>> ^dag:

Pretty cool technology, but like it or not - paper books are on their way out. Sometimes, you think that an industry is in its twilight - and it's really not. A good example would be movie theatres.
Something about sitting in a big dark room with lots of strangers while munching over-priced popcorn - it's an experience we don't want to lose. Prognosticators have been trumpeting the doom of cinemas since the VCR - but it turns out, it's not going to happen.
Similarly, those same sages are now telling us that the end is nigh for bookstores. In this case, I'd agree. Bookstores and paper books don't offer enough of a distinction or an improvement over buying a Kindle copy. You're buying something to read at home anyway - not to consume in a bookstore, so so much better to just download it with a single click. Verily, I say - bookstore, the bell tones for thee.


Well put but I disagree. Most avid readers I've spoken to still prefer the tactile feel of a paper book to the electronic versions and until there is digital format standardization across marketing platforms, adoption will be slower. Also there is the question of longevity that people quickly ignore with digital formats.

If I buy a book its possible for generations of my family to read it or own it. Like all other digital based technologies, there is no certainty of being able to keep a kindle book or ibook forever. If the format changes, the technology evolves, or formats are just not supported it will be more noticeable with books than it has been with movies and music.

With movies and music new media and formats have meant improved quality and functionality, so people are willing to repurchase for improved experiences. It is unlikely that books will have this added benefit as things progress and so convincing people to repurchase would be hard. This is where format standardization becomes key because you cant have an open standard or solution to longevity in a fractured market.

E-books are where music was when almost all digital music was in Real player format (or smaller competitors), it didn't fully explode until the open ended formats (mp3) became the standard. Once one of the more open e-book formats takes hold and e-readers become accessible to the vast majority of demographics...then maybe you can start to gauge if books will survive.

PS I'm curious if this machine or things like it would be embraced by higher education, for the purpose of printed materials they use now and perhaps to replace the scam that is college text book purchasing.

Love his acoustic stuff - goes to prove he's got the talent and deserves the longevity he's enjoyed all these years.

This program makes a bold point about hormone and chemical levels being much more strongly correlated with longevity than is likely to be the case. There are a lot of other factors that contribute to premature aging and susceptibility to certain illnesses and diseases, diet, exercise, and lifestyle among them.

To be sure, fasting is probably not a terrible idea for most of those of us who have been brought up eating a Western diet. There's probably something to be said for the human body failing to evolve quickly enough to adapt to the continuous supply of sugary, salty, and fatty foods on a nearly 24/7/365 basis -- rather than the feast/famine environment during the first million years of its evolution... But a switch to eating real foods, not too much, and mostly vegetables is clearly a good way to go.

perverted, or enlightened!?

"Reporter Ye Yunfeng's amazing rediscovery of Emperor Qin Shi Huang's secret to longevity -- the taisui lingzhi mushroom -- has spurred local entrepreneurship and spawned a whole new industry.
One very enterprising street cleaner who makes additional income by hawking things off the street is now passing off artificial vajayjays as the long lost magic mushroom, and selling them for as much as 18,000RMB (US$2,800)!"

http://shanghaiist.com/2012/06/21/artificial-vajayjay-mushroom-seller.php

"...while looking for the secret to longevity found this herb to be one of its important ingredients."

What next, compacted hair off a rhinos nose?

Interesting... I should see the movie.

I think the worst criticism that can be leveled against Kurzweil is that his timeframe might be off, but that, yes, we'll eventually be doing all these things.

In the meantime, if we can maximize our chances of living until, for example, 2070, it seems to be a reasonable speculation that even greater longevity will be possible at that point (if not earlier, as Kurzweil believes).

I remember at a Christmas family get-together telling my sister that aging will probably eventually be cured, and there was an awkward moment when it was clear that I was referring to our generation and not the older generation of family members who were in the same room

Biography
Dr. Gerald Curatola graduated from Colgate University in 1979 and received his dental education from New York University College of Dentistry. After graduating in 1983, Dr. Curatola returned to join the teaching faculty in both the Division of Prosthodontic Science and Post-Graduate Department of Continuing Education from 1984-1995. Dr. Curatola also served on the hospital staffs of both New York University and Cabrini Medical Centers in New York City. As a researcher in dental materials and national lecturing clinician in the field of Restorative and Cosmetic Dentistry, Dr. Curatola has worked with many dental manufacturers including the Den-Mat, Kerr, Siemens, Brasseler, Colgate, and Oral-B Companies.

In a joint effort with the Jamaican Government and the Peace Corps, Dr. Curatola performed voluntary dentistry on the island of Jamaica, West Indies in 1982. He continued to volunteer his services to the Bowery Mission in New York City from 1985-1995. Since 1996, Dr. Curatola currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Pediatric Dental Fund of the Hamptons (PDF) whose mission is to provide voluntary dental services to indigent children on the East End of Long Island.

