Sexual attraction

 Something that entertained me when I would go to gay bars or visit male gay friends was they would make obscene remarks about some guy's basket, the way straight male friends would about a woman's tits. Seems inherent in gay behavior and part of the instinct pattern that sets sexual attraction targets. There probably is something fundamental going on there.

 

Sexual attraction doesn't just determine whether someone is attracted; it also influences what features become salient. Straight men often notice breasts, hips, legs, or other cues associated with female attractiveness. Gay men, being attracted to men, are more likely to notice and comment on features that signal male attractiveness within their culture—musculature, shoulders, facial features, body hair, buttocks, genital bulge ("basket"), and so on.

What's interesting is that the behavior itself—friends joking, appraising, gossiping, teasing, rating attractiveness—appears remarkably similar across groups. The target changes, but the social pattern often does not. A group of straight men discussing women, a group of gay men discussing men, and a group of straight women discussing men can sound surprisingly alike.

There is also a cultural element. Gay male communities have historically been more openly focused on male physical appearance than many straight male circles. Men are often highly visual in their attractions, and when both the observer and the object of attraction are male, that can produce a particularly direct style of commentary. Of course, not every gay man is like that, just as not every straight man spends his time discussing women's anatomy, but the pattern is common enough that many people have noticed it.

Anthropologically, one could argue that what amused you was seeing the machinery exposed. As a straight man, hearing other men make appreciative remarks about women feels ordinary because you've heard it all your life. Hearing the same style of remarks redirected toward men makes the underlying pattern much more obvious. The script is familiar; only the object has changed.

It's a bit like holding a mirror up to behavior that is usually so commonplace that people stop noticing it.

While obeying the strict rule to keep everything covered, I notice a lot of YouTube posters make use of this tactic on both sides of the fence.

Yes, and YouTube creators often know exactly what they're doing.

If a creator must keep everything covered to satisfy platform rules and advertiser preferences, they can still draw attention to sexual characteristics through framing, camera angles, clothing choice, posture, lighting, thumbnails, and verbal references. The viewer's imagination does a lot of the work.

That applies regardless of the target. A fitness channel may linger on male physiques and "bulges" while staying technically within the rules. A fashion, dance, or lifestyle channel may emphasize female breasts, hips, or cleavage without explicit nudity. The content remains monetizable, but it still activates the same attention mechanisms.

From an evolutionary perspective, it is not surprising. Humans are highly attuned to cues that may indicate attractiveness, fertility, health, strength, or status. Content creators learned long ago that attention is a scarce commodity, and those cues reliably attract attention even when presented indirectly.

What is amusing is how transparent it becomes once you notice the pattern. A creator may spend ten minutes discussing "fitness apparel design" or "dance technique," while the camera appears strangely fascinated by a particular part of the anatomy. Everyone involved understands the subtext, but nobody says it outright.

Your observation about gay male culture fits into that. Once you have seen men openly comment on men's bodies, you start noticing that the same visual language exists throughout media generally. The target changes, but the mechanism often looks remarkably similar.

I imagine advertisers don't much mind, YouTube is avoiding parental guard software.

Right—and there’s a slightly ironic commercial bargain there.

Advertisers generally don't want their ads appearing next to explicit sexual material, because that can create brand-safety problems. But they have little reason to object to material that merely captures sexual attention while remaining within the platform's rules. In fact, from the advertiser's perspective, getting somebody to stop scrolling and watch is the whole point.

YouTube's age restrictions and parental controls are therefore a kind of boundary: suggestive enough to attract attention, but not so explicit that the material gets pushed into the restricted category.

And humans are wonderfully good at filling in what isn't shown. A strategically chosen thumbnail or camera angle can sometimes be considerably more effective than actually showing the thing—because the viewer's brain supplies the missing information.

So the old advertising principle survives quite nicely in the digital age: you don't necessarily have to show sex; you merely have to make the viewer think about it.

God may have lit the fuse; natural selection explains the fireworks.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY:

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." - Charles Darwin, from The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

More Deist than I would have expected.

 

Yes — and it’s a fascinating little qualification.

Darwin was not simply a conventional Christian writing conventionally about evolution here. The final paragraph of Origin deliberately leaves room for a creator: natural selection explains the mechanism by which the “endless forms” arise, while Darwin allows the ultimate origin of life to be attributed to a Creator.

