Saturday, July 9, 2022

3:14, huzzah for summer reading.

Last Saturday (July 2) at 3:14, I was reading a book:  Ageless.  This is a book about how "getting older" (that is, living longer) and "aging" (that is, degenerating in overall healthiness and vigor) are two different things, and about how scientific/medical researchers are starting to figure out ways to combat the latter.  It's  a dense book, but I'm finding it fun to slog through.  


Example of a sloggy sentence from page 228, which is what I'm currently reading: 

Exactly how we'll disentangle the different kinds of epigenetic and other changes which occur during the wide-ranging process of induced pluripotency and transdifferentiation is yet to be seen.

Example of the peppy parts which make the sloggy parts worth slogging through:

Aging is a phenomenally complex process. Nonetheless, as we've seen in the last few chapters, we have good ideas as to how we might treat it. All these ideas have, at a minimum, precedent in the lab, and most of them aren't just speculative treatments based on theory or experiments on cells in a dish. 

Before this book, I read a much less rigorous, but much more peppy book:  Daniel Pink's When.  (The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing).   Of course, here "secrets" aren't at all "secrets"; they're discoveries and/or knowledge.  My favorite takeaway from that book is the "nappucino":  a mid-day cup of coffee, setting a timer for 25 minutes, and then a brief nap.  

While reading Ageless, I also read The Art of Gathering, at the urging of a friend who is helping me plan a party.  That was a truly fun read, especially because my friend had read it so we could compare takeaways, and doubly especially because it gave us lots of good motivation to think about planning this party in strategic [ = fun!! ] ways.   Highly recommend.

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