Month: April 2016

A SHADY SPOT WHERE I WILL NEVER SIT

/ Ken Finton / 1 Comment

 

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I did not write this caption, but I could have written it. 

I believe in planting trees in whose shade I will never sit.

We would all be happier if we all did this.

The artist within us strives to perfect for perpetuity.

The writer within us knows that most of their words are not read.

The caregivers within us know that their efforts will not be returned.

We know we cannot take our efforts and our concerns with us.

We plant seeds for tomorrow even if tomorrow does not come.

Likely, we would likely go mad if we did not do this.

A good parent is a parent that gives to the future.

The future is about the quality of life of the child and the grandchild.

Yet there are those of us who do not believe in the future.

There are among us those that believe the world is ending.

They believe that the end of time is the will of beings greater than themselves.

There is no factual evidence that their beliefs are correct.

Riches are better than poverty. Wealth provides comfort.

Health is better than illness. It maintains our being.

Contentment is better than depression.

To know something is much better than believing something.

To know is a personal fact. To believe is a personal wish.

And every word I write is a shady spot where I will never sit.

DOES THE PENIS SHRINK WITH AGE?

/ Ken Finton / 7 Comments

By Kenneth Harper Finton

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Man looking in his underwear

Does the penis shrink in size as it ages? The astounding answer is “yes, it does.” Nobody talks about it. Men fear it, women don’t really care, and young men have no idea what is coming (pun intended). Sexual dysfunction in men with age is no secret. Sometimes it seems that every other ad on TV tries to sell a pill for it. Newer comedy movies are not complete until the older male has a problem with his little blue pill that leads to hilarious consequences. The percentage of potent men falls from 60% to around 30% between the ages of 40 and 70.

Most men know little about their penis. It begins to change around age 30. The head gradually loses its purplish color that is created by healthy and youthful blood flow. The head becomes less sensitive and gradually shrinks in size and girth as a result of decreased testosterone and blood flow. By the time a man is 60 or 70 he loses around an inch or more in size.

“If a man’s erect penis is 6 inches long when he is in his 30s, it might be 5 or 5-and-a-half inches when he reaches his 60s or 70s,” Irwin Goldstein says. “As testosterone wanes, the penis gradually reverts to its prepubertal, mostly hairless, state.” Goldstein, MD, is director of sexual medicine at Alvarado Hospital in San Diego and editor-in-chief of The Journal of Sexual Medicine. So even men without a tendency for baldness should not be surprised that they also gradually lose pubic hair. It also turns gray as it thins. [If this fact is troublesome, one alternative would be to shave it off like  porno stars do and lengthen the apparent length of your penis as well.]

Age brings declines in semen volume and sperm quality. Also, the urine stream weakens as the bladder muscles become weaker and the prostate enlarges.

The beer belly adds to the apparent loss in size of the penis because “a large pre-pubic pad of fat makes the penile shaft look shorter,” says Ira Sharlip, MD, clinical professor of urology at the University of California, San Francisco.

“In some cases, abdominal fat all but buries the penis,” says Ronald Tamler, MD, Ph.D., co-director of the Men’s Health Program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. “One way I motivate my overweight patients is by telling them that they can appear to gain up to an inch in size simply by losing weight.”

The penis shrinks from the same process that causes atherosclerosis. It is the same disease that contributes to blockages inside the coronary arteries and is a leading cause of heart attack. Fatty plaque is deposited by the blood in the small arteries and vessels in the penis, impairing the flow of blood and making erections softer and harder to achieve.

USE IT OR LOSE IT 

ThinkstockPhotos-474440822

overripe banana

You need to have erections regularly to keep your penis in shape. “It has to be essentially exercised,” says Tobias Kohler, MD, assistant professor of urology at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.

The brain dreams and dreams help to set up an automatic penis maintenance function for exercising the penis. “Pulses from the brain cause erections during the dreaming phase of sleep called the REM phase.”

Whether by a remembered dream or not, the penis gets hard during that REM period of the sleep cycle. It doesn’t matter if you’re having a hot sex dream or an apocalyptic nightmare. Dreaming brings erections.

Some men such as those who’ve suffered trauma to the nerves involved or who have nerve or blood vessel damage caused by diabetes are physically unable to get erections.

Most men can get erections.

There is a lot of locker-room significance to the facts. You cannot assume that a man with a big, limp penis gets much bigger with an erection. The guy whose penis looks tiny might get a surprisingly big erection. Many women do not care about penis size, as enormous shafts can be quite painful. If a finger works for satisfaction, a smaller penis can also suffice as well. Technique is often more important than size. Half the total length of a penis is tucked away inside the body. It is invisible.

“It’s what he does with it and the rest of his body that matters,” says Lou Paget, a certified AASECT sex educator and author of “The Great Lover Playbook.”

