Nice people thread part 4 - sugar and spice and all things

lostinrates

LydiaJ wrote: »

Something as disruptive to nutrition as the 1930s depression would be expected to make a corresponding dent on average American life expectancies, although once you get beyond the statistics to individuals, there would be a much bigger than average effect on those whose mothers were actually malnourished at the time, and little if any effect on those whose mothers were sufficiently well off to continue to eat well.

DH and I were taloking about this last night after I logged off (of all the fun stuff to chat about in bed, eh?) And comparing his grandparents to mine. My paternal grandparents were long lived. Grandmother suffered considerable deprivation in Ireland before the war and never ate like a wealthy woman''. Her husband grew veg, but mainly made undrinkable wine from it. The main veg I remember at their house was frozen mixed vegetables. My other lot, the really long lived lot, well, they DID eat like wealthy people, but as I say, worked like poor ones. Most of them had thyroid imbalances and a few insane ones and a few type 1 diabetics thought....but neither informity slowed them down too much. I really think that physical activity combined with good nutrition to suit needs is pretty good combination to maximise what genes you got in that lottery. I also think the stuff like feeling ''connected'' to your society is probably pretty important...they say contact with family is too...I'm not so sure...some phone calls with family leave me with little remaining will to live

Generali

michaels wrote: »

Don't suppose we will see CarolT back with you making comments like that.

Without wishing to be too not nice, what a lot of people fail to grasp is that every penny the Government spends must come from current taxation, future taxation or asset sales and the last item is limited.

If rich people are given welfare then someone else must pay for that. PN, as a low earning, childless smoker, is likely to be a net taxpayer. IMHO she shouldn't be paying benefits for rich people when she struggles to support herself!

I was harsh on carolt but middle class welfare really gets my goat. I think that is obvious to all!

It's been a grey day today but it's given way to what looks like it's going to be a glorious sunset.

LydiaJ

lostinrates wrote: »

I also think the stuff like feeling ''connected'' to your society is probably pretty important...they say contact with family is too...I'm not so sure...some phone calls with family leave me with little remaining will to live

Absolutely. There's a lot of data to show that, too. Robert Putnam has written a book about the way in which American culture (and Western culture in general) is becoming less connected, and discusses how harmful that is to health etc. His book is called Bowling Alone.

JonnyBravo

zagubov wrote: »

It could be statistical but there's growing evidence that your longevity is linked to your mothers nutrition and your own early nutrition

People born in the war during rationing are supposed (well, expected) to be long-lived nowadays as their diet was optimised by the Ministry of Food using linear programming (I remember my maths teacher claiming that won the war for us).

Just to be clear I was talking about your chance of living to 100 depending on when you were born. If you draw that as a graph of your current age it is people who are 82/83 if a man (5.9%) or 83/84 if a woman (8.5%) who have the smallest chance of making 100.
Genetic variations are important if we're talking about an individual but I was simply trying to answer Stevie's question about a population not individuals.

zagubov wrote: »

I've heard your chances of surviving one more year don't fall below 50/50 until you're about 100. And that the day you're born is the day you're most likely to die

Yep sounds about right to me, esp the "most likely to die on the day you're born". Entirely logical.

LydiaJ wrote: »

That doesn't seem quite right to me. I agree with your description of the general shape of the curve, but one side of the trade off you describe seems to have a flaw.

It's true that as you age, you are more likely to die this year but your own personal probability of dying before you reach 100 is decreasing gradually all the time as you survive the various things that might have killed you. However, the life expectancy of the population is generally improving with better health care etc - so a baby born now is a lot more likely to reach 100 than a baby born in 1911. The trade off is therefore between "close enough to 100 that you're nearly there" and "born late enough to have had the benefit of advances in medicine etc".

But as zagubov points out, there are all sorts of wiggles to the curve. There's really strong evidence that maternal heath & nutrition during pregnancy (and especially the beginning of it) is hugely influential on the baby's health and even IQ for the whole of its life.

