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66 votes
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Dawnshard - By Brandon Sanderson - Discussion
Spoiler warning for Dawnshard and previous Stormlight Archive books (Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, Edgedancer, & Oathbringer). I'd seen mentions of the sleepless and Dawnshards when browsing...
Spoiler warning for Dawnshard and previous Stormlight Archive books (Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, Edgedancer, & Oathbringer).
I'd seen mentions of the sleepless and Dawnshards when browsing the Arcanum and so was primarily hoping to learn more about these in this book. But in a short period of time I was surprised with how attached I grew to Rysn! In particular at the end of the book when the captain appreciates Rysn's role as Rebsk and allow here to steer the ship (showing their trust) for a few minutes, I let out an audible cheer. (Also when I noticed that she gained perfect pitch and perfect color recognition) Rysn and Vstim's interludes in the previous stormlight books were some of my favourite interludes and I'm so glad that we got to see more of them here.
The other thing I was surprised by was the set up for the two Winderunners swearing their third ideal here. Lopen says quite clearly that the third ideal is saying that you will protect even those you hate. And then a few chapters later we see Huio swear the third ideal in order to protect Lopen. I honestly thought this was just going to be played off as a joke since they have a fair bit of banter early in the book. But I was heart warmed to see that realisation that Lopen has that his jokes and teasing hurt people, and him swearing his own version of the ideal to protect other people from himself. It reminded me of some of the similar (but not same) character development moments we get with Wayne in Mistborn.
I'd love to hear what other people who read this book thought about it as well. Once I can get my hands on Yumi and the Nightmare Painter in paperback form, I hope to discuss that too with all you Cosmerenauts!
22 votes -
How public pianos decorated by artists came to dot Portland’s streets and parks
7 votes -
Letter showing Pope Pius XII had detailed information from German Jesuit about Nazi crimes revealed
33 votes -
Norway's former prime minister Erna Solberg said she should have recused herself from several matters when in government due to her husband's trading activities
9 votes -
Inside the very strange, very expensive race to “de-age”
Whizy Kim The Rejuvenation Olympics, an online leaderboard launched by tech millionaire Bryan Johnson earlier this year, takes the rivalry of the rich to the next level. The game? “Reversing” your...
Whizy Kim
The Rejuvenation Olympics, an online leaderboard launched by tech millionaire Bryan Johnson earlier this year, takes the rivalry of the rich to the next level. The game? “Reversing” your age
Participants compete not on physical abilities but on how quickly and by how much they can slow their “biological age.”
Competitors do this mostly by adjusting their diets (like which macronutrients and supplements they consume), being physically active, and retesting their “age” regularly. They’re not actually reverting to a more youthful version of themselves — that’s not biologically possible. Rather, these competitors are racing to see who can age the slowest; as the Rejuvenation Olympics website quips, “You win by never crossing the finish line.”
Some participants
Steve Aoki, the DJ and heir to the Benihana restaurant chain, appears toward the bottom of the site’s “absolute” ranking, which reflects the 25 competitors with the lowest rate of aging.
The biohacker Ben Greenfield makes the list, too, as does millionaire and longevity science advocate Peter Diamandis. Most of the top 25 names, however, don’t spark immediate recognition, and some are anonymous.
Right now, tech millionaire Bryan Johnson, who is 46 years old, is leading. But 46 is just what competitors describe as Johnson’s “chronological age,” which means, simply, the years that have passed since his birth date.
He has claimed that he eats 70 pounds of vegetables per month, most of it pureed. He receives blood transfusions from his 17-year-old son. He wears a red-light cap that’s supposed to stimulate hair growth. His body fat once fell to a dangerous 3 percent (though it has since bumped up a few percentage points).
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is renowned for his eccentric wellness habits; he eats one meal a day, meditates for at least two hours daily, and has a penchant for ice baths. For a while, Steve Jobs was a “fruitarian” — as in, only ate fruit.
Lifestyles of ultrarich
Such extremes are common among the ultrarich, and particularly the Silicon Valley set, a crowd known for its obsession with making moonshot ideas into reality.
The wealthy indulge in countless health trends of varying dubiousness, whether it’s getting IV drips to reduce hangovers, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, implanting devices in the body to monitor health and live longer, even injecting themselves with young blood (a treatment called parabiosis, which Johnson is receiving). This year alone, Johnson will reportedly spend at least $2 million on reducing his biological age.
Society treats them as idols, geniuses whose savvy has vaulted them into the 0.0001 percent of the wealthiest people on Earth. It’s a small hop from there to believing they’d also be savvier than the rest of us about turning back the clock.
