I’m lucky enough to already have a geeky gf, but these are just good tips in general. My favorite one:
Be able to have interesting conversations on any topic. This doesn’t mean that you have to be an expert in everything, but be willing to discuss unusual topics. Know nothing about fossils? Be willing to have her teach you what she knows, and ask relevant questions. If you try to learn something new each day, you’ll always have something new to talk about.
Charles Bamforth found that the beer’s silicon content ranged from 6.4 milligrams per liter to 56.5 milligrams per liter, with an average of about 30 milligrams. Since two pints of beer are just about equal to one liter, drinking two beers at happy hour could provide 30 milligrams of silicon. And while there is no official recommendation for daily silicon uptake, the researchers say, in the United States, individuals consume between 20 and 50 mg of silicon each day [LiveScience]. Light lagers and non-alcoholic beers not only lack flavor, they showed the lowest silicon content in Bamforth’s study. The ultra-hoppy India pale ales came in first.
While Bamforth happily reported his findings about silicon content, the study didn’t claim any link between beer drinking and bone health, which silicon supports.
Now, I am aware that the healthiest thing is a balanced diet with everything in moderation and probably a vegetable or two wouldn’t kill me either, but I enjoy beer and just am not a wine drinker (yet, come on resveratrol-fortified shiraz) so I am going to reject my better judgment and use this as an excuse to feel a bit less guilty when indulging in a Magic Hat #9.
And by old, I mean in their 30’s (not there yet, I’m safe!). A brutally accurate summary of what lies in wait for me in the coming decade:
Some oldsters don’t even bother trying to outwit the kids with age and experience. “As you get older, your want to be schooled by a 15-year-old supergamer disappears,” says game writer Chet Faliszek, who works for Valve and worked on Left 4 Dead. “You know you can’t beat him.”
Faliszek says that many older gamers gather on the forums of his company’s Steam service to start private matches in Left 4 Dead, a cooperative shooter that forces four friends to work together to survive the zombie apocalypse. Online, it pits players against each other in teams: four humans versus four infected zombies. The situation seems crafted to suit older gamers like myself, who would rather play together than die alone.
That was supposed to be the hook of MAG. The game’s massive battles are meant to bring players together by throwing them into smaller units, each of which is led by a more experienced tactical player.
These leadership roles would seem to be tailor-made for the older gamer, interested more in tactics than being on the front lines. But the job of trying to transform a squadron of teenage strangers into a well-oiled machine must require the patience of a saint — like herding cats, if the cats stopped every so often to call you gay.
Bummer, man. I just hope Portal:2 and Half-Life 3 are out by then.
Researchers are claiming they have pinned down a gene with influence on telomere length and shortening rate:
The scientists have discovered that a variant of the TERC gene determines not only how long the telomeres are when someone is born but also how quickly they shorten.
Prof [Nilesh] Samani, who reported his findings in the Journal Nature Genetics, discovered the variant by comparing the genetic make-up and biological age of more than 10,000 people.
He said: “In this study what we found was that those individuals carrying a particular genetic variant had shorter telomeres i.e. looked biologically older.
“Given the association of shorter telomeres with age-associated diseases, the finding raises the question whether individuals carrying the variant are at greater risk of developing such diseases.”
[“Ageing gene found by scientists could be key to longer lifespans” – The Telegraph via Popsci
Dr. Hughes is back with a new post in his “Problems of Transhumanism” series. The debates that have come out of these postings, both in the comments and in the larger intellectual sphere, make them some of the most productive transhumanist writing this year. Check out his newest “Moral Universalism vs Relativism.” Money quote:
For instance in Citizen Cyborg I argue that just as we currently formally acknowledge the different capacities and rights of adults without violating universalism, we could protect the basic equality of the enhanced and unenhanced while carefully acknowledging their differences. To drive cars, fly planes, possess weapons and hold certain occupations we oblige people to take specific courses of education, testing and licensure, and then subject them to special rules and obligations. It is possible to imagine that some cognitive and physical powers would be so dangerous that we would similarly require licensure for their possession.