Dr. Curatola has maintained private dental practices in both Manhattan and East Hampton. In 1986, he established the Curatola Dental Group, a restorative and cosmetic dental practice in New York City. After settling his permanent residence in East Hampton, he founded East Hampton Dental Associates, a multi-specialty practice in 1999. Dr. Curatola continues to consult for several major dental corporations in the United States and Europe and lectures internationally on the techniques and benefits of new treatment modalities especially natural, therapeutic approaches to building dental health. He is Cofounder and Chairman of C.S.Bioscience, Inc., a dental biotech company which has developed and patented a nutritional- homeopathic oral care formula (NuPath TM Complexes).

Dr. Curatola has authored numerous articles on dentistry and health including a recent chapter on dental health for the book entitled, "Live Long, Look Young" by Lisa Trivell. Dr. Curatola is currently writing a book entitled "Smile for a Lifetime- An Integrative Look at the Role Your Dental Health Plays in Wellness and Longevity."

http://www.easthamptondental.com/curatola.htm

Beck is profitable, so his longevity will probably depend on the willingness of businesses to buy commercial slots during his show.

I doubt Fox will drop him otherwise unless he does something unusually stupid.

But..some people want to keep who they love with them as long as they can.
Good care naturally causes that to happen. Just like in human history.
>> ^entr0py:
but we don't need to optimize the longevity of dogs, just give them good lives while they're around.

This could all be solved by feeding dogs the diet they evolved for, garbage. Grey wolves were already not at all picky eaters, but over 15,000 years of domestication dogs have become quite omnivorous. An all table-scrap diet would have been completely ordinary for a dog in the US a century ago, and is still what most dogs worldwide eat. I doubt it's quite as balanced as commercial dog food, but we don't need to optimize the longevity of dogs, just give them good lives while they're around.

Agreed. More meaningful comparisons would involve factors that directly influence longevity, like health care, medicine, nutrition and pollution.

Countries with socialized medicine like Japan, Switzerland, Australia, France, the UK and Canada rank much higher than the US when it comes to life expectancy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

Also, I added a book that blankfist should read.

@blankfist you have a unique talent for packing a huge number of factual errors and logical fallacies into so few words.

SS is solvent for 50 years according to every study done by organizations without a particular political axe to grind.

The commitment of SS is still on the books, and I fully intend to make sure that people like yourself don't try to force the government to break it.

People who put their money in 401k or IRA's and retired in the last few years lost their shirts, while their social security checks kept coming on time.

As for a Ponzi scheme, that's when you offer an investment that gives an impossibly high return (15% or something higher), and you pay the dividends with the money from new people coming into the system. It's completely unsustainable, because you've committed to a permanent, compounding return, and there's always going to be a finite number of new customers you can attract.

In social security, you're giving a fixed benefit to people until they die, while every new entrant to the workforce is automatically going to pay into the system. It does need some tweaking of the benefit/tax balance from time to time if you have population growth spikes (or crashes), but you have 65 years to deal with the problem before it becomes a crisis.

You'd only need major changes if something drastic happened, like someone inventing a longevity treatment that suddenly raised life expectancy from 75 to 375, or if a virus rendered 75% of the population infertile. Even so, the system could be rebalanced to deal even with extreme scenarios like those.

The only real threat to its stability is a political movement that seeks to break the system, either directly by phasing it out, or indirectly by refusing any attempt to raise taxes to maintain the commitment.

>> ^ForgedReality:
Sorry, I can't agree. What was it that you enjoyed most about the gameplay? Or was it just the setting?
For me, I dunno. Nothing really ever jumped out at me that made me want to play it. It felt kind of "meh." I just couldn't get as into it as some people apparently could. I tried, but certain things really bothered me, like the annoyingly typical Unreal Engine graphics (AA issues, "everything is shiny" syndrome, etc), incredibly weak feeling weapons that seemed like they should have had a lot more impact on your enemies, the repetitiveness of the single player experience...
I'll admit, at first, the visuals and the atmosphere were kind of cool, but that all quickly melted away for me because it just didn't feel all that fun. I think a lot of the longevity it had was due to impractical things like collecting tapes and stuff for background information--the kind of thing that had no bearing on the actual game itself.

The gameplay was nothing exceptional, but definitely better than games like Fallout 3. And I totally understand when things like technical issues or how the gameplay "feels" can ruin a game. Also I agree that there is a lot of repetitiveness. The repetitiveness, however, stems from the limited variety of enemies that you fought - and not from repetitive level design as in the first Halo game.

