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BS: Women in space
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: kimmers Date: 26 Mar 01 - 01:39 PM Alex, that's a hoot!! Did you write that on the spot, or was that sitting in your collection just waiting for an opportunity? Tune-wise... when I read the words, my brain sings it to something country-ish with three chords that resembles John Prine's "Flag Decal". |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: mousethief Date: 26 Mar 01 - 01:40 PM Wrote it on the spot, of course. If you want to put music on it and sing it in public, that's your never-mind. :) Alex |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: Mrrzy Date: 27 Mar 01 - 09:12 AM (from our genetics class way back when) Let me tell you how it's gonna be |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: GUEST,Fibula Mattock Date: 27 Mar 01 - 09:50 AM Umm, someone please explain what happens about a 28 day (lunar) menstrual cycle when a woman's in space. Seriously - will it change in length or anything when not on Earth??? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: MMario Date: 27 Mar 01 - 10:05 AM That really doesn't enter the equation until after you exit the earth/moon system - say for a trip to mars. but they suspect (since there is no way to test it) that it would depend on how many women are there - as women living in close proximity tend to synchronize cycles eventually - |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: GUEST,Fibula Mattock Date: 27 Mar 01 - 10:10 AM Cool. So how does it work outside of the earth/moon system? Oh, and that's definitely noticeable about the sychronised cycles. Used to happen to me and my mates when we all shared a house. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: Mrrzy Date: 27 Mar 01 - 10:24 AM Interesting question, that last one. I'm not sure how the moon works with coordinating menstruation anyway, perhaps the 4-week cycle is only artifactually lunar? I mean, do women's pit hormones actually feel the tides, like a homing pigeon or something? VERY good question, I'm gonna take that one to my staff meeting and see what everyone thinks... |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: MMario Date: 27 Mar 01 - 10:34 AM SF authors have mused about that question for some time - whether it's coincidence that the average cycle matches the moon cycle - or not. The cycle is not CLOSELY tied - or there would be a few days a month when ...uhmm - forget I even thought that. *shudder*
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: GUEST,Fibula Mattock Date: 27 Mar 01 - 11:02 AM Right, I did a quick Google search and came up with a heap of websites, mostly Feminist* and/or New Age* talking about the effect of the lunar cycle such as: "Certainly for a woman a key way to be sensitive to the lunar cycle is through her menstrual cycle. A woman's menstrual cycle may not be a perfect 28 days or link to the phases of the Moon, in ovulating at the Full and bleeding at the New Moon. There is some evidence that this used to be the order of things but that the amount of artificial light in our environment combined with the conditioned disconnection from our bodies has changed this. Now this bothers me. If a woman's cycle used to be "perfect" and in line with the phases of the moon, what about all the societies where menstruating woman had to be segregated? Does that mean they all went off at once leaving the men and kids behind? A whole community? hmmm. Also, artificial light is nothing new - it's been around since the advent of fire - although we have a lot more of it nowadays. Do they mean electric light? I'm not convinced. I'd like to know more about this subject, but I wish these sites would state the bloody (pun intended) "evidence". (* Not intended to be derogatoty. And I consider myself to be a feminist in that I want equality between sexes. Or does that make me an equalist? ) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: Mrrzy Date: 27 Mar 01 - 11:07 AM That makes you a feminist, don't be afraid of the label. Anyone read The Mists of Avalon? They go deeply into the mystical significance, and getting yourself in tune with the earth and moon so that you will be at mid-cycle at the full moon, and menstruate in the dark phases. But I doubt, even with the women-who-live-together-bleed-together effect, if all women of any village menstruated together. The segregation thing is a good point. Then, who'd make dinner? As the quaint saying goes. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: mousethief Date: 27 Mar 01 - 11:11 AM Please let's not get started on the Mists of Avalon. It's been such a pleasant conversation so far. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: Penny S. Date: 28 Mar 01 - 04:26 PM I started to write this last night, but when I got up to research the lunar months part, the computer crashed. The variation due to artificial light is susceptible to test - we still have primitive societies with none, and it should be possible to discover what cycles women there follow. Then there are communities of nuns, who are synchronised, live with much less artificial light, and run a longer cycle. What happens with women above the Arctic circle? The strongest influence is apparently, the presence or absence of men - research in a convent in which the researcher introduced testosterone into the air-conditioning(?), a terminated experiment, showed a speeding up of the cycle. There is the comparison with our close primate relatives, the females of whom run an average 33 day cycle. when observed. There is no 28 day lunar cycle, anyway. The synodic month, New Moon to New, is 29.53 days. The other cycles, such as the sidereal, in which the Moon returns to the same position against the fixed stars (27.3217 days), are mostly less than 27 and a half days. (The others are the tropical month, in which the Moon returns to the point where the celestial equator crosses the ecliptic - 27.3216 days, the anomalistic, from perigee to perigee - 27.55, and the draconic, from the node where the Moon's orbit crosses the ecliptic, either up or down, to the same node again - 27.21 days.) Only the anomalistic month and the synodic month seem to have any likelihood of influencing anything down here much, but clearly, anything running at 28 days, as a woman whose cycles are constrained by the Pill would be, will be noticeably out of step by nearly a full phase after four cycles. I wouldn't rule out an influence. There was a time in my life when for much of a year, my cycles did seem to be irregular in such a way as to keep menstruation at around the time of Full, not New Moon. As I recall, my cycle ran short, becoming closer to a Full Moon, and then lengthened, to stay with the lunar cycle longer. This was the time that I started to suffer from migraines, which tended to happen at about the same time, on Saturdays. However, I suspect there are far more natural influences closer at hand, not least in each woman's head. It would be interesting to compare samples of women not on the pill who a) believe their cycles to be influenced by the Moon, and b) don't. But given that the identification of menstrual and lunar cycles depends on linking a very variable phenomenon in some living systems (which originally may not have experienced them much, due to pregnancy) with a more regular cycle of a different length from that claimed, which two cycles are of similar but different frequencies, the identification seems to be more poetic than actual, and therefore very unlikely to have any importance to women travelling in space. What could be worrying though is if the known relationship between body mass and menstruation, which leads to women who lose weight drastically ceasing to menstruate and developing other serious effects, should turn out to be between body weight and menstruation. Penny |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: Wolfgang Date: 29 Mar 01 - 02:55 AM great post, Penny. Wolfgang |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: GUEST,Fibula Mattock Date: 29 Mar 01 - 05:01 AM Thanks Penny - that's really interesting. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: Mrrzy Date: 29 Mar 01 - 09:25 AM Penny, I didn't understand your very last sentence. But great post, good info. However, I must pick one teeny nit - please (this it to everyone, not just Penny) don't say Primitive when you mean Ancient. Any human society is just as complex as any other, it's just some forms of society have been around longer than others. (This is just one of my pet peeves. Feel free to ignore.) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: Wolfgang Date: 29 Mar 01 - 09:48 AM Mrrzy, Penny's last sentence focuses on the difference between mass and weight. In space, the mass of a person is the same as on earth whereas the weight is zero. I do understand your concern about 'primitive' for all its unwanted associations, but when I look into my Webster's I find that 'primitive' covers the sense Penny has meant, whereas 'ancient' doesn't. 'Ancient' doesn't relate to a society still being here today for testing, whereas 'primitive' does. Wolfgang |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: GUEST Date: 29 Mar 01 - 10:36 AM Partners, Incubus and Secubus. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: GUEST,Fibula Mattock Date: 29 Mar 01 - 10:38 AM Yeah, but I agree with Mrrzy on this aspect (though I'm not countering Penny's use of it). It's one of the things I have against anthropology (maybe just my archaeological bias) but sitting in our western society today there can be a tendancy to view other forms of society with different ways of life as inferior. There's also often a temptation to view past societies as being "primitive". Consider people expressing amazement that "oh, imagine, a society like that could build Stonehenge/the Pyramids/Roman roads etc!". We constantly underestimate the people of the past and write them off as "primitive" when most of the evidence I've seen seems to be to the contrary. Primitive in my wee Collins English Dictionary says: "of an early, simple stage of development; basic, crude" - but that's a subjective and relative definition. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: Penny S. Date: 29 Mar 01 - 05:17 PM OK, societies with a way of life more closely linked to the outdoors, and to natural diurnal rhythms, without excessive dependence on artificial light. Penny |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: Penny S. Date: 29 Mar 01 - 06:06 PM And I couldn't agree more about underselling the peoples of the past - saying that a society would have been too primitive to do something usually means that the person making the comment couldn't do it. Penny |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: GUEST,Sass Date: 29 Mar 01 - 08:42 PM Well, this is bizarre place to enter a conversation. Hi everyone! I've found this thread pretty interesting, and at the risk of being too late will go ahead and give my personal answer to the above questions. If gravity was needed for menstruation, they wouldn't sell huge all-night pads, right? And, 28 days -- not 29+, which is the lunar cycle -- is the AVERAGE length of the menstrual cycle. It's considered "normal" to be anywhere from 21-35 or so. Also, women mestruate for as little as 2 days or as long as a week, and can mestruate at any time of the lunar month. I haven't yet met a woman whose cycle correspopnds with the moon, but i'll bet it's possible. Mine doesn't -- it's 31.5 days, give or take a few hours. Oh, and I have no electricity in my house, or streetlights nearby. Not that one person means anything, statistically... Sass |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: Amos Date: 29 Mar 01 - 10:15 PM With your kind permission, Sir Mousethief: Now wigglers have their tales to tell, Regards, A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: Blackcatter Date: 30 Mar 01 - 01:54 AM Boy! (or Girl!) You go away for a few days, thinking that a thread is dead and boom - it gains new life - I love this place. To get back to my last bit of theread - I love the lil - wiggler song! And I was wondering how fast the little guys travel during ejaculation, not during their inside travels. Any ideas? It there an average distance we can use to calculate with some Newtonian physics? Also - an update from early on in the thread - I emailed NASA on the women in space and I have yet to hear back (and I swear I was really nice too!) pax yall. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: mousethief Date: 30 Mar 01 - 02:14 AM Amos, nicely turned. Mrrzy, with all due respect, not all human societies are at the same level of complexity. A simple hunger-gatherer society with no visible leadership is worlds apart, complexity-wise, from a society with permanent classes based on economic and career path factors, an established, multi-layered government, standing laws, etc. This is not to say the one is "primitive" and the other something else (what exaclty is the opposite of "primitive," anyway?). While it is true that the simpler one can often "evolve" into more and more complex ones, the complex ones can also be turned back into simpler ones due to disease, war, etc. Is one superior to the other? Well that obviously depends on whom you ask. For a really good look at human societies, both from a historical perspective and from a complexity-scale standpoint, please see Guns, Germs and Steel (I forget the author's name; easily found on Amazon.) Alex |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: Penny S. Date: 31 Mar 01 - 05:22 PM Oh, and thanks for the praise, Wolfgang, Fibula and Mrrzy. A friend has pointed out that the near coincidence of cycles involves a body which is also associated with another coincidence. ie, the Moon, which is coincidentally almost the same size in the sky as the Sun. More than one such coincidence is odd. Penny |
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Subject: RE: BS: Women in space From: lady penelope Date: 01 Apr 01 - 11:14 AM This is one of THOSE THINGS. I doubt you can nail the female cycle down to any one or even two or three things. As far as I can make out the main thing is your oestrogen / prooestrogen levels and how they interact with several other endochrinic systems within your body. These, in turn, are affected by 'loadsastuff' ( technical term there) externally. Circadian/ diurnal rythmns, men or their lack, food/ vitamins,essential minerals, how physical your usual routine is, aparantly how many pregnant women you are in regular contact with ( 'en famille' , for some reason it doesn't seem to work with women who work in obstetrics ) has an affect. It would not be untruthful to say that the medical profession is still trying to retro-engineer this one. Much to my disadvantage, typical, huh! TTFN M'Lady P. |