Sex Makes You 10 Years Younger
When I spotted this article last night, I found a few things about it interesting. The basic premise revolves around a ten year study conducted by a psychologist in the UK about how regular sex can help stop the aging process and help make us live longer. But you have to do it (sex) at least three times a week to gain the benefits, according to this study. And more important, you have to actually like doing it. You can’t fake it.
Weeks says pleasure from the act is a “crucial factor” in preserving youth.
It’s good for the heart, too.
“[T]he quality of sexual expression maintained in older adults is a predictor of good general health and well-being,” he said. “In a Welsh heart disease study from 1997, the mortality risk was 50 per cent lower in the group of men with high orgasmic frequency (twice a week or more) than in the group with low frequency.”
But, like with all good things in life, there is a catch. According to the study, regular sex with a consistent partner is really where you’ll get most of the benefits. So regular tricking doesn’t count (if you don’t know what tricking is you can look it up on Urban Dictionary). On the other hand those who get into kink have a mental health advantage over those who stick to the basics.
Practitioners of bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism (BDSM) have been shown to have better mental health than those less kinky.
I’m sure many are wondering about whether or not self-pleasure falls into any of the categories of the study. The article didn’t get into that, at least not from what I read. But I don’t see how it could hurt a person either.
Paying for Facebook
This was an interesting piece from the unofficial facebook blog by Twitter Co-founder, Biz Stone. I’ve seen Stone in interviews, and he’s actually very articulate and seems to know what he’s talking about…without the BS we normally see from social media types who always seem to sound so desperate.
Despite the fact that Facebook has repeatedly stressed that it will never charge for its service, suggestions to that effect emerge constantly, and the latest came from Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone, who wrote in a post on his blog that if the social network launched a Facebook Premium service for $10 per month, and 10 percent of its user base signed up, $1 billion in monthly revenue would be generated.
I think the word “if” here is the most important. And not “if” facebook did this, but more along the lines of “if” anyone would be willing to pay anything per month to be in facebook. Frankly, after working with high end clients in the art world for many years, I think that in order for this to work FB would have to charge something more like $100.00 per month to get that extremely wealthy crowd to pay up so they can tell everyone they pay for an ad-free facebook. In other words, it would be more like a status thing, like the way some of the wealthier pay $400.00 an hour fees to consultants to organize their children’s play dates.
But the basic concept of a premium ad-free facebook is interesting, and it might help offset some of the issues facebook has been dealing with lately. What’s even more interesting is that businesses based on the ad concept don’t seem to be working out as well as everyone thought they would. I’ve read where many online newspapers and magazines are thinking of charging subscriptions. If anything, I think most people resist clicking ads on facebook or any other social media on purpose. I know I go out of my way to avoid any web sites where pop up ads appear the moment you get there, especially those that start speaking to me. And trust me, if you ever click on an ad on facebook, that thing you were so curious about is going to follow you around the Internet for the next six months.
But I think the majority of people right now like (and expect) everything online to be free. Once the customer is trained it’s hard to break the old habits. I learned that from owning a small art gallery for years. The majority of people who came through my store were under the impression that I was like WalMart or Target, and that was far from the case. My average price point was about $1,000.00 and my personal restroom in the gallery was not for the public unless they were buying customers. But you’d be amazed at how many would sneak into the rest room behind my back. And when I confronted them about it they would reply with entitlement, as if I owed them the use of my restroom because retail outlets like Target have public restrooms. That’s only a small example of what I had to deal with when it came to what the public expects from all retail outlets, large or small. And I think the same sense of entitlement applies to online web sites as well.
I almost posted about a very interesting article today, but when I saw it was from Publisher’s Weekly I declined. You have to subscribe to PW to get the content, and the article…or anything else in PW…isn’t important enough for me to pay at this particular time in my life. All I have to do is cross reference a little and I can come up with the same basic info somewhere else for free. In the same respect, I think we’ll all eventually be paying subscriptions for online content whether we like it or not.
