But that's not what I want to think about. What I want to consider instead is this scene from Shoot 'Em Up:

Yes, yes! It's amazing! The amazing thing about it, however, is not that Clive Owen can fuck Monica Bellucci while killing a unit of assassins but that he can maintain his erection during a very stressful situation.

Some science: Erections are only possible if the human male is relaxed. To get hard, the body must turn on the parasympathetic nervous system. The opposite of this system is the sympathetic nervous system, which releases adrenalin. This system accelerates the heart and breathing rate (there is danger in the air, one must fly or defend themselves from harm). The parasympathetic system, on the other hand, slows down the heart and breathing rate (the pleasant digestion of a heavy meal, an afternoon nap). The bottom of this slow down is the place where the cock can get hard. And sex is essentially a return to the alert level of the sympathetic system--the moment it is reached, the man ejaculates.

Clearly the hero in Shoot 'Em Up is not human or a man. His flight/fright system does not turn on in a moment of danger. His muscles do not need the extra energy for increased speed and strength. He can kill in a perfectly calm state--the state a normal man/human is in when taking a nap.

Poetry in the mode of science news:

Nasa says its Phoenix lander on the surface of Mars has gone silent and is almost certainly dead.

Engineers have not heard from the craft since Sunday 2 November when it made a brief communication with Earth.

Phoenix, which landed on the planet's northern plains in May, had been struggling in the increasing cold and dark of an advancing winter.

So many more pleasing cartogram charts are on Mark Newman's (of University of Michigan's Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems) website.

(Thank the prolific NaFun.)

Updated:

Obama is likely to win Omaha's electoral vote. (Nebraska, like Maine, splits their electoral votes.)

Wow.

FiveThirtyEight's election-eve prediction, of 349 electoral votes for Obama:

Reality this afternoon, of a projected 349 electoral votes for Obama:

I might start caring about baseball, just to further appreciate the awesomeness of Nate Silver.

Scientists in Japan say they have successfully cloned a mouse from a body that had been frozen for 16 years, theoretically opening the door to a range of possibilities from preserving endangered animals, to resurrecting extinct animals to cloning Ted Williams.

And they laughed at my cryogenic chamber. They laughed!

The eye of the world that thinks (or the eye of the one world that produces a substance that thinks about thinking), the Hubble telescope, recently enabled the mirror and recorder of deep space (thought) to reflect on a blue ring...

...[that] was formed after one galaxy (on the left) passed through another (the galaxy on the right). Just as a pebble thrown into a pond creates an outwardly moving circular wave, or ripples, an outwardly propagating ring of higher density was generated at the point of impact of the two galaxies. As this excess density collided with outer material that was moving inwards due to the gravitational pull of the two galaxies, shocks and dense gas were produced, stimulating star formation.

Poetry is the condition of all writing that details celestial events.

Has anyone else been following the tragic death of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander via its Twitter feed?

It's bizarrely affecting.

Not sure how soon arm will freeze after 1st heater is turned off. Depends on the weather. But saving that power (250 watt hrs/sol) is good.

I should stay well-preserved in this cold. I'll be humankind's monument here for centuries, eons, until future explorers come for me ;-)

Many questions about next Martian summer and will I wake up? It is beyond expectations. But if it happens you'll be among the 1st to know.

In case we don't get this chance again, thank you all so much for the questions, comments & good wishes over the mission. It's been awesome

Scientists say they have a working prototype of a fully artificial heart ready for implanting in humans.

The device beats almost exactly like the real thing using electronic sensors to regulate heart rate and blood flow.

A plus:

The new heart is covered with specially treated tissue to avoid rejection by the body's immune system and the formation of blood clots.

A minus:

[A battery could last] for between five and 16 hours after which it would have to be recharged to prevent the artificial heart stopping.

BACKGROUND: Plants seem like the most peaceful of organisms, but they nonetheless have their own form of defense mechanisms: they emit toxins or volatile chemicals in response to plant-eating insects...

THE BEST DEFENSE: Proteins already present in the plants are eaten by the attacking insects. Digesting the proteins, the insects convert this food into a new type of chemical, which is in turn secreted back onto plants in later feedings. The plants recognize these secretions as a type of 'SOS' signal, and launch their telltale defensive chemistry. Although researchers have long known that some plants can distinguish between different insect attackers, they had not been able to fully describe all the potential interactions...

Reading this report about the tactics of plants brings up a fragment from the depths of the Pre-Socratic world:

We must recognize that war is common and strife is justice, and all things happen according to strife and necessity.
Heraclitus

Can this be real? Jen Graves says it goes overboard with the “second puff.”

Thanks, tipper NaFun.

The problem: The Earth is going to die.

The Sun is slowly getting warmer as it burns the hydrogen in its core. In about 5 billion years, the Sun will begin evolving into a bloated red giant. Its outer gas shell will swell up, engulfing the Earth by the time it reaches its peak size and brightness 7 billion years from now.

But long before that,, raising average terrestrial temperatures to around 50 °C (120 °F). That will warm the oceans so much that they evaporate without boiling, like a pan of water left on a sunny kitchen counter.

The solution: Move the Earth, with a humongous, solar-powered kite.

That danger could be avoided by using a giant solar sail, says Colin McInnes, a mechanical engineer at the University of Strathclyde.

Solar sails are thin, mirror-like films that are propelled by the weak pressure of the sunlight that falls on them. McInnes's idea is to put a free-floating solar sail at a point near the Earth where the pressure of solar radiation essentially balances the Earth's gravitational pull.

His analysis shows that the reflection of sunlight from the sail will pull the Earth outwards along with the sail – in physical terms, increasing the Earth's orbital energy and accelerating the centre of mass of the system outwards, away from the Sun.

A sailor's life for us.

From the BBC:

Scientists in the US say they have developed the ability to selectively wipe out uncomfortable memories.

In experiments with mice, researchers from the Georgia College of Medicine were able to eliminate memories without any damage to the rodents' brains.

They suggested that the technique which works on a particular protein in the brain could, one day, be used to help humans overcome traumatic events.

Targeted memory erasure is no longer limited to the realm of science fiction. A new study describes a method through which a selected set of memories can be rapidly and specifically erased from the mouse brain in a controlled and inducible manner....

"While memories are great teachers and obviously crucial for survival and adaptation, selectively removing incapacitating memories, such as traumatic war memories or an unwanted fear, could help many people live better lives," says Dr. Joe Z. Tsien, brain scientist and co-director of the Brain & Behavior Discovery Institute at the Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine.

Add memories of failed relationships to that list, doc.