Category Archives: Immortality

I recently bumped into a cute story that seemed familiar. It suggested a switch to an 18-cent coin. I found it by way of Hacker News for my money ($0), the best news aggregator for the tech set. It was a fairly typical blog post: a summary of a paper that ran the math and determined that the average number of coins one gets from a cash register is 4.7. But the addition of an 18-cent coin would drop that to 3.89.

I like this sort of thing. Its quirky. Its math. It speaks to the stupidity of pennies. It makes me think about government inefficiencies and the very human affection for little hunks of inconvenient metal.

But I couldnt get past the familiarity. I reread the article and realized it was originally written in 2003. Hacker News usually is pretty current, but a story like this is sort of timeless and prone to resurgence.

Then I realized the byline was Roland Piquepaille, and you dont forget a name like that. For many years, Roland was incredibly active on Slashdot, the news website I founded. His submissions were often like this 18-cent-coin piece: off the beaten path and interesting.

Roland died on Jan. 6, 2009. Apparently, last week, somebody searched online for something or other and landed on a story nearly a decade old, written by a man who had been dead for more than three years; it hit the Internet again just as effectively as if it were written yesterday. A trivial but fun little story has a bit of immortality attached to it.

Roland took a lot of garbage from Slashdot readers over the years. He was incredibly effective at what he did, and his name appeared on the site a lot. A community has a habit of being hostile toward anything extreme, and Roland often submitted stories on the fluffier end of the news spectrum. And he succeeded a lot, which made him a target. That always made me a little sad.

But Id like to think he gets the posthumous last laugh. He found fun stuff that we enjoyed reading. I hope that the traces I leave behind after Im gone are still good for the occasional laugh as well. Ill never write the Great American Novel or direct an Oscar-winning film. But the Internet lets all of us live forever.

Rob Malda is chief strategist and editor at large for the Washington Posts WaPo Labs team. Under the pseudonym "CmdrTaco," he created the "news for nerds" website Slashdot.org.

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Online, fun and immortality

A nose. That's all that separated Real Quiet from racing immortality. He was beaten by the smallest of margins in the 1998 Belmont Stakes, the longest and toughest leg of thoroughbred racing's Triple Crown.

Affirmed was the last to sweep the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont, 34 years ago. Since then, 11 horses have won the first two only to come up short in the Belmont, felled by a safety pin picked up in a stall, a stumble out of the gate or a jockey's judgment.

Now it's I'll Have Another's turn to try to become the 12th Triple Crown winner.

The chestnut colt chased down pacesetter Bodemeister in the final 100 yards to win the Kentucky Derby on May 5. Two weeks later, he surged past Bodemeister a few yards from the finish line in the Preakness to win by a neck.

Bodemeister won't be back to challenge I'll Have Another in the Belmont. But 10 other rivals are likely, including Derby also-rans Dullahan, Optimizer and Union Rags. The others are horses that skipped one or both of the first two legs, leaving them well-rested for the 1 1-2 mile run around the deep, sandy dirt track.

''It ain't like the old days where everyone used to run in all three,'' said Hall of Fame jockey Mike Smith, who is 1 for 13 in the Belmont. ''It's taxing on the horse to run in all three. If somebody is hiding behind the bushes waiting to jump you when they're all fresh, they can beat you.''

Smith will be aboard one of the fresh ones in next Saturday's Belmont. He'll ride Paynter, who skipped the Derby and Preakness.

Nineteen times since 1944 horses have come to the Belmont with a chance to win the Triple Crown.

Big Brown was the last horse to take a shot in 2008. But he bombed out in the Belmont, mysteriously getting eased at the top of the stretch and leaving nearly 95,000 fans stunned at the sight of the colt with the bad feet failing to finish.

The final 1 1-2 miles on the Triple Crown trail can do a number on a horse, trainer and jockey.

Continued here:
Triple Crown bids often come undone in Belmont

Saturday June 2, 2012

BETH HARRIS

AP Racing Writer

A nose. That's all that separated Real Quiet from racing immortality. He was beaten by the smallest of margins in the 1998 Belmont Stakes, the longest and toughest leg of thoroughbred racing's Triple Crown.

Affirmed was the last to sweep the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont, 34 years ago. Since then, 11 horses have won the first two only to come up short in the Belmont, felled by a safety pin picked up in a stall, a stumble out of the gate or a jockey's judgment.

Now it's I'll Have Another's turn to try to become the 12th Triple Crown winner.

The chestnut colt chased down pacesetter Bodemeister in the final 100 yards to win the Kentucky Derby on May 5. Two weeks later, he surged past Bodemeister a few yards from the finish line in the Preakness to win by a neck.

