Combating Aging ~ De Grey on Gerontechnology

Aubrey De Grey sums up why and how to combat aging...

Age Reduction ~ Using VFX to Time Shift Her...

Oldest Person ~ Rectangularization of Mortality!

David Goldenberg at FiveThirtyEight writes Why The Oldest Person In The World Keeps Dying...

"The cutoff for mortality has remained relatively firm. Robert Young, a guy with a remarkable name considering he’s the senior claims researcher for the Gerontology Research Group and the senior gerontology consultant for Guinness World Records, refers to this phenomenon as the “rectangularization of the mortality curve.” People are getting older on average, but the oldest are still dying around the same age as ever. Thus, when one of them does take over as the oldest, she doesn’t have much time left. The average age of the oldest-ever people has increased over the past 40 years from around 112 to around 114."

Plus lovely ageless infographic... Of course, that plot doesn't show "rectangularization" -- for this we need the actual Mortality Curve which is discernibly rectifying...

Gapminder World 2013 ~ Life Expect vs GDP/cap

Gapminder shares latest global figures comparing...

"Life Expectancy & GDP per capita of 187 countries in year 2013. Each bubble is a country. Size is population. Color is region. [Produced Nov 2014. Click to download PDF]"

Cycling Without Age ~ Kassow's Rides @ TEDx

Copenhagenize's Mikael shares the TEDx talk by Ole Kassow who created the Cycling Without Age movement...

How Doctors Die ~ Desiring Quality Over Quantity

Dr Ken Murray, Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC, writes at Zocalo Public Square about How Doctors Die...

"Doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently. Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. [...] Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. [Instead, doctors want] a life of quality, not just quantity. Don’t most of us? If there is a state of the art of end-of-life care, it is this: death with dignity."

Listen also to Dr Diana Hsieh's Philosophy In Action radio show interview with UChicago Medical School geriatrician Dr William Dale speaking about End-Of-Life Medical Choices.

R.I.P. Kay Stratton ~ MIT's Gracious First Lady

The lovely and kind Catherine “Kay” Stratton, wife of MIT’s 11th President and a wonderfully gracious first lady, has alas passed away at age 100. I met her during my grad studies when she shared how she and her husband connected both newly arrived and senior faculty and linked interesting people with one another through regular dinner gatherings at the President's house. Mrs Stratton stayed very active well beyond her formal duties. Indeed, as MIT's News Office reports...

"In 1988, Stratton created the “Aging Successfully” lecture series at MIT to explore health topics of concern especially -- but not exclusively -- to an aging population. MIT created a Lecture on Critical Issues series in her honor in 1994, which has included such varied topics as Internet security, population growth, control of nuclear weapons, and microfinance."

She remains an inspiration for those of us seeking to make MIT a welcoming and gloriously creative place.

Until ~ Gibb asks Who Wants to Live For Ever?

io9's Robbie Gonzalez asks Do You Really Want To Live Forever? spotlighting Barry J Gibb's short film Until...

"[Life extension is] the biggest change confronting humanity in the 21st [Century] world; it's much bigger than climate change. Make no mistake, this is humanity's greatest success. It's not, as some people believe, an unfortunate experiment in human survival that has gone disastrously wrong – when you hear some people talk about The Burden of all these old people around you it feels like this is something we never wanted to happen. Well, of course we wanted it to happen, because people, actually, don't like dying."

Oldest Living Things ~ Rachel Sussman's World!

Rachel Sussman spotlights Oldest Living Things 2,000 years+ old! Thanks to Kottke for spotting!

Identities ~ Ana Oliveira's Generational Portraits!

Neatorama's Zeon Santos spotlights lovely portraits by Ana Oliveira exploring self-generational Identities!

Alcor ~ Cryonics Facility Tour & CEO Interview...

Singularity weblog's Nikola Danaylov and colleagues visited Alcor Life Extension Foundation and created video tour plus interview with CEO Max More...

Makeover ~ Funny Tropfest Oz Short Film;-)

Check out Makeover, a funny Tropfest short;-)

Generations ~ Germain's Portraits of Families!

Thanks to John Farrier at Neatorama for spotting Julian Germain's Generations series of photographs showing recursive {child + parent} family portraits!

Curing Aging ~ de Grey on Healthy Longevity!

Thanks to Johnny Boston at H+ for spotlighting Galactic Public Archives interview with a genial modern-day Merlin, Dr Aubrey de Grey, on addressing the world's most important problem -- the diseases and ravages of aging -- via Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence or SENS... This is especially important in light of the neo-luddite anti-gerontechnology movement festering in our society, for instance Daniel Callahan's screed in the NYTimes On Dying After Your Time.

Dutch Pensions ~ PBS on Pooled Risk+Benefits

PBS Newshour investigates Dutch pensions...

Life Begins at Rewirement ~ Uploaded Elderly?

io9 spots Life Begins at Rewirement short film on uploading the elderly as alternative way of future nursing care... See also Behind the Scenes...

End of Aging ~ de Grey on the Key to Longevity...

FORA spots The End of Aging: Aubrey de Grey's Key to Longevity...

100 ~ Dutch Baby to Centarian Speak Their Ages!

24oranges spots this delighter!

Robot & Frank ~ Embracing the Future, Bot by Bot

Trailer for Robot & Frank movie...

Final Words ~ Last Things Said Before Death...

Moving piece by Kerry Egan in CNN Belief blog...

"I am a hospice chaplain. I visit people who are dying -- in their homes, in hospitals, in nursing homes. [...] What do people who are sick and dying talk about with the chaplain? [...] Mostly, they talk about their families: about their mothers and fathers, their sons and daughters. They talk about the love they felt, and the love they gave. Often they talk about love they did not receive, or the love they did not know how to offer, the love they withheld, or maybe never felt for the ones they should have loved unconditionally. They talk about how they learned what love is, and what it is not. And sometimes, when they are actively dying, fluid gurgling in their throats, they reach their hands out to things I cannot see and they call out to their parents: Mama, Daddy, Mother."

Read the rest, heartwrenching stuff including Kerry's discussion of her learning experiences and personal faith beliefs. I'm not of her creed but I honor her humanity and admire her goodness. In any case, I personally think dying and specifically death due to aging are the ultimate genetic disease -- a devilish DNA defect we all inherit from ancestors who were never naturally selected for longevity, nevermind immortality. Maybe with enough investment in life sciences and biotechnology we can end this scourge?