Funny you should mention that Paras. I ran about 3 or 4 blocks to get to the metro theatre in the cold tonight. But all the running started making me breathe very heavily, and by the time I got to the theatre I had an incredibly sharp pain in my chest! The air is too fucking cold to breathe!

Also, coming back from Calgary on highway 2 was fucking insane. I've got some videos that I'll post on facebook later where entire semi-trucks disappear completely in fog when they're only 20 metres in front of you. That was the most fucked up driving experience of my life! There are parts in the video where the whole screen goes white and you can't even see the road. I actually feared for my life, haha.

Also, -38ºC isn't a temperature, nor should Environment Canada pretend that it's anything other than a condition in which one's alveoli freeze shut.

the ketchup conundrum -- Malcolm Gladwell.

How much raw spinach are you eating? Could be the cellulose and how your body doesn't digest it completely. When spinach is cooked, other fibres soften in the process making the spinach easier to pass through. Might want to load up on the water as fibre causes bulking, which can cause passing it after really painful.

nice, thank-you for the postulations, paras. It all sounds very plausible, though like you said, further study would be needed to say with any certainty whether or not women DO generally have colder extremities. But for the most part, it does leave me satisfied that this is in fact a halfway good reason and not entirely impossible. It would be (somewhat) interesting to do a study on something like this. I would assume though that since there's a joke about why women have colder hands than men that I'm not the first (or only) person to notice this temperature difference.

As for those photographs, I saw an entire hardcover book full of those at Urban Outfitters when I was there before Christmas. That photographer has some pretty uncanny look-alike models, and for the most part they're pretty funny.

This circulation thing reminds me of a joke T-bot told me:

T-bot: Do you know why women hands are always cold?
Al: No why?
T-bot: So they'll be more willing to hold a man's hand.

Wount Wount (Suppose to be the onemtopeia(sp?) of that bad joke horn)

the pink is in the "beautiful blue" shading of the white... very peachy.

wrt Taylor's question and the subsequent explanation, I think this deserves a study!

hey Par, where's the cursor? I don't like this...

That's a lot of questions.

I think I'll take Al's advice and defer the spinach question to the experts. (I mean, it could just be an osmotic effect of non-digestible carbohydrates like cellulose bulking-up your stools -- in the same manner as how lactulose works as a laxative -- but that'd just be me hypothesizing.)

As for your other questions, well, I'll still be hypothesizing. But why let that stop me? Let me tackle number 3 first.

"Poor circulation" doesn't seem like the right way to describe it. People with diabetes have poor circulation. People with atherosclerotic disease -- the kind that increases their risk of heart attacks and strokes -- have poor peripheral circulation. They end up with atrophy of tissues (a common sign is hair loss on one's feet) and poor healing -- actual detrimental effects.

A better explanation might be more peripheral vasoconstriction -- not that the blood isn't getting to your extremities, but that your body is autoregulating to reduce bloodflow to your extremities.

When your peripheral arterial circulation dilates, your extremities feel warmer; when it constricts, you feel colder. There are a number of chemicals that control when your arterioles dilate and constrict. One simple example is alcohol (which is why you feel warm after a stiff drink -- you're actually losing heat faster, but your blood vessels are dilating, so you feel warmer.)

There's a whole list of endogenous factors that cause vasodilation that I can never remember. One of the important ones, though, is nitric oxide. And one of the factors that affects arteriolar smooth muscle response to nitric oxide is estrogen. There have been studies (well, I found a study, but it portends the existence of more studies) that show that there is a significant difference between genders in response to nitric oxide because of estrogen.

So what does this mean? Well, I can think of two possibilities:

1. Increased response to vasodilators centrally means a corresponding increased vasoconstriction peripherally
2. Adjustment to a normal baseline at higher estrogen levels means a more noticeable vasoconstriction and cooling of extremities when estrogen levels drop

Update, that is season 1 and season 2 arena gear(full).