Posts by giovanni tiso
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I wouldn't normally spam, but since we're talking about web 2.0 and online research, it seems fair to mention the Firefox extension Zotero.
Hear, hear. (Or read, read, I suppose). It's one of those things, as the cliche goes, which makes you wonder how you used to operate without it.
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I'm with Danielle, you're welcome to use an encyclopaedia to do basic preliminary research on a topic at any level, but it's not a good enough source for tertiary research in its own right, unless the subjects are encyclopaedias themselves.
But the problem is not that Wikipedia is an inferior encyclopaedia, I think we've moved past that. Roy Rosenzweig has a bunch of interesting thing to say about it in this here article.
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Clifton and Easton I can read in \the supermarket; does anyone know whats happened to their circulation in the last year or so?
Easton you can also read on his website, including the Listener columns as soon as the next issue has come out (and they're seldom so topical you need to read them at once).
Along the lines of the perfect Listener cover story, there ought to be the perfect PA comments generator, something along the lines of "partner-abusing, coffee-loving rugby celebrity disses The Listener". But I'm sure others can do better.
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Why do you think I've avoided talking about heart attacks and strokes and other seriously-life-threatening eventualities?
I know you didn't talk about heart attacks, I did. You talked about fighting obesity, and cardiovascular disease happens to be the main problem associated with it. Hip fractures are costly to treat, sure, and if they can be avoided early in life it's great (that'd be why car accidents are so expensive for society). But you can't delay the onset of such things forever, and there's going to be a bill at the end of the day. One of my aunts died at 101 and the thing that did, as is so often the case with the mega-old, was a broken femur.
Also, you talk about "retirement". It seems to be becoming an accepted position that for many people retirement won't be a complete cessation of employment. They'll work fewer hours, or play TradeMe as a way of generating income, but they won't be out of the productive sector.
Look, my father started working at 14 and died at 64. Can I tell you how much he was looking forward to retirement and no longer being a productive member of society?
You're still stuck on the basic premise, though: the longer we live, the more expensive we become. I'd like to buck a family trend and be as much of a burden in my old age as humanly possible.
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mean, how many times have they ran cover stories with the the words "How To..." or "How You Can..." ?
"How You Too Can Stay in Shape and Keep Your Job in the Current Property Downturn (And what It Means for NCEA)"?
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Or not. Heart attacks are often not fatal, they just put the patient into hospital for a few days, on medication for years (if not the rest of their life), and are expensive both because of the direct costs of pre- and post-discharge care and through the diminished economic output of the victim during recovery.
See, I'm still highly sceptical. Consider that even if you fail to be killed by the first heart attack, chances are the second one will get you and that this is most likely to happen in early retirement, just at the time when you've stopped having an 'economic output' and have started receiving a state pension. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for preventative medicine and better habits leading to longer, healthier lives, but let's not kid ourselves that it's going to save us money - we've never spent more in health services and yet we're the healthiest we've ever been.
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Are those two concepts mutually exclusive?
Not at all, he was pretty clear you could do one and then the other (although not vice versa).
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There are many benefits from keeping weight in check, including things like reduced need for joint replacements. Keeping active, which is encouraged both as a weight-control measure and as a result of being less overweight, helps bone density, too, which means that the risk of fractures in old age drops. Those two things alone could mean savings of eight or nine figures a year.
I am a little sceptical of this kind of bookkeeping, I must say. The overwhelming issue with excessive weight is the increased risky of early death due to cardiovascular disease. The way it often pans out is you're fine, suddenly you have a heart attack, you die. That is very sad but not at all costly for the health system. If you live a longer, healhier life, on the other hand, things are still bound to catch up with you eventually, and caring for people in their eighties and nineties is really expensive regardless of their medical history. So by all means let's encourage healthy habits, but can we try not to look at it in terms of being a good investment or a smart use or money?
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Either. Either be indulged.
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That seems unduly generous, David, but I am not known to turn down free stuff, much less free books. Tell you what, I'll accept so long as you're able to track down the author and get him to sign it.
Now there's a challenge for you.
(My son the other day spotted this book in the lounge I had just brought home, Film and the Shoah in France and Italy, written by our dear friend Giacomo Lichtner. He wanted to know what it was about, so I told him, although obviously given that he's 6 years old I didn't get into the kind of detail that you would expect to impart on an older fella. Still, there was the basic concept there, that certain men felt that whole other groups of people had to be destroyed, and they set about doing just that, and the concept must have registered at a certain level judging by the expression on his face, and a very obvious thing occurred to me, namely that there is a first time in life when you learn about these things that are bigger than life itself, death being the most egregious one I guess, and being there to witness one such occasion made me catch my breath for a moment.)
(What Machiavelli did in fact write, among very many other things, is that men ought to other be indulged or utterly destroyed. Go figure.)