First person to live to 1,000 already alive today?

La princesa busca marido - Jorge Bucay

Alemar Psicologos

John H. Conway hablando del Juego de la vida

Emue 

microsiervos

No es la primera vez que mencionamos por aquí el Juego de la vida de John Horton Conway, pero en esta ocasión el vídeo bien lo merece pues es el propio creador quien lo describe con sus propias palabras; algo así como si bajara Dios a explicar cómo «funcionan» los diez mandamientos (los «de verdad»). En este caso, dibujando una cuadrícula infinita y utilizando pistachos y un lenguaje muy divulgativo enseña cómo se puede seguir la pista de las diferentes celdas y cada tic, tac del «reloj cósmico» que hace evolucionar a estos autómatas celulares.

Resulta interesante también ver cómo Conway, de 76 años, mantiene aún hoy en día una relación de amor/odio con su creación. En su momento no le dio demasiada importancia; supuso que era un mero entretenimiento curioso. Pero con el paso del tiempo y la ayuda de los microordenadores de la época se convirtió en una gran herramienta para estudiar los autómatas celulares, las matemáticas y lógica que lo rodean.

En cierto modo, el Juego de la vida eclipsó otros trabajos de Conway que él considera más profundos y meritorios. Sabemos de ellos porque Martin Gardner siempre le trató estupendamente en sus columnas y libros; tiene publicados números trabajos y libros sobre geometría, combinatoria, topología… Pero su nombre probablemente pasará a la historia ligado indefectiblemente a ese pequeño jueguecito que tanta gente conoce.

• El juego de la vida, versión estratégica, doble juego
• El juego de la vida, versión épica, un vídeo
• ¿Qué sucedería si el universo fuera una simulación? un autómata celular quizá
• SmoothLife: el Juego de la vida en versión «continua», en coma flotante

# Enlace Permanente

10+10 Invaluable Quotes From Money Masters And Great Philosophers - Forbes

Forbes

With Wall Street reaching new highs this year, investors may want to pause for a moment and re-assess their investment strategy and personal lifestyle, reaching for the wisdom of money masters and great philosophers.

The wisdom of Money Masters can help investors manage money effectively and avoid costly mistakes that can reverse their fortunes. And the wisdom of Great Philosophers can help investors use their fortunes to live the good life, as a great deal of money doesn’t necessarily bring happiness.

In the text that follows the wisdom of money masters and great philosophers is condensed into 20 quotes that are easy to remember and apply in everyday life.

Ten Quotes from Money Masters:

1. Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria. The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell—Sir John Templeton

2. In bear markets, things first decline to reasonable prices, then they fall to cheap prices, and then they reach unbelievable giveaways prices. After that, things get really bad, and everybody gets cleaned out—Jim Rogers

3. Earning power is as valuable as assets, therefore try to buy earning power at a discount—George Michailis

4. The usual way I lose money is by buying concept stocks—Philip Carret

5. One must understand the interaction between intelligence and emotion as they in turn respond to the market —George Michailis

6. Investors operate with limited intelligence: they do not know everything. As long as they understand something better than others, they have an edge—George Soros

7. The investor’s chief problem—and even worst enemy—is likely to be himself—Benjamin Graham

8. Seek facts diligently; advice never—Philip Carret

9. On the long side, I’m looking for lower-multiple dull stocks, laggards, with a recovery potential. On the short side, I want to be in the best-known companies of America, the areas of speculative focus. I’m usually short the Who’s Who of the market, stocks in the institutional universe—Michael Steinhardt

10. My approach works not by making valid predictions, but by allowing me to correct false ones. —George Soros

Source: John Train, The New Money Masters (New York: Harper Perennial, 1989).

