OK, as you know I have been very busy having field trips in the last few days. The thing is tha I went to an ancient quarry where we dug up a mammoth´s skull several years ago. Colleagues from the University of Kansas were here. We are trying to locate a geological horizon with evidence of the Dyer´s Event, a probable double cometary impact from about 13,000 years ago that might have been the beginning of the end of the Clovis Culture and provoked several species extinctions, includingmembers of the megafauna living then. We had to do some detailed stratigraphy and take many samples. A strong magnet was applied to one suspicious horizon and it resulted awfully rich in iron, so it looks promising. We will be doing some preliminary analysis in the next few days. If results are positive it will be the first mexican site to show evidence of such Event and it will be added to the more than 50 sites where this evidence has been located all over North America. Exciting uh? Here´s a good abstract and you´ll find links to the pages of the proponents at the bottom of it.
Love to all, Luis.
ww.madmenyourself.com
As I said in my note, I will be in a working trip starting this afternoon and I hope I will be back home tomorrow night. Anyway, I wanted to wish a HAPPY HALLOWEEN to all of my friends who celebrate!
Loving bites, Luis. V----V
seems to feel as comfortable with the skates as without them,
Talk about a NATURAL! :o)
Enjoy!
Love,
Luis.
"The Doggie In The Window" by Pattie Page was the # 1 song on Billboard the day I was born, March 18, 1953!
Wanna try yours?
Love, L. :o)
...thanks Kurt!
DIA DE LA INDEPENDENCIA EN MEXICO!
VIVA!
As a small celebration, I am offering you
a version of the very sensual piece of
music "Danzon No. 2", composed by
Arturo Marquez, a guy from my own town.
I hope you all will enjoy it!
Love to all, Luis. :o)
Auditory (yellow)
and limbic (blue)
systems of the
brain.
Did somebody ask for a juicy blog? OK, here we go!
Her name is Maria Emilia Beyer Ruiz. She is intelligent. She is a professional. She is brilliant. She's clear. She is FUN. She was the great lecturer I could appreciate the other day at a conference entitled La Quimica del Amor/The Chemistry of Love. As the title suggest, the lecture dealt with the most recent discoveries of brain biochemical functioning and that emotion we call "love". Here's an abstract of the lecture that lasted about an hour. Paraphrasing is inevitable but I have done the best effort about doing a rigurous presentaton of the ideas she exposed: First, she established that it was final: Love, as an emotion, is not in the heart but in the brain, and in a particular zone, the so-called Limbic System. So, from now on, we shouldn't say "You broke my Heart", but "you broke my Limbic System",! From the start, she made clear we should distinguish between Being in Love and Loving another person. That was both, surprising and fun. Falling in Love/Being in Love: to fall in Love with a person seems almost literal, yes, it's like a Free Fall! Of course, our sensors are deeply involved at the beginning. We are primarily visual primates, so the image of our love subject is very important, but not only that, our sense of smell, and the capacity of our nasal membranes to detect human pheromones, our specific biochemical signals to attract potential mates, are very important too; this is the process that seems to be involved when you feel the chemestry towards a person that doesn't seem the type you are usally attracted to. Enter dopamine. Yup, we begin to secrete these special neurotransmitter in unusually high doses so we literally become doped about these other person! We become a physical and emotional mess. We feel the very well-known butterflies in the stomach, we lose our sleep, we don't eat or eat too much, e.g. we might be incappable to eat our usually favorite dishes, or, if we don't have this person at hand, a triple Banana Split might be a suitable temporal substitute...! We laugh and we cry for the most atypical resons... kilometers of syrupy pseudopoetry are written... just the sight of this person accelerates our heartbeats... oh well...! Maria Emilia talked also about the experiments and how, thanks to the high number of individuals that entered the studies, it was possible to even obtain a media of the duration of these state: 14 months. However, she ponted out. this is a media, there were individuals who lasted 9 months or attained full 2 years! Many initiated a relationship during these state, many would receive a negative and would get the disastrous pain of a Broken Limbic System, or become obsessed. Some excepional cases would become even certainly patholgical. However, In the end, to maintain this state is very expensive energetically, so the