Category Archives: Immortality

David Clarkson is approaching Devils postseason immortality, as last night he scored his third game-winner in these playoffs, beating the Rangers 3-2 in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Final at Madison Square Garden.

Clarkson is now one goal short of matching the franchises postseason record of four game-winners in one playoff run. Atop the list with four winners are Jeff Friesen and Jamie Langenbrunner (both in the Stanley Cup-winning season of 2002-03), and Neal Broten (1994-95, another Cup-winning season).

Im not chasing anything, Clarkson said. Im just trying to get to those areas.

Charles Wenzelberg

TRUE BLUE: A young Rangers fans waves a rally towel during his teams 3-2 loss to the Devils last night.

His goal came 2:31 into the third period, when he was set up in front of the net and tipped a high wrist shot from Adam Henrique past Henrik Lundqvist. After spending most of the season skating on a dangerous second line with Zach Parise and Patrik Elias, Clarkson was demoted to play with Henrique and Alex Ponikarovsky

In Game 1 he was average, coach Peter DeBoer said, to outstanding tonight.

Added goalie Martin Brodeur, We need him to be dominant. Every time he scores, its a game winner.

* A strange moment came in the second period, with the score tied 1-1 and the Rangers going on the power play on an interference call on Travis Zajac.

Heading to the penalty box after a television timeout, Zajac was stopped.

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Clarkson comes through for Devils again

COFFEE IS GREAT IM A FAN OF COFFEE HEY HOW ARE YA LOOKING GREAT I HAVE LOTS OF ENERGY HEY LETS GO CONQUER SOMETHING LARGE LIKE MAYBE CANADA IT SEEMS MANAGEABLE YOU NEVER HEAR OF PEOPLE TRYING TO INVADE CANADA AND FAILING AM I RIGHT HEY GREAT SO GOOD SEEING YOU BOY THIS IS GREAT COFFEE HUH (Erin Meister - ERIN MEISTER) Every few months, like clockwork, scientists emerge from their lair to inform us that something we have been doing for years will either kill us or make us live forever.

According to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine, coffee extends your life. Drink six or more cups per day, and you have a 10 percent lower risk of death if youre a man and 15 percent lower if youre a woman. Or so the study, based on self-reported coffee consumption, claims.

I love coffee. I drink so much that, if this study is to be believed, I am functionally immortal.

It is reassuring for once to hear that possibly, just possibly, something you actually do is going to extend your life. Usually longevity requires uncomfortable concessions like onion sandwiches, push-ups or kale. And forget kale, as Cee Lo Green would say.

To get back my youth, Oscar Wilde wrote, I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. Thats how I feel. But coffee I can do.

Besides, if it werent for coffee, as someone wise once quipped, Id have no personality whatsoever.

Coffee is a civilized vice. As a society, we have agreed upon certain mutually acceptable bad habits. To some extent, this is a crapshoot. Here is a plant, we say, which, when treated and consumed in a certain way, produces a certain stimulatory or depressive effect on the system. Depending on the plant, this is either completely illegal, illegal behind the wheel, illegal in airports and discouraged around babies, or something we are bringing by the gallon to morning meetings! Youre welcome!

If you are one of the fortunate plants, there are hip establishments on corners with counters and tables and low music playing, dedicated to your consumers. If you are not, agents of the law will pursue you over hill and dale, and the only people really enthusiastic about you will have ill-advised beards, bad teeth, unsound political opinions, or the tendency to blow over in high winds.

But we were right about coffee! It even extends your life! Possibly.

The trouble is that most coffee drinkers do not drink it in isolation while doing calisthenics and eating onion sandwiches. Even the study admitted as much. Coffee is the good habit of people with bad habits.

The rest is here:
Alexandra Petri: Coffee, lies, and immortality

George Bush the elder, not Dubya is heading for immortality. Executive producer Jerry Weintraub, who brought us Oceans 11, 12, 13 and maybe someday 14, 15 and 16, on how HBOs coming documentary on former President George Herbert Walker Bush came about.

