Hopefully, they won’t let that go to their heads. :-D

Good post. Personally, I think the site gets the balance about right. It can’t be easy.

With regards life extension, I think the role of the mind is too often underplayed. It’s possible to think yourself into an early grave, just as it’s possible to think yourself into a long life. Of course, mental faculties diminish with age and it is the fight against this decline that (barring cures for cancer) I believe will have the biggest initial impact on life extension.

I have a friend who’s a spritely 87 – he is still curious about the world and marvels at all the modern scientific advances. His outlook on life is inspirational. One of his favourite sayings is: “Why worry?”

I’m sure genetics, diet & environment are important factors, but I wonder just how much of their importance is in simply maintaining a healthy mind, and thereby a healthy outlook.

The book “Timeless Mind, Ageless Body” is a bit hokey, but has useful information about the connection between our perceptions and aging.

That’s one reason I’m still teaching after 47 years.

jp

This newsletter was so good at this task that I cancelled my subscription to “Science News” within the first 6 months of reading this newsletter.

I prefer that the KurzweilAI staff NOT invest their time in attempting to rewrite original articles better than the original researchers and authors. I am sure that all people involved are reasonably competent and intelligent, so duplicating their work would seem to be wasted effort. That the editors provide a way for us to “drill down” into the actual articles and source material, should we be interested, is an unnecessary, but much appreciated, convenience!

The main service I look for this newsletter to provide is that of selection of material. And by that I mean alerting us to the most important breakthroughs of the day, while filtering out and protecting us from the unimportant, and often repetitive, chaff.

My advice to the editor would be as follows: If you are going to err, err on the side of leaving out one article too many. After all, that only means that we must wait a few days longer to encounter that single piece of material in the commercial media. But to include one unimportant article too many every day means that many many person-hours will be invested in wading through lots more stuff every day.

Or, worse yet, we look at a long list of articles, perceive their reading represents too large a time investment “for today,” and elect, instead, to skip reading any of the newsletter “today.”

I am reminded of this situation: When I worked at Apple many moons ago, contract technical writers were hired via a standard contract which paid them by the word. I wanted our team to build a product which was as convenient as possible for the customer to install. This meant the shorter the accompanying documentation was (but which still communicated everything necessary), the better. (As Einstein said, “We must make it as simple as possible, but no simpler.”) I wanted my writers to invest a significant portion of their time REDUCING the length of their product. (At the time, it was a crazy idea antithetical to past endeavors.) Luckily, I managed to get a new writer’s contract accepted by management, and I am sure it has subsequently saved time for many of us.

I see the KurzweilAI Newsletter editor and staff in a similar situation. In most jobs, journalists have been rewarded to some extent for the length of their publications. In this job, I suggest that “shorter is better.”

I hope this is perceived in the humble and constructive spirit which it has been offered.

Thank you.

If that means being lazy, than this isn’t something bad but a synonym for being practical.

For legal copyright reasons, we do use more than the standard “fair use” 150 words in excerpts.

“It just went away,” he said. “I actually went back to America about 25 years after moving here to see if the doctors could explain it to me.”

I had heard this part of the story before. It had become a piece of the folklore of Ikaria, proof of its exceptional way of life. Still, I asked him, “What happened?”

“My doctors were all dead.”