eimi

"Just Smelling the Coffee May Wake Up Genes"

If you’re the type of person who perks up in the morning at just the smell of fresh-brewed coffee, you are not alone. There are some laboratory rats you should meet.

While countless studies have looked at what occurs when coffee is drunk, far fewer have examined the effects of sniffing the aroma, which contains many volatile compounds. So Han-Seok Seo of Seoul National University and colleagues exposed stressed-out rats that had been deprived of sleep to coffee bean aroma and then evaluated the effects by performing genetic and protein analyses on brain tissue. They compared the results with tests on other rats, including some that were sleep deprived but not exposed to coffee … they found that the expression levels of 13 selected genes were different between the stress-with-coffee rats and the stress-only animals. With 11 of the genes, levels were higher for the stress-with-coffee group; with the other two the levels were lower

The researchers say the study is a first step toward understanding the effects of coffee aroma. One intriguing question, they say, is whether it is better to smell coffee than to drink it when trying to stay awake all night.

[here via alaina]

feelin' bad

The case that things are basically pretty good? Unemployment is 5.5%, low by historical standards; income is rising slightly ahead of inflation; housing prices are down, but the typical house is still worth a third more than in 2000; 94% of Americans do not have threatened mortgages, and of those who do, most will keep their homes.

Inflation was up in 2007, but this stands out because the 16 previous years were close to inflation-free; living standards are the highest they have ever been, including living standards for the middle class and for the poor.

All forms of pollution other than greenhouse gases are in decline; cancer, heart disease and stroke incidence are declining; crime is in a long-term cycle of significant decline; education levels are at all-time highs.

Sure, gas prices are up, the dollar is weak and credit is tight – but these are complaints at the margin of a mainly healthy society.

Yet the mood of public discourse is four-alarm panic. A recent CBS News/New York Times poll showed “Americans’ views on the economy and the general state of the country have hit an all-time low,” with 81% saying the nation is on the “wrong track” – the worst-ever number for this barometer. Some 78% told pollsters the U.S. is worse off today than five years ago, the highest percentage to say this since the CBS News/New York Times survey began tracking the question in 1986. Watch any news channel, listen to any political debate, read any pundit. The consensus is we’re headed to hell in a handbasket.

Campaigning in Pennsylvania in April, Hillary Clinton said “We need to go back to the prosperity of the 1990s,” a comment that drew loud, enthusiastic applause. Converted to today’s dollars, per-capita income in the Keystone State is 23% higher than in 1990. People may think Pennsylvania was more prosperous in the past, but the state is better off today. The same can be said for most (needless to say, not all) parts of the country and most demographics. Most are, right now, the best-off they have ever been.

[Gregg Easterbrook via ayjay]

On Graduation and All The Rest of It

So here we are: you wondering what I’m going to say next, and me wondering what I can possibly say that you’ll remember as far as the bathroom, let alone next week or next month or on the day that you might actually need it. This whole enterprise of talking, when you consider it from that perspective — not what we can say, but what they will remember — seems so hopeless that I wonder why we bother at all.

And I think the truth is that when someone writes a letter, or a novel, or composes a speech, he is really talking to himself as much as to you, and you in turn are listening because you are hoping, beneath the well-turned phrase and the dramatic pause, that he will mutter something at himself that is a surprise to the both of you.

In that spirit, I’ll start with something that should be no surprise, and see if I can’t creep up sideways to some kind of truth, which is the only way, I think, we can ever let ourselves see the truths we are probably most in need of seeing.

And that something is this: each of us is going to die…

We know we are going to die, but we are afraid to look it full in the face. At this point you can be forgiven for thinking that I am going to give you an insipid little piece of advice, like: “Live as if there is no tomorrow.”

I want you to slap me if I ever start talking like that. In this case the advice is particularly bad, I think, because the problem isn’t that we live like there is an endless supply of tomorrows. Yes, we do tend to live like there are plenty of tomorrows, but the problem with not contemplating our mortality is that we end up making our tomorrows stingy, and small. We get so wedded to life, so fearful that something might disturb it, that we rob ourselves — and the people we love, and the people who need us — of living.

[Here]

Pierre

[…] Every sphere of work was, in his eyes, bound up with evil and deceit. Whatever he tried to be, whatever he undertook—evil and falsehood repulsed him and barred him from all paths of activity. And yet he had to live, he had to keep busy. It was too frightening to be under the burden of all the insoluble questions of life, and he gave himself to the first amusements that came along, only so as to forget them. He frequented every possible society, drank heavily, bought paintings, built, but, above all, he read.
[…]
     Sometimes Pierre remembered stories he had heard about how soldiers at war, taking cover under enemy fire, when there is nothing to do, try to find some occupation for themselves so as to endure the danger more easily. And to Pierre all people seemed to be such soldiers, saving themselves from life: some with ambition, some with cards, some with drafting laws, some with women, some with playthings, some with horses, some with politics, some with hunting, some with wine, some with affairs of state. “Nothing is either trivial or important, it’s all the same; only save yourself from it as best you can!” thought Pierre. “Only not to see it, that dreadful it!”