Its on right around the historic D-Day week of June 6. A birthday celebration, its June 14. The 8th is Barbaras 87th birthday, and his 88th is the 12th. The documentary is called 41.

We both have homes in Kennebunkport, [Maine,] so I know the family well. Im close to them for years. Look, Im too old not to know everyone well. A young man whod filmed some footage about astronauts for $1.50 had the idea and started making this. The president asked me to get involved.

The two hours will be all in President Bushs words. First time ever hes talked about himself. Nothing political. No philosophizing. All about his childhood, father, mother, sisters, children, service to the country. Plus never-before-seen private home movies. We shot lots of photos and personal footage. The whole thing took 2 1/2 years.

Bios dont usually do something. This will. Itll tell who he was, what formed him. Its lots about the young Bush.

I called HBOs co-president Richard Plepler and said what Im doing. He came to California to see it. He and Sheila Nevins, who does all their special projects, wanted to do it.

Bush loves what we have. Hes over the moon. My idea was a premiere in Houston, but instead were building a facility in Kennebunkport, and therell be a clambake at his home.

TOM Cruise took singing lessons for next months Rock of Ages film outing. Training with Lenny Kravitz, he surprised everyone. Now, they say, the guy can really carry a tune. Were not talking exactly Andrea Bocelli, but he can actually sing . . . C. David Heymann wrote books on Jackie, Liz, JFK, Barbara Hutton. Jackies gone, Liz gone, Hutton gone, JFK gone, Bobby gone. As of last week, Heymanns gone. He once phoned me to call Elizabeth Taylor a sacred monster.

THE morning line on the presidential election: Pros estimate the same-sex marriage stance brings Obama another $20-$30 million. The gay community is affluent. Willing to spend money. However, the race is too close to call. Romneys language and campaign ads, focusing on Americas prosperity, stimulating jobs, not romance, are having impact.

WHILE learning from Usher, 33, Justin Bieber, 18, is teaching his mentor a few things. At a cover shoot for ABCs Sunday Billboard Music Awards, the senior one said: He makes me feel old. He messes with me about my phone or how slow I type. Replied the junior: Listen, he didnt even know what iChat was!. . . Susan Lucci and five girlfriends lunching at Southamptons 75 Main.

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Straight from Bush’s mouth

Rogers four minutes to immortality

By Stephen Wilson

Monday, May 07, 2012

Roger Bannister remembers those fabled four minutes as if they were yesterday.

Like a proud patriarch regaling wide-eyed children, the 83-year-old avidly recounts that magical four-lap race on a cinder track in Oxford on May 6, 1954 an event that still stands as a transcendent moment in sports.

3 minutes, 59.4 seconds.

"Its amazing," says Bannister, expressive as ever, "that more people have climbed Mount Everest than have broken the 4-minute mile."

The enduring black-and-white images of Bannister, eyes closed, mouth agape, straining across the finish line at the Iffley Road track, symbolise the supreme test of speed and endurance that captured the publics imagination. It made him a global celebrity as the first man to run the mile in under four minutes the mythical barrier that some thought was beyond human reach.

With London hosting the Olympics this summer, the Oxford-educated neurologist knighted Sir Roger in 1975 finds himself in the spotlight again, the embodiment of sporting achievement in Britain.

While Bannister never won an Olympic medal, having finished fourth in the 1,500 metres at the 1952 Helsinki Games, he still represents a strong link to the Olympic ideals of faster, higher, stronger.

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Roger’s four minutes to immortality

WHEN you think of the word "immortality" it is hard not to feel a tingling excitement, even if those feelings are quickly followed by a sense of something more biblical, almost God-like, and then by something darker lurking in the shadow of the word.

As Western science still has not found the immortality gene, it is perhaps not surprising that in Silicon Valley and on the outskirts of Moscow the eccentric wealthy (and it always is the eccentric wealthy) are now turning their attention - and their money - to projects that are promising to deliver a new version of the age-old fantasy (or folly) of everlasting life: Digital immortality. And this time it may actually work.