My favorite sentence in the whole essay is the end of that paragraph. It consists of thinly-veiled reference to a dictatorship of hillbillies:
Just as people who own monster trucks and automatic weapons have not established themselves as a dictatorial aristocracy in democratic societies careful regulation of enhancements could diminish threats to legal and political equality.
The national anthem would be dueling banjos and the national animal would be a dead opossum. The essay is great, covering everything from animal uplift (and it’s criticisms) to Hume and Burke.
Discovery News has two interesting articles. First, insect AI:
But a small organism doesn’t have so many cells to control and can fit some very elaborate mental circuitry in a pinhead-sized brain.
Several hundred neurons give the ability to count. A few thousand create sentient, and perhaps even sapient, thought. If that’s really the case, then it seems that we’re barking up the wrong tree with cognitive computing concepts and AI projects.
Second, cyborg astronauts. The pros are interesting, but the hearing the cons aired are a breath of fresh air:
Of course there’s a catch. Each of the procedures that would make all this possible would be a) incredibly invasive, b) exorbitantly expensive and c) require decades of highly focused research projects to make it all possible. While the benefits to those who suffered serious trauma to the brain, limbs and spine, or suffering from organ failure would be immense, there may be some serious pause about healthy individuals undergoing this sort of modification for the sake of traveling to other worlds. People who may never walk again without a prosthetic spine or mechanical legs would certainly volunteer for such procedures because being confined to a bed or a wheelchair for the rest of their lives is a far higher cost than the risks involved with the surgery.
When you need to learn how to fold a fitted sheet, what do you do? I YouTube it. Without thinking, I know there will be a video of some nice person showing me how to do this mundane task correctly and neatly. Five years ago, before YouTube existed or broadband was popular, I probably would have called my grandma. She knew everything you could need to know about keeping a home nice, baking, cooking, sewing, and cleaning. She was the kind of grandma that some how managed to make your bed and leave a warm apple pie on your pillow in the 30 seconds it took you to sleep walk to the bathroom and back.
I was talking about this with a friend, and I realized that a significant portion of our generation grew up without learning how to keep a home, or our lessons were incomplete. As an ostensible adult of some sort, I do things like buy tables at IKEA and know the difference between drapes and curtains [insert Tyler Durden quote here]. But I don’t know how to iron slacks or get sweat stains out of my white collars or bake brownies that don’t come in a Betty Crocker box. I don’t know, of course, until I search the internet.
Our grandparents had/have storehouses of useful information about caring for your home, your stuff, and your health (mental and physical), a great encyclopedia of advice given with the occasional off-color joke or crazy story from mid century. Now, their advice is augmented by a series of tubes that tell me how to make chicken salad and more NSFW jokes than I can handle. I’m not saying the internet has replaced my perpetually enraged Polish grandfather or my tiny, impossibly sweet grandmother (think a real life Archie and Edith Bunker), nothing will ever replace them. What I am saying is that for my generation, it seems we’ve come to think of the internet as the source for information that Gen Xers would have gone to their parents or grandparents to get. Our advice from the greatest generation is crowd-sourced and digitized.
Second, guys, I am really sorry about your penises. You know, the ones we took away from you with our book clubs and our vampire TV shows.
Update: Jezebel has a whole article on the sad superbowl dudes too:
Only a few minutes into the 3rd quarter and it was evident that a theme had already emerged, namely, advertisements aimed at emasculated men and the harpies who have sucked the manhood and life out of them. The pattern kicked off with this Snickers/Betty White ad, and I must admit that I laughed the first time I watched it – who wouldn’t laugh at the former Golden Girl yelling, “That’s not what your girlfriend said!” But as the night went on, it became clear that the Snickers spot was the first of many ads starring emasculated males who need to “man up” via various products.
Buzzfeed has got a compendium of the commercials trying to sell us sad men stuff. My favorite good commercial from the night, “The Green Police:”
Pop Transhumanism, written by Kyle Munkittrick, is an effort to study the continuing evolution of the human species via the lens of pop culture and be somewhat entertaining in the process.
Kyle is an NYU Masters student in the John W. Draper Program. His current areas of study are feminism, science studies, and critical theory.
For questions or comments:
kmunkitt-at-gmail-dot-com
Pop Transhumanism | Kyle Munkittrick | 
February 8, 2010 4:55 pm | 
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