51–60 of 154 posts
TIL that even if you study longevity for 10+ years, you're never allowed to share anecdotes (or god forbid, close with a joke) ever again unless you're prepared to be crucified by twentysomething pseudo-experts in Silicon Valley.
The easiest way to live past 100? Use your father's birth certificate.
It's easy to imagine. You've got six months to live. You move to a place where you won't run into people you know. You reconnect with relatives and childhood friends. You realize you could transfer your identity to a brother or friend and hand off your pension/social-security. Or avoid inheritance tax. Your wife and parents agree.
You die and are buried overlooking the blue Mediterranean. There's a small ceremony. The sun is shining. Life goes on.
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Not to mention the fact, that the man could've been simply misdiagnosed. It was 60s after all...
It's always possible of course, but from the article: As he recalls, nine other doctors confirmed the diagnosis. So if true, chances of a misdiagnosis are pretty slim.
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Qualitative difference between expert with years of experience and twentysomethings lacking any experience justifies it not working both ways.
Are you seriously suggesting that as long as anyone has been working on something for years, that we should accept what he says without looking at it in a critical way? The enlightenment must have passed you by.
One thing that annoys me about software culture in general is how, by virtue of being a programmer, people are also political scientists, economists, biologists, chemists, astronomers, manufacturing experts, doctors, nutritionists, sociologists, anthropologists, and the grand poobah of dismissing speech because of the way it's phrased.
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The other problem with blue zones is, they could just be a statistical blip. It's especially bad when you try to identify things like centurions, or spontaneous remission of cancer - things which are rare are the most prone to statistical blips.
I think you mean centenarians . Centurions were Roman foot soldiers.
Really interesting to see this here on my first morning after beginning my segmented sleep experiment. I took a quarter pill of melatonin yesterday around 6pm and slept from 6:30 till 8:30, then quickly fell asleep again till 11:30. I then failed to fall asleep at 2:30am after a wonderful mellow productive night programming session, and had to skip the second sleep. During the morning I found, completely by chance, s…
Segmented sleep? Melatonin? Maybe it's just my Mediterranean upbringing talking but I think I'll stick with healthy food, good wine, 8 hours sleep, and surrounding myself with people I like.
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It's always possible of course, but from the article: As he recalls, nine other doctors confirmed the diagnosis. So if true, chances of a misdiagnosis are pretty slim.
He also recalls being 5 years older than his birth certificate says.
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Qualitative difference between expert with years of experience and twentysomethings lacking any experience justifies it not working both ways.
Are you seriously suggesting that as long as anyone has been working on something for years, that we should accept what he says without looking at it in a critical way? The enlightenment must have passed you by.
It's just possible that a twenty something may not have spent as much time making bad judgements as a forty something. At forty you will look at your twenty year old self and wonder how you could have been such an idiot even though at that time you would have thought all the forty somethings were idiots.
It happens in parent-child relationships all the time. Every teenager thinks he's smarter than his parents. The parents have experience on their side. Wait till the teenager becomes a parent. Now that's enlightenment.
Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies. Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense. The weight of evidence suggests that, if anything, ingested antioxidant…
Unsophisticated people read an article like this and think: Gosh, I better eat honey for breakfast! People a little more sophisticated think: Hey, this is anecdotal evidence! Yeah, we know that. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article? Is it not at least a source of ideas for things to investigate further?
The problem with the middlebrow dismissal is that it's a magnet for upvotes. The "U R a fag"s get downvoted and end up at the bottom of the page where they cause little trouble. But this sort of comment rises to the top. Things have now gotten to the stage where I flinch slightly as I click on the "comments" link, bracing myself for the dismissive comment I know will be waiting for me at the top of the page.