Tuesday night roundup.

* Just posted to MetaFilter for the first time in a long time: Tomorrow, Obama will extend federal employee benefits to same-sex partners. But is it too little, too late to mend the growing rift between Obama and gay rights advocates, especially after last week's controversial (to say the least) DOMA brief? From my perspective it's a very small first step in the right direction, but very small—until the Lieberman-Baldwin Domestic Partnership Benefits and Obligations Act passes Congress it won't even cover health benefits.

* Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles.

* Alex Pareene's new blog reports that everyone is trying to kill you.

* Let UNC tell you how old your body is. More here and here.

* Busted-up Pokémon.

Speaking of Star Trek, the Poli-Sci-Fi Radio podcast got deep into the weeds this week on Dollhouse, The Prestige, clone "immortality," and how the transporter on Star Trek is a fax machine that shreds its input when it's done with it. (Bill has more on his home blog.)

Having spent a good portion of my childhood working out the metaphysical implications of such technology, I myself was moved to comment. As someone with a well-documented and simply unhealthy fear of death, I must admit that the consciousness-as-Ship-of-Theseus direction these discussions invariably take is both the only possible solution to the problem as well as a clear ontological horror in its own right.

Even if you think my periodic endorsements of This American Life are just so much hot air, you should really give a listen to this week's podcast, "Mistakes Were Made." Act 1 on the disastrous birth of the cryogenic movement is a great listen, and the William Carlos Williams spoofs in the second act are a good time too.

Advantage: hippies—vegetarians live longer.

Are humans designed/evolved to eat everything and at risk of malnutrition as vegetarians? Or is vegetarianism the healthy and ethical choice? The most impressive data arises from a study of 1904 vegetarians over 21 years by the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsche Krebsforschungszentrum). The study's shocking results: vegetarian men reduced their risk of early death by 50%! Women vegetarians benefit from a 30% reduction in mortality.

30% of female vegetarians will never die.

Immortality update: It turns out the reports that they invented crazy immortality powder out of pig's bladder were erroneous.

Brain death has never been a particularly reliable way to gauge whether or not somebody has died, but this story is pretty striking:

Thirty-six hours after the accident, Zack was declared brain dead. The hospital notified the authorities, news reports of his death were published, and preparations were made to harvest his organs.

But when family and friends were called in to make their last goodbyes, Zack's cousin, Dan Coffin, decided to check Zack's vitals one last time. When he ran his pocket knife along Zack's foot and applied pressure under a fingernail, the young man's body responded.

After 48 days in the hospital, Zack was able to return home to Frederick. He continues with rehab, which he finds challenging. "Just ain't got the patience," Zack told NBC.

Meanwhile, io9 shows life expectancy actually going down in a lot of places in America since the 1980s, what the writers of the study call a "growing health gap":

However, beginning in the early 1980s the differences in death rates among/across different counties began to increase. The worst-off counties no longer experienced a fall in death rates, and in a substantial number of counties, mortality actually increased, especially for women, a shift that the researchers call "the reversal of fortunes." This stagnation in the worst-off counties was primarily caused by a slowdown or halt in the reduction of deaths from cardiovascular disease coupled with a moderate rise in a number of other diseases, such as lung cancer, chronic lung disease, and diabetes, in both men and women, and a rise in HIV/AIDS and homicide in men. The researchers' key finding, therefore, was that the differences in life expectancy across different counties initially narrowed and then widened.

Is it possible John Edwards was right all this time?

MSNBC.com's running a series on longeivity that puts the blame squaring on you, the couch potato...

Tuesday morning links.

* "Kurzweil is 60, but he intends to be no more than 40 when the singularity arrives": Wired profiles futurist and Singularity prophet Ray Kurweil.

Kurzweil predicts that by the early 2030s, most of our fallible internal organs will have been replaced by tiny robots. We'll have "eliminated the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel. What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain."

* How to Build a PhD Cohort That Doesn't Fall Apart Five Years Later: Inside Higher Ed talks PhD completion rates, with some Duke-specific information.

