MetaFilter posts tagged with aging

When you were young, you cried only for yourself.

Paid In Full — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:13:21 -0800

On the Division of Our Three Score & Ten

HumanComplex — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:52:07 -0800

Ben Schott (previously) on The Ages of Man.

In Sickness and in Health

digaman — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:29:25 -0800

Sassy lesbian couple in Florida celebrates 70 years together after having to keep their relationship secret for decades. You go, girls!

The girl who doesn't age

mr_crash_davis mark II: Jazz Odyssey — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:49:29 -0800

The girl who doesn't age.

Past a certain age, to paraphrase Catherine Deneuve, it’s either your fanny or your face.

beaucoupkevin — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 07:03:18 -0800

How Plastic Surgery Can Give An Older Woman The Face Of A Baby:

She looked a little like … Madonna? Strange, I know, since Madonna and my friend have little in common, at least physically. But when I saw the Big Ciccone on the cover of Vanity Fair a couple of months later, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities: the Mount Rushmore cheekbones, the angular jawline, the smoothed forehead, the plumped skin, the heartlike shape of the face. Their faces didn’t seem pulled tight in that typical face-lift way; they seemed pushed out. Looking at Madonna, I kept thinking of the British expression for reconditioning a saddle: having it "restuffed." Perhaps that’s where she got the idea to have some work done. After the hunt, Madge dismounted her trusty steed and thought, My saddle needs restuffing. And, by George, so does my face!

Another excerpt:

I decided to e-mail Liz Rosenberg, Madonna’s publicist since fuh-evah (and no relation to the doctor), to see if she would have lunch with me and talk about celebrities and plastic surgery. "Absofuckinlutely," she wrote back. "Though why you think anyone I represent has done anything to their faces is beyond me. Ha-ha. Getting any artist besides Joan Rivers and Kathy Griffin to go on record about the subject is not easy. Of course one of the great quotes came from my gal Cher, who said in an interview, 'If I want to put my tits on my back it’s my business.' Whatever Madonna has had done—and I really don’t know—she looks truly amazing."

Caring for the Old

mygothlaundry — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:34:45 -0800

The NYT has a new blog on aging and eldercare. Thanks to the marvels of medical science, our parents are living longer than ever before.The Gray Lady has started a blog catering to the sandwich generation, with topics, so far, ranging from when to take the car keys to personal accounts of eldercare crises. The 290 comments on this post in particular are eye opening and heartbreaking.

Life in a retirement home

cardboard — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:06:26 -0800

Senior High: A week-long series from the Globe and Mail on life in the Terraces of Baycrest, a retirement home in Toronto. Drawing parallels to high school (the average stay of residents is 4.5 years), stories have ranged from the anxieties about the first day, the problems with cliques and getting snubbed by the cool kids, the ups and downs of the dating scene, and what to do about the awful food in the cafeteria. On Friday the series concludes with graduation, the one area where you might think the analogy would fall apart. Humanizing above all else, each piece is supplemented with video interviews of the residents that give a bit more flavour to the story. Read and watch it now as the Globe and Mail usually archives its stories within a couple of weeks.

Here is the best part. You have a head start. If you are among the very young at heart.

mrducts — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 15:21:46 -0800

Young@Heart. What started as a 2006 British television documentary and became an audience favorite at the Los Angeles and Sundance film festivals in 2007 and 2008 opens across the United States this weekand will soon open in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Japan and Australia. The opening sequence showing Eileen Hall , then 92 , singing the 1982 hit from punk-rock group The Clash provided the inspiration for director Stephen Walker when he first saw the group on stage in London in 2005. Besides giving new meaning to lyrics from popular hits, the film is comedic and poignant as it explores friendship, old age and death.

The Immortal Species

Foci for Analysis — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:33:24 -0800

While the dream of immortality might be as old as mankind, the jellyfish Turritopsis nutricula (image) seems to be living it:

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!

An in-depth research paper.

Love in the Time of Dementia

GrammarMoses — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 07:39:15 -0800

Love in the Time of Dementia Former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s husband, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, has a romance with another woman, and the former justice is thrilled — even visits with the new couple while they hold hands on the porch swing — because it is a relief to see her husband of 55 years so content. (More on their story from AFP.) This is also the plot of the wonderful Alice Munro short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” which became the recent movie Away from Her. More about the O'Connors' marriage here.

wanna live forever

shotgunbooty — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 10:56:20 -0800

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.

Never run after a bus. There'll always be another one.

hexatron — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 09:59:49 -0800

A 400 year old clam has been slaughtered by ruthless 'scientists'. How much could this clam have told us about history, about longevity, about life? Probably not much--it's a clam.

