The Big Think

I’m all about learning new skills. Guide a raft, fly a plane, EMT, do the Mr. Spock eyebrow. If it’s unusual and slightly difficult I’m all over it. So last week I started learning a new pen spin. In college a bunch of us learned to do this the “thumb around“, and I’m so practiced at it that it’s second nature. I decided last week to learn the “finger pass“, where the pen rolls effortlessly (ha!) through your fingers and then back up to the starting position (see the video). What I realized is that the trick is much harder to get fluid than you’d think, and that I’m totally right-hand dominant. I can spin the pen through all of my fingers at a fairly respectable pace, but I’m nowhere near fluid yet. It’ll take another 10,000 times before I start to get really smooth. Wasted time, you say? Not really. It’s something that you can do when you’re sitting at the desk thinking about other things, or reading a book, or whatever. Good double use of your time.

I tried to spin with my left hand and was amazed at how uncoordinated I am over there. I couldn’t even get the pen to go through all of my fingers once without dropping it. It’d be interesting to see how the left/right side of my brian is different. Oddly, I’m about equal in dexterity between my hands while typing or playing the guitar, but I’ve always been left-hand limited on the piano.

Build a man a fire
and you warm him for the night.
Set a man on fire
and you warm him for the rest of his life.

Americas life expectancy increases to record high.

This is pretty much in keeping with what the actuarial escape velocity people claim will happen. They say that we’re on the beginning part of the bell curve and that they expect it to take off somewhere in the next 30 years or so (some say 10 years, some say as much as 50). At that point we’ll be improving life expectancy by more than 1 year per year, therefore our expected average max age will go up faster than the calendar years go by.

Critics say that this will never happen, but the Kurzweilian view is that it’s happening now, but we’re just on the gentle initial slope of the curve- hardly noticeable because the slope is so gentle. We won’t see disruptive changes until the last few years. The critics will be saying “sure, life expectancy has gone up, but it’s still only a few days per year increase”, then “sure, but it’s only a few weeks/year”, then suddenly it’s month/year and years/year and we’re over the hump.

I don’t believe that we’ll reach the holy grail of “infinite expected lifespan” in the next 100 years (too many unknowns to be realistic, I think), but I do think that it’s very possible, and even likely, that I’ll get my wish and get to see the year 2100.