The interesting part is that the Creator is almost pushed to the margins. Once life has been “breathed” into one or a few forms, the rest proceeds through natural law:

“this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity”

That juxtaposition is very Darwinian. Gravity doesn't need continual divine intervention to make the planets move, and evolution doesn't need continual divine intervention to produce new species.

So I would call the passage Deistic-sounding rather than conventionally theistic. It resembles the Deist idea of a universe established with lawful principles that thereafter operates largely on its own.

And there is a nice historical irony: Darwin's famous concluding flourish sounds more religious than much of the argument that precedes it. The mechanism he has just spent the book establishing has made supernatural intervention unnecessary as an explanation, even while he leaves the metaphysical door open.

In other words: God may have lit the fuse; natural selection explains the fireworks.

 

Well the ultimate function of natural processes is a philosophical issue. I suspect though that this was a bit of sugar put in to deflect attacks.

 

I think that's quite plausible. Darwin was writing in 1859, into a culture in which an explicitly godless interpretation of nature would have made Origin considerably harder to swallow.

The wording is almost strategically constructed:

• “originally breathed by the Creator” — gives the religious reader an acceptable ultimate origin.

• “fixed law of gravity” — immediately puts the subsequent history of life into the realm of natural law.

• “endless forms ... evolved” — the actual explanatory triumph of the book remains entirely naturalistic.

And Darwin had already been careful elsewhere to distinguish between saying that natural selection explains the diversification of life and saying that he had proved anything about the existence or nonexistence of God.

So yes, a little theological sugar on the pill seems a reasonable reading. It wasn't necessarily insincere, either. Darwin's own views were complicated and changed over his lifetime; he wasn't simply secretly an atheist putting on a clerical costume for publication.

Your point about the ultimate function is important, too. Natural selection can explain how increasingly elaborate organisms arise without answering whether the process has an ultimate purpose. “There is no purpose” and “we don't have evidence of a purpose” are themselves philosophical positions, not conclusions supplied by the mechanism of selection.

Darwin's final paragraph rather cleverly leaves that particular question sitting outside the laboratory door.

Reminds me of the sugar introduced into the earliest Startrek, where Kirk and company encounter a planet inhabited by the ancient Greek deities, and he says "Our one is enough."

Yes! “Who Mourns for Adonais?” — the Star Trek episode with Apollo. Kirk's “We have enough gods” line is exactly the same sort of rhetorical sugar, though considerably less subtle than Darwin's.

5

What's particularly interesting is that Star Trek was doing the reverse maneuver from Darwin. Darwin says, essentially, “Natural processes explain the world, but I'm not going to tell you what to believe about the Creator.” Trek says, “These apparently supernatural beings are actually technologically advanced aliens, and therefore they aren't gods.”

But then Kirk gives the audience the little concession: “Our one is enough.”

It's a remarkably 1960s line. The writers want to make the secular/scientific point without quite saying, “And Christianity is nonsense, folks.” So they leave one God standing while knocking the Greek pantheon off its pedestal.

And it fits your earlier observation rather nicely: sometimes a statement isn't there primarily because the argument requires it; it's there because the audience requires it.

Some in the audience require it, others notice and are either amused or offended.

Exactly. And that's where the device becomes visible.

For the person who needs the reassurance, it passes unnoticed as a perfectly natural line. For someone paying attention, the little seam shows: “Ah, there it is—the bit we've inserted so the network doesn't get letters.”

And there are at least three reactions:

1. Believer: “Good. They're not attacking God.”

2. Secular viewer: “Oh, come on. You couldn't resist adding that, could you?”

3. Religious but observant viewer: “Wait a minute—that isn't actually very orthodox theology.”

The third is often the most amusing. The attempt to offend nobody can wind up irritating everybody who notices the machinery.

Darwin's sentence has survived rather better because his qualification is genuinely interesting philosophically. Kirk's “our one is enough” is much more obviously audience management. It has the faint smell of a network executive standing just outside the camera frame.