...Siegel said interventions introduced after 1995 included reducing the emphasis on GREs and GPAs in selecting students, and publicly posting data on placement rates, time to degree, and completion, all in the name of transparency.

Unfortunately, those completion rate and time to degree statistics are getting a little hoary; they haven't been updated in about one full time-to-degree. On the other hand, the admissions and enrollment data page is quite current, and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that my cohort (2006-07) is the rockingest yet known.

* Also at Inside Higher Ed: more tenured academics speaking against tenure. So it's not enough to just pull the ladder up after them; they also want to burn the whole treehouse down with them inside...

What happens when my ethical vegetarianism runs headlong into my unquenchable thirst to live forever? Looks like we're about to find out. Via grinding.be.

Three years ago, Lee Spievack sliced off the tip of his finger in the propeller of a hobby shop airplane.

What happened next, Andrews reports, propelled him into the future of medicine. Spievack's brother, Alan, a medical research scientist, sent him a special powder and told him to sprinkle it on the wound.

"I powdered it on until it was covered," Spievack recalled.

To his astonishment, every bit of his fingertip grew back.

"Your finger grew back," Andrews asked Spievack, "flesh, blood, vessels and nail?"

"Four weeks," he answered.

...

That powder is a substance made from pig bladders called extracellular matrix. It is a mix of protein and connective tissue surgeons often use to repair tendons and it holds some of the secrets behind the emerging new science of regenerative medicine.

"It tells the body, start that process of tissue regrowth," said Badylak.

Badlayk is one of the many scientists who now believe every tissue in the body has cells which are capable of regeneration. All scientists have to do is find enough of those cells and "direct" them to grow.

"Somehow the matrix summons the cells and tell them what to do," Badylak explained. "It helps instruct them in terms of where they need to go, how they need to differentiate - should I become a blood vessel, a nerve, a muscle cell or whatever."

If this helped Spievack's finger regrow, Badylak says, at least in theory, you should be able to grow a whole limb.

Saturday potpourri:

* Science is still teasing me with dreams of immortality:

A genetically engineered organism that lives 10 times longer than normal has been created by scientists in California. It is the greatest extension of longevity yet achieved by researchers investigating the scientific nature of ageing.

* At culturemonkey, Ryan's got an essential take on There Will Be Blood that I think people who have seen the movie should be very interested in reading. (There's a good sidebar on No Country for Old Men too, the movie with which There Will Be Blood will forever be paired.) Click the [+/-] for a brief, spoiler-laden excerpt.

In TWBB one gets the impression from Eli, a grotesque parody of Christianity as both the paradigmatic model for non-capitalist politics and a type of show business, that stories can no longer be seriously invested in. Instead we learn to see Plainview the same way he sees others: "I see the worst in people. I don't have to look past seeing them to get all I need." In the much-criticized final showdown in the bowling alley, this impression of God and his earthly salesmen is rendered painfully concrete. It's the scene where the film's facade of realism, though always unsettled, is strained to the point of absurdity: the priest recants, he is made to suffer for his sins, and behold, his milkshake, it hath been drunk! But not even the grand narrative of entrepreneurial capitalism can survive past the last shot. The realization that has been building over the course of the film, in the form of Plainview's increasingly strained encounters with Standard Oil and the unstoppable expansion of monopoly power it represents -- that the individual capitalist is no longer a suitable vessel for the daemon of capital -- comes at last to fruition, and so with the resignation "I'm finished," the lights go out. The camera apparently hasn't the right to follow. But is it irrational hope to wonder if nostalgia for the end of a distant era can reflect any light back on the end of one still present? Or has Plainview eaten that as well?

Not to toot my own horn, but I think there have been some interesting points made by both Ryan and myself in the comments of that post, too.

* Sci-Fi Weekly has a good interview with George Romero on Diary of the Dead and what's next for the definitive zombie franchise.