For writer Stephen Cave, author of the new book Immortality, digital immortality does not refer to the "legacy" we'll leave on Facebook. Cave's book explores the quest to live forever and how - he believes - it has been the driving force behind civilisations, coming to a climax in modern science.

"Digital immortality," he says, "is about there being a silicon you for when the physical you dies" as a kind of "Plan B if bioscience fails to deliver an actual biological immortality".

And of course, he adds, biological immortality would not stop you being run over by a bus.

"So your brain is scanned and your essence uploaded into a digital form of bits and bytes, and this whole brain emulation can be saved in a computer's memory banks ready to be brought back to life as an avatar in a virtual world like Second Life, or even in the body of an artificially intelligent robot that is a replica of who we were."

For Cave, though, this "is not true immortality" as "you physically die" and this new you, "even though its behaviour could fool your mum", is then just a copy. A copy he admits could carry on growing, marrying and even having children.

Currently however, this is still "almost science fiction" as there are "three big challenges" that stand between us and digital immortality - challenges that projects such as Carbon Copies and Russia 2045 already believe they can overcome within 40 years.

"The first is that we have to be able to read all the information that makes up who you are, and this is likely to be achieved destructively by removing the human brain from the body and then preserving, slicing and scanning in the data it contains. Then there is the challenge to store an amount of information many millions of orders of magnitude bigger than the current computer systems. And finally we need to find a way to animate it."

In the end, Cave argues, "theoretically the problems of digital immortality seem solvable, but whether the solutions are practical is another story... Although when it does happen it is simply inevitable that the rich will get there as they have the most power among us".

See the article here:
The making of an 'immortal'

Tomb Treasures from Han China. Credit: Fitzwilliam Museum

In the first exhibition of its kind, the Fitzwilliam Museum will relate the story of the quest for immortality and struggle for imperial legitimacy in ancient Chinas Han Dynasty.

The Search for Immortality: Tomb Treasures of Han China (May 5-November 11) will feature over 350 treasures in jade, gold, silver, bronze and ceramics in the largest and most important exhibition of ancient royal treasures ever to travel outside China.

The Han Dynasty established the basis for unified rule of China up to the present day. To maintain this hard-won empire the Han emperors had to engage in a constant struggle for power and legitimacy, with contests that took place on symbolic battlefields as much as on real ones. While written accounts provide an outline of these events, it is through the stunning archaeological discoveries of recent decades that the full drama and spectacle of this critical episode in Chinese history has been brought to life.

Dr. Timothy Potts, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, commented: It is impossible to overstate the importance of the Han Dynasty in the formation of a Chinese national culture and identity. At the time of the ancient Romans, the Han emperors were the first to unify a large part of the regions we now know as China under a sustained empire, which they ruled virtually unchallenged for 400 years.

The Han Dynasty gave its name to the Chinese language, its script and the vast majority of the Chinese people. It was arguably the defining period of Chinas history and the point of genesis for the China of today.

The spectacular objects in this exhibition bring to Cambridge the finest treasures from the tombs of the Han royal family, the superb goldwork, jades and other exquisitely crafted offerings the kings chose to be buried with on their journey to the afterlife. For their artistry, refinement and pure beauty they rival anything from the ancient world.

This pioneering exhibition will compare the spectacular tombs of two rival power factions: the Han imperial family in the northern cradle of Chinese history, and the Kingdom of Nanyue in the south, whose capital in modern-day Guangzhou formed the gateway to the rich trade routes of the China Sea and Indian Ocean.

Objects from these tombs have never before been displayed together as a single exhibition. Through the exhibition it is revealed how, in both life and in death, Empire and Kingdom played a diplomatic game of cat and mouse, one to assert its supremacy, the other to preserve its autonomy.

Protected by clay guardians and surrounded by jade and gold, the monarchs tombs were palaces fit for immortals. Each tomb was a symbol of power and majesty, designed to ensure that its owner continued to enjoy in the afterlife the same comforts and privileges afforded to them in life. In showing these two tombs together, The Search for Immortality sheds new light on a critical period of Chinas early history. The exhibition will only be seen in Cambridge.

Link:
The Search for Immortality: Tomb Treasures of Han China