Ten quotes from Great Philosophers:

1. The unexamined life is not worth living—Plato

2. Remove utterly your desire; for if you desire some one of the things that are not under your control you are bound to be unfortunate. . . .Never say about anything, “I have lost it,” but only “I have given it back. . . .It is not things themselves that disturb men, but their judgments about these things—Epictetus

3. Friendship is a relationship in which two people come to share the same soul—Aristotle

4. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of turmoil in the mind—Epicurus

5. No person is free who is not master of himself—Epictetus

6. Nothing in excess—Solon

7. Reproach yourself for the things you do wrong—Pythagoras

8. A prosperous fool is a grievous burden—Aeschylus

9. The man who does evil to others does evil to himself—Hesiod

10.  No act of kindness is ever wasted—Aesop

Source: M.A. Soupios And Panos Mourdoukoutas, The Ten Golden Rules, Hampton Roads, 2009

Malcolm Gladwell talks underdogs and longshots

America and Greece Spirits: "Bread Education Freedom" [Short Film]

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9 Tips for a Longer Life that You Shouldn’t Be Following

Yahoo! Canada

By Anne Roderique-Jones

Extend Your Life
"Stop drinking coffee and alcohol." "Take an aspirin daily." How many times have you heard that advice for adding years to your life? Turns out, lots of long-held wisdom just isn't true. Read on to see which suggestions you should ignore and what actually ups longevity. Photo by Getty Images.

1. Lay off the java.
You've probably read that multiple cups of coffee a day can be bad for you (jitter city), but research published in the New England Journal of Medicine may prove the opposite. Male and female participants who had two or three cups a day and didn't smoke were 10% and 13% less likely, respectively, to have died during the 14-year-long study than those who never or rarely drank coffee. Men and women who drank a single daily cup were 6% and 5% less likely, respectively, to pass away. According to the researchers, more cups mean a lower risk of stroke, diabetes and heart and respiratory disease. But watch the cream and sugar-extra fat and calories could negate any longevity benefits.

2. Get eight hours of sleep every night.
While research suggests snoozing fewer than six or more than nine hours a night raises your mortality risk, "everyone has different sleep needs," says Shelby Harris, PsyD, director of the behavioral sleep medicine program at Montefiore Medical Center in Bronx, NY. So if you wake naturally after only, say, six-and-a-half hours a night, forcing yourself to reach eight hours won't lengthen your life. To learn how much sleep you need, try awakening without an alarm for a week, if you can swing it. If you feel good and have enough energy most of the day, you've found your ideal amount of rest.

3. Lower your body mass index (BMI).
According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, weighing a little more can lengthen your life span. Adults with a BMI that qualified them as overweight but not obese (that's between 25 and 29.9) were 6% less likely than all others in their age groups to die. While BMI isn't always an accurate measurement of a person's health risks, registered dietitian Jen Brewer, author of Stop Dieting and Start Losing Weight, says if the extra weight comes from muscle mass, you're more likely to have lower cholesterol levels and a better ratio of HDL (good cholesterol) to LDL (bad cholesterol). It may also lower your risk for life-threatening heart disease, stroke and diabetes. And that's good for staying alive.

4. Don't worry, be happy.
Actually, being a glass-half-empty kind of person may keep you kicking longer. In a study published in Psychology and Aging, 65- to 96-year-olds who thought life would get worse outlived those who anticipated better days ahead. "Our findings revealed that being overly optimistic was associated with a greater risk of disability and death within the following decade," says lead author Frieder R. Lang, PhD, of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. "Pessimism about the future may encourage people to take health and safety precautions."

5. Take a daily aspirin.
Popping that pill can help you live longer by preventing heart attacks, strokes and even cancer-right? "If you're a healthy, 45-year-old female, it may not make a difference," says Nieca Goldberg, MD, medical director of the Joan H. Tisch Center for Women's Health at New York University's Langone Medical Center in New York City. In fact, taking a daily aspirin can lead to bleeding, allergies and upset stomach. Ask your doctor if you can skip the pill, suggests Dr. Goldberg.

