why we get hernias, hiccups, and hemorrhoids

This article, adapted from the book Your Inner Fish and posted on The University of Chicago’s web site, explains the evolutionary origins of varicose veins, hemorrhoids, hiccups, snoring, and hernias. They’re symptoms of some inconvenient consequences of the structures and processes we’ve inherited from our evolutionary ancestors.

What really captured my interest is that we can blame fish and tadpoles for hiccups.

Fish out of water

Bishop Morlino: no emergency contraception for rape victims

I commented on this post on a Catholic blog [via Dane101]. Over the last week it had become a lively discussion until today when the priests took their ball and went home.

For my assertion that a rape-induced pregnancy should be a woman’s prerogative to abort, especially at a stage of development where a zygote is months away from the capacity to even feel pain, I was accused of “promoting death” as a “kill-all-the-babies-[relativist].” This wasn’t surprising, but I would have preferred that they stuck to attacking my argument instead of attacking me personally.

Once he started making it about me rather than my argument, I began asking Fr Renzo di Lorenzo: if God is required for moral behavior, then in the absence of God, would you rape, maim, and kill? Again and again he ignored it, preferring instead to speak in parables and insist that I don’t / won’t / can’t see. By the time the thread was closed he had created a caricature of me which was in equal measure entertaining and bizarre.

None of these 7 things are true.

These seven myths have worked their way into “common knowledge,” but none of them are supported by evidence:

• People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day.
• We use only 10% of our brains.
• Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death.
• Shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, darker, or coarser.
• Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight.
• Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy.
• Mobile phones create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals.

my worth has been quantified

278 WATTS Body Battery Calculator – Find Out How Much Electricity Your Body is Producing

Your Body is Producing 278 Watts!

This is 39% MORE wattage than the average person

• You could light up 3 light bulbs
• You could power 70 iPods
• You could power 1 Xbox 360
• 4 of you would be needed to keep a refrigerator running

I’m getting skinny-guy-fat.

When I stepped on the scale this Monday, I was at 166 lbs and 22.4% body fat. Because it uses biolelectric impedance, the scale’s body fat assessment probably isn’t accurate, but I’m using it only for relative comparisons over time.

Ever since I started the pushup program in May I’ve been taking these measurements once per week. Today I finally put them into a spreadsheet and confirmed what my growing “spare tire” had suggested: my lean (muscle) mass has stayed the same, and over the last 2 months I’ve put on 3 or 4 pounds — all of it fat.

I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve gone months without practicing kung fu, and that’s obviously what had been keeping my body composition in check. I didn’t change my diet and I dropped the exercise, so I’ve just been adding blubber to my gut since then.

I remember when I first got that scale in 2004, when I was going gung-ho with kung fu before any of the theatre-induced hiatuses. I weighed about 150 and was at about 16% body fat. Since then I’ve put on about 3 pounds of muscle and about 12 pounds of fat. Sheesh.

Since I’m pretty sure I’ll be doing theatre on a regular basis, I need to find a way to keep up my fitness during the 2-month stretches when I don’t have time for kung fu. This slow transition into becoming a tub of goo isn’t going to cut it.

I’m going to continue on with bodyweight exercises at home, which seem to be the only thing to which I can commit. Along with the pushups I’ve been doing bilateral (2-legged) free-standing bodyweight squats at the same count, but I can tell from the relative effort of each exericse that the squats aren’t doing much for me. I’m going to give one-legged squats — “pistols” — a try in order to build some functional strength and hopefully turn my body composition around a bit.

Just shut up and get down on the floor.

It’s not going to matter if I’m sore, if I’m tired, if I’m already late for work. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be doing pushups every morning before I leave the house.

I’m starting with 3.

Every week I’m going to increase that number by one. Every pushup is going to be done slowly, deliberately, with perfect form and no cheating. That should keep me from injuring my shoulders. I’m starting with 3 because I just now determined that that’s the number of perfect-form pushups I can do without feeling like I’m straining. Granted, this is starting pretty small, but I’m pretty weak in the upper body, and I always have been, and I’m tired of it.

Adding one rep a week seems to me to be an extremely gradual progression that should allow my body plenty of opportunities to lay down the structure to support the increasing workload. With luck, I won’t really notice the added rep and I’ll always stay at that level of effort without having to strain. It’s also an unstoppable progression that will have me doing more than 50 pushups per morning in a year. By the time the number of reps starts has reached a point where it’s inconvenient because of the time it takes, I’ll imagine I’ll have started replacing a few dozen regular pushups with one one-arm pushup.

Maybe things will get easier with time and I won’t want to wait a week before adding a rep anymore. That would be great. For now I’ll just stick with something that seems so easy, and therefore makes me think of any excuse to avoid it as a pathetic cop-out, that I have to stick to it, for my own pride’s sake. And this is a public announcement of it to anyone who reads this blog — not that anyone else does, or should, care about it. Yes, both of you are now aware of my “You’re Pathetic If You Don’t Do Your Pushups Today, Jordan” plan, a.k.a. YPIYDDYPT: “yippie-dipped”…hey, I kind of like that.

Enthusiasm comes with a price yet again.

This post has been moved to the Move Aware blog.

why I’m going to back to eating vegetarian

You can ignore it, but it doesn’t change the fact that all of this happens on a massive scale. It’s happening as you read this.

on happiness

Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk who was found to be “The World’s Happiest Man” by our own UW-Madison Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, had this to say in Robert Chalmer’s interview for The Independent:

…ultimately, it’s how your mind relates to the world that determines whether you’re miserable or not. You have to ask yourself: is my happiness dependent on other people?“

This isn’t a new idea, but it’s as easy to forget as it is to grasp. It helps me to be reminded of it every now and then.

oof

I had the Capitol Chophouse’ grilled salmon for lunch today, and shortly thereafter my afternoon of GI discomfort began. I really hope this doesn’t develop into anything further.