Mitch Gann’s

Sooner or later, you have to move on.

Today I cleaned out my trove of 3.5 inch diskettes — nearly 150 of them. For those of you who grew up with giant hard-drives and CD-ROM/ DVD drives, the “floppy disk” was the way computer files were saved and distributed in the olden days.  I never thought of 3.5 disks as “floppy” myself, though many people called them that. Unlike the 5.25 disks, the smaller ones had a hard-case and did not flop.  The 3.5s that I discarded were a mixture of personal data disks and commercial installation disks — including an unused, plastic-wrapped set of MS-DOS 6.2 installation disks and a used set of Windows 3.1 installation disks, about six disks in each set.

I ran magnets across the personal disks just in case they contained sensitive info.  One of them had a label “Novel 1993.”  I assume I wrote a novel that year — or more likely the first chapter of a novel. Maybe I have a paper copy somewhere.

Those 3.5 disks held between 1.44 and 2.0 MB of data.  So altogether, the 150 disks contained at most 300 MBs — which you could put on a tiny USB thumb drive with room to spare.

I still have a box of a dozen 5.25 floppies, the oldest software and files I own.  I can’t bring myself to toss them out.  One floppy contains another novel, or so the label claims.  The rest are mostly devoted to computer programming.  There is a copy of the legendary Borland Turbo Pascal, circa 1988, the finest and fastest DOS programming compiler ever sold — and for just fifty bucks a copy.  There is a disk labeled “Play Ball” that contains a baseball game I created for my father, and a couple disks with an extensive and specialized record-keeping program I wrote for his business.

Apparently, it’s still possible to hook a 5.25 drive to your computer. You can emulate DOS, too.  I know I won’t ever bother, but I will keep the box in a back corner of my closet, just in case.

“Heart Disease Patients Carrying Extra Pounds Do Better, Live Longer”

That’s right, thin people, read it and weep.  Researchers at the American College of Cardiology say, “Obese patients with heart disease respond well to treatment and have paradoxically better outcomes and survival than thinner patients.”  No one knows why this is.  Researchers also caution people not to pack on pounds because that only contributes to the development of heart-disease in the first place.

Sure, but all of a sudden, it’s looking better for some of us to make  the Singularity.

I have been reading a book this week — the old-fashion kind with paper pages — Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near (2005).  Kurzweil is an inventor, futurist and Baby Boomer who believes that he and other Boomers just might be able to live long enough to live forever.

Even though the book was a best-seller in 2005 and proclaimed the 13th most blogged about book of 2005 by the NY Times, I somehow missed it. I had heard of or read eight of the first twelve books on the list, so it isn’t that I am completely out of the loop.  (Oddly, the 14th most blogged about book for that year was Orwell’s 1984.  This suggests to me that there is a lot of paranoia on the Web.)

Anyway, I was surprised that I hadn’t heard about Kurzweil until recently because living forever happens to be one of my ambitions. According to Kurzweil, we just may be able to do it; “we” includes Baby Boomers who take care of themselves enough to last another 30 years or so.  By then, accelerating advances in bio-tech, nano-tech and computer science should guarantee anyone who wants it immortality.  You will, of course, have to get intimate with machines; that is, become a machine yourself. Some may see this as a drawback, especially if you get stuck in a computer running, say, Windows 2038. (I think this will be one time to spend a little more and go with a Mac.) Then there is the question of room-mates. What if you get stuck with neighbors you can’t stand and you can’t get away from them ever for all time? However, from the scientific perspective, being dead also has clear drawbacks for any organism. And it makes it harder to get credit or a good table.

Kurzweil calls this approaching change the “Singularity” because it will be a one-time event in human history — perhaps in the history of the universe. He thinks that the destiny of the universe is to achieve a maximum state of information.  Merging human intelligence (including emotional intelligence) with artificial intelligence is a big step toward fulfilling that destiny.

It sounds a little nuts in summary — a geeky, secular version of The Rapture. And there is a risk that if we don’t handle things just right, trillions of malevolent nanobots will take over and destroy us all.  Those of us who are getting up there in years and facing oblivion in the next couple of decades, give or take, may be willing to accept the risk. But is it right to gamble the future of humanity to achieve personal immortality?  Or for once in our self-centered lives, ought we just to go gentle into that good night?

A web site devoted to the global travel industry claims that middle-aged adults are ” less susceptible to the H1N1 influenza strain” (R.O.A.R: Baby boomers and the swine flu).  Three reasons are offered:

1. The middle-aged have weaker immune systems that won’t  turn against their own bodies in the “cytokine storm” sometimes produced by this type of virus.
2. The middle-aged lead “more settled lives, enjoying home-life, rather than crowding into trendy bars night after night . . . .”
3. The middle-aged tend to play it safe, no longer feeling invincible as the young do.

I love the idea that my wheezing excuse for an immune system and boring life-style give me a survival advantage.  Maybe.   But, so far, the young seem to be handling the 2009 H1N1 virus much better than they did the 1918 version.  No cytokine storms yet, at least outside of Mexico, and who knows what the real story is down there?  Most of this epidemic could turn out to be the residue of poor medical reporting.

Ah, late summer. The season of  tomatoes, sweet corn, and ragweed pollen.  An article in Science News discusses the genetic basis of allergies. I definitely have the gene.

Saturday was terrible. I stayed inside, with the windows closed and a new pollen-proof filter on the AC. Didn’t help.  The house is apparently not air-tight.  Medications didn’t help much either.

Then finally it rained.  The rain washed the pollen out of the air.

God bless the rain.

Scientists in Israel have been researching the health benefits of red wine — a great gig if you can get it — and have discovered a new explanation for the benefits, says an article in Science Daily.  Researchers have known for a while that anti-oxidants called “polyphenol” are responsible for wine’s protection against cancer and heart disease but weren’t sure how.  The human body does not easily absorb polyphenols.  So how could polyphenols be protecting us?

According to the new study, the answer is that polyphenols “thwart formation of harmful substances released during digestion of fat.”  Thus, drinking wine with a fat-laden meal offers the most benefits.

At least it works that way in rats.

The Flint River, placid in the morning sun, just west of downtown Flushing, along the route of my daily walk. In this case "daily" means "done during the day time." Perhaps it will someday mean "done every day." We shall see.

“Life Expectancy Hits Record High in United States” (Washington Post):

The overall U.S. life expectancy of 78.1 years was up 0.3 years from 2005. Life expectancy for women was 80.7 years, and for men, 75.4 years. The disparity between the sexes — 5.3 years — has been declining since it peaked at about eight years in 1979.

White women had the longest life expectancy, at 81 years, followed by black women (76.9 years), white men (76 years) and black men (70 years). The gap between men and women is markedly greater in blacks (6.9 years) than in whites (five years).

This is good news for Hillary Clinton. She can bide her time for two Obama terms, get elected in 2016, and still have more life-span left than John McCain does now. Indeed, according to the statistics, it is unlikely that McCain will live out even one presidential term, except maybe Bush’s second. Meanwhile, if Obama were as old as McCain is now, he would have been dead three years. That would’ve been a severe blow to his chances. I would say insurmountable, but he is from Chicago.

Of course, factor in regular doses of red wine and herring, and anything could happen.