Related: 8 Environmental Beauty Hazards To Avoid

6. Drink 8 glasses of water a day.
Once believed to be the amount everyone needs for proper hydration, a longevity essential, a 2002 study from Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, NH, debunked the 8X8 rule. As Dr. Goldberg explains, "there's no magic number of glasses," emphasizing it's more about getting fluids, not necessarily from straight-up H20. Herbal tea and juices are hydration helpers (though soda isn't), but fruits and vegetables (like celery and leafy greens) are an even healthier way to get your liquids.

7. Milk does the body good.
You're taught that drinking it by the glassful keeps bones healthy and prevents fatal injuries. Yet a 12-year-long Harvard study found that women who drink milk three times a day break more bones than women who drink less than one glass of milk per week. While lowfat dairy may agree with you, calcium is what's key for strong bones. You can get it from leafy greens, beans, vitamin D (sunshine!) and even lifting weights.

8. Cut out booze.
A daily glass of wine not only can help your heart but also add years to your life. University of Texas at Austin researchers found that moderate drinking, such as a small glass of wine (about four ounces) a day, reduces mortality among older and middle-aged adults. Dr. Goldberg says it's because heart disease is the leading killer of women, and wine is chockfull of antioxidants, which prevent serious sickness. So fill 'er up-without overflowing that glass.

9. Take a multivitamin.
Even though half of all adults pop one, the 2011 Iowa Women's Health Study found that women taking multivitamins don't live longer than those who get their nutrients from food alone. Only calcium supplements are linked to a lower death risk, with 37% of users dying compared to 43% of nonusers in the study. Researchers' conclusion: Get the vitamins and minerals from fruit and vegetables, not capsules. 

The Mysterious Difference Between Those Who Make It Rich And Those Who Don't

Business Insider

tripwow.tripadvisor.com

James Altucher 

Rob told me JB was dead. JB was my best friend growing up. We sat next to each other on the bus. After school we’d play ping pong or pinball or monopoly or ride bikes.

Every single day we did this for eight years. Then we drifted apart.

Rob said, The last time I spoke to him he sounded like a ghost.

It was like there was nothing there, Rob said.

I hadn’t seen JB in 20 years.

He dropped out of college, Rob said, and never really had a job. His parents gave him money to live. He didn’t want to do anything.

He changed his phone number every few weeks, Rob said. So he was hard to keep in touch with.

I didn’t understand. Why did he change his number every few weeks?

He’d meet a girl, and then a few weeks later he’d get tired of her but not want to deal with it. He’d change his number so the girl couldn’t reach him, Rob said. And he moved a lot.

He had no Facebook page, no internet presence, it was hard to track him down, Rob said.

And it’s true. I had never found him on the Internet.

JB hurt his leg a few years ago, Rob said, and had no insurance because he never had a job. So got addicted to painkillers.

He was into the drug scene, Rob said.

So no job, drifting phone numbers, a hazy identity, drug, nerve damage, pain killers.

One day he never woke up, Rob said.

He was 39.

I don’t feel sad about this. People die. I haven’t seen him since we were 18 and on graduation day.

But I wonder about one thing Rob said.

“He was like a ghost the last time I spoke with him.”

We know when the body and mind are giving up. We know when spirit is exhausted. When the emotions don’t care.

He never had anything he wanted to do, Rob said.

Is that all it is? Do we just need something to do? Something that we want to scratch just a tiny bit so we continue one more day?

We don’t have to save the world. Or invent warm ice. Or time travel. Or even have a passion or a purpose.

When I was dead broke and crying I wanted to die just so my kids could have my life insurance policy. What got me to get up and go again?

And then later, when it happened again. And then again.

Why didn’t JB do that?

I call it “the push”.

You’re riding the bicycle up the hill all the time in life. Everything in life wants you to decay. To be subjugated. To be violated. To be tired. To become a ghost.

To roll back down the hill just when you thought you were close to the top.

It’s fucking tiring to live.

What can give us THE PUSH?

I don’t know.

For me, today, it’s just this post. Some days, it’s to see my 11 year old smile. Sometimes, I just want to take a walk. Or help Claudia. Or do something fun and creative.

What’s your PUSH today?

A little bit, every day, compounds.

