Category: Miscellaneous babble

Ok, just give me a big dopeslap. Accidentally deleted my weblog directory while cleaning out some stuff.

Thank goodness for backups and MT. Weblog was restored by doing a simple rebuild from MT, and image files were recovered from backups.

whew

Let me know if you spot anything that’s broken.

Yesterday marked my 5th year working here. It’s the longest I’ve ever worked at a single place in my short career. I have to say, it’s been a very pleasant 5 years. I think I’ve accomplished a good deal, although probably not as much as I should have or would have liked. My wife says I shoud make up a 5 year plan for the next 5 years. And earlier this year my boss asked me what I planned to accomplish this year.

Tough thing to do for someone who generally doesn’t plan anything more than 10 minutes in advance.

At the start of 2004, I listed some of the things I hoped to get accomplished this year. At the rate things are going, I don’t know how much research I’ll be able to get done or published this year. Maybe that should be part of my 5 year plan.

Definitely on track with the other items though. Haven’t really done much with spiffing up the weblog though.

I’ll have to think about this 5 year plan thing and come up with something.

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