Stephen Speicher

You simply cannot spoil dogs and little children with too much love.

Wow. Two nice boxers! You're a better man than me in handling two dogs. My one golden retriever has me well-trained, wrapped around her little paw. One more dog and I would have to give up entirely.

Is that his friend (girlfriend?) behind him? Looks like some sort of retriever. Your dog (his name?) must be pretty quick to beat out a retriever.

Cute, but I guess you don't get to play with your toys too often. p.s. What breed of dog is he?

If true, that is definitely not a good sign.

Thanks for the suggestion, HaloNoble6, but playing with MySQL is beyond my ken. (Besides, I am not even sure I would want to transfer posts.)

That's an interesting perspective. To agree or disagree I would have to read more of Adams' own writings than I have done. I look forward to the thread on Sparta's legacy that you suggested and that "Nathanial Hale 1775" said he will start. I am not as well-read on all this as I would like, so no doubt there is much to learn.

I guess we are preempting this thread with the political discussion. By all means feel free to start a more general thread on the subject of the legacy of Sparta.

Those quotes seem to indicate that, if anything, Sparta had a negative influence on Adams, rather than him basing many American principles of government upon it. Am I misinterpreting the quotes?

Thanks for the reference, HaloNoble6. This indeed does show that Hamilton's reading and analysis of this aspect of Sparta (in particular) had some intellectual influence on him. Do you have any references for Founding Fathers other than those who wrote essays in the Federalist Papers? (That would exclude, at least, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay.)

imdb.com listing for Must Love Dogs (2005) Movie suggested for rating by Elizabeth.

Book suggested for rating by CodyD.

Yes, I think this is the crux of the matter. And, as RJM knows firsthand in his own disagreements with colleagues, this entire field of aging is beset with controversy and conflicting claims. I sympathize with RayK and acknowledge that for one who is not a specialist in this field it is extremely difficult to sort out the valid and relevant factors from those with lesser justification. I have struggled through many papers on this subject and I confess to an inability to sort it all out. There are certain aspects that may be clearly seen, but others that are rather shrouded. Take, for instance, the whole area of oxidative stress. A few years ago the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences published the proceedings from the Ninth Congress of the International Association of Biomedical Gerontology of 2001. The papers are organized into eight main sections, each more interesting than the next. There were a number of fascinating papers on antioxidants and oxidative stress that remained, ultimately, difficult for me to assess. But Dr. RJM lent a perpsective on the issue of oxidative stress that I had not read before. In a 2001 paper [1] he actually demonstrated a negative correlation, i.e., there was no enhancement of antioxidant defenses for the longer-lived, and in fact there was a reduction in a certain relevant enzyme. And in a later paper [2] Dr. RJM provides a strongly critical analysis of the entire oxidative stress hypothesis and signals the work that needs to be done in order to establish any proper causal links or relationships that may apply. There are many approaches taken towards understanding the aging process, many of which are difficult to assess without great expertise in the field. Unfortunately, it looks like a lot of the promise remains just that, promise, and the real causal factors and breakthroughs are yet to come. I for one am glad to have RJM around to shine a beacon helping the rest of us to more clearly see what is going on. [References deleted]

Thanks to RJM for his interesting response. It is late for me and I am quite tired, not able to do justice to what RJM wrote, so I will respond to a couple of his points tomorrow. However, one point is easily dealt with, regarding my comments about Raymond Pearl's own view. As support for my claim, I offer the following quote from a 1938 paper by Pearl, less than two years before his death. "In this respect this human material agrees with and confirms a generalization that has emerged from experimental studies of life duration. It is that the length of life is generally in inverse proportion to the rate of living. The more rapid the pace of living is, the shorter the time that life endures. This relationship has been shown to exist for a variety of forms, including plants, various lower animals, insects and men." (The Search for Longevity, Raymond Pearl, The Scientific Monthly, V. 46, No. 5, pp. 462-483, May, 1938. Quote is found on p. 483.)

I first came across Raymond Pearl when I was doing some preliminary research on smoking, and I discovered his remarkable analysis relating smoking and longevity. As far as I know, his was the first scientific analysis that really provided significant data linking smoking to a reduction in longevity. This was in 1938! His short paper was based on firsthand data accumulated from the Family History Records of his Johns Hopkins University lab, and it involved almost 7000 white males. Pearl's conclusion was unequivocally clear: "However envisaged, the net conclusion is clear. In this sizable material the smoking of tobacco was statistically associated with an impairment of life duration, and the amount or degree of this impairment increased as the amount of habitual smoking increased." (Tobacco Smoking and Longevity, Raymond Pearl, Science, V. 87, No. 2253, pp. 216-217, March 4, 1938.) When I looked into Pearl's career I found that he was incredibly prolific (more than 700 papers!) and he was a true pioneer of statistical methods in biology. However, some of Pearls techniques, and some of his conclusions, became rather controversial. I know that Pearl, till the day he died, strongly believed that the length of life is generally inversely proportional to the rate of living, and Pearl further believed that this has been demonstrated not only for man and other higher life forms, but also for insects and plants as well. Granted, as RJM has said, that Pearl's rate of living theory has not been proved with any degree of "mathematical rigour," but does RJM believe along with Pearl that the general principle has been significantly demonstrated across the board from plants to man? I myself am rather sketical of that, but I am sure RJM has studied the data very much more than the tiny amount of which I am aware, so I would be interested in RJM's view.