A little push today turns into a big life tomorrow.

My one requirement: I have to give something. I have to enjoy it.

Else, it’s too draining. It’s a shit stain. I slip back on the hill.

A deep breath. You can do it, I tell myself. One more turn of the pedals. THE PUSH! Get over the hill!

I want to live.

Read more: http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/04/how-to-be-rich-the-push/#ixzz2RnGGphWZ

Debate: Should the United States Ration End-of-Life Care?

ForaTv

Just because we can extend life, should we? The U.S. is expected to spend $2.8 trillion on health care in 2012. Medicare alone will cost taxpayers $590 billion, with over 25% going toward patients in their last year of life. If health care is a scarce resource, limited by its availability and our ability to pay for it, should government step in to ration care, deciding whose life is worth saving? In other words, how much is an extra month of life worth?

Peter Dziuban: Trying to Measure Awareness

ForaTv

What If Jobs and Einstein Lived to be 150?

ForaTv

Why Would Anyone Want to be 150?

ForaTv

An information-processing approach to the origin of life

kurzweilai

Is life based on software and information? (Plants in the Rwenzori Mountains, Uganda; credit: Wikimedia Commons)

A novel approach to the question of life’s origin, proposed by two Arizona State University scientists — Paul Davies, an ASU Regents’ Professor and director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, and Sara Walker, a NASA post-doctoral fellow at the Beyond Center — in an open-access Journal of the Royal Society Interface paper, attempts to dramatically redefine the problem.

The authors shift attention from the “hardware” — the chemical basis of life — to the “software” — its information content. They suggest that the crucial distinction between non-life and life is the way living organisms manage the information flowing through the system.

“We propose that the transition from non-life to life is unique and definable,” said Davies. “We suggest that life may be characterized by its distinctive and active use of information, thus providing a roadmap to identify rigorous criteria for the emergence of life. This is in sharp contrast to a century of thought in which the transition to life has been cast as a problem of chemistry, with the goal of identifying a plausible reaction pathway from chemical mixtures to a living entity.”

“Chemical based approaches,” Walker said, “have stalled at a very early stage of chemical complexity — very far from anything we would consider ‘alive.’ More seriously they suffer from conceptual shortcomings in that they fail to distinguish between chemistry and biology.”

“To a physicist or chemist life seems like ‘magic matter,’” Davies explained. “It behaves in extraordinary ways that are unmatched in any other complex physical or chemical system. Such lifelike properties include autonomy, adaptability and goal-oriented behavior — the ability to harness chemical reactions to enact a pre-programmed agenda, rather than being a slave to those reactions.

“We believe the transition in the informational architecture of chemical networks is akin to a phase transition in physics, and we place special emphasis on the top-down information flow in which the system as a whole gains causal purchase over its components, This approach will reveal how the logical organization of biological replicators differs crucially from trivial replication associated with crystals (non-life). By addressing the causal role of information directly, many of the baffling qualities of life are explained.”

Nonlocal biological functions

“The most important features of biological information (i.e. functionality) are decisively nonlocal,” the authors say. “Biologically functional information is therefore not an additional quality, like electric charge, painted onto matter and passed on like a token. It is of course instantiated in biochemical structures, but one cannot point to any specific structure in isolation and say “Aha! Biological information is here!”

The authors expect that, by re-shaping the conceptual landscape in this fundamental way, not just the origin of life, but other major transitions will be explained — for example, the leap from single cells to multi-cellularity.

“In all of these cases where appeal is made to an informational narrative, we encounter context- (state-) dependent causation. In this respect, biological systems are quite unlike traditional mechanical systems evolving according to fixed laws of physics.

“In biological causation, subject to informational control and feedback, the dynamical rules will generally change with time in a manner that is both a function of the current state and the history of the organism (suggesting perhaps that even the concept of evolution itself may be in need of revision.”

Life in non-organic substrates?

