Don't worry, that will change in a hurry when the boomers start going into nursing homes. There are lots of bedpans that are going to need emptying.

From the summary:

"Emanuel says that Americans seem to be obsessed with exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death and prolong life as long as possible."

Omitting the fad stuff, exercise and eating well improve the length of time you will remain healthy. The quote makes it sound like taking care of yourself will just let you hang on by your fingernails for a little bit longer. The opposite is actually true. Exercise, diet and mental engagement in particular improve health and mental function in old age, not necessarily overall longevity.

If you want to be a healthy octogenarian, take care of yourself now. If you want to be frail and going in for your third bypass operation, don't.

There's actually some decent research on that point. A surprising number of people die very close to the age they expect to, more than can be explained by genetics. The placebo effect is a powerful thing.

I'm convinced I'm immortal, so things might be interesting in forty or fifty years.

Enjoy your life, don't wait for your retirement. I don't see an especially good chance of ever being able to retire. Plus there are a lot of things I want to do while I can comfortably walk for eight hours a day, see, hear and smell well, and take a hit or two.

Because exercising, eating well and being mentally engaged don't help keep you healthy to an older age.

They had observational data from 381 people. The seven are a preliminary study to find the causal direction of the correlation observed in the bigger group. Seven isn't a lot, but it's decent for a preliminary look supporting something seen in a larger group.

Except that it's quite difficult to measure either side of that equation.

Both.

To study the effect of NAS in humans, we examined the relationship between long-term NAS consumption (based on a validated food frequency questionnaire, see Methods) and various clinical parameters in data collected from 381 non-diabetic individuals (44% males and 56% females; age 43.3 ± 13.2) in an ongoing clinical nutritional study. We found significant positive correlations between NAS consumption and several metabolic-syndrome-related clinical parameters

Finally, as an initial assessment of whether the relationship between human NAS consumption and blood glucose control is causative, we followed seven healthy volunteers (5 males and 2 females, aged 28–36) who do not normally consume NAS or NAS-containing foods for 1 week. During this week, participants consumed on days 2–7 the FDA’s maximal acceptable daily intake (ADI) of commercial saccharin

An observational study that people who consume artificial sweeteners tend to be heavier, have lower waist to hip ratios, higher blood glucose, etc. doesn't tell you whether eating artificial sweeteners does that or vice versa. An experiment where you take people and put them on artificial sweeteners does. So they took their observational correlation and did a (preliminary) experiment to find out what direction the causation is.

Sand.

Saccharin, sucralose, aspartame, sucrose and glucose were the primary groups tested. Decreases in glucose tolerance were observed between the artificial sweetener groups and the sugar groups.

As a secondary experiment, they used the saccharin group to investigate the mechanisms because it showed the strongest effect. It's possible that saccharin works by a different mechanism than the others, and I suspect they'll investigate that possibility in the future, but the primary finding applies to all the sweeteners tested.

According to the article, the effect was transferable to other mice via a fecal transplant. So even if your probiotic yogurt happens to contain the right strains (it probably doesn't) then the existing bacteria are likely to just convert the new ones. Of course, if your yogurt is artificially sweetened (many are) then the bacteria are stewing in the artificial sweeteners while on the shelf, which they also showed caused them to change.

What you're describing is a random number generator with a key to initialize it. Some of the good ones might be good enough (or might not). Anything you can keep in your head is going to be crap and fairly easily breakable. Either way, you're still better off to just exchange regular secret keys at your meeting, which can be concealed in a variety of ways. Even real one time pads can be fairly easily concealed - a "blank" USB key, for example.

You didn't say so, but I'm assuming you're encrypting your message using the book page as a one time pad, then obscuring it using steganography. If someone sufficiently motivated were after your criminals, they could break that. Steganography isn't much protection when someone knows there might be hidden messages. And your one time pad, while one time, isn't random. Book pages have quite a bit of structure.

Any structure in a one time pad makes it vulnerable. To the point where people have gone to great lengths to construct them using the best random numbers obtainable, from devices ranging from antennae monitoring the ionosphere to quantum devices.

One time pads have been, and probably are, used extensively. You send a bunch of random data to someone via some secure method, which is usually very slow (like hopping on an airplane with a DVD full of random numbers on your person). You can then exchange messages securely using a convenient and fast channel, such as e-mail. See the utility there?

Companies have been paying the post office to shove stuff in my mailbox for years. That actually causes physical annoyance, as I have to shovel it into the recycle bin and then toss it. Then there are those crazy people who hand out free samples on the street. I don't have to take it, but I still have to see them.

Whoever tagged this "first world problems" was dead on.