Romero: I have this balls-out comedy zombie thing that I have wanted to do for three years. It's basically the coyote and the roadrunner. It's one human and one zombie. You can do a lot of damage to a zombie and it still lives. So I just had this idea that I'd love to do that as almost a cartoon. That's the one that's closest to my heart, but I don't know if anyone's ever going to get it enough to say, "OK, we'll finance that."

* Although most people have been saying that the writers' strike won them a good deal, delightful crackpot Harlan Ellison insists the writers actually got taken for a ride.

* It has become so much part of conventional wisdom that affluence is a problem that it is hard to imagine that attitudes were ever different. The media is full of stories about problems that allegedly owe much to our affluent lifestyles, including environmental degradation, social inequalities and even mental illness. Daniel Ben-Ami at the Spiked Review of Books remembers John Kenneth Galbraith's excellent The Affluent Society as a prelude to launching a broadside attack on it.

* And at the Valve, John Holbo says Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics is the best work of literary criticism of the last year. I've been meaning to pick this up; now I have no excuse not to.

Longtime readers know that one of my chief hobbyhorses is any crazy hint that I won't actually have to die someday. So here's Aubrey de Grey on Colbert last night, repeating the promise he made me:

It's my week to post at culturemonkey again, and I wound up getting a little bit philosophical. The topic is nominally the nuclear sublime, but it really would up being more about immortality and the imagination of the future. As I say over there, I'm just trying something on for size, I'm not sure I'm ready to make a down payment.

If you dream of immortality on Earth, you might be interested in Turritopsis nutricula, the jellyfish that never dies.

The hydrozoan Turritopsis nutricula has evolved a remarkable variation on this theme, and in so doing appears to have achieved immortality. The solitary medusa of this species can revert to its polyp stage after becoming sexually mature (Bavestrello et al., 1992; Piraino et al., 1996). In the laboratory, 100% of these medusae regularly undergo this change. Thus, it is possible that organismic death does not occur in this species!

In human terms, you can live forever, but you have to live through middle school over and over again. It's a tough call.

Via MeFi.

This is amazing: researchers have discovered a treatment that dramatically reverses the degenerative effects of Alzheimer's within minutes of injection.

1) Aubrey de Grey was right; we really are all going to live forever.

2) I smell a great potential origin for a superintelligent superhero. Or supervillain. Or zombie epidemic.

Via Boing Boing.

A glowing WaPo profile of futurist Aubrey de Grey, who has personally assured me that I will never die.

Aubrey de Grey may be wrong but, evidence suggests, he's not nuts. This is a no small assertion. De Grey argues that some people alive today will live in a robust and youthful fashion for 1,000 years.

In 2005, an authoritative publication offered $20,000 to any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that de Grey's plan for treating aging as a disease -- and curing it -- was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate."

...

In the end, they decided no scientist had succeeded in blowing de Grey out of the water.

But it gets more interesting as de Grey gets more and more Utopian:

"Of course the world will be completely different in all manner of ways," de Grey says of the next few decades. His speech is thick, fast and mellifluous, with a quality British accent.

"If we want to hit the high points, number one is, there will not be any frail elderly people. Which means we won't be spending all this unbelievable amount of money keeping all those frail elderly people alive for like one extra year the way we do at the moment. That money will be available to spend on important things like, well, obviously, providing the health care to keep us that way, but that won't be anything like so expensive. Secondly, just doing the things we can't afford now, giving people proper education and not just when they're kids, but also proper adult education and retraining and so on.

"Another thing that's going to have to change completely is retirement. For the moment, when you retire, you retire forever. We're sorry for old people because they're going downhill. There will be no real moral or sociological requirement to do that. Sure, there is going to be a need for Social Security as a safety net just as there is now. But retirement will be a periodic thing. You'll be a journalist for 40 years or whatever and then you'll be sick of it and you'll retire on your savings or on a state pension, depending on what the system is. So after 20 years, golf will have lost its novelty value, and you'll want to do something else with your life. You'll get more retraining and education, and go and be a rock star for 40 years, and then retire again and so on."

Previously. Previously. Way way back.

Man wakes up during autopsy. Via Boing Boing.