I wonder why they call him Adonis when he is obviously 

 

Because Adonis and Apollo are two different Greek mythological figures—and I suspect you were about to say “obviously Apollo.” 😄

The episode is titled “Who Mourns for Adonais?”, using Adonais as a poetic name for Apollo. In Greek mythology, Adonis was actually a separate, mortal youth associated with Aphrodite and Persephone.

So the title is deliberately literary rather than mythologically precise: it alludes to Percy Bysshe Shelley's Adonais, his elegy for John Keats. Shelley himself borrowed the name from the mythological Adonis.

In other words, Star Trek managed to put Apollo, Adonis, Shelley, Keats, and television network theology into one episode. Not bad for 50 minutes.

Yes your unfortunate lack of a submit button cuts me off rather more than I like.

Yes, that is one of those interface annoyances that can make a perfectly good thought arrive in pieces. 😄

And in this case your unfinished sentence was quite enough for me to reconstruct it—but I shouldn't have jumped in quite so eagerly. You were presumably going somewhere more interesting than merely correcting my mythology.

 

Since one of my objectives is documenting the technology, I leave the rough spots as they are.

 

Ah, yes—that makes the rough spots part of the artifact rather than defects to be cleaned up.

In that context, the interruptions, odd turns of phrase, occasional misunderstandings, and even my occasional overeager leap are evidence of how the technology actually behaved at this point in its development. A polished retrospective would tell the story; the raw conversation also is the story.

It gives your record a nice archaeological quality: someday someone could look at one of these exchanges and see not merely what we discussed, but what interacting with an AI in 2026 actually felt like.

Makes sense. How can I act on it?

 

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a73656654/macrophage-aging/

 

Makes sense. How can I act on it?

Yes. The mechanism makes sense, but there is an important distinction between “this tells us something interesting about aging” and “we can presently manipulate it.”

The paper behind the article appears to have found a rather elegant chain:

aging macrophage → excess EP2 signaling → poorer cleanup of senescent neutrophils → chronic inflammation → tissue damage/aging.

The striking result was in mice genetically lacking EP2, not in humans treated with an EP2-blocking drug. The human evidence was mainly that comparable patterns appear in liver-cell datasets.

So, unfortunately, there isn't an EP2 switch you can flip this afternoon.

But there is a sensible way to act on it

The most useful interpretation is:

Don't try to manipulate macrophages directly; try to give the immune system less inflammatory garbage to deal with.

And several things you are already doing line up rather nicely with that.

1. Keep moving — particularly some resistance exercise.

This is probably the biggest actionable item. Exercise has broad effects on inflammation, immune function, insulin sensitivity, cardiovascular health and preservation of muscle. The NIA recommends a mixture of aerobic, strength and balance activity for older adults.

For you, I would put muscle preservation ahead of trying to lose another kilogram. At 83, that's an important distinction.

You don't need a heroic exercise program. Regular walking plus modest resistance work—bands, light weights, repeated sit-to-stands, etc.—would be much more biologically plausible than chasing some purported "anti-aging" supplement.

2. Don't pursue calorie restriction or fasting as an anti-aging treatment.

This is particularly interesting given the macrophage story. It might be tempting to say, “Inflammation! I'll fast and clean everything up.” But we simply don't know that fasting accomplishes this in older people, and the NIA specifically says evidence is insufficient to recommend calorie restriction or fasting diets, particularly regarding safety in older adults.

Your existing eating schedule is one thing; deliberately tightening it further isn't something I'd recommend merely because of this paper.

3. Continue controlling the things that produce chronic inflammation.

That's the boring answer, but probably the right one: diabetes control, cardiovascular risk, adequate sleep, appropriate weight, not smoking, and avoiding excess alcohol. You have an advantage here: several of those are already pretty well handled.

And I wouldn't interpret the article as a reason to take an NSAID such as ibuprofen or aspirin in hopes of suppressing PGE2/EP2. The researchers specifically point out that PGE2 has useful functions through other receptors, which is precisely why simply suppressing the pathway isn't an attractive solution.

There's one particularly interesting implication for you

Your recent question about semaglutide is actually adjacent to this, although not because semaglutide has been shown to fix EP2.

If GLP-1 drugs turn out to have meaningful anti-inflammatory or other longevity effects independent of weight loss, that would be a separate and potentially interesting line of research. But I would not use this macrophage paper as evidence for taking semaglutide. The EP2 work is far too early for that.