Like I said, I never considered the gunplay to be a strength of Bioshock, and those negative aspects that you mentioned never really bothered me. For me, the setting was always the real star of the show. From lush underwater rainforests, to the opulent decadence of the operahouse, to the run down squalor of the underwater slums, no one has ever put together such a spectacular cast of locales with such believable fidelity. And each locale has its own story to tell - told through flashbacks and journals - of how it was twisted into the macabre and fallen vision that you see before you. Throwing you in alone into this creepy and hostile world, run by a powerful and malevolent madman, created a sense of danger and desperation evoked by great survival horror games like System Shock 2.

For me, Bioshock was one of the few games that managed to transcend the limitations of gaming and provided an interactive experience.

>> ^mentality:

>> ^ForgedReality:
WOW GREAT GAMEPLAY.. oh wait.
Anyway, both Bioshock games were average at best, and in my eyes, rather mediocre. Incredibly overrated, and not really all that fun. The only thing they had going for them was the somewhat original setting, but when you boil it down, it's really just a glorified shooter with less-than-stellar gameplay running on a shitty engine.
I don't expect this one will do much in the way of improvement. We'll see though, I guess.

I felt that the setting and the atmosphere that they created was amazing. The uniqueness, consistency, and execution of their vision makes it easily one of the best single player FPS games ever.
Personally, I'd probably rank it above Half-Life 1+2 and Deus Ex (I prefer Bioshock's setting more), and alongside Portal and System Shock 2 as the best singleplayer FPS experiences that I've ever played.


Sorry, I can't agree. What was it that you enjoyed most about the gameplay? Or was it just the setting?

For me, I dunno. Nothing really ever jumped out at me that made me want to play it. It felt kind of "meh." I just couldn't get as into it as some people apparently could. I tried, but certain things really bothered me, like the annoyingly typical Unreal Engine graphics (AA issues, "everything is shiny" syndrome, etc), incredibly weak feeling weapons that seemed like they should have had a lot more impact on your enemies, the repetitiveness of the single player experience...

I'll admit, at first, the visuals and the atmosphere were kind of cool, but that all quickly melted away for me because it just didn't feel all that fun. I think a lot of the longevity it had was due to impractical things like collecting tapes and stuff for background information--the kind of thing that had no bearing on the actual game itself.

A short excerpt from Galton's work on the efficacy of prayer.

"In one statistical study, Galton examined data from a previous study by Guy on longevity. Galton first focused on clergy. He reasoned that clergy should be the longest lived of all since they were the most “prayerful class” of all and among the most prayed for. When Galton compared the longevity of eminent clergy with eminent doctors and lawyers, the clergy were the shortest lived of the three groups. Galton next focused on royalty, who were much prayed for, when compared to other members of the aristocracy. In analyzing the data on royalty, Galton concluded: “Sovereigns are literally the shortest lived of all who have the advantage of affluence.”

I am sure there are genuine feelings in there, but really this is just a publicity stunt, using a dieing man's misfortune for the benefit of a church - made possible by the fact he knows peoples heartstrings will be moved by this breaking news, and that they will be more open to 'suggestion'. The suggestion in this case being that when he says "pray for Christopher" - people will instantly make the assumption that this will help because they are judgmentally impaired.

Why do I say this?
If he were truly speaking as a friend, he wouldn't be standing in front of a sign with the name of his organisation
He wouldn't spend half the video talking about his own beliefs/agenda
He wouldn't need to talk about specific speaking dates his organisation is committed to
The video wouldn't begin with a splash screen and intro music for the foundation (an advert in effect) and also end with a splash screen
He would give his name (that would be reasonable) but he would not introduce himself as the "Executive Director"
The video wouldn't pan out at the start to show all of the Latimer House signage
He wouldn't repeat the name of his foundation and the house multiple times
He wouldn't talk about a debate that he is "scheduled to moderate" (more shameless self promotion)
His facial expressions when he says "wouldn't that be nice" (referring to Christopher debating on the pro-Christian side) are very typical of the salesman "puppy-dog" tactics to try and win empathy from the person you are trying to convince to buy your product (I have the empathy face, you can't help but love me!). He thinks the video's audience is too stupid to realize what he is doing.
He says "we... wish him the very best" - if he was speaking as a friend he would say "I". He cleverly uses "we" so that everyone in his organisation feels as if they are being spoken for and they don't feel like they need to think or speak for themselves.
He wouldn't try to sneak in the "to what extent does Christopher really believe some of the things he says" - this one speaks for itself it is just a really low blow.
His body language and demeanor is shifty as hell, he rarely looks at the camera for more than a few seconds, when he is trying to say something personal he often looks away from the camera.
At the end, it sounds like he says "we hope you'll bury him in mind" - LOL - Freudian slip mayhaps?

Christopher, you never took the blue pill, I think you define a lot of what is right about humanity, you left your mark on a lot of people, you made a difference. I hope your cancer is operational, if not, maybe we will see you as a zombie clown one day.