Hunger and lack of sleep

Due to some recent changes in my life, I am working more than usual, which isn't that much! I notice that in sleeping less, I've been eating more. Sometimes I wonder if what I read / learn also affect how I am.

There's a growing corpus of literature that shows that appetite inducing hormone, ghrelin, is not only fluctuating throughout a 24h period, but it also increased due to lack of sleep. This was reported awhile back and my recent lack of sleep has also increased my appetite. Is this real or am I buying into the hype?

Another line of evidence that shows the importance of ghrelin is in patients who have undergone Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery. Not only do these patients have decrease ghrelin, but they also have increased release of GLP-1. Although not a direct antagonist to ghrelin, GLP-1 increases insulin secretion and thus, lowering blood sugar while suppressing appetite. Intriguing eh?!

Is she the one?

One comment in response to this reminds me of a "natural" who was very good with women. He was driven to connect and have sex with girls, all because he couldn't be alone. Many of these psychopaths become very good hustlers, they are driven to interact with people because of their personality flaws. Look up antisocial personality disorders if you are interested.

Unfortunately, those in the community have the same drive to connect with people but they also have this deep seated mistrust of people, a very strong characteristic of those who have schizotypal personality disorder. From my interactions with them and the existence of this pickup subculture, their inability to relate with people and mistrust lead them to formulate these bizarre, eccentric ideas, and odd beliefs about society. They are not entirely delusional, but certainly have interfered with their social lives. This, I believe, is why they are so driven to find ways "get" people, be that sex, money, and/or fame. Of course, the by-product of their disorder is the creation and application of routines, NLP patterns, innergame mantras, and whatever else that fuel their deep desire to get back at people.

The most common one being their desire to become dating coaches. To scam money from others by cannibalizing off their "friends." If they have any skill at all, then they would try to get sex from girls. This can range from girls who are naive because of their young age to their background. I don't need to name a particular pickup company, their leader is "dating" this FOBy J-girl. I even heard suggestions from guys who want to become ESL teachers just so they can get foreign girls because they can't get native-born girls. If you are still in the community, look around for some of these losers. Are they any better or worst than hooking up with drunk girls? I don't know, that's up to our individual standards and ethics.

So next time you hook up with a girl... are you doing both of you and her a favor, or just yourself? What do you have to hide? What are your motivations?

A generation gap

What's the deal with texting? Younger girls are so into texting and IM'ing, whereas girls a few years older, i.e. my age, don't care much for texting and we prefer to talk on the phone. Even worst is that some of the younger ones want my myspace/facebook profile. Whatever happened to just talking and getting to know people?! I spend so much of my time in front of the computer, but I don't ever see a good reason to have a myspace and/or facebook profile; okay, I did, just to look at pictures, but now that myspace AND facebook have implemented privacy settings for pictures, I just don't care enough to login to check. What's the point?!

Another is the ipod/iphone craze, as a friend told me, people are having iGasm over silly gadgets that serve no purpose other than more entertainment. How about reading a book? I was telling my friends in otolaryngology must love these devices (music, bluetooth headset,...), think of future patients with hearing loss. It's like my friends in medicine have job security due to McDonald's; myself included. So keep texting, listening to your ipods, eating crappy food. I will have iGasm as I laugh my way to the bank.

S/NSRI: emotional lobotomy

Prozac: Why feel when you can just function? (Thanks Chemist!) Someone just forwarded me an article that 48% of American population is on antidepressants now. As Chemist suggested, the other 52% probably can't afford it. I would say that taking antidepressant for unhappiness is akin to dosing opioid for pain. The pain/happiness is still there, you just don't care. Is this how we want to live?

Sure, life has its ups and downs, rather than getting at the core of how we go about managing and dealing with stressors in our lives. We have turned our backs and started to numb ourselves, essentially ablating our emotion centers/circuitries. I'm sure many of these patients are depressed, is our policy of dispensing medications whenever they feel sadness the only solution? Emotions are not necessarily good or bad. Love and loss, for example, gives the contrast, the wide range of emotions that we need to experience in order to appreciate each other. By dampening our emotional response, what kind of world will we create?

The best classical works, from literature, music, paintings to sculptures, were created by those who went through those emotional ups and downs. Most if not all of those artists were manic depressives. Their ability to express their emotions, and to lead us through their emotional roller coaster would never exist today. Instead, we just get to nod our collective heads and go thru the same spastic dance moves to the drum beats of doldrums, that we call hip hops, pop country, and whatever else that P.Diddy decides we should listen.

The silver lining though, I suspect is that most people don't and won't know what feeling love is about... to go through the longing, obsessive phase, the insatiable emotional craving, and peaceful contentment. Without these emotional travails, people are much more easily deceived, can definitely caught up in the moment, wrapped up in the temporary emotional escape, and thus, pickup techniques will be so much more effective. Hence, the secret of connecting with women is through emotions, add on the time distortion of multiple venue changes, and in the whirlwind of kino escalation combined with our intrinsic desire for companion to enter into the dark night. Thank you Prozac, Celexa, Lexapro,... who needs roofies?!