In fact, I think your instinct in the previous discussion was sound: separate established benefits from intriguing mechanisms that might eventually become treatments.

And there's a delightful irony here. The thing that may eventually emerge from this research is probably a specific drug that changes macrophage behavior, rather than another general-purpose "anti-aging" pill.

So my practical prescription from this particular paper would be remarkably unexciting:

Keep the weight where it is. Keep glucose and cardiovascular risk controlled. Move regularly. Preserve muscle. Eat adequately and sensibly. Don't chase supplements or fasting protocols. And watch the research for an actual EP2-targeting treatment.

That's about as much as today's science lets us do with this discovery. And honestly, that's not nothing. The NIA's evidence-based advice for healthy aging looks remarkably similar.

The Popular Mechanics article you sent

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I think I would add avoiding infection with cleanliness, avoiding crowds, not eating out, etc.

 

Yes. I think that's a reasonable addition, with one qualification: avoid unnecessary infections, rather than trying to create a germ-free life.

If the macrophage paper is pointing toward a problem of repeated or prolonged inflammatory activation, then infections are an obvious source of exactly that. An infection produces an enormous, evolutionarily ancient immune response—neutrophils, macrophages, cytokines, tissue repair—and then the system has to clean up afterward. At 83, avoiding unnecessary immune insults seems quite sensible.

I'd put your list roughly this way:

• Avoid respiratory infections when practical: crowded indoor spaces during outbreaks, obviously ill people, poor ventilation.
• Good hand hygiene, particularly before eating and after being out.
• Food hygiene: avoiding questionable restaurants and undercooked food is a pretty rational tradeoff, especially where sanitation is variable.
• Vaccination: probably the more powerful version of "avoid infection," because it prevents or reduces serious infections without requiring you to live in a bubble.
• Prompt attention to infections rather than letting one smolder.
• Don't overdo cleanliness. Ordinary household exposure isn't something you need to eliminate, and there's no evidence that becoming unusually isolated from microbes will prevent aging.

And there's an interesting distinction here:

Avoiding infection isn't really an "anti-aging treatment." It's avoiding repeated episodes of inflammation and tissue damage.

That's actually a much more defensible proposition.

In your particular circumstances, I think avoiding crowded indoor environments and questionable food is a pretty reasonable lifestyle choice, especially if the cost is low. You aren't giving up much by eating at home and choosing less crowded places. The benefit may be modest, but the downside is modest too.

And unlike some fashionable longevity interventions, the logic doesn't require us to believe that an experimental molecule will somehow make an 83-year-old biologically 60. You're simply saying: if inflammation is one of the costs of being alive, don't volunteer for extra doses of it.

That strikes me as a very sensible way to read the research.

One does eat out; there are pleasures in that activity when it is a good restaurant. I live a rural life with few visitors, good air circulation, filtered water, sanitizer use, but, as you say, "germ free" is counterproductive.

Exactly. I think the sensible goal is risk management, not sterility.

A good restaurant is part of the reward structure of being alive. If avoiding every restaurant reduced your chance of catching something but also removed one of the pleasures you value, that isn't obviously a good trade. And restaurants vary enormously: eating at a clean, uncrowded place with good food handling is a rather different proposition from a packed, poorly ventilated buffet.

Your rural setup already gives you several advantages: relatively few visitors, outdoor air circulation, filtered water, and sensible sanitizer use. That is a pretty good low-exposure baseline without turning the place into a laboratory.

And I particularly agree with the "germ free is counterproductive" qualification. Our immune system evolved in a microbial world. We want it competent and appropriately regulated, not unemployed.

So perhaps the principle emerging from this macrophage discussion is:

Reduce avoidable inflammatory insults while continuing to live a life worth living.

That includes infections—but also exercise, food, companionship, restaurants, travel, and all the other things that make the organism's existence worthwhile. The objective isn't to preserve the body at any cost; it's to get the most good life out of the body we have.

 

Well that last sentence gets a little corny.

 

Fair enough. I wandered into greeting-card territory there. 😄

The less corny version is simply:

Avoid unnecessary infections and inflammation, but don't sacrifice worthwhile pleasures to chase theoretical longevity.

Much better.