This perspective “forces new thinking in how life might have arisen on a lifeless planet, by shifting emphasis to the origins of information control, rather than — for example — the onset of Darwinian evolution or the appearance of autocatalytic sets (i.e. either analog or digital that lack information control), which, although certainly important to the story of life’s emergence, do not rigorously define how/when life emerges as a function of chemical complexity.

“It also permits a broader view of life, where the same underlying principles would permit understanding of living systems instantiated in different chemical substrates (including potentially non-organic substrates). …

“Purely analog life-forms could have existed in the past but are not likely to survive over geological timescales without acquiring explicitly digitized informational protocols. Therefore life-forms that ‘go digital’ may be the only systems that survive in the long-run and are thus the only remaining product of the processes that led to life.

“As such, the onset of Darwinian evolution in a chemical system was likely not the critical step in the emergence of life. … Instead, the emergence of life was likely marked by a transition in information processing capabilities. This transition should be marked by a reversal in the causal flow of information from bottom-up only to a situation characterized by bi-directional causality.

“Characterizing the emergence of life as a shift in causal structure due to information gaining causal efficacy over matter marks the origin of life as a unique transition in the physical realm.”

Hallmarks of life

The authors suggest these specific hallmarks of life:

• Global organization
• Information as a causal agency
• Top-down causation
• Analog and digital information processing
• Laws and states co-evolve
• Logical structure of a universal constructor
• Dual hardware and software roles of genetic material
• Non-trivial replication
• Physical separation of instructions (algorithms) from the mechanism that implements them

Walker is also affiliated with the NASA Astrobiology Institute in Mountain View, Calif. and the Blue Marble Space Institute, Seattle.

References:

• Sara Imari Walker and Paul C.W. Davies, The Algorithmic Origins of Life, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2013, DOI: 10.1098/​rsif.2012.0869 (open access)

New DNA project shows us living beyond our genes

nbcnews.com/

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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No arms, no legs, no problems!: LOOK AT YOURSELF AFTER WATCHING THIS (spanish subtitles)

Notes from the Field

ClubOrlov

[Guest post by Mark. As I keep saying, being poor takes practice.]

You hear a lot of talk about relocalization and deindustrialization. The pastoral life, the good old days. How romantic! Reality pays you a visit when your pick-axe hits a rock, a chunk hits your face, and you taste your own blood.

Unaware of it at the time, I was a child of privilege, one of five born to a Chairman of Earth and Space Sciences at a State University in New York. We were all expected to be high achievers. I fulfilled the expectation and put in 32 years as an engineer helping the über-wealthy zip around the skies in personal rocket ships from one golf game to another while chalking it off as business expenses, when all I ever really wanted to do was sit out in the woods and cook some food on a stick over a fire.

In 1994 I acquired a 160 acre tract of land in southeast Kansas, for a price only slightly above chicken feed, as a weekender place to go sit by that fire and decompress from the rat-race. 18 years ago the future didn't look quite so ominous. Reel forward to the present and this full-time back-to-the-land experiment is starting to look like a pretty good idea. Some stark realities become self evident however when you are actually 'living the life'. Talking about it is easy. Doing it is something altogether different. Here is where I wish to convey a few 'notes from the field':

1. You realize after a while it is mostly hard, dirty, repetitive and boring. Mud, blood, shit, sweat, discomfort, disappointment, death. There are rewards, but you have to have a passion for it to endure. People who have grown up ranching already know these things of course, but they don't have to adapt. They know the life.

2. If you create an artificial abundance of anything, Mother Nature will do her best to return things to the status quo. Plant a large garden and you will have more venison than you can eat. Goats are not native to this region, coyotes are. Eagles, hawks, owls, raccoons, possums, foxes and bobcats are also native here. Chickens are not. They will all eat your chickens, given a chance.

3. If you want to eat meat, you have to kill something. It's brutal and unpleasant. Blood is blood, you best get used to it. Warm guts smell bad. They smell different, depending on what you just killed, but they all smell bad. The first time you shove an arm elbow deep in warm guts and blood to tear loose some connective tissue, you are hard pressed to not lose your lunch. It begins to get a bit easier when you have a chilled carcass with the hide peeled off, and the pieces you hack off start to look like something you would buy in a grocery store, but the lifeless eyes continue to stare.  

