Thread: One for the coffin dodgers.

Older members - Peterpan, Blackgang, Dr Andy, Propogator et al.

Now that you are getting on in life have your ears got bigger? Just wondering if you have sucumb to that phenomenon where old peoples ears (particurarly mens) get massively oversized.

What about nob size as you get older.... Does it really get smaller as you stop using it?

It all a lie I tell you

^^You numpty, now they'll all be talking about old wrinkly bits and other horrible stuff!

Originally Posted by rawlins

What about nob size as you get older.... Does it really get smaller as you stop using it?

Who says you stop using it - its just a myth

I think that your ears don't really get any bigger. However, they appear to as the facial muscles begin to sag.

Originally Posted by mrsquirrel

Older members - Peterpan, Blackgang, Dr Andy, Propogator et al.

Now that you are getting on in life have your ears got bigger? Just wondering if you have sucumb to that phenomenon where old peoples ears (particurarly mens) get massively oversized.

Seniors to you ya cheeky bastard and why am I at the head of the list, I'm the youngest of the old farts section.

What about nob size as you get older.... Does it really get smaller as you stop using it?

As for this I'm getting more quality pussy inches than I have at any time of my life, and fvcking loving it.

I'm just 43 and while my ears haven't grown, I've recently suffered a bout of spotted dick.

and is it true ur ears get more hairy?

