Phenomena

For anyone struggling to get into an exercise routine, I've ran into a potential solution because it doesn't require lots of time and effort.

Exercise 10 minutes daily (or at least 3-5x a week) as soon as you wake up and before you hit the shower. Do intervals. Out of the 10 minutes, two have to be all out and intense. You can do a treadmill, elliptical, or as I often do at home: jumping jacks and running in place (no, seriously). Also, listen to your favorite, upbeat music.

Benefits:

* exercise is generally good for the frontal cortex, what helps you focus and get things done [1]

* exercising in the morning will put you in a more positive mood, helping to reduce stress; by reducing stress, you feel more energetic, you feel less hungry and crave less crappy food, therefore you prevent the systematic downward spiral that comes with it and you lose weight.

* because you exercise in the morning, you burn more fat [2]

* adding music is great for your dopamine levels: [3]

* intensity (anaerobic exercise) is more important than duration and frequency [4]

I ran into this routine because I always have a hard time waking up in the morning (not so much anymore) and was always late to work. But knowing from previous experience that working out intensely in the morning helped with my energy level and focus, I did 10-15 minutes and found that it's all that I needed. In a bit over a month I've lost like 9lbs, I eat better, get less tired at work and can focus for longer periods of…

I'm seeing the usual comments about life expectancy and IQ here, so I had better respond to both issues.

First of all, and I encourage readers to follow the links for more details, today we have longer life expectancies at birth, at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages than ever before.[1] Whatever it is that we are eating these days, so far our diets aren't undermining the steady long-term trend of increasing life expectancy at ALL ages all over the developed world. An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why"[2] tells the story of the steady improvements in prevention and treatment that have reduced all-cause mortality and morbidity for Americans and for most people in the developed countries. I have been stunned to realize I now have several aunts and uncles who are past the age of 90 and still living independently and in reasonably good health. A couple years ago I was shopping for a birthday present for my own mother, now more than 80 years old, and I found multiple birthday cards for 80th and 90th birthday cards for sale at the bookstore where I was shopping. Lots of people are living a long time now.

But don't just take my anecdotes as evidence. Check what professional demographers write about the issue in peer-reviewed journal articles and say about the issue in press interviews. Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely…

> But lots of animals commit suicide. You don't need to talk about lemmings.

We have to talk about lemmings when we are talking about conscious human-like suicide because lemmings are the only animals that purportedly had conscious intentional suicides like human being. After all, the philosophical debate was "the difference between humans and animals". I actually brought up honey bees committing suicide ( once they sting, they die ). But the professor rejected it ( rightly so ) because it wasn't conscious and intentional suicide. For example, a parent storming a burning building to save their child and dying in the process isn't suicide in the human sense. A female octopus giving birth and dying isn't suicide.

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/07/30/octopus-cares-for-her-eggs-for-53-months-then-dies/

A soldier going to war and dying isn't suicide. A mother bison trying to save her calf from predators and dying in the process isn't suicide. There is a difference between sacrifice and intentional conscious suicide where no one benefits.

> And your discussion sounds with your professor sounds really stupid

It wasn't. It was one of my favorite classes in college and hence why I decided to double major in philosophy. It was the first time I can say I really thought about something. If the class was "really stupid" it wouldn't have left such an indelible mark on me.

> he literally claimed to be the ultimate authority on lemmings?

Yes. He believed it was a fact…

As usual, Ed Yong has a good overview on NERS: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/06/19/why-naked-mole-rats-dont-get-cancer/

edit: I see the NYT article is by Carl Zimmer, so I can only recommend though I've yet to read it.

Although

> Hyaluronan probably isn’t the only way to fight off cancer. Blind mole rats (which, despite their name, are not close relatives of naked mole rats) rarely get cancer either. But the research Dr. Gorbunova and Dr. Seluanov have conducted on those rodents suggests that they fight cancer by sending a different signal to fast-growing cells, causing them to commit suicide.

Dan Engber's wonderful 2011 Slate piece[0], linked by Yong, notes naked mole rats have perfectly functioning apoptosis processes:

> A naked mole rat cell, they argued, is hypersensitive to crowds: The minute one of its cytoplasmic arms brushes up against a stranger, it stops dividing. A cell could be induced to overcome its shyness with the help of some cancer-causing proteins, and so emboldened it would grow out of control, like a tumor. But even then, a second line of defense would be activated: The cell would apoptose, or self-destruct.

it's not clear whether Zimmer is talking about somehow extra-active apoptosis in blind mole rats, does anybody have precisions?

[0] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/naked_mole_rats_can_they_help_us_cure_cancer_.html

> > It's already preventable -- we came with a sufficient supply of antimalarial pills, but they're so expensive it's obviously not a solution.

> There's just one problem with that one — aside from costs for third-world regions: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/03/25/can-we-beat-drug-resistant-malaria-at-its-birthplace/

Good point -- the expense is serious, but also widely using low levels of drugs that are effective treatments as antimalarials means giving the parasite lots more great opportunities to evolve resistance (which is already happening, and is a serious upcoming problem).

> At the social level it is debilitating...

Yup, I agreed with Gates' conclusions; I was trying to share some direct experience.

> Given our experience with actual simulators, the fact is that simulating a world populated with intelligent beings capable of simulating another world, going into a recursive loop, requires infinite processing capacity.
This reminds me of old-timers talking about "You'll never use 640 kB of RAM!" It is rather odd when thinking about "infinity" though, but there are a couple things that I would note: 1) It's hard not to accept the concept of infinity. It's used quite a bit. 2) In order for one infinity to exist, all infinities must exist. 3) http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/24/when-hubble-stared-at-nothing-for-100-hours/

Those are galaxies...in a tiny patch of "empty space". Space is big. Really big...