BouncingBabyBoomer.com

Upsides in the Down?

My delayed return to posting here has been less about the holidays and more about my mood. I have been too depressed by the financial mess to say very much upbeat. So to drop kick myself out of the doldrums, I am going to think out loud about some things that prick a few rays of light in my clouds.

Where am I taking my encouragement when rays of light seem so few and far between? Let me free associate to see which top dozen things come to mind..
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My Top Dozen Rays of Hope for 2009

12. That Obama will take office on 1/20/09 (to feel even more encouraged about him, read this candid Time profile if you haven't seen it).
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11. That we are seeing so many well-tempered minds in high places again and it is no longer un-PC to admire an extra-strong intellect
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10. That when I want to just escape and forget for a bit, there will soon be new episodes of old faves on TV (House, Lost, 24, Galactica, and [eventually] Mad Men)
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9. The emerging return of mutual respect on the international stage, both towards us and from us. One does get the sense that many countries are sincerely cheering us on (except when not).
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8. That there is more and more accessible science content in print and on TV (e.g. SciQ and Brink on the Science Channel). Whatever the challenge, from the economy to the environment, we all will need a stronger grasp of how complex systems tend to operate. Meanwhile the nation is also gaining a clue about how big a difference healthy eating can make (a la Michael Pollan and Matt Goulding) and this awareness will pay back from our waistlines to our pocketbooks and help us make headway in health care too.
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7. I see increasing traffic on intelligent web sites (Salon, Slate, NYT, Wired, Seed) where good minds can cross-pollinate good ideas with a hope they will compound into wider understanding
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6. Encouraging headlines in health and medicine remind us almost daily of how much we have already achieved and how much more is coming soon (watch for another Top12 list this week)
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5. That already we are remembering how it feels when less turns out to be more.
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4. At my own desk, I am grateful every day that Windows XP is still alive, cloud computing is getting so good, that so much of the Net is still entirely free and that there is often something on You Tube to make me grin (e.g. RoombaCat)
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3. On the serious side of the street again, I am also grateful we are gaining perspective on how we got into this financial mess (such as this Mea Culpa and this lookback from Stein, and these comments from Kristof on the upside in the down) even if we sure still dont know what to do with it.
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2. I also appreciate that so many people in positions of power are becoming more comfortable saying, "I don't know, but together we will figure it out." Global warming might be helped quite a bit just from the resulting reduction in hot air.
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1. Did I mention that Obama takes office in just a few days?

My First Thought for Today (11/5/08)

Happy New Era to US all!!!! (she said while tagging this post to every category on this blog where I now feel more optimistic than I did yesterday)

Is a "Singularity" Near? Learning more about Ray K., part 1

 As mentioned last post, there will be a "Singularity Summit" this weekend in San Jose (at The Tech Museum on Friday and the Montgomery Theatre on Saturday with discounts on tickets here.)

The summit is the brainchild of inventor-futurist, Ray Kurzweil, in partnership with IEEE, the engineering society. But the conference is not all and only about the visions of Kurzweil; it is a convening of several big thinkers and scientists sharing updates on everything from nanotech to artificial intelligence.

For those not already familiar with Ray, this might be an apt time to share from a couple presentations I myself gave about his ideas last year. Whatever you think about his specific predictions, his understanding of history is compelling and his sense of the future is fascinating.

For the next few days I will be folding in snips from my own speaking notes as a preface to what I will later report from the conference itself.

In his book, The Singularity, Ray Kurzweil makes the case that life as we know it is about to radically change. Within a scant few decades, perhaps as soon as 2030, he predicts we will see a "Big Bang" when exponential growth in our understanding of the brain converges with explosive growth in machine intelligence plus nanotech, and the boundaries between man and machine become blurred. How much of this prediction is likely how soon has been a topic of dispute, so much so that IEEE devoted a special issue to this topic last year.

What follows is some detail from the Kurzweil book, interspersed with my own reflections.

The Thoughts in a Box That Can Kill Us

I am only half-way into this book but I can't say enough good things about it. This could as easily have been called "How Engineers Think" or "How Professors Think"  since many of the same dynamics apply to anyone who absorbs a large body of knowledge and needs to apply it flexibly under real world conditions. However if a physician gets overly stuck inside a logic box it runs a real risk of killing someone. This issue is tackled head on by Jerome Groopman MD who also writes on matters medical for the New Yorker. In this book, he gives us an intimate, accessible glimpse into the minds of doctors, explaining the most common mistakes a physician might make. In this era of soaring medical error rates, everyone with a pulse should check out this book before their next checkup.

Title: How Doctors Think (click on the title to jump to the Amazon page)
Author: Jerome Groopman MD
Publisher: Mariner Books; (March 12, 2008)
Author's site: www.jeromegroopman.com

It's the same 'ole low wherever you go

for the jr. boomer department...

If you're around 45 and feeling low, you've got lots of cohorts around the globe. So says Scientific American in one of its 60 Second Science podcasts, reporting on a study in the journal Science and Medicine. People from Bangalore or Boston all say they hit the pits for a stretch in between the peaks of well-being and optimism you feel in your 20s and should feel again after 55. They found this same U-curve wherever they went; culture, affluence, marital status all made no difference.(For text of this podcast, click here.)

I think I am going to file this snip in the bulging folder I've labeled "science confirms common sense."

Muscle-Building Pill. Maybe.

So did you catch that news (see link at end) about the pill that can fake exercise? No kidding; in adult mice it had the same effect on muscles as a brisk burst of cardio, and since the muscles felt as if they were already in shape, it boosted endurance too when the mice actually exercised.

These are just rodent trials, no humans yet, but the implications are fascinating for everyone from athletes to the aging to those with back injuries.

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