2024/09/30
What’s the secret of the supercentenarians? They don’t really exist
What’s the secret of the supercentenarians? They don’t really exist
Earlier this month, an unusual prize ceremony got under way. Five Nobel laureates gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, not to receive further accolades themselves, but to present the Ig Nobel prizes. Now in their 34th year, these are awarded to researchers whose discoveries “make people laugh, then think”.
One winner was Saul Justin Newman, whose research probing the quality of demographic data certainly made me laugh and think. Places with surprising clusters of individuals reaching remarkable ages, with centenarians or even supercentenarians (aged 110+) galore, attract lots of attention. Debates focus on their secrets – from Mediterranean diets to superior genetics.
But Newman argues that the real secret is that many of these super-senior citizens exist only on paper. He shows that in the US, when a state introduced birth certificates, often towards the end of 19th century, there was a 69-82% fall in supercentenarians recorded. Maybe birth certificates harm our health… or, more plausibly, they cleanse dodgy data.
Even better is his work on Europe. It shows super-oldies are correlated with how rich a region is. But not in the way you’d expect: poorer and deprived places record most people living to the oldest ages – odd, when those regions have terrible health outcomes on every other metric.
Despite having high poverty and the lowest proportion of people aged 90+, Tower Hamlets somehow records more people aged 105+ per capita than anywhere else in England. Corsica is apparently stuffed full of the super-old, yet is very poor (and has France’s highest murder rate).
What’s going on? Pension fraud, because deprived areas create financial pressures, not greater longevity. Something to think, but not laugh, about.
Torsten Bell is Labour MP for Swansea West and author of Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back
Todays Thought
Racism tends to attract attention when it's flagrant and filled with invective. But like all bigotry, the most potent component of racism is frame-flipping -- positioning the bigot as the actual victim. So the gay do not simply want to marry; they want to convert our children into sin. The Jews do not merely want to be left in peace; they actually are plotting world take-over. And the blacks are not actually victims of American power, but beneficiaries of the war against hard-working whites. This is a respectable, more sensible bigotry, one that does not seek to name-call, preferring instead to change the subject and straw man.
-Ta-Nehisi Coates, writer and journalist (b. 30 Sep 1975)
Todays Thought
No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.
-Miguel de Cervantes, novelist (29 Sep 1547-1616
2024/09/27
Todays Wiki
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Henri-Frédéric Amiel | |
|---|---|
 Amiel, c. 1888 | |
| Born | 27 September 1821 Geneva, Switzerland |
| Died | 11 May 1881 (aged 59) Geneva, Switzerland |
| Occupation | Philosopher, poet, critic |
| Nationality | Swiss |
| Period | 19th century |
| Signature | |
 | |
Henri Frédéric Amiel (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃ʁi fʁedeʁik amjɛl]; 27 September 1821 – 11 May 1881) was a Swiss moral philosopher, poet, and critic.
Biography
[edit]Born in Geneva in 1821, Amiel was descended from a Huguenot family that moved to Switzerland following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.[1]
After losing his parents at an early age, Amiel travelled widely, became intimate with the intellectual leaders of Europe, and made a special study of German philosophy in Berlin. In 1849 he was appointed professor of aesthetics at the academy of Geneva, and in 1854 became professor of moral philosophy.[1]
These appointments, conferred by the democratic party, deprived him of the support of the aristocratic party[why?], whose patronage dominated all the culture of the city. This isolation inspired the one book by which Amiel is still known, the Journal Intime ("Private Journal"), which, published after his death, obtained a European reputation.[1] It was translated into English by British writer Mary Augusta Ward at the suggestion of academic Mark Pattison.[2]
Although modest in volume of output, Amiel's Journal gained a sympathy that the author had failed to obtain in his life. In addition to the Journal, he produced several volumes of poetry and wrote studies on Erasmus, Madame de Stael and other writers.[1] His extensive correspondence with Égérie, his muse name for Louise Wyder, was preserved and published in 2004.[3]
He died in Geneva on 11 May 1881, at the age of 59. He was buried at the cemetery of Clarens in the canton of Vaud. The tombstone bears an inscription with a quote from the Epistle to the Galatians 6,8:
The French philosopher Ludovic Dugas, in trying to describe a new psychological phenomenon, took the word depersonalization from an entry in his Journal intime, "Everything is strange to me, I can be outside of my body, of me as an individual, I am depersonalized, detached, away". Dugas took this as a literal description, but a few paragraphs later Amiel clarifies: "it seems to me that these mental experiences (transformations mentales) are no more than philosophical experiences. I am not committed to any one in particular".[4]
Works
[edit]- Berlin au printemps de l’année 1848 (1849)
- Du mouvement littéraire dans la Suisse romane et de son avenir (1849)
- Grains de mil (1854)
- Il penseroso (1858)
- La Cloche (1860)
- La Part du rêve (1863)
- L’Escalade de MDCII (1875)
- Charles le Téméraire (1876)
- Les Étrangères (1876)
- L’Enseignement supérieur à Genève depuis la fondation de l’Académie depuis le 5 juin 1559 (1878)
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau jugé par les Genevois d’aujourd’hui (1879)
- Jour à jour (1880)
- Fragments d’un journal intime (1884), 2nd ed.
- Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1885), trans. by Mrs. Humphry Ward. Description and preview. Macmillan.
- Philine (1927)
- Lettres de jeunesse (1904)
- Essais, critiques (1931)
Todays Thought
Life is short. Be swift to love! Make haste to be kind!
-Henri Frederic Amiel, philosopher and writer (27 Sep 1821-1881)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
-
Arizona's huge new dark sky observatory: See the construction progress Renderings & Floorplan The 22,000 square-foot IDSDC will ac...
-
The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers is a c. 1672–75 oil on canvas painting by the Dutch Golden Age...