Trichotillomania interruptus v. forme fruste

Awhile back I blogged a bit about cell death as the body's way of policing itself, to protect itself, sacrificing one or a few cells to isolate damage to the rest of the body. Those are pathological forms of cell death, mostly in response to injuries. There are also physiological forms of cell death; examples include cells between digits dying so that we don't born with web hands, like ducks, or later in life, where hair follicles degenerate under the influence of testosterones, commit quiet suicide, little bits, dying slowly.

The morphological hallmark of physiological cell death is the quiet disappearance of these cells without triggering inflammation; which I will blog about in the future (I know, don't get too excited). There are also frustrated forms of physiological cell death. By that, I mean the process is interrupted. The best example would be skin cells. Technically, they have committed suicide, yet the cell soma is still here, serving as a barrier to prevent the hostile environment outside from invading the sterile environment inside. Another would be red blood cells, they are so specialized, so well trained, in their mission in life, in sustaining life, that they don't even have the heart and soul of a cell, the nucleus. In the case of keratinocytes (skin cells), they are dead; but that's not the case with red blood cells, they don't die until they are gobbled up by other cells in the liver. Yeah, don't get me started on how you swallow, eat, and digest your own cells and proteins on a daily basis. So all these cells are what we called terminally differentiated. They don't become anything else, their fates have been determined. At an earlier point in their lives, they could have the potential to become anything, as we are currently trying to coax stem cells to do, but these cells at this stage, however, are fated to serve a limited set of functions then die. They have, in essence, petered out.

Yes, I know I'm anthropomorphosizing the process. This is how we all relate to the world, using what we know in order to acquire, incorporate, and organize information. One can only imagine the frustration if a normal process is disrupted, or in this case, interrupted. How does this frustration manifests itself? In the case of keratinocytes, they just slough off and become the dust in our house, as waste. In the case of erythrocytes (red blood cells), their content, such as hemoglobin, is recycled.

The distinction of whether something is useful or not is difficult. It's almost as bad as trying to figure out the cause and effect. For example, if you see someone who is bald, does s/he have trichotillomania (and possibly trichophagia, a "zebra") or just another case of alopecia areata (the horse)? Sure, there are clinical signs that we can look for, but to a lay person, who is reading online medical books without training, how would that person figure out without clinical experience? It's almost like trying to figure out what I am saying in my blog without knowing who I really am and what I'm really saying. What inspired all this? Subcommunication.

Something I leave you with, you know the expression about people who are frustrated, they pull their hairs out. What happens to those who are already bald? Where do they find an outlet for their frustration?

A new hope

Now that we can grow hairs out of stem cells... The next step is to grow balls for some hairy balls!

Baby don't hurt me...

Leaving ethical and philosophical argument aside, for the greater good of the body/person, each cell within us is capable of committing suicide. There's an elaborate system of cellular machinery within each and every cell that will quietly kill the cell, if sensors of that cell-death machinery are triggered. The rationalization is that if something bad happens to or within that cell, it would rather die than to mutate or act in ways that would hurt the rest of the body.

Failure of such system can be one potential cause of cancer. For example, DNA modified by radiation that mutated the gene to either nonfunctional form (in the case of an anti-tumorigenic gene) or to an overactive form (gain of function in a proto-oncogene), that cell undergoing multiple mutations will lead to a "cancerous" state. Usually, self-check or by immune cell surveillance would detect this change and the cell is either self-induced to die (by apoptosis) or to be killed by immune cells. This way, the irradiation damage is limited, contained within that one dead cell and not be spread, or to affect other nearby cells.

In fact, most cells in the body are "programmed" to die by default without the proper growth factors and other environmental factors. This self-induced death is quiet in the sense that nearby cells or local immune cells will clear the debris without causing inflammation; i.e., the death is quiet but not silent. The same molecular machinery within cells that are used to die, as it turns out, I discover that they can be used for functions other than cell death. There's a growing corpus of literature that shows these cell death enzymes are used for both physiologic and pathologic functions without leading to cell death.

The importance of this discovery can be categorized at multiple levels. At the epistemological level, there is a distinct connection between form and function. Cell lives and dies by changing its form. At the scientific level, this provides a novel insight into mechanisms of cellular differentation, fusion, fission, chemotaxis, apoptosis, proliferation and growth. At the medical level, we can deduce how the body regulates both normal (physiologic) and in response to disease/injury/harm (pathologic) activities using the same set of enzymes. This would provide a list of candidate targets for drug development.

Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. — JFK

We probably heard/read different variations of that same quote by JFK. I submit my own: The winner has a thousand proud parents, and all losers are just lonely orphans. When I read reports (for both work & fun), I’m rather skeptical because everyone is craving to be that winner, who wants to be a lonely orphan? Almost everyone is guilty of only publishing their best results (at best), however, many are also guilty of falsifying their works in general.

Here I am, working, doing my usual readings and in my mailbox is a confidential email about our colleague whose dissertation work has been discovered (by journalists and experts will verify) to be false, and not only that, she also published the same “result” for multiple works by simple manipulations of images. I’m sure there are many people out there falsifying their works, but at least be smart enough to make multiple falsifications instead of repeating the same fake data! Are they that stupid and/or lazy?!This brings me to a recent discussion with a dear friend. We have been re-reading some FR’s by a self-proclaimed “Jedi knight” of PUA. The conversation flow in his FR is simply poetic. We all have talked with our share of women; yes, we are a bit awkward, and I’m sure we are not that smooth, even then, we have never encountered girls so compliant or eager. Of course, these same FR/LR’s are posted in multiple seduction boards (no, they were not peer-reviewed), and they also serve as advertisements.

If they are fake, how can we tell? Other than by our intuition, and thus, what about the false hopes they give to their readers? When these “reports” are just fantasies of someone trying to seduce these needy, socially inept, awkward dudes into giving up their hard-earned cash. A few of us have started our new seduction forum, we still haven’t formulate and agree on policies for dealing with people posting ads, and even more importantly, how do we review reports? Do we allow only reports of failures? Should we focus our attention on dissecting only reports of successes? At the very least, how do we flag reports to warn ea other? You are welcome to post your suggestions here in comments or in General Discussion.

Cracking open the blackbox

This past St. Patties’ day was probably the best one I’ve had as someone who is becoming more social. Although I have much to learn, I wonder if I am making progress at the right direction and at the right pace. Throughout the night at only one venue, I opened around 20-some sets. I would say almost every set opened and had I plowed, I would have progressed in my game.

There was a long drawn out discussion on naturals vs. us. The debate got quite personal at times. Hopefully someone will recount here in Seattle lair and describe what he saw. I agree that naturals don’t really run our version of the game. I would even contend that the game we run isn’t natural; not because the game isn’t natural, as it was built from the ground up based on what many deconstructed of their observations of naturals, published peer-reviewed works in evolutionary psycho-biology, and their in-field experience. Our “game” isn’t natural is the result of our incongruence; rather than blaming the game or the community as I have described before about other “gurus”, I should bear the responsibility of practicing and improving my game.

The next part was more difficult so I will start with an analogy. Medicine, as it was practiced in the Roman empire, was horrendous. Their physicians harmed more than they helped their patients. Then Galen came along and used his opportunity of treating wounded gladiators to understand human anatomy. So I do see a value in observing naturals in field; however, until we use the scientific process of deconstructing their behaviors and interactions, how do we model someone without even being able to describe his/her looks, presentation, behaviors,…?! Or in the case of Galen, he can’t start treating his men until he can describe the basic anatomy.

Perhaps my professional training automatically kicks in when I encounter a difficult problem, like the blackbox of how naturals doing PU. The first step is to collect data, that means making observations, of not just one interaction, but many of multiple naturals. Second, we deconstruct their interactions to similarities and differences, and formulate a hypothesis that consists of a series of simple yes-no questions that we go out in-field and test. Finally, we reconstruct a model that we can use to apply in future to see if we get the same result. Yes, the process is tedious and unless we are meticulous in this process, we would never “get” naturals.

We spent nearly 2 hours arguing about the merit of the community and trying to find ways to reject commonly held beliefs within the community. Sure, I can always find a few anecdotes that go against the community teachings. This tantamounts to finding a zebra among a herd of horses. Sure, there are always exception to the rules; which is the point, those few exceptions prove that the rules are correct most of the time. Most guys coming into this are from the computer industry, so they see almost everything in terms of black and white, and the second they see something gray or a zebra, they become nihilists and decide to reject everything wholesale. They do the proverbial throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Perhaps it’s my personal philosophy, I find that it’s easier to build on the works of others than to tear everything down and claim that I’m the second-coming of Christ, so my teaching is correct. This PU skillset is frustratingly difficult to learn & master without any guidance as we are all blind leading the blind here. But to take this frustration out and blame on others are not the best way of solving this blackbox. Yes, there are limitations to any PU method, that doesn’t mean we should reject it outright, many ppl have succeeded in using it. The lack of progress and/or success lies with the practitioner, whether that is due his lack of mastery, intelligence, whatever,…

Rather than throwing our hands up and admit defeat, or to say this-or-that is wrong, we need to solve this puzzle. Until we have faith in our ability and we dedicate our energy to solving it, we can sit around a bicker all day and trash any other method. The more productive way of spending our time and energy is to systematically finding solutions.