Tuesday, April 28, 2009

How to live to 100: Rita Levi-Montalcini's Routine

If you want to live to a 100, you might consider following Rita Levi-Montalcini's routine: get up at five in the morning, eat just once a day, at lunchtime, keep your brain active, and go to bed at 11pm.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Scott Adams on Ageism

Sometimes, you find the most interesting things in some random,  dusty ol’ RSS feed that died in Thunderbird, or Free Agent, or Net News Wire, or some other random reader thingie that you set up and abandoned years ago. In Feb 2008, Adams wrote:

In other professions, how often do people over the age of 70 produce innovative or exceptional results? Look around your home or office and ask yourself how many of the technical innovations came from senior citizens. How many of the best selling books on your shelf were written by senior citizens who weren’t already famous? How many senior citizens wrote the music you have on your iPod?

I don’t have the time right now to take this to town with all the goodness that it deserves. Suffice to say, defending prejudice with statistical probabilities has never worked out too well. How often is it a non-white that commits the assault and ends up in prison? Statistically, I’m fully justified to move to the other side of the street, simply due to skin color. Adams adds:

You will be tempted to point out exceptions to the rule. Warren Buffet is a good example. But he plans to retire. Alan Greenspan already did. Evidently they think age matters.

Evidently, they have BANK, dude. What’s that got to do with age? Sounds like you were just too tired from creating super awesome cartoons to think this one all the way through.

In response to my skin-color analogy, you may be tempted to bring up Obama, or Shaq, or Tiger, but those are exceptions. Can you say "slippery slope?" I knew you could.

The fact is, people are ageing in greater numbers and with more success than ever before in human history. We don’t get to hide behind statistical justifications when they serve our own purposes and cry “exceptionalism” as a defense.

Many, if not most of us voted for Obama because he was the best man for the job and best represented the values that we all believe are most crucial to the success of a healthy, vibrant,  democratic republic, and for evolving beyond the short-sighted, unsustainable resource skews attributable to this insane era of cannibal capitalism, toward a post-scarcity free market socialism.

Bringing you up to speed on the empirically imperative  adaptive advantages of a Free Market Socialist Democratic Republic aside, dear reader, one might recall that back in the day, you could count on the fact that we would just die off before we could argue our own case; which obviously worked well for your increasingly obsolete ageist attitudes. Your handy little self-serving prejudice could just march right on, unopposed, and with a self-congratulatory, "whatchu’ talkin' ‘bout now, down there six feet under, you old useless phukr!?" for flair.

Um, well, these days, WE'RE STILL HERE, PUNK, that’s what we’re talkin’ ‘bout; and we’re mobilizing our social media networks; and we have 400-800% more life experience than your ADHD WTF-URL-TXTing lil smartass. And we're blogging, and GPSing, and camera-phoning, and thumb-typing, and we can see through your immature, inexperienced, unstable, irrational, relentlessly hormone-driven deranged lack of judgment. Underneath it all, especially in your most disastrous hiring and strategy decisions, social psychology reveals the fact that all you're deep down really hoping for is a good after-hours cubicle phuck.

Flash! Hiring your best flirty phuck buddies prolly ain't all that good for the company; not to mention the excuse of dissin' and pissin’ on people simply because they might remind you of your own parents and force you to deal with all your own petty, dysfunctional authority-figure baggage.

So, yeah, pretty much your ageism bullshit is utter bullshit, right? Yet somehow it is still The Other Acceptable White Prejudice.

So how about this, Mr. Scott Adams? How about let's see Catbert’s HR Agency hire some old fogies who may need glasses to read but who can also see right through Dogbert's little games? Maybe we can even have some fun making the world safer and more inclusive for everyone, in the process.

TIA, Scott. That is, if you're not too old to understand WTF that means.