body decides to end it. Dopamine secretion begins to slow down so these dream person begins to be no such a dream. The defects we so overlooked all along, jump before our eyes, and their blinding beauty starts not to be that blinding anymore. Symptoms can be certainly funny: e.g. this person calls at 03:00 AM. When we were in love we might have responded with a melodic "oh baby, how are you? No, no problem about the hour! I was just dreaming about you...!", but now that dopamine is not there in such excess we might just respond with a dry "Hey, i'ts 03:00 AM! What's wrong with you? Are you drunk?" It's at this point, said Maria Emilia, that a lot of people would lose interest in the other person to such and extent that they would end breaking up the relationship. Some, having become addicted to the doped-in-love state would jump from one state of being in love to other for a long time, or even for a lifetime. However, some, she pointed out, particularly the most psychologically mature ones -not a matter of age, she said- would take the relationship to another phase: a loving relationship. In this state, the neurotransmitters like dopamine are no longer in high levels but brain biochemestry is not the same anymore, a new level of equilibrium has been reached and the two people might simply like to spend time in the presence of each other and they would stimulate the secretion of some other biomolecules like the endorphins -the pleasure neurotransmitters in the brain- now and then. This state lacks the state of exaltation of the previous one but can keep being passionate; besides, because it is not as energetically expensive, it has the potential to last much longer, even a lifetime. Well, this is the interesting lecture Emilia gave us on a Friday more than a week ago in a nutshell, and that I thought about sharing with you all. Besides, there were some funny or intersting questions from the public. The majority were people in the field of sciences there, since the event was a session of the "Cafe Cientifico" we have around here. I will remember some good Q&A, they are also obviously paraphrased:. A funny one was asked by a guy: "I am about to take some vacations and I want it to be some pleasant ones. Is there a pill or an injection of dopamines or endorphnes for that?" (everyone laughed!) The response of Maria Emilia was a sound NO. However, "...a nice level of endorphines can be reached with physical excercise" - she said-. So her advice to this guy was to visit the gym before taking his vacation. Since he was obviously overweight he didn't like it that much! Another question was by a woman, a divorced, mature one, known to be a bit passional: "Can we live a higher-intensity loving experience even at an older age?" "Could be," - said Maria Emilia-"but in general it is much more intense in our youth, when our brains are functioning at full speed, we are full of enegry, and the social and cultural conditionings are not getting in the way." Then there were obviously some questions about fidelity. "There's still not a consensus," -said Maria Emilia- "in our culture the stereotypes -faithful female, infidel male- make it difficult to grasp a rigorous interpretation of the available data. That this stereotype have no scientific veracity is obvious since female and male stereotypes have greately varied on these and many other aspects in space and time, from culture to culture.". And then came the inevitable question: "Is homosexual love equal to heterosexual love?" "They are exactly the same" -said Maria Emilia- "they are indistinguishable".
Love you all,
Luis.
Your hair? curly
Your mother? clever
Your father? intelligent
Your favorite thing? guitar
Your dream last night? flying
Your favorite drink? coffee
Your dream/goal? wisdom
The room you are in? studio
Your fear? irrationality
Where do you want to be in 6 years? Canada
Muffins? bran
One of your wish list items? beachouse
Where you grew up? Hermosillo
What are you wearing? sandals
The last thing you did? eat
Your TV? big
Your pets? collective
Your computer? good
Your life? lonely
Your mood? serene
Missing someone? always
Your car? none
Favorite store? Videostore
Your summer? traveltime
Your favorite color? blue
When is the last time you laughed? today
Last time you cried? movies
Where is your cell phone? away
A - Age: 55
B - Bed size: Matrimonial.
C - Chore you hate: Doing the dishes.
D - Dad's name: Luis Ignacio Alberto.
E - Essential start your day item: Coffee
F - Favorite actor(s): Daniel Day Lewis.
G - Gold or Silver: Bronze.
H - Height: 6' 3"
I - Instruments you play(ed): Guitar, Harmonica, Traverse Flute, Cabaza.
J - Job title: Maestro, Profesor, Biologo, Listen you Jerk, it depends.
K - Kid(s): Broiled.
L - Living arrangements: Me, alone.
