Friday, January 8, 2010

Happy Friday afternoon! More sex is better for you!

How is this news anymore?

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/01/07/sex.health.benefits/index.html

(CNN) -- Yoga instructor Sadie Nardini and her husband got an early start on their New Year's resolution: In December, the New York couple decided to have sex every day for the entire month.

Nardini and her husband, a professional photographer, initially decided to have sex like bunnies in the hopes that all the activity might help them overcome his-and-her bad habits: cigarettes and chocolate, respectively. And indeed, the nightly trysts did help. But they also found, unexpectedly, that frequent sex made them feel better in other ways, too.

Nardini says they both slept better and had more energy, and she didn't get a cold or the flu all month as she usually does in the winter. "Sex doesn't seem at first glance to be the cure for what ails you, but there's so many health benefits of having more sex," Nardini says. "Anyone can be better served by having more sex.

Benefits:

1. A longer life

In a British study, men who had intercourse at least twice a week lived longer than men who had sex less than once a month. A U.S. study had similar findings, and a Swedish study examining the sex lives of 70-year-olds found that men who died before their 75th birthday had ceased having sexual intercourse at earlier ages.

The Swedish study didn't find that women lived longer if they had sex more frequently, and neither did a study in North Carolina. However, in the North Carolina study, women who reported enjoying sex more lived longer than those who didn't report enjoyment.

2. A healthier heart

In a British study, people who had intercourse twice a week or more were less likely to have heart attacks and other fatal coronary events. Those who had sex less than once a month had twice the rates of fatal coronary events, compared with those with the highest frequency of intercourse.

3. Lower blood pressure

In a study published in the journal Biological Psychology, people who had sex more often tended to have lower diastolic blood pressure, or the bottom number in a blood pressure reading. Brody's experiment, in which more sexually active study subjects had markedly less dramatic blood pressure spikes when they were put under stress, also supports the benefit.

4. Lower risk of breast cancer

A French study found that women who have vaginal intercourse not at all or infrequently had three times the risk of breast cancer, compared with women who had intercourse more often.

5. Lower risk of prostate cancer

A Minnesota study found that men who'd had intercourse more than 3,000 times in their lives had half the prostate cancer risk of those who had not. While it's not clear why this would be true, studies have found that men who had more intercourse tended to have better prostate function and eliminated more waste products in their semen. "These differences could conceivably impact prostate cancer risk," Brody writes in his article.

6. Pain relief

Whipple and others have conducted studies suggesting that more sexual activity helps relieve lower back pain and migraines.

7. A slimmer physique

A study of healthy German adults revealed that men and women who had sex more frequently tended to be slimmer than folks who didn't have as much sex. Sex burns 50 to 60 calories per encounter, Whipple says, so sex three times a week for a month would burn about 700 calories -- or the equivalent of jogging about seven miles.

8. Better testosterone levels

A group of men being treated for erectile problems saw greater increases in testosterone when, along with the treatments, they had frequent sex. Specifically, men who had sex at least eight times per month had greater increases than those who had sex less than eight times per month.

9. Fewer menopause symptoms

Menopausal women in Nigeria experienced fewer hot flashes when they had sex more frequently. Brody says this may be because sexual activity helps regulate hormonal levels, which in turn affect the symptoms of menopause.

10. Healthier semen

In three studies, men who had frequent intercourse had a higher volume of semen, a higher sperm count and a higher percentage of healthier sperm, compared with men who tended to participate in other sexual activities.

--

I've noticed that the above doesn't even include "a better relationship".

Ray Kurzweil

Ray has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. The magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States and called him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.”


http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/ray-kurzweil-h-interview


Principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition, Ray has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc.

"RAY KURZWEIL: One area I commented on was the question of a possible link between quantum computing and the brain. Do we need quantum computing to create human level AI? My conclusion is no, mainly because we don‘t see any quantum computing in the brain (ed: some don't agree with this. For the record, I don't either). Roger Penrose‘s conjecture that there was quantum computing in tubules does not seem to have been verified by any experimental evidence.

Quantum computing is a specialized form of computing where you examine in parallel every possible combination of qubits. So it‘s very good at certain kinds of problems, the classical one being cracking encryption codes by factoring large numbers. But the types of problems that would be vastly accelerated by quantum computing are not things that the human brain is very good at. When it comes to the kinds of problems I just mentioned, the human brain isn‘t even as good as classical computing. So in terms of what we can do with our brains there‘s no indication that it involves quantum computing. Do we need quantum computing for consciousness? The only justification for that conjecture from Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff is that consciousness is mysterious and quantum mechanics is mysterious, so there must be a link between the two.

I get very excited about discussions about the true nature of consciousness, because I‘ve been thinking about this issue for literally 50 years, going back to junior high school....."

Criticisms of Ray?:

Pulitzer Prize winner Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, has said of Kurzweil's and Hans Moravec's books: "It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid."[58] (from Wiki)

Tonight

On Friday January 8th at 6 pm, Gallery 44 will host an artists’ talk with Elinor Whidden, Chai Duncan and Leila Armstrong.



Elinor Whidden considers the notion of progress by likening the promises of today’s off-road automobile advertising to those of the Canada’s Western Frontier when the fur trade first blazed its trails into the wilderness. Whidden’s photo series Ford EXPLORER captures her car-carrying performances in which she endeavours to use car parts as survival tools in the wilds of Northern Ontario.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Elinor Whidden received a BA in Canadian/Environmental Studies from Trent University, a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and a MFA from the State University of New York in Buffalo. She has exhibited throughout North America, recently showing work in Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Buffalo, NY.

12 POINT BUCK
has been working collaboratively for two years. They have shown their work at the Toronto Urban Film Festival, Parlour in Lethbridge and worked in situ at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. Chai Duncan holds an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan and is currently on staff at the University of Lethbridge. Leila Armstrong acquired an MA in Media Studies from Concordia University and went on to do doctoral studies in communications at Simon Fraser University.

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 120
Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8
www.gallery44.org

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography is a non-profit artist-run centre committed to the advancement of photographic art. Founded in 1979, the centre consists of a gallery, resource centre, and production facilities. Gallery 44 is supported by its members and patrons, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.