Researching this question has been a lot of fun. I looked at the web discussion you referred to (Self-Service Science Forum Message). The first thing I thought about was confirmation bias: we pay more attention to information that supports our existing ideas, probably because that is where we are directing our attention. This is called a cognitive bias (see http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/19104/art12.html and just about any introductory psychology text). So maybe the person who said that older men’s ears are overly large is falling under the spell of confirmation bias.
Next, I thought about correlation and causation – they are not the same. Just because two things happen at the same time does not mean they cause each other. For instance, deaths in India are correlated with ice cream sales in America. Why? The weather. The two happen at the same time, and so are correlated, but one does not cause the other. Mathematically, a fitted regression line can be drawn by plugging in almost any real numbers to the estimated equation, that is, you can draw a pretty graph of the relationship between nearly any two things, without it meaning anything. We are so used to thinking about relationships between events that we often overestimate. ( http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/archives/Psycoloquy/1999.V10/0026.html, Altman DG, Blan JM. Generalisation and extrapolation BMJ 1998;317:409-410, Kuo Y- H, Extrapolation of Correlation Between 2 Variables in 4 General Medical Journals, JAMA. 2002;287:
So watching out for bias, I thought about ear and nose growth. Are they different from the rest of the body? Probably not – the outer or external ear is mostly cartilage and skin, with a little fat and muscle and a supply of blood vessels and nerves. Does cartilage and skin continue to grow throughout life? Yes and no. The cells continue to divide, grow, mature and die, just like cells in the gut, liver, bones and elsewhere. And the amount of skin and cartilage in our bodies obviously increases as we grow. But cartilage does not keep growing at the same rate throughout life, and while cartilage keeps dying and being replaced, in the vertebrates it does stop increasing in size in adulthood – which is what is usually meant by ‘keeps growing’. This information can be found in most introductory physiology text books.
(The idea that cartilage mass increases in age may come from the cartilaginous, or boneless, fishes. In the cartilaginous fishes, including sharks, the cartilage ‘skeleton’ does increase in size throughout life. Sharks get really noticeably bigger and bigger (A warm welcome to the Isle of Man,). This does not happen in animals with bone skeletons – the cartilage does not keep getting bigger and bigger to any known extent. We would all look very different if it did. We would get big lumps in our noses, ears, thoraxes, shoulders, wrists, knees and ankles – but at least osteoarthritis would not be such a problem! In fact, new cartilage is produced more slowly as people and sharks age (O'Driscoll SW, Saris DB, Ito Y, Fitzimmons JS. The chondrogenic potential of periosteum decreases with age. J Orthopaedic Res. 19(1):95-103, 2001, http://homepage.mac.com/mollet/VBGF/VBGF.html)
The size of the ear canal does not increase with age (Liu TC. Chen YS. Aging and external ear resonance. Audiol. 39(5):235-7, 2000.) The ear canal is defined by skin and cartilage as well as bone. That suggests that there is no overall ear cartilage growth in adulthood.
Does the pinna, or outside flappy part of the ear, grow during adulthood? Do old men really have big ears? Maybe their ears look bigger relative to their head size because they don’t have as much hair. Maybe their ears just get flabbier, and hang down more. Several studies have found that ears are larger in older people. (Ferrario VF. Sforza C. et al., Morphometry of the normal human ear: a cross-sectional study from adolescence to mid- adulthood. J Craniofacial Genetics Developmental Biol. 19(4):226-33, 1999.)
In July 1993, 19 members of the south east Thames faculty of the Royal College of General Practitioners gathered at Bore Place, in Kent, to consider how best to encourage ordinary general practitioners to carry out research. Someone said, "Why do old men have big ears? Some members thought that this was obviously true--indeed some old men have very big ears--but others doubted it, and so we set out to answer the question "As you get older do your ears get bigger?" 206 patients were studied (mean age 53.75, range 30-93, median age 53 years). The length of the left external ear was measured from the top to the lowest part with a transparent ruler; the result (in millimetres), together with the patient's age, was recorded. The mean ear length was 675 mm (range 520-840 mm), and the linear regression equation was: ear length=55.9+(0.22 x patient's age) (95% confidence intervals 0.17 to 0.27). It seems therefore that as we get older our ears get bigger (on average by 0.22 mm a year). (James A Heathcote BMJ 1995;311:1668, 23December)
But there are other reasons than continued growth that could explain this. Maybe fewer people who are old now had plastic surgery for large ears when they were young, and lots of young people are having plastic surgery for large ears. These are alternative explanations. One of the things that does happen is that skin loses elasticity as we age, so it stretches. Ear lobes tend to increase in length with age.
“Another interpretation may be that big ears predict survival: men with smaller ears may die selectively at younger ages. Ear size or pattern, or both, may be a marker of some biological process related to health. However, I don't think that I would go as far as my grandmother, whom I remember admonishing me in early childhood to stretch my ears daily to ensure long life” (Khaw, K-T. Why do old men have big ears? The Chinese believe that long ears predict longevity. BMJ 1996;312:582, 2 March). “An alternative interpretation of the findings is that a secular trend towards smaller ears has occurred during most of the present century. Have the senior citizens in the sample had big ears all their adult lives, and will the younger members keep their smaller ones? If so, what environmental factors, presumably operating during childhood or adolescence, might have been responsible? I wonder whether there has been a steady decline in the boxing or scrubbing of children's ears, or whether big ears are simply another result of passive smoking. This interpretative doubt seems to call for extended pinnametric research: the question can be resolved only by a lifelong follow up study of a cohort of young patients” (Hardisty RM. Lifelong follow up study of young people is needed BMJ;312:582 2 March 1996.)
James A Heathcote went on to say "Why ears should get bigger when the rest of the body stops growing is not answered by this research. Nor did we consider whether this change in a particular part of the anatomy is a marker of something less easily measurable elsewhere or throughout the body."
“All medical research is carried out on selected individuals. . . . . The usefulness of research lies primarily in the generalisation of the findings rather than in the information gained about those particular individuals. . . . .The extent to which it is wise or safe to generalise must be judged in individual circumstance. . . . Many studies use regression analysis to derive a model for predicting an outcome from one or more explanatory variables. The model, represented by an equation, is strictly valid only within the range of the observed data on the explanatory variable(s). When a measurement is included in the regression model it is possible to make predictions for patients outside the range of the original data (perhaps inadvertently). This numerical form of generalisation is called extrapolation. It can be seriously misleading. . . . . To take an extreme example, a linear relation was found between ear size and age in men aged 30 to 93, with ear length (in mm) estimated as 55.9+0.22×age in years. The value of 55.9 corresponds to an age of zero. A baby with ears 5.6 cm long would look like Dumbo.” (Kuo Y-H, Extrapolation of Correlation Between 2 Variables in 4 General Medical Journals, JAMA. 2002;287:
So do ears keep growing? Who knows. But, thanks to Welsh scientist William Linnard, I know the Celtic words for flap eared: clustlaes. (Prominent ears: a Celtic perspective BMJ 1996;312:582, 2March).

0.22mm a year longer.

OLD EARS BIGGER

There are many burning questions for humanity, and usually, the most important ones get answered first. That’s probably why it took so long to answer the question of “Why do your ears get bigger as you get older?” They’re talking about the bit you can see on the outside, the external ear.

Now ears do more than just hold up your glasses. They help collect sound from down in front of you, and off to the side, which is where most suspicious noises in the forest supposedly come from. The amputated ear of Captain Robert Jenkins, supposedly cut off by Spanish pirates, led to the famous “War of Jenkin’s Ear” that began in 1739 between Spain and Great Britain, and very quickly turned into the War of Austrian Succession that lasted another 11 years.

The Chinese have long placed great significance on the length of our ear. Basically, the longer the earlobe, the longer you will live, and the thicker the earlobe, the thicker your wallet. And the longer the whole external ear, the more noble and wise you are - so Buddha, and the emperors of Old China are said to have had long ears.

But as far as medical science is concerned, there hasn’t been much attention paid to the markings or shape or size of the human ear, apart from a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1974, which claimed that people who had a diagonal crease in their ear lobe were more likely to suffer heart disease. So I was extremely delighted to read, in the 1995 Christmas Issue of the British Medical Journal, a paper by James Heathcote discussing the relationship between the size of human ears and age. He did the right scientific thing, and ignored the question of “Why do your ears get bigger”, and went back to the far more basic question of “Do older people actually have bigger ears?”

