Life Expectancy Return Calculations

Number of hours exercised must equal the number of extra years lived to make back the time investment in the exercise. To be a worthwhile investment, amount of time spent exercising must be less than the number of extra years lived, thus you are gaining time.

So assuming every day you exercise 1 hour, and that this would extend life expectancy by 3 years, the extension of 3 years would equate to 26,280 hours of life extended. Therefore if you exercise for an hour a day from birth, at the age of 82, your investment would balance out, and any further exercise investments would not pay off. This is assuming the lifespan extended by is static.

New Yahoo! Search Engine Results Page

Yahoo! rolled out a cool new search engine results page. I have to say, such a drastic change was long overdue for search engines.

Interestingly enough it has a few of the elements I thought could be useful when I posted about the future of search engines a while back. The new design is centered, it has a sidebar with a notepad. The best new feature is the ability to search any website from within Yahoo!. There’s awesome tabs on the left that appear to be dynamic, and change based on your search term. Brilliant! Ads are also closer to the center, and should be good for increasing profits.

Nice new search engine results page, but too bad all of Yahoo!’s other internet properties are an absolute mess.

Interesting

To keep my mind off of the mass of physics and organic chemistry I have to do, more writing to keep my mind off things and delay the inevitable.

There was a very interesting discussion on NPR the other day about germ line gene therapy. I had heard of gene therapy, but germ line gene therapy was new to me. Something about modifying the damaged mitochondria in egg cells and having healthy monkeys be born. The ensuing discussion included talk about how it was immoral and whatnot.

I don’t really think there’s anything wrong with designer babies, as long as the designer element is restricted to physical ability. After all, if you created a child that looks good or more physically fit, no harm done. The kid would probably be happier overall, although this is hard to say. Who wouldn’t want to eliminate the risk of having a child with some physical deficiencies. Obviously I’m looking at this from a practical standpoint only.

While there’s nothing wrong creating modified people physically, there’s a large risk in improving mental ability through gene therapy. This has an inherent danger because this would essentially create two strata of people. These “superhumans” would have superior intellect, so who knows what could happen.

Any person created through germ line gene therapy would need to be tracked, regardless of whether the modifications are physical or mental.

Bean Breeding

Selectively breed beans for maximum size until x (?) generations later, they are tomato sized super beans so large that a couple could be a meal. Would be very cool. No idea how many generations it would take. But once I get a pad I’ll probably start testing until the end of my life. Hopefully the beans will at least have doubled in size by then.

Why beans? Beans are healthy and nutrient dense. They’re delicious. But they’re small, so they’re perfect for breeding.

The Joy Of Organic Chemistry

Organic chemistry. Oh joy. It’s especially difficult since I’ve forgotten everything I learned in chemistry. Arrhenius acids and bases, Lewis structures, acid base pairs, all of it gone when I vomited the facts onto the final exams.

Now I have to relearn all this stuff by week’s end.

Real Time Strategy Expansion Flowchart

Because the first strike can easily mean a win for either side, determining the best ways to allocate the resources is important. The top players are skilled simply because they have fine tuned it to a point.

In all RTSs, you can basically harvest resources or build attacking units. Because the rate of resource acquisition and creation of new units is essentially constant, simple flowcharts can be created to determine the various combinations of units for optimal expansion or offensive capability.

Just another idea I will pursue when I’ve got loads of cash, time, an F430, and a nice McMansion.

The College Conjecture

There must be a reason all (most) great ideas seem to come from kids in college. The atmosphere is stressful, hellish, overwhelming. At the end of the day, you’re just exhausted. But this in turn, makes everything else seem like the most fun thing to do in the world, thus inciting motivation.

Meebo Chatrooms Have Public Chatlogs

I use Meebo simply because it’s a webapp, and won’t slow down my computer too much. For some strange reason, Meebo thought it would be a brilliant idea to make chatlogs public to everyone. A simple search with some keywords will bring up plenty of results.

site:http://chatlogs.meebo.com/ "keywords"

And all that stuff will be brought back. You can narrow things down as well if you add a separate “username” part to the search. While you can’t see the usernames straight out, a simple View Source will solve that, which makes it even worse. Digital records are great, but only if you’re the only person who can see them.

Tired Of It

Once again I’ve been told that “money does not buy health and happiness”. I hear this far too often.

It is illogical to think that money does not buy happiness. Money buys both health and happiness. Money buys everything, as long as you have enough of it.

  1. It is undeniable that people want different things, whether it be an experience or physical object.
  2. It is also undeniable that when people acquire what they want, they become happy.
  3. But how are experiences (such as travels) or physical items (such as Mont Blancs) acquired? Money of course.
  4. Therefore it is only logical to see that money buys happiness. The logic here is undeniable as far as I see. There is no reason for anybody to continue claiming “money does not buy happiness”. Of course, people may go to different lengths to acquire that wealth which may negatively impact their health, but ultimately, it differs from the question.

I also started reading Beyond Freedom And Dignity. I was just thinking about the book too and boom, I saw it on the library shelf. It’s interesting, but a tough read. Lots of metaphors, and I have to rack my brain to see the connection.