Investing in de-aging
Last year, according to a report from the news and market analysis site Longevity. Technology, more than $5 billion in investments poured into longevity-related companies worldwide, including from some big-name tech founders and investors. Many of these companies are aiming to prolong life by focusing on organ regeneration and gene editing.
The buzzy life extension company Altos Labs, which researches biological reprogramming — a way to reset cells to pliable “pluripotent stem cells” — launched last year with a whopping $3 billion investment, and counts internet billionaire Yuri Milner and, reportedly, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among its patrons. Bezos was also an investor in the anti-aging startup Unity Biotechnology.
OpenAI founder Sam Altman, meanwhile, recently invested $180 million in Retro Biosciences, a company vying to add a decade to the human lifespan.
Some of the most famous names in the death-defying sector are old: Calico Labs, a longevity-research subsidiary of Alphabet, was launched by then-Google CEO Larry Page in 2013.
Tally Health, a new biotech company co-founded by Harvard scientist David Sinclair — who is something of a celebrity in the longevity community — boasts some Hollywood A-list investors: John Legend, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ashton Kutcher, Pedro Pascal, and Zac Efron.
Possibility of de-aging
“It’s not possible to reverse your age,” Stuart Jay Olshansky, an aging expert and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago, tells Vox. “There’s validity to some of the work that’s going on in epigenetics that may be telling us something about the rate of aging. It’s not yet telling us about longevity.”
No two people age in the exact same way. Discrete from chronological age, “biological age” is the attempt to capture the often invisible difference through epigenetic gene expression, the state of someone’s organs, their immune system, and more.
A 40-year-old with a history of heavy drinking and smoking, for example, may have a higher biological age than someone who never drinks or smokes. (In 2018, a Dutch man even complained that he ought to be able to change his legal age to match his biological age.)
Johnson again
Johnson, who made his hundreds of millions after selling a payments platform he developed to eBay in 2013, has become renowned not for what he’s invented, sold, or designed, as is the case for many other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but for the unimaginably strict lifestyle he leads.
According to his website and the many interviews he has given, he exerts constant vigilance over the 78 organs of the human body, consistently tracking everything from BMI to brain white matter. Johnson is often described as the “most measured man in human history.”
The point isn’t merely being healthy. It’s laser-precision optimization of his health.
Johnson, for example, never eats pizza or drinks alcohol. It’s simply not a part of his algorithm. “I was just a slave to myself and my passions and my emotions and my next desire,” he said in an interview with Vice Motherboard. That doesn’t mean he never stumbles, but when he does, he calls it an “infraction,” as though he has committed a minor crime.
Leaderboard
Johnson tops the Rejuvenation Olympics leaderboard; he created the game along with Oliver Zolman — who leads Johnson’s team of 30-plus doctors and other health experts — and TruDiagnostic, an epigenetics lab based in Kentucky that provides the biological age test kits that participants in the Olympics must submit. The cheaper version costs $229. The more expensive one, at $499, provides more data on your results, including how habits like smoking or drinking alcohol have impacted a person’s aging speed.
Ultramarathon
It’s a contest that participants hope never ends — the most ultra of ultramarathons. The most dedicated members in the longevity community are, in essence, spending their lives obsessing over living. Says Lustgarten: “I plan on doing this for at least the next 70-plus years.”
27 votes -
Gauntlet IV: “Game needs port, badly”
13 votes -
A literary history of fake texts in Apple’s marketing materials
27 votes -
Norway remembers its wartime debt to Dumfries – special relationship being marked with the unveiling of a one-and-a-half tonne stone of friendship
3 votes -
“Inverse vaccine” shows potential to treat multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases
48 votes -
TikTok fined record £300m for putting children’s privacy at risk
28 votes -
Carrefour in France puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands
81 votes -
How Sam Bankman-Fried’s elite parents enabled his crypto empire
9 votes -
UK government vows action after man dies in latest dog attack
27 votes -
American Library Association report: Texas led the nation in book ban attempts in 2022
14 votes -
New Mexico Governor bans public carry of guns in Albuquerque
33 votes -
Drew Barrymore takes down apology video as Alyssa Milano, Bradley Whitford, Debra Messing & more have strong reactions to actress’ decision to return to work amid strikes
25 votes -
Elan.School has finished
73 votes -
This "perpetual motion" device is really clever
18 votes -
Oregon launches legal psilocybin access amid high demand and hopes for improved mental health care
33 votes -
Wait, is Unity allowed to just change its fee structure like that?
