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Medicine

Bioethicist At National Institutes of Health: "Why I Hope To Die At 75" 478

HughPickens.com writes Ezekiel J. Emanuel, director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the US National Institutes of Health, writes at The Atlantic that there is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. "It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic." Emanuel says that he is isn't asking for more time than is likely nor foreshortening his life but is talking about the kind and amount of health care he will consent to after 75. "Once I have lived to 75, my approach to my health care will completely change. I won't actively end my life. But I won't try to prolong it, either." 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. "I reject this aspiration. I think this manic desperation to endlessly extend life is misguided and potentially destructive. For many reasons, 75 is a pretty good age to aim to stop."

Comment Re:The article isn't any better. (Score 2) 795

I use to live in a 100+ year old house. The structure was ridiculously over done. 12x12 logs holing up the roof, The bricks were 5 layers deep. In essence it was engineered by someone without strong science knowledge. He just figured more is better

Seems to me that someone engineered it to last 100+ years.

As for bricks... 100+years ago there were no air conditioning devices to keep the heat out in the summer and most heating was done by burning wood or coal inside the house in the winter.
Such thick walls would sure come in handy for those circumstances.

Education

How Our Botched Understanding of "Science" Ruins Everything 795

An anonymous reader writes "Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry writes at The Week, "If you ask most people what science is, they will give you an answer that looks a lot like Aristotelian 'science' — i.e., the exact opposite of what modern science actually is. Capital-S Science is the pursuit of capital-T Truth. And science is something that cannot possibly be understood by mere mortals. It delivers wonders. It has high priests. It has an ideology that must be obeyed. This leads us astray. ... Countless academic disciplines have been wrecked by professors' urges to look 'more scientific' by, like a cargo cult, adopting the externals of Baconian science (math, impenetrable jargon, peer-reviewed journals) without the substance and hoping it will produce better knowledge. ... This is how you get people asserting that 'science' commands this or that public policy decision, even though with very few exceptions, almost none of the policy options we as a polity have have been tested through experiment (or can be). People think that a study that uses statistical wizardry to show correlations between two things is 'scientific' because it uses high school math and was done by someone in a university building, except that, correctly speaking, it is not. ... This is how you get the phenomenon ... thinking science has made God irrelevant, even though, by definition, religion concerns the ultimate causes of things and, again, by definition, science cannot tell you about them. ... It also means that for all our bleating about 'science' we live in an astonishingly unscientific and anti-scientific society. We have plenty of anti-science people, but most of our 'pro-science' people are really pro-magic (and therefore anti-science). "

Comment Riiiiight... (Score 1) 294

I fear that it is the other way round.

Which can be noted from your conflation of several unrelated issues into a single one, without actual definition of a concrete question or an argument, because conflation is not based on logical reasoning but on a personal foregone conclusion you are working from.
Ergo, paragraphs like this, littered with stacked, incomplete, shotgun questions, extended into other questions:

Using the math you just listed, you honestly believe that people maintain this rate of weight gain purely through the difference in consumption vs output? Do Zucker rats become monstrously obese (at the expense of organs and muscle) on a calorie restricted diet because of ??? (Do they lack the willpower to resist food like other rats? and if not, why wouldn't their genetic make up have some corollary to human obesity?)

As you are not setting up theses with those questions (no argumentation following to prove or disprove) those are clearly just inquiries.
But, there is no single answer to all these questions, nor is there a way to provide argumentation which would answer them as a whole, as they are unrelated and even incomplete.

Seems to me that you have some personal belief about those rats and the issues regarding calories and obesity in general, which do not correspond to reality.
Which is clouding your reasoning regarding those subjects, by providing some kind of a reasoning shortcut known only to you, which allows you to treat those issues as a single, generalized one, while allowing you to ignore the obvious issues of such reasoning.

Like the fact that the Zucker rat argument carries no weight whatsoever as it is both an exception and an ENGINEERED exception to boot.
Those rats are tailored by the researchers through gene manipulation TO BE FAT and to be hungry, along with their brothers who are genetically tailored TO BE THIN.
On top of that, humans not being genetically manipulable laboratory animals... Zucker rats can't be used even as an analogy.

Which is why all your argumentation boils down to a single "Aaah, you don't get it" line.

Comment Re:Does HFCS count? (Score 1) 294

Rats are not humans.
Rats don't give a fuck about their health or physical fitness. Nor are they great at thinking long term.

As for Zucker rats... Ummm... You do know that they were DESIGNED TO BE LIKE THAT?
They are a mutation created for research purposes.

For all intents and purposes - those are not REAL RATS, any more than one could consider pekingese to be wolves.

Calories in/calories out is at best a proxy for what's really going on under the covers (ie, insulin, hormonal reasons)...

  ...

  ...but that doesn't mean it's correct.

Correct premise, wrong conclusion.

It IS correct. BUT... It is not the only factor at play. And "obesity" is a generalization.
There ARE genetic or health components involved - but not in the entire population.
On average though, reducing/limiting intake and/or exercise IS equal to weight loss.

Yes, and if you look at what food items constitute 100 calories, it should become plainly obvious that human beings lack the consistency and precision in choosing food and/or exercise in order to maintain weight like we do.

Sorry, but number of calories in "some food A" is in no way in correlation with "human beings lack(ing) the consistency and precision in choosing food".
I'm not really sure what was it you tried to say there.

Also, have you ever heard the phrase "work up an appetite" what do you suppose the body's very first reaction to burning those 100 calories is?

Ever heard of the phrase "Un bon mot ne prouve rien."?

Actually... After spending 100+ calories through exercise... They probably won't be hungry.
If anything, they'll be less hungry. IF they have some extra weight. They will be thirsty, though.
I only have personal anecdotal evidence for it, sorry, but I do have a theory why it is so regarding hunger.

