Recent Blogs Posts

For several reasons, I sometimes wonder how long humans can live, and I also wonder whether death may be voluntary. In my limited experience, people often seem to have an innate sense for how long they will live, and they are relatively accurate, and that has led me to wonder how long humans can live. There was that Chinese herbalist, Li Ching-Yuen, who lived more than 250 years. And there was Old Tom Parr, an Englishman who lived 152 years. And there are others who were 150 years or older when ...

This is something that I wrote a few months ago and forgot about, but it’s worth the wait.

I don’t worry about it, but as with my questions about the perception of time, I wonder how other people perceive their own aging. There are many signs, both real and illusory, of aging, and they appear at different times in different people’s lives. I have been listening to the Jefferson Airplane recently, and I enjoy their lyrics and sounds more now than I did when they were fresh and new. ...

Aging is a more interesting subject than critical judgment, so I'll forget the other one for now. Have you noticed that some people look old before they hit forty, while others look youthful into their seventies? Even more interesting, some parts of bodies age faster than others. We all know about telomers, but this link tells of methylation of genes, as part of the aging process in addition to stopping the activity of genes, and it also tells of differential aging rates. http://io9.com/scientists-discover-p...ffn-1449085569 ...

When I was a little kid, I had a bag of marbles. We used to play marbles outside in the dirt for hours. Can you imagine kids doing this today? We almost always went outside to play, unless the weather was really bad. I remember one day my friend Bruce Robinson and I climbed up to the top of a couple of young maple trees during a ferocious wind storm. We held on to those thin trees for dear life as the merciless wind buffeted us around. We were both screaming at the top of our lungs in real fear. ...