This is pretty damned cool:
Chan said the experiment shows that it is not possible to simply add the force on the constituent solid parts of the plate — in this case, the tines — to arrive at the total force. Rather, he said, “the force actually depends on the geometry of the object.”
“Until now, no significant or nontrivial corrections to the Casimir force due to boundary conditions have been observed experimentally,” wrote Lamoreaux, now at Yale University, in a commentary accompanying publication of the paper.
I don’t know what it means for the singularity, but molecular manufacturing seems to be moving along nicely. Tony Snow’s death was sobering for me, because we were very close to the same age. Fortunately, I don’t have the genetic time bomb that he did, though my family’s heart history is worrisome. All I can do is do what I can do, and hope that things will come along.
“though my family’s heart history is worrisome”
I take daily:
One non-FE fortified multivatimin.
Two or more glasses of 100% Grape Juice. (You can sub red wine if you like.)
7 Omega 3 complex Fish oil capsules.
1 Supplemential B complex vitamin.
1 500MG Vitamin C in the morning and 1 in the evening.
Same as the C with a grape seed extract with resveratrol complex capsule, morning and evening.
Mom’s side is fishy, Dad’s side is great. Dad is 88 and still chuggin’ and Mom is 78 and doing likewise.
^ is me.
Mike, you want to add 81 mg of aspirin if you’re over 45.
Rand, your coronary arteries are not going to be Roomba’d out by MEMS devices anytime soon. Assistance will come from chemical interventions targeted at some biochemical step in the process of plaque formation, and more effective, targeted assistance in the form of proteomic evaluations of your particular biochemistry and the best way of interfering with it.
All this silicon nanophotolithography is fluff, I think; the real revolution is cooking in the molecular biologist’s test tubes and possibly the bioinformatics geek’s programs.
I am not 45 yet.
The doctor has me on a low dose of Zocor and I also take A CoQ10 to ward off the CoQ10 depletion effects statins are known for.
Asprin eats my stomach up, I avoid it.
Supposedly, the grape seed extract has similar blood thinning effects.
I believe the Bcomplex and Niacin are more important than anything else, I suspect plaque is a response to arterial damage and not the source.
Niacin to reduce the Homosystine (which I think is the true bad actor) and the rest for their anti-oxidative effects.
Mike:
I hope that I can be of help here. As I understand it; B6, B12 and zinc are the main nutrients for keeping down homocysteine, along with trimethylglycine (otherwise called TMG or betaine) if levels are particularly high. B3 isn’t particularly important, except of course that you need it along with all the other nutrients.
Anti-inflammatory nutrients and herbs such as cats claw and calcium pantothenate (vitamin B5) can also help reduce the arterial wall damage that eventually leads to plaque; studies have shown a strong positive correlation between levels of C-reactive protein (often used as a marker for generalised inflammation) and levels of vascular disease.
A site that may be useful (sorry, I don’t know how to insert hyperlinks):
http://www.lifeextensionvitamins.com/homred.html
Another important anti-plaque measure is to keep blood sugar levels under control; keeping easily-absorbed sugars out of the diet helps with this, and the main nutrient involved is chromium (usually supplemented as picolinate).
By the way, although not formally qualified I do this stuff for a living. 🙂
Umm. You’re not telling me that you seriously expect, with any kind of confidence, that you’re not going to die because this singularity will save you, right? I don’t care what kind of adjustments you’re making to your diet and exercise regimen, death — and death before you reach the age of 100 — is obviously still a near-certainty, right?
You’re not telling me that you seriously expect, with any kind of confidence, that you’re not going to die because this singularity will save you, right?
I don’t know whether the singularity will save me. By some definitions, no one will survive it in human form. But I do think that advancing medical technology, including nanotech, has a good chance of doing so.
I don’t care what kind of adjustments you’re making to your diet and exercise regimen, death — and death before you reach the age of 100 — is obviously still a near-certainty, right?
No, not at all. I think that if we can make it another thirty years or so, people will be able to live as long as they want, barring accidents.
Rand: unless you are planning to have yourself frozen and later resurrected, I think you are being very very optimistic.