From fasting for 72 hours with only ~30 calories per day, and from doing 10-15 minutes of light exercise each day (to stave off muscle loss) which would cause, then relieve the sense of hunger.
My guess is that I was forcing my body to reach out for those accumulated calories. Getting it to spend those ketones in place of glucose.
I did it in order to compare it to just eating less. In short - you gain back the weight lost that way really fast.
You do feel "un-bloated" though... Empty bowels and all that.

But regardless of it... It's not about those 100 calories spent. It's only ONCE a week. Who cares about what they eat ONCE A WEEK.
It's about raising the BMR by spending those calories ON EXERCISE.
You gotta do a LOT of exercise to spend those 100 calories. Keep doing it week after week, and you got muscles which you didn't have couple of weeks ago.
You slowly start burning more even just resting. That's it.
IF you pay attention how much you eat and don't just stuff yourself, that is.

Again... anecdotal, but I've knocked down my weight from 84-85 kilograms in December to 75 in June by limiting calories and exercising.
Since then, I'm exercising less (maybe once or twice a week) and eating on average around 2000 calories (more than before), and I'm slowly moving toward 73-74 kilograms, at the moment being closer to 74-75 mark.
Being in my mid-30s it's almost EXACTLY what you would expect from the formula.

Slow, continuous loss of fat through limiting of calories and through light exercise.
It can be done faster, but then you end up buying pants more often.
Yet another issue that rats never have to face.

Crime

Science Has a Sexual Assault Problem 460

cold fjord writes: Phys.org reports, "The life sciences have come under fire recently with a study published in PLOS ONE that investigated the level of sexual harassment and sexual assault of trainees in academic fieldwork environments. The study found 71% of women and 41% of men respondents experienced sexual harassment, while 26% of women and 6% of men reported experiencing sexual assault. The research team also found that within the hierarchy of academic field sites surveyed, the majority of incidents were perpetrated by peers and supervisors. The New York Times notes, "Most of these women encountered this abuse very early in their careers, as trainees. The travel inherent to scientific fieldwork increases vulnerability as one struggles to work within unfamiliar and unpredictable conditions."

Comment That's... optimistic. (Score 1) 294

in 2000 years or so

At 25 years per generation that's only 80 generations or so.
In comparison, rats reach sexual maturity after 5 weeks, gestate for 21 days, and have about 5 litters with 7-14 baby rats per litter.

That's about 6 generations of rats per year. Conservatively.
We will "evolve" in 2000 years about as much as rats "evolve" every 13-14 years.
Not squeaking much.

On the other hand, it is also optimistic considering how pessimistic people tend to be regarding our survival on this planet at all.
Which IMHO has become a ridiculous notion for quite some time now.
There's too many of us at too many places at the same time for most things to wipe us out as a species.
Many things could fuck us up significantly... say a nuclear war... but we are too dispersed to be completely wiped out by anything that would not wipe out all life on Earth almost instantly.

But people love their antiquated 19th century ideas... After all that's only about 5 generations ago.
My parents' grandparents' time. Well... except on my mom's side.
She had a grandmother who lived to be 102.
Not much room for evolution there. Of genes OR ideas.

But in 2000 years... we'll get some shit done on the ideas front. That we've shown that we are capable of.
Unlike rats.

Comment Re:Does HFCS count? (Score 1) 294

Also why exercise leads to weight loss, since training makes muscle tissue more sensitive to insulin, and fat cells less so. Seriously the amount of calories burned through exercise is laughable.

It is... but it isn't. It adds up.
100+ calories spent through exercise once a week don't seem much on their own... BUT.

It boosts one's BMR.
So those 100+ calories spent doing exercise once a week boosts one's daily calorie requirement from those magical 2000 calories to 2290 calories.

And that adds up.
290 * 7 + 100 = 2130
That's about a pound lost (or not gained) in about 12 days. About 30 pounds in a year.

Now, sticking to one's daily calorie requirement and weekly exercise routine... that's another ball game entirely.

Comment Re:Does HFCS count? (Score 2, Informative) 294

From your reply I can only assume that you are deliberately being dense.
I.e. You are trolling.

Or, you would not have acted like you haven't realized that when I'm talking about there being 30% more fructose, and then saying that there is 4:3 mix in favor of "sugar for later" - that I'm not talking about sucrose but of fructose as "sugar for later", i.e. FAT.
In fact, if you weren't trolling you could NEVER EVEN THINK that I was talking about sucrose, because you apparently acknowledge that you know that sucrose needs to be hydrolyzed into glucose and fructose to be used for energy by the body.
I.e. You know what I'm talking about but you still choose to be obtuse.

Nor would you spout the 1 : 1 nonsense.
HFCS 55 is a 55 : 42 fructose-glucose mix.

Which, as I've explained above, comes out to 2 : 1 ratio in consumption of fructose and glucose through HFCS, compared to 1 : 1 ratio when consuming sucrose.
Because the human body ends up eating twice as much of fructose when ingesting HFCS than when ingesting sucrose, while trying to raise the glucose in the blood to the same level.
I.e. Your brain is hungrier for glucose longer.
It wants two spoons of HFCS where a single spoon of sucrose would suffice.

But then again... you are trolling.
Or you would not equate cheap HFCS used in Coke and Pepsi with VERY EXPENSIVE insect juice used in practically NOTHING commercially - because it is expensive and not "roundup ready".
And it is also not a 55 : 43 mix, nor is it a 50 : 50 mix, but a whole other ball game which includes various antibacterial properties, a different mixture of mono- and polysaccharides and various other stuff which bees dump into their insect juice.
Which can be gleaned from the link above.

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