Day: September 23, 2000

Olympics Coverage Really Stinks

I’m a sports nut, but the problem is most of the time when I turn on the Olympics coverage I rarely get to see sports. Went to watch today and endured this long piece about Australia’s participation in World War I. The bizarre thing was seeing all of these historians and the NBC commentator talking about the deaths of many thousands of Australian men in a poorly planned and disastrously executed assault on Turkey as Australia’s coming of age among nations. If that’s what it takes to be a great nation, personally I’d prefer to be part of a minor country.

Finally they got on with the women’s mountain bike competition but they seem to think people don’t want to watch this event because they kept cutting away to commercial and then back to a different part of the race or for out of context comments from the participants (what was with one of the racers being shown on a mountain talking about how peaceful it was there — who cares, I just want to see the darn race!)

This is the real problem with the tape delay — it is very obvious from the way they handle the editing of events that what you’re watching is not even a close approximation of what people at the Olympics saw. For me this reached absurd levels during the diving competiton where NBC in succession quickly showed many women making their dives where it was obvious they had edited out all of the events in between each dive because there was now way they could have dived that quickly.

If they want to do that, fine, but then cover it like ESPN’s excellent SportsCenter covers events rather than trying to make me feel like I’m watching a live event.

Oh, and NBC should fire whoever is writing Bob Costas’ material. Costas is great for live events, but he’s clearly at the mercy of inane NBC writers and is becoming painful to watch.

Red Dragon Tattoo

Woke up this afternoon from a nap to see The Illustrated Man running on the SciFi channel, which reminded me of a hilarious song “Red Dragon Tattoo” by the little known pop group Fountains of Wayne. In the song a guy who wants to impress a girl who isn’t interested in him decides to get a tattoo:

Red dragon tatto, it’s just about on me

I got it for you, so now do you want me?

Will you stop pretending I’ve never been born

Now that I look a little more like that guy from Korn

Personally, I’ve never understood the whole tattooing concept. I have a friend who literally has wings tattooed on her back. I prefer to avoid pain, and therefore tattoos.

The Immortality Watch

One of the things I’d prefer not to do is die (I’m going to need at least a couple centuries to get my web site updated!) Anyway, Lisa thinks the whole notion is absurd, but I think the odds of never having to die are now higher than they’ve ever been and increasing on an almost daily basis. The odds of effective immortality within my lifetime (I’d like to live at least 200 years) are still exceedingly small, but I am optimistic.

Something I don’t think people who don’t regularly read scientific journals realize is the extent to which human discoveries about biology are accelerating. I don’t know how to quantify it, but I believe there is a sort of Moore’s Law-style principle for biology in that not only are new discoveries being made, but the actual rate at which medical knowledge is being acquired is increasing over time.

Anyway, two news items last week strongly improved the price of my immortality futures.

Another advance was added to nanontechnology (Eric Drexler’s looking less and less like a nut every day) a few months ago. Researchers developed a robot small enough to do repair work at the single cell level. The full article on the robot was published in Science this past June.

Meanwhile, researchers at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology made newspapers around the world for discovering why some animals on calorie-restricted diets live so much longer. In mice given diets that contain all the necessary nutrients but just exactly the number of calories required to maintain life, the mice tend to live 40 percent longer than mice given higher, but still normal, calorie diets. Why this happened was a mystery until the MIT researchers announced that their experiments with yeast strongly suggest that the calorie restriction interacts directly with the SIR2 protein which functions to “shut off” certain cells and whose absence in yeast was found to shorten life span.

The good news is that the reason all of this works is that the SIR2 protein needs a chemical NAD, which is also needed by the body when it converts food to energy. At least in yeast and mice, it is now believed when they eat high calorie diets, there is less NAD available for the SIR2 protein since all the NAD is used to metabolize food. Restrict the calories, and all of a sudden there’s more NAD for the SIR2 to do its work and the result is a more efficient system that extends the lifespan of the organism.

Assuming all of this applies to human beings, it is not inconceivable that in a few decades we might all be taking medication to increase our NAD levels, thus getting the benefits without having to eat a 1,200 calorie diet from birth to death. And for people like me who have already lived a substantial portion of our lives, we can send in the nanorobots to repair pre-existing cellular damage.

It’s a cyberpunk future without the fascist governments (what I really want is the “suntan” lotion in one of Bruce Sterling’s Islands In the Net that literally changed skin color, although I’d want to get to choose more skin colors. Think of the market for teenagers — my nephew had green hair, I’m sure he’d have loved green skin!)