Tolstoy, War and Peace, Volume Two, Part Five, I

The illusions of television (no. 5 & 6).

And then (5) it’s ultimately of course not even actors we’re espying, not even people: it’s EM-propelled analog waves and ion streams and rear-screen chemical reactions throwing off phosphenes in grids of dots not much more lifelike than Seurat’s own Impressionist commentaries on perceptual illusion. Good Lord and (6) the dots are coming out of our furniture, all we’re really spying on is our own furniture, and our very own chairs and lamps and bookspines sit visible but unseen at our gaze’s frame as we contempate “Korea” or are taken “live to Jerusalem” or regard the plusher chairs and classier bookspines of the Huxtable “home” as illusory cues that this is some domestic interior whose membrane we have (slyly, unnoticed) violated.

David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U. S. Fiction

(via nsomn)

Are you not ashamed?

… Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honor, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?
     And if any of you disputes this and professes to care about these things, I shall not at once let him go or leave him. No, I shall question him and examine him and test him; and if it appears that in spite of his profession he has made no real progress toward goodness, I shall reprove him for neglecting what is of supreme importance, and giving his attention to trivialities. I shall do this to everyone that I meet, young or old, foreigner or fellow citizen, but especially to you, my fellow citizens, inasmuch as you are closer to me in kinship. This, I do assure you, is what my God commands, and it is my belief that no greater good has ever befallen you in this city than my service to my God. For I spend all my time going about trying to persuade you, young and old, to make your first and chief concern not for your bodies nor for your possessions, but for the highest welfare of your souls, proclaiming as I go, Wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing, both to the individual and to the state.

Plato, Socrates’ Defense (Apology) in Plato: Collected Dialogues, Bollington Series LXXI, 1963, reprinted 2005, 16.

Anatole

When an insecure man is silent at first acquaintance and shows an awareness of the impropriety of this silence and a wish to find something to say, it comes out badly; but Anatole was silent, swung his leg, and cheerfully observed the princess’s hairstyle. It was clear that he could calmly remain silent like that for a very long time. “If anyone feels awkward because of this silence, speak up, but I don’t care to,” his look seemed to say. Besides that, in Anatole’s behavior with women there was a manner which more than any other awakens women’s curiosity, fear, and even love—a manner of contemptuous awareness of his own superiority. As if he were saying to them with his look: “I know you, I know, but why should I bother with you? And you’d be glad if I did!” Perhaps he did not think that when he met women (and it is probable that he did not, because he generally thought little), but such was his look and manner.

Tolstoy, War and Peace, Volume One, Part Three, IV

(Maybe awkwardness isn’t such a bad thing in the end.) 

...it only seems rational...

Questions connected with the existence of God may be the most important that we can ask and try to answer. If God exists, then it is of the utmost importance that we come to know the fact; and it is also important to learn as much as we can about God and God’s plan. Implications follow that affect our understanding of the world and ourselves. If God exists, the world is not accidental, a product of mere chance and necessity, but a home that has been designed for rational and sentient beings, a place of personal purposefulness. We are not alone in our struggle for justice but are working together with one whose plan is to redeem the world from evil. Most importantly, if God exists then there is someone to whom we are ultimately responsive and to whom we owe our absolute devotion and worship. Other implications follow for our self-understanding, the way we ought to live our lives, and our prospects for continued life after death. On the other hand, it may be that a supreme, benevolent being does not exist. If there is no God, this too will affect our lives. We will have to look elsewhere for meaning and purpose; we will be forced to reconsider the grounds of what we take to be our moral obligations; we will enjoy or come to despair in the thought that we are entirely free from the obligation to live in devotion and submission to a cosmic authority figure. Whether there is a God or not will thus make a significant difference in the way we view the universe and in the way we live. And so it seems only rational to do everything we can to find out the truth of the matter.

—Louis P. Pojman & Micheal Rea, Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, 2008, xv. 

The arts, though, are important.

Christians might think that the confusions in the art world are no concern to them, simply another example of the vanity of this world. The arts, though, are important. We cannot escape them. They permeate our lives and our culture. The decor of our surroundings; the music we listen to; the entertainment we enjoy in books, television, and films are all manifestations of the arts. They influence us and our children whether we are aware of it or not. For good or for evil, the ideas, the concerns, and the imagination of the age are expressed and communicated throughout the culture by the arts. The question is not whether we will live with the arts; the question is whether we will live with good art or bad art.

Gene Veith, State of the Arts: From Bezalel to Maplethorpe, 1991, xvi.