Stuff on my mind at this hour

(Actual photo of two colliding galaxies having sex taken by NASA Spitzer Space Telescope)

My current moods: complacent and pensive. Currently listening to the song “Morphing Thru Time” by Enigma on my iPod.

Here are a few things on my mind right now:

1) Psychologist Elaine Hatfield, PhD has written papers discussing passionate love, sexual desire, and gender differences when it comes to receptivity of sexual encounters. It’s truly fascinating stuff and I’ve read her work on her site. She even developed a series of love scales varying from romantic love with a partner to companion love, etc. In her “Passionate Love Scale,” she asks 15 basic questions to determine how much a person is in love. The object is to see if love can be quantified… measured. Apparently it can be. Not surprisingly, in her research paper on “Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers,” men often jump at the chance to sleep with a partner, while women often say no. Interestingly enough, I’ve had more women turn me down than men… and women are the ones who turn me on! Her theories on why that is (including some research studies to back it up) most definitely aroused my curiosity.

2. I read on Discovery that two dudes (Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth) developed software designed to measure overall happiness in the world. Basically they’ve come up with a “Happiness Meter” in which the software scans user blogs, Twitter entries, and social networking sites for sentences beginning with “I feel” or “I am feeling” to determine how people throughout the world are feeling at the moment. Although I’m not convinced it’s a true way to measure happiness (I, for once, have never started a Twitter entry using those words), it was pretty interesting to read.

3. Speaking of the words, “I am feeling…” Sometimes I feel I’m one of the rare people out there who genuinely cares about what’s going on in space and how it affects us as humans on a day to day basis. I get extremely annoyed at people who don’t care what’s going on in the universe. Personally, it makes no sense to me why people would rather gossip about shoes, cellulite, or bills… rather than take the time to look at the fucking sky and put their lives in perspective. We’re so small in this universe, my goodness. Think the sun in the sky gives a crap that someone has cottage cheese thighs? I sure don’t. I’d rather understand concepts like how in the world Venus now has a mysterious bright spot (just discovered yesterday!) and why scientists don’t know what it is. Why is this important? Well gee… if it came from the sun’s solar storms that could put the earth at risk. And I’m not even talking in terms of extreme destruction… I’m referring to basic things like… uh, power, electricity, and all the things we take for granted. When the power shuts down, people instinctly call their electric companies to complain without taking the time to read scientific news which usually warns people that solar storms are going to cause power outages during the week. Most of the time I feel like I’m surrounded by nitwits. Hey, I’m being honest. Not to mention that humans have now recorded two near-catastrophic collisions between asteroids/comets and Jupiter. Things fall from space… just hitchhiking through the sky… and land on planets all the time. We have scientists who watch for this sort of stuff but we CAN’T SEE THEM all the time especially when they’re coming from the direction of the sun (too bright!).

4. Yesterday scientists discovered that stars are boiling. Boiling! There is a massive star called Betelgeuse (in the Orion constellation) which is fairly close – only 640 light years away – that is 100,000 times brighter than our sun. And get this. It’s expected to explode in not billions, not millions, but thousands of years from now. I know it won’t be in our lifetime… but I am absolutely fascinated beyond belief that it would light up the sky even on a bright day and should humans be alive on earth at that time, they’ll have one hell of a light show. Just last night I watched a space documentary called “The Life and Death of A Star” which explained how stars are created, how they die (whether phasing out, exploding into a supernova, creating black holes, turning into brown dwarfs, etc.) and discovered many things I didn’t know before. For instance, in the human family tree – we all come from stardust. All the elements match up. If it weren’t for exploding stars in the sky, there wouldn’t be life on earth and there most certainly wouldn’t be humans walking around today. The most common element in outer space is carbon… and *gulp* that’s one of the elements in our bodies. We’re stars. The evidence is irrefutable! Our genetic makeup comes from stardust. Why does this matter? I can think of a billion reasons, but I’ll give just one. Imagine how much closer we’ll come to world peace if we see human similarities to the grand universe rather than seeing cultural and religious differences between us.

5. I love to read absurd news from time to time. This one is classic. It’s about a grad student with crappy grades who is suing her college for not finding her a job. Talk about a frivolous lawsuit. I pity the company who ever decides to hire her. I bet she’d sue them down the road for not giving her a parking spot paved in gold.

6. Stars have sex with each other. All space is… is sex. But that’s another story. All erotic hypnosis, in my opinion, stems from the universe’s sexual imagination.

Love
Isabella
xoxoxox