The downside of living longer

desjardins — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 06:49:16 -0800

Animated population pyramids project a steady increase in the median age. England and Wales. United States. Canada. China. Japan. "The number of older persons has tripled over the last 50 years; it will more than triple again over the next 50 years." [pdf] There will be a shortage of workers to support the retired and disabled. The looming crisis has been predicted for years. Proposed solutions include robots and immigration. [previously, previously]

Aubrey de Grey - Do you want to live forever?

homodigitalis — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 16:12:28 -0800

Do You Want To Live Forever? [Google Video - Channel4 documentary] Aubrey de Grey is a genius, a weirdo and predicts the death of death. Don't miss his lectures and some interviews as well. Who is going to be the first immortal MeFite?

Wrinkled and Rankled

hermitosis — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:15:59 -0800

Okay, it wasn't exactly banned, but the new Dove ad for their anti-aging products-- featuring tastefully nude older women-- was pre-emptively rejected by broadcast networks. Dove's Campaign For Real Beauty shares reactions, lets you meet the cast, and invites you to discuss. Previously on MetaFilter: Dove's short "Evolution" about how image-manipulation distorts beauty standards.

Isotopically delicious!

greatgefilte — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 15:44:24 -0800

One burger, double neutrons, hold the quarks. Mikhail Shchepinov believes that eating food enhanced with more isotopes can lead to longer lives. What could go wrong?

Human time capsules

madamjujujive — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 06:43:42 -0800

There are about 250,000 centenarians alive today, including several hundred "supercentarians" aged 110+ years. Jerry Friedman, founder of Earth's Elders Foundation, has spent the past four years on a landmark project to introduce the world to the oldest people on earth. And in a similar endeavor, photographer Mark Story has been capturing portraits and stories of people from around the globe who are Living in Three Centuries.

Old people neglecting to die

daHIFI — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 09:11:25 -0800

The Coming Death Shortage We've talked about Aubrey De Grey and gerontology before, but what about the Anna Nicole Smith syndrome and compound interest? This piece from the Atlantic online brings up a scenario that that we may well have to deal with as the maximum possible age increases. Generational warfare, government subsidized longevity treatments ,30 year old adolescence and bio-engineered nations are just some of the things we will live to see if this forecast is accurate. (via Plastic)

“There is no free lunch,’’ Dr. Sharpless said. “We are all doomed.”

Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 13:29:35 -0800

The evolutionary reason behind senescence^ is one of the great mysteries of biology. Now cancer researchers may have discovered the key to why we age.

Autopsy: Life & Death

srboisvert — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 06:54:01 -0800

Autopsy: Life & Death. Following on from Anatomy for Beginners which concentrated on the anatomy of life, anatomist Dr Gunther von Hagens and pathologist Professor John Lee now turn to the process of understanding death. Full video clips.

Death as we know it will die.

sharksandwich — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 15:58:31 -0800

Death as we know it will die. If you wish to be a prophet, first you must dress the part. No more silk ties or tasseled loafers. Instead, throw on a wrinkled T-shirt, frayed jeans, and dirty sneakers. You should appear somewhat unkempt, as if combs and showers were only for the unenlightened. When you encounter critics, as all prophets do, dismiss them as idiots. Make sure to pepper your conversation with grandiose predictions and remind others of your genius often, lest they forget. Oh, and if possible, grow a very long beard. By these measures, Aubrey de Grey is indeed a prophet. The 42-year-old English biogerontologist has made his name by claiming that some people alive right now could live for 1,000 years or longer. Maybe much longer. Growing old is not, in his view, an inevitable consequence of the human condition; rather, it is the result of accumulated damage at the cellular and molecular levels that medical advances will soon be able to prevent — or even reverse — allowing people to go on living pretty much indefinitely.

How to Live Forever

ewkpates — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 10:12:28 -0800

How To Live Forever: More research suggests that there is no such thing as aging, and reminds me of that quote from the Barbarian Brothers, "there is no such thing as overtraining, there is only undereating and undersleeping." As opposed to Timothy 8. Also, I LOVE the HNRCA database. Get yer mutli people, get it!

We no longer know what it means to be human,

Mr. Gunn — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 10:42:01 -0800

EMBO's report on Time and Aging (free access) contains an essay wherein the author, Karin Knorr Cetina, from the University of Konstanz, Germany, argues that death and aging used to be major issues that defined what it means to be human and helped us find our place in society by showing us the limits of what is possible to achieve as a human. With the advances in science, particularly biological advances in slowing aging and technological advances in extending human function, we no longer accept our fate. Instead of accepting that we all grow old and die so we should take our place in society, with the expectation that if we contribute, society will take care of us, too, we now have promises being made by science that death and aging are no longer inevitable. Where are we headed, then? If we can no longer find our place by finding the limits of achievement and accepting our place within them, how do we work as a collective?

Geek Overboard!

craniac — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 17:40:16 -0800

Jamie Zawinskie forsakes Linux. For an Imac.

Rats Perception Elvis

mcgraw — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 19:26:58 -0800

If rats can distinguish between Japanese and Dutch , why would Elvis have looked like this at age 70?