Thanks to RJM for this clarification of his position in regard to rate of living. RJM's view seems close to my own substantially less-informed perspective. I note, though, that some the details that RJM discussed have emerged over a period of time, and even today are in a state of flux. My concern with Raymond Pearl, in this regard, is with, to me, what appeared to be, at best, an over-generalization on his part. As I mentioned previously, Pearl's contribution to establishing statistical methods in biology is of unquestioned value. But one reason why some of his work was so controversial, was that it is legitimately open to severe criticism, sometimes because of such over-generalizations (and perhaps a touch of an unwillingness to face some facts) on his part. An historical case in point is in regard to a 1913 paper [1] by Pearl in which he made the remarkable claim that inbreeding will not necessarily lead to having the same gene allele on each of an organism's homologous chromosomes (this is known as being "homozygous"). In other words, Pearl made the claim that inbreeding between brother and sister will not bring recessive genes to the surface. Without going into the details of Pearls genetic calculations, he only calculated to a point and from there his generalized conclusion was derived. When Pearl's error was later pointed out to him by two different people using different calculational methods, Pearl attempted to have one them removed from his position. Just a couple of years later, an editorial in Biometrika, the first and then foremost journal on the use of statistics, presented a scathing criticism of Pearl's generalization from and misuse of the proper mathematics in another Mendelian application. In the final paragraph the long and detailed editorial concludes: "Shortly Dr. Pearl's method is entirely fallacious, as any trained mathematician would have informed Dr. Pearl had he sought advice before publication." I think of Pearl's characterization of "rate of living" as having, though not blatantly wrong mechanics, as being a somewhat one-sided, over-generalized, and, to some points, a questionable hypothesis. I had other comments regarding RJM's discussion of caloric restriction, but perhaps we will save that for another time. [1] A contribution towards an analysis of the problem of inbreeding, R. Pearl, American Naturalist, V. 47, pp. 577-614, 1913. [2] The Probable Error of a Mendelian Class Frequency, R. Pearl, American Naturalist, V. 51, p. 144, March 1917. [3] The Probable Error of a Mendelian Class Frequency, Biometrika, Editorial, V. 11, No. 4, pp. 429-432, May 1917.

Thank you, RJM. We truly appreciate the expertise that you offer to us here.

Dufrene's report of the positive effects from walking or bike riding makes perfect sense, and it is not surprising that he found it to be a good and pleasant way to relieve stress. One should certainly remove unnecessary self-imposed stress through proper identification and thought, but thinking is not the sole key to our neurochemical makeup.

You suppose quite correctly, RJM. We welcome, nay, encourage decent enterprising activities here on THE FORUM, in whichever forum is most appropriate for the activity (CAPITALIST CORNER, CAREERS, WORK, & SCHOOL, etc.).

I made the "ageless" birthday change again and it seems to be working, so RJM, or anyone else who is interested, should now be able to specify just the day and month of birth in your user profile, and leave off the year.

Okay, I modified the software and it seems to work fine. If you catch today's birthdays (4/29/05) you will see member "abc2" listed, minus his age. I will send out a notice about this now.

I am going to make the change that RJM requested. It's just taking me longer to get around to doing it than I had anticipated. I apologize for the delay, but I will get to it.

The software is pretty impressive in regard to the number of variables it allows you to control, but the one that you highlight is not among them. The software developers are quite open to enhancements, and I know for for a fact they have implemented some suggested by their clients. But, your suggestion has been made to them before. However, there are a large number of modifications that savy administrators have made to the software on their own, and your idea for birth year is one that has been done. I have been reluctant to make such modifications -- I have been debating with myself about whether to do the "automatic sent mail" modification -- for a few reasons, some of which I mentioned on another thread. But an additional concern I have is that modifications made will have to be made again for any new version of the software that is released. Which means, in essence, that we are at the mercy of the person who designed the modification to update it to apply to the new version. But, perhaps I have been treating this too much as if the whole issue is too fragile to mess with. Maybe as a test case I will make the "sent mail" modification and RJM's "birth year" modification and we'll see what happens over time. Give me a little time , but I will try to get to it, say, within a week, and I will respond here when the modification has been made.

The software modification that I applied was overwritten when the software developers updated our system a little while ago. So the "ageless" birthday feature reverted back to the original. This is an ongoing problem with making modifications, which may or may not work when the software is updated. I will try to make the mod again in the next few days, and I hope it will work with the new update. I'll report back here when it is done, one way or another.