M - Mom's name: Luz Carmen.
N - Nicknames: Lou, NNP.
O - Overnight hospital stay other than birth: Prostate reduction surgery.
P - Pet Peeves: People who can't pu themselves in the shoes of other people.
Q - Quotes you like: "The Love you take, it's equal to the Love you make."
R - Right or left handed: Right.
S - Siblings: A brother and a sister, both younger than me.
T - Time you wake up: Usually around 6:00 AM.
U- Eat breakfast daily: I seldom do, usually I just have my coffee until I become human again.
V - Vegetable(s) you dislike: Love all veggies.
W - Ways you run late: Citing me to an ADMINISTRATIVE meeting, ugh.
X - X-rays: Head (ear problem).
Y - Yummy food you make: Calabacitas en Caldo de Queso, Arroz a la Pimienta, I am a natural on seasoning.
Z- Zodiac: Pisces.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY JEFFREY!
Yes you are LOVED
NLL,
You truly
ARE!
:o)
As some of you know, I attended the lecture on Cosmology by Nobel Prize laureated Dr. George Smoot this past Tuesday 13 in San Jose del Cabo. Here's a brief account on that experience that I hope you will like. Dr. Smoot happened to be in SJC, a pretty town just 15 min from Cabo San Lucas, because of a symposium on Cosmology taking place in this last location. It was a very special scientific meeting , which was very clear if you attend at the title:"Cosmology on the Beach" / "Cosmologia en La Playa". Our University was an important party at organizing the symposium so I had the fortune to join Dr. Smoot in his travel to the site of the symposium -the city theatre- and had the opportunity to have a nice chat with him. I did learn that he has a shared-time house in San Jose del Cabo, which in turn was in part why the meeting has been thought to be repeated here from now on every January, the time he comes to visit every year. He asked me for my e-mail so I will be sending him the photos I took during his lecture and at the Press Conference that took place half and hour before the lecture.
The lecture was great. He started with a very brief account of the history of the first truly scientific ideas about the Origin of the Universe at the time of the Theory of Relativity onset, very early in the XX century.
He then continued to talk about all the data that led to the birth of the Big Bang theory and how the cosmic background radiation -a prediction of the theory- was found by the early radioastronomers. Problem was that the energy was uniform as measured by the instrument available at the time.
He then proceeded to describe how instead of felt discouraged, cosmologists engaged in several lines of work at different levels: the design of better instruments; the building of these better, more sensitive instruments an, finally, the placement of these instruments, starting from the floor, then airplanes, then meteorological baloons, and finally space satellites like COBE.
Then he described how thrilled they were when they obtained the first image, -obtained by the highly refined, high-resolution instruments so hardly obtained- of the cosmic non-uniform background radiation -deemed the most important image obtained in the past millenium.
He finally described how then cosmologists underwent on modelling all the different stages of he Universe since the Big Bang -now highly substantiated=, and the Universe present structure.
Several of my students attended the lecture and I am very grateful that Dr. Smoo made very clear that good science is made out of compromise, dedication, hard work, patience and a lot of creativity.
The graphics he used were truly amazing, particularly the movies that show the 3D models of the universe structure at the supra-galaxy level. I am posting some photos of the lecture (and the movies later) I got for you to see.
Love to all,
Luis.
Love to all, Luis.
Today, November 21, we celebrate Rene Magritte's Birthday! It is one of my favorite surrealist artists and, as a matter of fact, it is considered by many as one of the Godfathers of the style. Their paintings always amazed me and intrigued me beyond the mere aesthetic experience. Enjoy!
Love to all, Luis.
for L's friends & their friends |
OK G&G, for my Egolibrary, I will be ¨starring¨ in David Suzuki "The Nature of Things" tonight on CBC Canada on a documantary called "The Lost People of Baja", here´s a link, SEE PHOTO 16:
Love to all,
Luis.
I CONGRATULATIONS to all my
dear American Friends here!!!!
dear American Friends here!!!!
You have a
BRAND NEW PRESIDENT!!!!!
My humble BEST wishes for the future AMERICA!
Luis H.
- Mood:
good
Profile
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
otterlover01- otterlover01
Syndicate