SOURCES:

http://www.webmd.com/men/guide/life-cycle-of-a-penis

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/15/penis-problems-aging-_n_6480920.html

http://www.webmd.com/men/guide/8-things-you-did-not-know-about-your-penis

http://www.menshealth.com/health/your-penis-when-you-age

THE HUNZA PEOPLE OF NORTH PAKISTAN

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http://www.readgang.com/2016/03/they-never-get-sickthey-dont-know-about.html

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LEGEND HAS IT THAT THESE ARE THE PEOPLE OF SHANGRI-LA

Is living well past 100 years only a dream?  Not in Northern Pakistan.

They, like many in Northern Pakistan, claim to be descendants of the soldiers who came to the region with Alexander the Great‘s army in the 4th century BC.

Healthy living advocate J. I. Rodale wrote a book called The Healthy Hunzas in 1955 that asserted that the Hunzas, noted for their longevity and many centenarians, were long-lived because of their consumption of healthy organic foods such as dried apricots and almonds, as well as their getting plenty of fresh air and exercise.[21] He often mentioned them in his Prevention magazine as exemplary of the benefits of leading a healthy lifestyle.

Dr. John Clark stayed among the Hunza people for 20 months and in his book Hunza – Lost Kingdom of the Himalayas[22] writes: “I wish also to express my regrets to those travelers whose impressions have been contradicted by my experience. On my first trip through Hunza, I acquired almost all the misconceptions they did: The Healthy Hunzas, the Democratic Court, The Land Where There Are No Poor, and the rest—and only long-continued living in Hunza revealed the actual situations”. Regarding the misconception about Hunza people’s health, John Clark also writes that most of the patients had malaria, dysentery, worms, trachoma, and other things easily diagnosed and quickly treated; in his first two trips, he treated 5,684 patients.

Clark reports that the Hunza do not measure their age solely by the calendar––as he also said there were no calendars––but also by personal estimation of wisdom. This leads in turn to notions of typical lifespans of 120 or greater.

The October 1953 issue of National Geographic had an article on the Hunza River Valley that inspired Carl Barks’ story Tralla La.[23] Their standard of living is totally different from the others. Barks said,  “the healthy way of that kind of living should be an example to us.”

THE HUNZA LIFESTYLE

Hunza people are people who take a bath in cold water, and they can give birth to a baby at 65 years.

In summer, they eat only raw foods and in winter they use dry fruits, especially apricots, germinated seeds, and cheese from sheep.

”Hunger spring” is the name of the period when they are fasting. At that time, they do not eat anything, but they do drink clean water.

From 2 to 4 months they drink that water and consume the apricot seeds.

One of the Hunza people, known worldwide as Said Abdul Mobuda, totally confused the workers for immigration services when he pulled out his passport which stated that he has lived 160 years. They did not believe him until they checked that the man is really born 160 years ago and that in his village all the people have a long lifetime.

THEIR GENETIC LINE

A variety of Y-DNA haplogroups are seen among the Burusho. Most frequent among these are R1a1 and R2a, which probably originated in Central Asia during the Upper Paleolithic.[17][18] R2a, unlike its extremely rare parent R2, R1a1, and other clades of haplogroup R, is now virtually restricted to South Asia. Two other typically South Asian lineages, haplogroup H1 and haplogroup L3 (defined by SNP mutation M20) are also common among the Burusho.[19] [18]

Other Y-DNA haplogroups reaching considerable frequencies among the Burusho are haplogroup J2, associated with the spread of agriculture in, and from, the Neolithic Near East,[17][18] and haplogroup C3, of Siberian origin and possibly representing the patrilineage of Genghis Khan. Also present at lower frequency are haplogroups O3, an East Eurasian lineage, and Q, P, F, and G.[18] DNA research groups the male ancestry of the Hunza with speakers of Pamir languages and the Sinti Romani (Gypsies), due primarily to the M124 marker (defining Y-DNA haplogroup R2a), which is present at high frequency in all three populations.[8] However, they have also an East Asian genetic contribution, suggesting that at least some of their ancestry originates north of the Himalayas.[20]

NATURE’S FLIGHT PATHS

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bees flight path

Time lapse of bees in flight.

CAPTURING THE RHYTHM  OF BIRD AND INSECT FLIGHT

 Source:

Dennis Hlynsky is a professor at Rhode Island School of Design. He began filming birds in 2005 on a Flip video camera. What began as a hobby turned into a remarkable study in bird behavior. Hlynsky’s videos capture the raw rhythm of life. They are filled with graceful geometric patterns.

BLACK VULTURES

By using a unique process known as extruded time, or layering frame sequences atop one another until the darkest pixels become “tracers”, we are able to see the birds careening across the sky, leaving a discernible trail behind them like ice skates do on ice. Hlynsky uses a Lumix GH2 to capture footage of the birds in flight before turning that into time lapses that are several minutes longer. Once he’s uploaded the footage to his computer, he uses the magic of After Effects to stack the sequence of shots closer together and after hours of editing, the flight paths are finally unveiled. Source:

STARLINGS AT SUNSET

CROWS