Month: June 2012

Vienna, Austria, 2.42 pm

Adam Lee contemplates how anti-aging therapy might challenge those who believe:

[W]hen we invent a real treatment for aging – when we can stop people from growing old, when we can rejuvenate ourselves at will – that will be the acid test of whether most religious people really believe what they say they do. Most religions teach that death is only the gateway into another realm of existence, one so blissful that we should envy the dead rather than mourn them. In a world where death is inevitable, that may be a comforting belief. But what happens when death is no longer inevitable? What will happen in a world where, barring rare accidents, people must choose to die?

Along the same lines, Ronald Bailey reviews Stephen Cave's Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How it Drives Civilisation: 

[If immortality were possible] Cave argues that on the one hand, boredom and apathy would eventually set in after one has done and seen everything, and other the hand, the prospect of an infinite future means that there is no urgency to do or see anything resulting in paralysis. Meaningful lives require a time limit, he argues.

"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace," - Frederick Buechner.

(Image: The Listener by Jason de Caires Taylor is assembled from casts of human ears and fitted with a hydrophone that is continually recording sounds from the reef environment. It's located in the National Marine Park of Cancun.)

Mark O'Connell explains why he's more drawn to Marilynn Robinson’s "Christian humanism" than "to the Dawkins-Dennett-Hitchens-Harris school of anti-theist fighting talk":

She makes an atheist reader like myself capable of identifying with the sense of a fallen world that is filled with pain and sadness but also suffused with divine grace. Robinson is a Calvinist, but her spiritual sensibility is richly inclusive and non-dogmatic. There’s little talk about sin or damnation in her writing, but a lot about forgiveness and tolerance and kindness. Hers is the sort of Christianity, I suppose, that Christ could probably get behind. I’ll never share her way of seeing and thinking about the world and our place in it, but her writing has shown me the value and beauty of these perspectives.

Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake,
inimitable contriver,
endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon,
thank you for such as it is my gift.

I have made up a morning prayer to you
containing with precision everything that most matters.
'According to Thy will' the thing begins.
It took me off & on two days. It does not aim at eloquence.

You have come to my rescue again & again
in my impassable, sometimes despairing years.
You have allowed my brilliant friends to destroy themselves
and I am still here, severely damaged, but functioning.

– "Eleven Addresses To The Lord" by John Berryman. Continued here.

Lucid dreaming apps and specialty eye masks are aiding the effort:

Created by psychologist Richard Wiseman, the app [Dream:ON] has seen over half a million downloads in just six weeks. "The new wave of interest is led by technology," says Wiseman, whose app claims to allow users to choose their dream before bed, and plays sound cues once they have entered the right phase of sleep. "When I selected birdsong, for example, I found myself dreaming that I was in a green and sunny field," says [recent recruit Michael Cave].

The eye masks use light instead of sound:

The project was initiated with a nearly $600,000 Kickstarder fund. The Remee website states, "In essence, Remee is a specialized sleep mask. You put it on before you go to bed and with practice and determination, it should help increase the number of lucid dreams you have." So, it’s not as if one will put Remee on and be dropped into a state of lucid dreaming. Remee, in effect, triggers light patterns during REM sleep, the time when the most vivid and intense dreams occur.

Geoff Nicholson suggests sushi:

Indeed, the first rule of naked dining is this: Hot food is generally to be avoided. … Not only is [sushi] temperature-appropriate, but there are hundreds of years of history behind it, according to the Japanese traditions of nyotaimori (literally, "female body presentation") and nantaimori (the male version), whereby a naked body can be used as a kind of sushi buffet. Whether the diners are also naked is a matter of personal choice and, perhaps more important, restaurant policy.

His own experience eating nude in public:

When I had dinner in the restaurant of a clothing-optional resort in Florida—it was research, trust me—I was dreading it, and it definitely was awkward and embarrassing, but only for about five minutes. It took amazingly little time to get used to the abundance of, in this case, perfectly ordinary bare flesh all around me; if I had been surrounded by naked supermodels it would no doubt have been a different experience. But after those first few minutes it was just like eating in any other not-very-good resort restaurant. I seem to recall I had macaroni and cheese, and I laid out my napkin very carefully.

(Video via Robb Walsh's list of the Top Ten Food and Sex Scenes in the Movies)

Tokyo, Japan, 8 pm

Marina Adshade weighs the economic benefits of having a significant other:

All the data I have seen suggests that the men who have sex the least frequently, after men who have no sex at all, are those who report having more than one sexual partner in the previous three months. The men who have sex the most frequently, for example more than 20 times a month, are almost exclusively men who have only one sexual partner. So even though it may appear to cost less to head out to the clubs on the weekend than it does to wine and dine a girlfriend, given that the outcome of that outing is uncertain it is probably still the most expensive option.