First he searched the medical literature, and to his surprise, found that nobody had ever tried to answer this question, at least, as far as adults were concerned. There was a German study which looked at 1,271 children, and found that their ears did get bigger as they grew older (which is not a real surprise), but there were no studies on adults.

So soon four English GPs began measuring the ear lengths of all their patients over 30 years of age. Eventually their study looked at 206 people, aged between 30 and 93, with the length of the left ear ranging between a delicate 52 mm and a whopping great 84 mm (about 2-3.5 inches). They found that people’s ears did get bigger with age, at the rate of 0.22 mm per year.

Soon after, some Japanese doctors looked at 400 patients aged more than 20. Now of course, taller people have bigger ears, and the British hadn’t taken account of this. But the Japanese were a bit more clever with their statistics, and found that, even allowing for this effect, older people still had bigger ears.

Well of course, national pride was at stake. Surprisingly, it was two doctors from Belgium and Holland who counter-attacked with some even more clever statistics, which they published in the 1996 Christmas Issue of The British Medical Journal. They went back and re-analysed the original data which had started off the whole debate. They found that there was, in this sample of 206 English patients, a strange seven-year cycle in ear growth. When the people in the study were 35, 42, 49 and 56 years old, their ears grew at around 1.5 mm per year. And in the years in the middle of the 7-year cycle, the ears actually shrank! - which seems ridiculous!

At this stage, I began to think that they had used very powerful statistical engines on a very small sample size, and come up with complete garbage - for example, they didn’t mention how many in the sample were women who wore heavy earrings! I can hardly wait for the next Christmas Issue of the British Medical Journal - and until then, like the Chinese Emperors of old, I’ll keep my ear to the ground!

REFERENCES
James A. Heathcote, ‘Why do old men have big ears?’, British Medical Journal, 23 - 30 December 1995, p 1668.
‘Prominent ears: a Celtic perspective’, British Medical Journal, Vol. 313, 2 March 1996.
Kay-Tee Khaw et al, ‘The Chinese believe that long ears predict longevity...and that thick ears signify greater wealth’, British Medical Journal, Vol. 313, 2 March 1996.
Yasuhiro Asm et al, ‘Correlation of ear length with age in Japan’, British Medical Journal, Vol. 313, 2 March 1996.
R.M. Hardisty, ‘Lifelong follow up study of young people is needed’, British Medical Journal, Vol. 313, 2 March 1996.
Jos Verhulst & Patrick Onghena, ‘Circaseptennial rhythm in ear growth’, British Medical Journal, 21 - 28 December 1996, pp 1597 - 1598.
Copyright© 1996 Encyclopaedia Britannica (CD-ROM), Inc. All rights Reserved.
‘A Bland World’, Fortean Times, May 1997, p 19.

Originally Posted by kingwilly

and is it true ur ears get more hairy?

Yes. I would've thought that you would've noticed it by now. It seemed to start when I passed 30.

What the hell are you talking about ? !

Since we are talking about coffin dodgers...here is one I read on the net.

A new business was opening and one of the owner’s friends wanted to send flowers for the occasion. They arrived at the new business site and the owner read the card; it said “Rest in Peace”.
The owner was angry and called the florist to complain. After he had told the florist of the obvious mistake and how angry he was, the florist said:
“Sir, I’m really sorry for the mistake, but rather than getting angry you should imagine this: somewhere there is a funeral taking place today, and they have flowers with a note saying ‘Congratulations on your new location’.”

Originally Posted by peterpan

I'm getting more quality pussy inches than I have at any time of my life

Does that include the bird who sucked you off in your car?

oh, sorry that was your friends wife wasnt it

Originally Posted by peterpan

and fvcking loving it

you might well be, are they?

Another coffin dodger !





"Cremated son" turns up alive

LONDON (Reuters) - A mother cremated a body she thought was that of her dead son, only for him to turn up alive later, police said on Friday. Gina Partington's 37-year-old son Thomas Dennison was reported missing last month and a body was found in Rusholme, Manchester, three days later.
The 58-year-old mother, from Urmston, Greater Manchester, formally identified the body as that of her son and, following an inquest, the body was cremated on October 30.
But police had actually found Dennison, living rough in Nottingham, four days earlier.
The case has been referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission to discover why Partington was not told of her son's discovery in the days before she attended the cremation.
Inquiries are continuing to formally establish the identity of the body, but Greater Manchester police said they believe they know who he is.
Next of kin have been informed.
Police said in a statement: "This set of circumstances is clearly distressing and urgent inquiries are ongoing to establish how this happened."

Just checked out another well-known forum and found these ears which apparently belong to some old geezer called "Bangkok Phil"

I think my nose is growing. This could be because of age, or because unbeknownst to myself, I am actually Pinocchio and lie far too much.