.

Found on Slashdot.org

Woo hoo! Farscape is coming back to SciFi! The SciFi Wire announcement only mentions a 2 part miniseries, so I don’t know if it’s just coming back as a mini-series, or if this mini-series is going to kick off a whole new season of Farscape. Hopefully this means more seasons of Farscape. If so, I can’t wait! Now if only SciFi would re-run Farscape at a more reasonable time…

Found via GeekGrrl and SciFi Wire

My wife was stepping out of bed after a nap, heard a crunch. This is what she stepped on: her Visor Edge in the pocket of the jeans that were on the floor. The screen can be pretty easily replaced, but I guess this is as good an opportunity as any to upgrade her to a newer PDA. She’ll need something more capable for med school anyway. So now we’re shopping around for a new PDA. A Tungsten C is at the top of the list at the moment. With the recent price drop, it’s looking pretty good.