Bodemeister won't be back to challenge I'll Have Another in the Belmont. But 10 other rivals are likely, including Derby also-rans Dullahan, Optimizer and Union Rags. The others are horses that skipped one or both of the first two legs, leaving them well-rested for the 1 1-2 mile run around the deep, sandy dirt track.

"It ain't like the old days where everyone used to run in all three," said Hall of Fame jockey Mike Smith, who is 1 for 13 in the Belmont. "It's taxing on the horse to run in all three. If somebody is hiding behind the bushes waiting to jump you when they're all fresh, they can

Smith will be aboard one of the fresh ones in next Saturday's Belmont. He'll ride Paynter, who skipped the Derby and Preakness.

Read more here:
Racing immortality fleeting at Belmont

In the high-tech hothouse of Silicon Valley where the leafy streets are lined with temples to Microsoft, Apple and Google, one establishment seems distinctly out of place.

Moffett Airfield is a relic of another era, three vast hangars stark reminders of a time when people took to the skies in airships, travelling across San Francisco Bay at a sedate 80kmh.

Today these lighter-than-air leviathans have long since sailed off into the sunset, but the dream still lives on in the form of a replica Zeppelin that takes tourists for a trip down memory lane.

As they float over the sprawling airfield, where Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin park their personal Boeing 767, they are most likely unaware of an extraordinary odyssey taking place right below them.

Nestled alongside Hangar One, a gargantuan structure that covers an area the size of six football fields, is a modest building housing an elite organisation known as the Singularity University.

Its here that some of the worlds best and brightest minds, including two young New Zealanders, have been on a quest to find the Holy Grail immortality.

Brothers Luke and David Hutchison from Auckland were two of just 120 scientists worldwide selected to take part in cutting edge research into nano-technology the science of manipulating atoms to build microscopic structures.

Luke says it has profound implications for humankind.

If you lose an arm we should be able to trigger some growth factors where the arm used to be and you should be able to regrow a new arm.

If you have congestive heart failure we should be able to grow a second heart in your chest cavity and then cut out the old one, rather than transplants. So you grow from your own tissues.

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Never say die - the quest for immortality

Its Friday! That means its time for our weekly Storify wrapping up the week on Ideas@Innovations.

Its worth noting that this is the only place to see my collection of the best in the weeks videos. Also, it's sharable, and its not landing in your inbox like other newsletters.

Storified by Emi Kolawole Fri, May 25 2012 12:19:27

ICYMI: Our own Vivek Wadhwa was on CBS's 60 Minutes this past weekend. So, we, naturally, started the week with his follow-up on Peter Thiel's then-most recent appearance advocating for kids to reconsider going to college:

Peter Thiel sings siren song to America's youthThiel made this statement based on a 2011 calculation by Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, which found that plumbers make m...

We also couldn't resist bringing to your attention this wonderful piece from our esteemed colleague Joel Achenbach:

Facebook IPO and Twitter meet Copernican PrinciplePosted at 11:49 AM ET, 05/21/2012 Mazel tov to Mark Zuckerberg and his lovely bride! Now let's talk about that Facebook IPO again. Your b...

And VentureBeat had the story about Reddit's latest gift-giving effort. Featuring Stephen Colbert for the win...

Reddit kicks off new gift exchange to boost troop moraleEver the patriot, The Colbert Report's Stephen Colbert (pictured) was among the first to sign up for the new gift giving program. The new...

STAPLES Center "Sports-ageddon" Conversion - LA KINGS to LAKERS to CLIPPERSscntmarketing

The rest is here:
A siren song, Facebook’s special, TED , Gatsby and immortality: The week that was in innovation

In the near future, the cure for ageing is found. Will we and the world we live in survive it? Heres an entertaining examination of the possible consequences.

The Postmortal

Author: Drew Magary

Publisher: Penguin, 365 pages

THE cure for ageing has been found. Of course, its not legal ... yet. But thats not going to stop John Farrell from getting it.

After all, for the price of some blood, three admittedly painful injections, a waiting period of two weeks and US$7,000 (to be paid in denominations no higher than US$50), potential immortality is quite a good deal.

You can still die, of course, as the doctor who administers the cure to Farrell tells him. Those who have stopped ageing are still vulnerable to diseases like cancer and HIV/AIDS, as well as fatal accidents and murders.

But otherwise, Farrell will effectively be biologically 29 years old for the rest of his life.

The Postmortal is the story of the rest of his life, cleverly told through a LifeRecorder app in which Farrell records and saves his thoughts, conversation transcripts, e-mails, news links and digital articles.

Taking a page from the found-footage movie genre, this book is, in a sense, found footage, as readers will see from the prologue, which also cleverly drops in a one-sentence note at its end that tantalises readers into reading the book to find out what its about.

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Immortality will kill us