I think you are being very very optimistic.
May be. Is that a bad thing?
Rand,
Do you take any nutritional suppliments?
FC, thanks for the info.
How much zinc do I need, is my multi-vitamin enough to provide zinc?
What about garlic suppliments?
Not many. Just Omega 3, a multi-vitamin, CQ10.
“I think that if we can make it another thirty years or so, people will be able to live as long as they want, barring accidents.”
Well … that will certainly be nice. But I think it remains a sound policy, f’rinstance, to have life insurance, make out a will, etc. Just in case, and seeing as people have been imagining that the progress of science would shortly eliminate the whole death thing for a couple centuries now.
Though I grant that our understanding of the longevity problem continues to improve, and the rate of improvement continues to accelerate.
I think it remains a sound policy, f’rinstance, to have life insurance, make out a will, etc.
I’m pretty sure I’ve never advocated otherwise.
Mike: 10-15mg of zinc in a well-absorbed form is plenty, and it’s difficult to take too much – with the caveat that very large doses probably ought to be combined with copper (they compete for absorption). As for a multivit being enough – they vary a lot; the better brands probably do contain enough.
Garlic; fine, it does cut cholesterol and retard unwanted blood clotting, along with removing heavy metals and improving immunity. Again, there is a possible snag – garlic (along with numerous other anti-clotting nutrients) interacts with anticoagulants. If the drug in question is warfarin (I think it may be called Coumadin in the USA) proceed with EXTREME caution. If it’s something like aspirin you’ll probably be OK – but it’s probably best to consult a physician first. Try to find one that actually knows something about nutrition at therapeutic doses; there are quite a few in most parts of the USA (one of the advantages of non-socialised medicine).
Everybody else; sorry for the thread derail.
Mike, the Zocor interferes with your own liver’s production of cholesterol, and niacin interferes with fat metabolism. In both cases you’re definitely attacking the plaque-forming substances — and not the inflammation that, yes, some people feels is the key to plaque formation. That’s what the aspirin does. It’s not a question of “thinning the blood” (interfering with clotting), because it’s too small a dose for that (650 mg is the usual dose). It’s speculated to work by some kind anti-inflammatory action on the arterial walls, but no one knows.
It’s odd that 81 mg is enough to make your stomach upset. (I assume you’ve tried the “enteric” version e.g. Ecotrin, that doesn’t dissolve until it hits the small intestine, too. I suppose you could try extra virgin olive oil, which appears to have anti-inflammatory activity similar to ibuprofen…)
But so it goes. Since you’re obviously under the care of a physician, I wouldn’t dare to second-guess his opinion.
Here’s another weird thought to chew on: it turns out that your liver stops making cholesterol for a while (what the Zocor is forcing it to do now) when you fast. (I don’t know how long it takes — maybe 12 hours?) There is some mild epidemiological evidence (see here, for example) that occasional fasting (once a month) is associated with lower rates of coronary artery disease. There’s also the thought, which Fletch has expressed, that insulin resistance caused by a lifetime’s excessive intake of simple sugars is another underlying contributing cause of CAD.
Another thought and then I’ll probably leave it; everyone here (and in a lot of other places, too) seems to be concentrating on arterial disease. Perhaps in a decade or so there will be available micron-scale robots to scrape the rubbish off your artery walls. However, this won’t do anything to address the underlying cause of the junk being there in the first place – which is free-radical damage to all cellular components, caused mostly by respiring and using oxygen. (This seems to be the leading theory of the cause of aging.) This damage is inflicted on everything, including brain cells. Best defense against that is any and all of the antioxidants, ranging from vitamin E to things far more exotic – and to avoid things that make it worse, such as smoking – but all those reading this already know the last bit, right?
To sort that level of damage out, we’ll have to wait a little longer – for nanoscale repair machinery that can undo damage to DNA, cell membranes and collagen fibres. Then all you’ll have to worry about is a programing error in the trillions of nanomachines leading to, instead of being repaired from inside, being dissolved into a puddle of goo. When that level of molecular control arrives, then nothing at all will be the same – bringing us back to the subject of the OP. 🙂