Personal update, with lots of parentheses

First a huge THANK YOU to the four people who worked all night and then all day to bring LJ back up.

Work ate my life for a few days there--it was not a big deal or especially unpleasant, but I did have to prioritize, and LJ writing wasn't on the list. (What was on the list: don't take out stress at home, do the dishes every night, and keep taking care of skin. ( grr )

) There were also some anticlimactic moments... I decided not to buy a new computer right now, and I also decided not to keep going to dahn yoga, after hearing their pitch for what my next step would be if I stayed with them. ( Read more... )

So, on both counts, I'll save my $$$ for the moment.

(Speaking of $$$, Politic Frog has changed us all over from bimonthly paychecks to every-two-weeks paychecks, and suddenly I'm not smart enough to figure out my budget. Anyone else get paid this way? How do you deal?)

Yesterday was sort of the first day I had my life back, and I spent a large part of it at bluechromis' place. I had a ton of fun going down her bookshelf going I gave her that one, I borrowed that one a while back, hey, that's my copy that she (or he) is borrowing. *grin* And it was also fun to play Apples to Apples, which I've been wanting to try forever. And then there was J's pulled pork pie and the giant ding-dong cake. All in all a great weekend kickoff. Now to decide what to cook for my guests for tomorrow night!

Who wants to live forever?

An article in Technology Review pissed me off on Friday night, so yesterday I wrote them an editorial.

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Sherwin Nuland ("Do You Want to Live Forever?", February '05) may have reason to conclude that Aubrey de Grey is "nuts", but in his concluding speculations about de Grey and "the end of days" he does not come across as convincingly sane himself. In addition, his assumption that society at large would not desire immortality treatments is just as unexamined as de Grey's assumption that it would.

Some of the space given to Nuland's philosophy of dying at the end of a "natural" lifespan should have been spent describing his reasons for holding that philosophy. The article as written simply illuminates the unsupported opinions of two men--and in the absence of good reasons not to, yes, I still want to live forever.

--flexagon, MIT '9x

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The author of the article was sanctimonious in the extreme about his willingness to be shoved off the island when his cells tell him to: I should declare here that I have no desire to live beyond the life span that nature has granted to our species. For reasons that are pragmatic, scientific, demographic, economic, political, social, emotional, and secularly spiritual, I am committed to the notion that both individual fulfillment and... life on this planet are best served by dying when our inherent biology decrees that we do.

Er... that's nice, but what if I'm not impressed by your listing of big words? What if I want to know your actual reasons? What if, just maybe, I have no particular idea what you're talking about, and at this point just think you sound like an insufferable prig?

I've already given away that I want to live forever, selfish little flexagon that I am. ( I can definitely see problems associated with greatly increased longevity, but the upsides... yum. )

What do you think? Discuss.