Actually, I'm pretty sure the 120 years in that passage was the amount of time remaining until the deluge -- a one-time event.

Which (incidentally, not that this has anything to do with your point) happened within a year of when Methusaleh died. (You have to do a small amount of arithmetic to put this together, based on the ages of a Methusaleh and Lamech when their sons were born and Noah's age when the flood came.) Some theologians speculate that Methusaleh's name was prophetic, something along the lines of "he dies [and then] [it will be] sent", in reference to the flood. This is linguistically plausible, but the Bible doesn't actually say what his name means (and the name is far too succinct to be as clear as all that in the absence of additional clarification). For that matter, it doesn't even actually say whether he died right before the flood came or *because* of the flood; it only gives enough information to conclude that both events happened within a year of one another.

In any case, people who read that passage as a hard limit on maximum human lifespan are engaging in a practice we call "eisegesis" -- reading an interpretation _into_ the text rather than taking it for just what it says. Whether medical science in the current era will be able to extend human lifespan beyond 114 or 120 or any other arbitrary finite figure you care to name is an issue the Bible does not address.

It does say something about lifespans during the Millennium (see for example Isaiah 65), but that's a future era. Before that happens, there's to be (among other things) an earthquake so severe that cities and mountains and islands just plain cease to exist, worldwide (Rev. 16:17f). Ad interim, we don't really know what will happen to human lifespans in the immediate future, although I would tend to assume that people who make extremely grandiose claims (like, "the first person to live to 1000 has probably already been born) don't know either and are just making stuff up.

HTH.HAND.

Yeah, except, that's preposterous.

Influenza isn't even the illness most people call "the flu". (That's what medical people call "gastro-intestinal disease" or somesuch.) The actual influenza virus isn't dangerous at all. It doesn't, for example, make you puke until you're dehydrated. It doesn't even make you nauseated. It's pretty much just a cold: a case of the sniffles, some coughing, maybe some achy muscles for a couple of days, and possibly a headache. It's about as dangerous as a toy gun made out of a folded sheet of notebook paper.

The only way influenza could kill somebody would be if they were already most of the way dead -- standing with one foot in the grave and the other in a roller skate on a banana peel, as it were. In which case, influenza isn't actually the problem (*anything* can kill someone whose health is that bad; a papercut, for example, can be fatal if your immune system is completely shut down already) and immunizing against influenza wouldn't actually solve anything even if it WORKED, which it doesn't, because influenza mutates beyond the vaccine's ability to significantly protect against it every ten days or so.

I am generally very much in favor of vaccinations, but flu shots are completely pointless.

> For most of the Central U.S., the amount of water that comes in via rain
> or rivers, is less than the amount of water lost due to evaporation.

When you say "Central US", are we talking Central timezone, or what?

> The case is different for the East Coast or for most of Europe,
> where more fresh water comes in via rainfall or rivers, than gets
> lost due to evaporation.

The entire Midwest is like that too. Our municipal reservoirs
generally stay pretty well full just from the precipitation that
falls on the reservoirs themselves. Pretty near everything else
gets routed downstream as fast as possible so it doesn't flood
us out. Almost every road has drainage ditches along the sides
for this purpose. That water all ends up either in the great lakes
or in the Mississippi.

So yeah, we can use as much water as we want.

I think much of the south (east of the Mississippi) is similar.

You trade off water efficiency for other kinds of efficiency. You could use less water and more land (per unit of food produced), for example, or less water and more equipment and labor (to distribute the water more carefully only to the plants that need it), but we don't usually do those things because water is very affordable, so being excessively efficient with it is uneconomic.

Agricultural use of water is not a significant environmental problem[1], because all the water we use for agriculture goes one of four places: it goes directly into the plants, or it evaporates right away into the air, or it runs off to the nearest stream, or it soaks into the ground and makes its way downstream rather more slowly. In all four cases, the water eventually makes its way back into the atmosphere and falls again as rain. "Using" water doesn't use it up in any permanent sense. It just relocates it slightly. It's a completely renewable resource, even on a very short timescale.

[1] I'm assuming here that you're not doing something problematic in the process, like putting DDT into the water. That would be a separate issue. What we're talking about here is just the mere fact of using water.

> The reality is corporation want to suck up all the cheaply accessible water

That's absurd. Where would they put it all? They'd need a tank so large it wouldn't fit all in one state. The entire Fortune 500 could spend a decade's worth of gross revenue building such a thing.

The article summary talks about percentages of the fresh water that is actually used, *not* percentages of what's available, because we (humanity) use only a small fraction of what's available. We take almost all of the fresh water that falls from the sky and route it downstream as fast as possible, toward the ocean (where it evaporates so it can fall again someplace else), because otherwise it would flood our basements several times a week.

When you pay your water bill, you're not paying for the water itself. You're paying for filtering and chlorine and whatnot -- water treatment. The water itself is free, if you're willing to use it untreated: just put in a couple of cisterns and Bob is your uncle. Almost nobody does this anymore because untreated water isn't worth collecting.

Now, I'm kind of assuming here that we're talking on a nationwide scale. On a local scale it might be possible for a corporation to collect a fair portion of the available water in a limited area, but it would be a *tiny* percentage of the total available water nationwide, because you could only do it in an area that's significantly drier than average. If you tried it anywhere in the Midwest, people probably wouldn't even bother to laugh at you.

> RTFA!

YMBNH.

> So the remaining question is does it work the same way in humans.

If the mice showed actual cognitive improvement, I'm sure someone is already thinking about a study involving humans. Whether they'll do that straight away or do another couple of animal studies first, I don't know (for a drug already approved in humans for other indications one would imagine the former, but you never know) but in any case I am certain they're already thinking about how the human study might go.

> I think the fact that Ohio is not near any source of saltwater would be the real non-starter.

Granted.

> Trying to make the internet non-communicable is like making water not wet.

That's easy: run it through one of those mister/atomizer thingies that people get to make the atmosphere in their homes less dry in the winter, then while it's still suspended in the air lower its temperature to about forty below. You get a dry powder, which will precipitate out of the air and collect on surfaces.

Wait, did I just say rationals? I meant irrationals.

Rationals, of course _can_ be and _have been_ enumerated. Again, see Cantor's diagonal.

> Enumerating the irrationals fails because there is so much complexity,

Actually, it's much more basic than that: enumerating the irrationals fails because there are too many of them -- there aren't enough counting numbers to go around. (Yes, I know, there are infinitely many counting numbers, but it's a strictly smaller infinitely large number than the number of rationals. If you are in doubt about this, research Cantor's diagonal.)