A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Starting today, I am eating resveratrol supplements with my breakfast.

I feel good about this. After following anti-aging developments for years, and flirting with some ideas like calorie restriction, this is the first time I have applied a promising technology to myself. I do not mind saying that I went ahead and made a little ceremony of my first dose, eating the pills with cold water while standing under a hot shower. From tomorrow on, they'll just go down with my morning coffee.

Effects so far: some of my burps taste funny. Stay tuned for updates.

My plan, henceforth, is to continue following the news about anti-aging treatments and applying the single sanest-sounding one to myself, letting it complement a lifestyle of varied diet, frequent exercise, low stress, high friendship, and all that good stuff. I suspect, though, that there'll only be so many more candidates before one treatment really blows the lid off.

Still, I can't help but feel a little self-conscious about this. Many of my friends are apathetic about, or even resistant to, the idea of clinical anti-aging therapy. I can understand where they come from, because it's based on countless generations of the shared human condition, and that's awfully strong stuff. It doesn't help that decades of advertising have confused the definition of "anti-aging" with the promises of beauty creams or plastic surgery. This can make the desire to truly eliminate aging seem like a shallow pursuit, when really it's no shallower than wishing to eliminate any other debilitating, degenerative disease.

The meme that aging is treatable started working its way into the mainstream just as I was turning 30. I don't believe in fate, but I do believe in auspiciously timed opportunity.

Here's to the future, eh?

Edit: I'm shutting off anonymous comments on this entry because it's getting a lot of anon-spam.

* There's an really annoying bug with volity.net that isn't going away no matter how often I think I kill it. I am feeling really spring fevery and don't wanna fix it, but this afternoon's really the best time to do it.

* Ha ha ha I fixed it in the time between I wrote the above paragraph and now. No more blank game records.

* misuba sent the Andys and I some core web client code. We're going to look at it tonight duirng our regular biweekly meeting. The goal is to get a "Hello World" working demonstrably enough that we can check the whole thing into public Subversion. It's very important to me that this project go beta this year.

* Mailed first invoice to the new and magical client today. Mixing the advices of a random web page and taskboy3000, now that I have a plurality of clients I have stopped serially numbering my invoices and instead switched to the format TLAYYYYMMDD, where TLA is some three-letter code that reminds me which client this is. The date is the date I mailed the invoice. (Though it occurs to me now that there ought to be another digit there in case I need to mail two or more in one day. Hm.)

* Here is a talk by Vernor Vinge titled "What if the Singularity does not happen?" I listened to the MP3 version while lightly dozing on my couch below an open window last night.

* I am swinging back into a more active interest in transhumanism. I think step one is to investigate just what my feelings are. As much as I find attractive, there's a lot I find repellant, embarrassing fairly tales out of a 1988 issue of Omni. I owe myself an essay. The possible key phrase "make your own damn afterlife" came to me today, which appeals to me for personal reasons, though I'm not sure it fits perfectly.