60 votes -
Unity is offering a Runtime Fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay as it tries to “kill AppLovin”
29 votes -
The world’s first 3D-printed salmon is hitting store shelves
23 votes -
Should I use third party firewall or antivirus on Windows (or elsewhere)? Which one?
It's seems to have been common sense for a while now that Windows has good-enough security software that you don't need 3rd party tools but is it actually the case now? Is there anything to lose...
It's seems to have been common sense for a while now that Windows has good-enough security software that you don't need 3rd party tools but is it actually the case now? Is there anything to lose or gain from trusting 3rd party with this stuff?
20 votes -
An oral history of Bank Python
15 votes -
Quantum Error | Next gen immersion trailer
3 votes -
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth | Release date trailer
21 votes -
Tildes Minecraft Survival Weekly Thread
Server host: tildes.nore.gg Dynmap: https://tildes.nore.gg The server operates on a soft whitelist. Anyone can log in and walk around, but you need a Tildes account to gain build access. Server...
Server host:
tildes.nore.gg
Dynmap: https://tildes.nore.ggThe server operates on a soft whitelist. Anyone can log in and walk around, but you need a Tildes account to gain build access.
Server Changelog
- All registered players now have access to
/co inspect. This command will allow you to see block changes from the last 14 days so that you can hopefully resolve land disputes without admin/moderator intervention. - There is currently an alpha version of a treasure hunt script (source) running on the server. Once every few days you'll see a
TREASURE HUNT!message in chat and a 10 minute race for an elytra or netherite loot begins. - There is a page to see each player's time on the server in the last 30 days.
- I have disabled Phantoms entirely
30 votes - All registered players now have access to
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Hasan Minhaj’s “Emotional Truths”
20 votes -
Music is a continuum - Interview with Terry Riley
4 votes -
Wargasm - Bang Ya Head Feat. Fred Durst (2023)
5 votes -
The football ground with a steam railway running through it
10 votes -
What is a simple tech tip that changed how you use your computer or other devices in a significant way?
Looking to accumulate some great tips on this topic! If your tip involves specific software, ideally it should be FOSS (free or open source).
136 votes -
Battle over a recurrent French national obsession: How Muslim women should dress?
17 votes -
Big SUVs become most sold new vehicles in Europe. "Customers feel more safe, they feel more powerful" says car industry executive.
22 votes -
Immersion iced coffee: A better and easier technique
7 votes -
What have you been listening to this week?
What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as...
What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)
Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.
You can make a chart if you use last.fm:
http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/
Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.
13 votes -
Today I learned this weird Windows keyboard shortcut opens LinkedIn
43 votes -
Polygon review: Palia is an early access utopia that relies on its regular patches
14 votes -
What did you do this week (and weekend)?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do...
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
14 votes -
Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news
Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like unity, elon musk and tortillas. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was curious....
Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like unity, elon musk and tortillas. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was curious.
But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched
offbeatstories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!24 votes -
Plan for £100m UK underwater living research facility move forward
12 votes -
The earthquakes in Turkey killed a prolific war crimes investigator, deputy chief of Syria investigations for the Commission for International Justice and Accountability
9 votes -
US government imposes sanctions on five Turkish corporations over dealings with Russia
7 votes -
Study shows US public defenders have significantly more clients than they can adequately represent
27 votes -
Nigerian power grid in ‘total system collapse’. Generation falls to zero, with blackouts across most of Africa’s largest economy
20 votes -
Economist, business professor, digital economy expert Shane Greenstein discusses the US Department of Justice vs Google antitrust case
4 votes -
Who are your favorite Tiny Desk concert musicians? Bob Boilen - Tiny Desk founder is leaving National Public Radio
51 votes -
Douglas B. Lenat - The Ubiquity of Discovery
4 votes -
Fresh Album Fridays: Mitski, Nas, Explosions in the Sky and more
Good morning ~ This is a thread to discuss new album releases that have arrived on our doorstep this week. Feel free to share albums and EPs that have caught your eye and interest! Discussion...
Good morning ~ This is a thread to discuss new album releases that have arrived on our doorstep this week. Feel free to share albums and EPs that have caught your eye and interest!
Discussion Points
What are you looking forward to listen to?
Have you listened to any of these releases?
What are your thoughts?
What have you enjoyed from these artists in the past?Why Friday?
Most (but not all) new LPs release on a Friday, as labels want to give the release a full week of sales before entering the charts.
~~ Feedback on the format welcome!
15 votes