Within a few decades, we might reasonably expect to have extended life to 150 years or more – the first human to live to 1,000 may have already been born. But, does death give meaning to our lives? Where do we go from here?

Developments in a number of scientific disciplines suggest that we may soon be able to increase life expectancies from the 70- to 80-year range already seen in the richest countries to well over 100 and, perhaps, to over 1,000. We shall, in one sense, have made ourselves immortal.

We shall not be immortal in the sense that we cannot die; plainly we could still be killed in a car accident or by a cosmic event such as an asteroid striking the Earth. But we could not be killed by disease or age, our bodies would be immune to infection, dysfunction or the ravages of time. We would be medically immortal.

Some say this will happen quickly within, perhaps, 30 years with the first clear signs that we are on the right track appearing within the next decade. Others think we are at least a century or two away from attaining medical immortality. Some consider it completely unattainable. But the majority of scientists and thinkers in this area now consider life extension and even medical immortality possible and likely.

Not long ago, most would have said it was out of the question, that death at or well before the absolute maximum age of something like 122 was inevitable. (…)

Our relatively brief lives and our routine proximity to the deaths of ourselves and others are the foundations of everything we have ever thought or believed. Neither religion nor philosophy necessarily promises immortality, but each offers ways of coming to terms with or giving meaning to death and, therefore, life. If death is to be postponed indefinitely, then both religion and philosophy face fundamental crises. (…)

The gerontologist Steven Austad calculated that a medical immortal would have a life expectancy of 1,200 years. Austadhas also bet US$500 million that somebody living in 2001 will still be alive and sentient in 2150; it is a wager he says he is ‘feeling very good about’.

{ Cosmos Magazine | Continue reading }

photo { Helen Levitt, New York, 1972 }

{ Example showing how the date would reset at 03:14:08 UTC on 19 January 2038 | the year 2038 problem (also known as “Y2K38,” by analogy to the Y2K problem) may cause some computer software to fail before or in the year 2038. The problem affects Unix-like operating systems, which represent system time as the number of seconds | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

previously { We’re gonna have a Y10K problem here }

photo { Jacob Holdt | scanned from United States 1970-1975 }

related { Exact time now: US Naval Observatory Master Clock Time }

A year contains 365.242199 days. That’s why we have leap years, to compensate for the extra 0.242199 days.

Prior to 1582, the year was approximated as 365.25 days (instead of 365.242199). And every year divisible by 4 was a leap year. Big mistake! said Pope Gregory XIII. Because 365.25 days per year is not 365.242199 days per year… it gives an error of 1 day in approximately 128 years…

So in 1582, the Pope and his mob noticed that an error of ten days had accumulated over the centuries.

To make up for this error, Pope Gregory XIII decreed that that year the ten days between October 5 and October 14, 1582 would be removed from the calendar.

Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, adopted the reform when Pope Gregory proclaimed it (and skipped from October 4 to October 15). France skipped from December 9, 1582 to December 20, 1582, Denmark and Flanders skipped from December 25, 1582 to January 5, 1583.

The Church of England waited almost two centuries before considering changing the calendar. The British Empire (Great Britain and American Colonies) adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, by skipping from September 2 to September 14 (by that time, 11 days had to be added).

Correcting for the extra 0.242199 days each year requires 96.8796 days (400 x 0.242199) every 400 years. The Gregorian Calendar provides for a correction of 97 days (97 leap years) every 400 years. After 1582, years divisible by 100 are not leap years unless they are also divisible by 400. Thus, 1900 is not a leap year, but 2000 is.

{ About the Gregorian Calendar | The Gregorian Conversion | Calendar for September 1752 }

Humans are built to last. Rats, not so much. A newly discovered body clock apparently ticks much faster in rats, snuffing out their lives tens of years earlier than humans.

This biological rhythm, which tends to cut short the lives of smaller animals and let big creatures live longer, should apply to all mammals, said researcher Timothy Bromage, a dental professor at New York University.

Bromage discovered the rhythm while looking at growth lines in tooth enamel and skeletal bones in rats, medium-sized monkeys and humans.

Unlike circadian rhythms, which follow a relatively strict 24-hour cycle and coordinate sleep-wake stints, the new biological clock ticks to a different beat depending upon the animal. In general, the clock operates on shorter time intervals for small mammals and longer ones for larger animals. For rats, every day meant a new growth ring, while the monkeys followed a four-day interval and humans showed eight-day patterns.

The same biological rhythm that controls tooth and bone growth also determines body processes, such as heart and respiration rates, Bromage said.

“In fact, the rhythm affects an organism’s overall pace of life, and its life span,” Bromage said. “So, a rat that grows teeth and bone in one-eighth the time of a human also lives faster and dies younger.”

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

{ motion clock screensaver | Dropclock }

The time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock. The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions. In the space of an hour, we can accomplish a great deal — or very little.

Inner time is linked to activity. When we do nothing, and nothing happens around us, we’re unable to track time. In 1962, Michel Siffre, a French geologist, confined himself in a dark cave and discovered that he lost his sense of time. Emerging after what he had calculated were 45 days, he was startled to find that a full 61 days had elapsed.

To measure time, the brain uses circuits that are designed to monitor physical movement. (…) Inner time can run faster or slower depending upon how we move our bodies — as any Tai Chi master knows. (…)

The brain’s inclination to distort time is one reason we so often feel we have too little of it. One in three Americans feels rushed all the time, according to one survey. Even the cleverest use of time-management techniques is powerless to augment the sum of minutes in our life (some 52 million, optimistically assuming a life expectancy of 100 years), so we squeeze as much as we can into each one.

Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash. Tasks take longer. We make mistakes. (…)

Studies have shown the alarming extent of the problem: office workers are no longer able to stay focused on one specific task for more than about three minutes, which means a great loss of productivity.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

I started playing the cello when I was nine. And ever since, I have worried about time compression diseconomies. Yes really. I didn’t know they were called time compression diseconomies, but I did worry about them.

As a child, I used to have cello lessons on Saturday morning. I would play a certain piece in front of my teacher and then she would give me a new piece to practise for the next week.

Some weeks, I practised for half an hour on Sunday, then half an hour on Monday, the same on Tuesday, etc., so that when my next lesson would be up, I would have practised for a total of three hours (6 days; half an hour each). And I usually would be able to play the piece in front of my teacher reasonably well.

Some weeks, however, I did not practise on Sunday because I was out playing football. On Monday, I was at the Boy scouts, on Tuesday playing at a friend’s house, on Wednesday I forgot about it altogether, and so on. By the time it was Friday, I would realise, “oops, it’s my cello lesson tomorrow, and I haven’t practised at all yet…!”

What then I would usually do, is think, “I will just practise for three hours in a row now; that’s the same amount of time as half an hour each day for six days, and I am sure I will be fine”. But I never was…. It never worked. The noises coming out of my cello would be outright terrifying. (…)

We call this “time compression diseconomies” – a term cornered by professors Dierickx and Cool from INSEAD. When you, as an organisation, try to compress lots of effort and growth into a short period, it will not be as effective as when you spread it out over a longer period of time (which is why we call them “diseconomies”).


{ Freek Vermeulen | Continue reading }

related { violin hickey: a mark left on the neck from playing the violin }

For decades, conventional wisdom has held that daylight-saving time, which begins March 9, reduces energy use. But a unique situation in Indiana provides evidence challenging that view: daylight-saving time may actually waste energy.

{ Enlarge }

Up until two years ago, only 15 of Indiana’s 92 counties set their clocks an hour ahead in the spring and an hour back in the fall. The rest stayed on standard time all year, in part because farmers resisted the prospect of having to work an extra hour in the morning dark. But many residents came to hate falling in and out of sync with businesses and residents in neighboring states and prevailed upon the Indiana Legislature to put the entire state on daylight-saving time beginning in the spring of 2006.

Indiana’s change of heart gave University of California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant a unique way to see how the time shift affects energy use. Using more than seven million monthly meter readings from Duke Energy Corp., covering nearly all the households in southern Indiana for three years, they were able to compare energy consumption before and after counties began observing daylight-saving time. (…)

Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading | graphic by The New York Times }

Pretty soon, on March 9, we’ll all change our clocks one hour forward to change from standard to daylight-savings time. An absolutely pure misnomer, daylight savings time is nevertheless, to my mind, the greatest success story of mass psychological control there ever has been. Just imagine if the government put out some sort of strongly worded encouragement that everyone needs to get up an hour earlier, starting Monday, and should continue to do so for the next eight months, so as to save energy and have a little more time in the evening when it’s light out. I imagine not many people would comply.

But, what they do instead is to say, “okay, starting early Sunday morning, it will suddenly be an hour later on your clock for the next eight months!” And, magically, just about everyone complies…it’s breathtaking, actually.

But what time is it really? This week, on February 29 we have a Leap Day, a once-every-four-years event. Actually, it’s not once every four years; we skip it every hundred years, except we don’t skip it every four hundred years. That is, 2000 was a leap year, but 1900, 1800, 1700 etc. were not. We’ve been doing this since 1582 when Pope Gregory introduced the new calendar.

{ Cosmic Variance | Continue reading }

A year contains 365.242199 days. That’s why we have leap years, to compensate for the extra 0.242199 days.

Prior to 1582, the year was approximated as 365.25 days (instead of 365.242199). And every year divisible by 4 was a leap year. Big mistake! said Pope Gregory XIII. Because 365.25 days per year is not 365.242199 days per year… it gives an error of 1 day in approximately 128 years…

So in 1582, the Pope and his mob noticed that an error of ten days had accumulated over the centuries.

To make up for this error, Pope Gregory XIII decreed that that year the ten days between October 5 and October 14, 1582 would be removed from the calendar.

{ Continue reading }

The biggest lows of our lives are experienced in middle age, according to new research that concludes that Britons are at their most depressed aged 44.

Scientists believe that although we are closer to death as pensioners and powerless in youth, it is the “reality check” years of our 40s that are the most depressing.

In one of the biggest surveys into human happiness and mental health ever conducted, more than two million people - including a million in Britain - were interviewed by researchers from the University of Warwick and Dartmouth College in America.

They found overwhelming evidence that happiness was U-shaped over life, bottoming out in middle age. It did not matter whether the subject interviewed was a millionaire banker or a poorly-paid manual worker; man or woman; single or married with children; the result was generally the same.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

On this perfect day, when everything has become ripe and not only the grapes are growing brown, a ray of sunlight has fallen on to my life: I looked behind me, I looked before me, never have I seen so many and such good things together. Not in vain have I buried my forty-fourth year today. I was entitled to bury it — what there was of life in it is rescued, is immortal. (…)

The happiness of my existence, its unique character perhaps, lies in its fatefulness.

{ Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 1888 }

Is time travel possible?

If it were possible, the people of the future would have done it; and if they did, why haven’t they shown up yet?

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }