Walk the talk. Do what you’ve always been talking about!
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007Every one of us has something that we really want to do, but never find the time, or the energy, or the money… There is always something which seems to stand in the way. For some people it’s travel, for others it’s exercise and diet, some more time with the kids.
When I used to play paintball, I had a few nick names, preach, teach, preacher, lips…I love to talk about things I believe in. The subject that I’ve found myself telling people about the most the last few years is longevity research. If you CURE cancer and CURE heart disease, it adds 7 years to our life expectency. 100,000 people died yesterday from age. Yes, 100,000 real live people. They didn’t die from starvation, they didn’t die from aids, they died from age. Why not work on something that can give us 3.5 years? 7.5 years?
You can only cure cancer once. You can add 3 years to your life expectency more than once. (to verify the 3 and 7 year numbers, google “s jay olshansky”) It’s an actuarial fact among folks that know what actuarial means I’d guess. I definitely never ever knew that curing cancer would be worth only about 3 years. Wow.
So I went a few years preaching and preaching about it, the world didn’t change. About 2 years ago I started donating my computers time to cure disease at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org and I felt a lot better. It felt WONDERFUL knowing that I was no longer just talking, but doing, making the world a better place.
So I made the next step. I decided to dedicate my life to the combat and elimination of age related diseases wherever possible. My fiancee (who I’m sooo lucky wants to do the same thing!) and I bought our tickets for Cambridge, England and our tickets to the SENS3 conference, sept. 6-10, the largest conference in the world with a focus on age related disease and prevention.
I met up with Aubrey de Grey (buy his book!) before the show with the aim of finding where I would fit best in helping progress happen. I volunteered to take charge of the video of the event and Ray Kurzweil’s video conference with us. I bought a tripod, hooked up my handy Sony SR8, and got to work. The 5 day event went great, and except for the heat in the projection booth, the accomodations were excellent. Cambridge really is a beautiful city.
After the show I copied the 300 gigs of hidef video to 2 hard drives for the directors to work on. I knew in the back of my head how hard it is to edit hidef video, and figured I would get started on it myself to cut down on their work load. I got to work on my laptop and it wasn’t going fast enough, so I bought/built a quadcore q6600 and overclocked it to 3.2ghz. Now I can encode the movies in 2x realtime instead of slower than real time. Editing and separating the 79 different speakers talks, and sometimes even figuring out what to name them, is much harder and time consuming than I thought.
I’ve uploaded some of the videos to this site already, and am distributing ones without watermarks on them directly to the good folks at mprize.org. I’ve been spending all day and all night every day working on this. I will be very very proud when I’m done, as some of these talks were AMAZING. Truly amazing talks on technology that we really will be using in the next 5 years. You have to check out the nanotech molecular band aid (Rutledge Ellis-Behnke). Stops bleeding instantly without coagulation. No more bleeding out on the operating table.
The moral of the story is! If there’s something you’ve always been talking about doing. I can’t stress enough to you how great you will feel once you’ve done it! Finally making the move from talking to walking is a life changing event. As long as your peer group or loved ones supports you, it’s one that sticks!
Here’s a video of no scientific value at all, but I’m proud of! Me running the Ray Kurzweil video conference on my little sony tx and logitech webcam. How awesome is technology these days!
Here are the videos from the conference: http://richardjschueler.com/wp-gallery2.php?g2_itemId=56847
Here’s some good folks who talk about this story:
LongevityMeme.org
FightAging.org
Partial Immortilization
Partial Immortilization 2