4. Intellectual deprivation. This was unexpected. It doesn't become apparent right away because you're so damned glad to be away from the crush of humanity and the demolition derby approach to getting around. Land is inexpensive in certain regions for a reason. Living elsewhere is much easier (so far). In this case, the regional economy has been in decline for 70 years. The population has declined nearly 80% from its peak, and the brain drain is close to 100%. Most anybody with ambition left long ago, and most youth leave, never to return. It is not hard now to understand why, historically, tribes of 1 to 5 haven't fared well. You need some minimum critical mass of human interaction to be able to survive psychologically, and some degree of specialization and division of labor just to cover all the bases. For those of you considering it, the 'survivalist bunker' approach to dealing with the future would be ill advised. Social interaction is not just something nice, it is an imperative.

Not to be too glum, on the upside there is sunshine, fresh air, fresh meat, eggs, milk, cheese, honey, fruits, nuts, vegetables, abundant wildlife and beautiful scenery. You don't need to 'go to the gym' to stay in shape either.

To peer into the future and see nothing beyond an endless re-run of this hard living is enough to put fear and dread in most hearts. I find it increasingly difficult to believe that dispossessed cubicle dwellers will be able to adapt physically or mentally.

In this setting it is not hard to envision the emergence of a tradition where you take each seventh day off from the grunt work and get together with your friends and neighbors just to celebrate the fact you are still breathing. No deities or voodoo required. Then just for fun, throw a big feast every solstice and equinox and invite everybody. Wait... haven't we been there before?

People tend to think of a 'land of milk and honey' as something idyllic and easy. This land of milk and honey is accessible, tangible and real, but it comes with strings attached.

"Do You Want to Live to Be 1000?" and Why That's a Stupid Question

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How Life Arose on Earth, and How a Singularity Might Bring It Down

By George Musser  
It didn’t take long for the recent Foundational Questions Institute conference on the nature of time to delve into the purpose of life. “The purpose of life,” meeting co-organizer and Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll said in his opening remarks, “is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.” Well, there you have it. Carroll is one of the most reflective scientists I know and would never claim to reduce all of human existence to molecular disequilibrium. Still, it’s nice to know your place in the grand scheme of things. The FQXi meeting had much to say about where we came from—and where we’re headed.
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Near-Death Experiences Now Found to Have Scientific Explanations

Scientific American

Near-death experiences are often thought of as mystical phenomena, but research is now revealing scientific explanations for virtually all of their common features. The details of what happens in near-death experiences are now known widely—a sense of being dead, a feeling that one's "soul" has left the body, a voyage toward a bright light, and a departure to another reality where love and bliss are all-encompassing.

Approximately 3 percent of the U.S. population says they have had a near-death experience, according to a Gallup poll. Near-death experiences are reported across cultures, with written records of them dating back to ancient Greece. Not all of these experiences actually coincide with brushes with death—one study of 58 patients who recounted near-death experiences found 30 were not actually in danger of dying, although most of them thought they were.

Recently, a host of studies has revealed potential underpinnings for all the elements of such experiences. "Many of the phenomena associated with near-death experiences can be biologically explained," says neuroscientist Dean Mobbs, at the University of Cambridge's Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. Mobbs and Caroline Watt at the University of Edinburgh detailed this research online August 17 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

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Meteorites Carried Life's Building Block to Earth

Discovery News

A new analysis of carbon meteorites suggests that they likely carried some of the building blocks needed for DNA to the Earth, according to a NASA-funded study.

The research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences adds weight to the long-debated theory that at least some of the materials needed to make early life forms came to our planet via meteorites.

NEWS: Meteorite Holds Amino Acid Surprise

Scientists used advanced mass spectrometry instruments to scan 11 organic-rich meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites for nucleobases, which contribute to making DNA and RNA.

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