In muslim populations, for example, there's a statistically observable dip in health, IQ and other measures of wellbeing in every year group of people, corresponding to the babies who were in their first month or two of gestation when their mothers were fasting for Ramadan. Something as disruptive to nutrition as the 1930s depression would be expected to make a corresponding dent on average American life expectancies, although once you get beyond the statistics to individuals, there would be a much bigger than average effect on those whose mothers were actually malnourished at the time, and little if any effect on those whose mothers were sufficiently well off to continue to eat well.

Sorry, I wasn't clear about what I was talking about. See above re Stevie's question. I was talking about the odds of reaching 100 (in the UK) not surviving another year, and talking about whole populations not individuals. Clearly nutrition would inform an individuals graph massively but they simply become part of a dataset.
The steepness of the decline to the left of the nadir, the point at which it started, and the actual value of the nadir would be dictated by, for example, the degree of medical advancement, nutritional improvements etc in the population in question but it would still occur due to the statistical phenomenon I attempted to describe before.

Here are your links folks

The raw data

News item with graph

JonnyBravo

:j

I did one of them link thingies with different words for the first time!!!

YAY!!!!



Small things....

lostinrates

I don't suppose we have a bedside alarm/radio guru amongst the nice people?

My beside radio is now quite old and cranky. Quirks incude buttons having developed multiple functions. e.g. press he ''up volume'' and it might go up, but eqully it might go down, or up and down a bit til a suitable volume is acheived at random. Try to retune on the fm setting an you might instead get an am alternative. Try to chage from am to fm and you ight also get a volume offering, or reset the alarm timer. All of this I love in it, its like a cranky old cat who might purr or bite when you stroke it and you just have to gamble that it will purr more often than bite, and not draw blood when it does bite BUT this weekend it did something unforgivable. It was on standby, thanks to the sleep timer working corectly and we were soundly and snuggly asleep when at an ungodly hour in the middle of the night we were woken by a loud and disharmonious chord. ''not the gas chambers'' yelled dh mistaking this sound for the sound of iminant death. The cats fluffed up like suirrels tails and I opened one eye (unlike dh I decided if it were death best not to let it know you know its coming).

Then nothing, silence....we started to drift off again and equally loudly it swched back on to trat us to the horror of subo's version of ''Perfect day''. It took some fumbling around in the dark and the kncking over of my bedside table to get it unplugged. Its also very big, and if we were not miser's i ight have been replaced on the basis of it leaving almost no room for anything else on the bedside table.

DH has ruled that it must be replaced....but really, what can you get to replace such a fun beside radio with character?

Gizmos, that's what. So ideally, and i recognise this ish list probably can't be fulfilled, I would like a new bedside radio/alarm with the following features:

lights up slowly over a half hour (dh has one of these in Town, but thats pretty much all it does)
is a digital radio
has a sleep timer function
DH want's it to have an iPd dock...is that how that's called?

and......is a tea or coffee maker.

I have an old teasmade from the 60s or seventies which dh also banned using as an alarm...I bought it in a charity shop because my parents had one nd I love it when I was little, but I had forgotton the fog horn an buzz quality of the alarm which, while incredibly efective......I literally jump to my feet from the bed, hackles up, does tend to start the day with a racing pulse and uneasy nurosis. so while I'm prepared to forgo this tea/coffee feature in a beside gadget, dh begs me to look for one which will avoid me saying every now and again (it takes a while to forget the horror of leaping out of bed and knocking hot drink over the bed in the leap...but forget it I do) ''darling, look, I've set the hot drik maker on for the morning, isn't that fun?''.


Any ideas?

lostinrates

JonnyBravo wrote: »

:j

I did one of them link thingies with different words for the first time!!!

YAY!!!!



Small things....

I feel just like that when I manage it, and a funny linky-clever thing. Sadly the posts tend to take e far too long, and so I don't make the effort too often:o

Davesnave

Sorry, my alarm is the cat.

She knows when it's light enough for the chickens to need letting out. She starts with a bit of scrabbling, and if I don't respond to that, a whisker up the nose has never been known to fail! :rotfl:

lostinrates

Davesnave wrote: »

Sorry, my alarm is the cat.

She knows when it's light enough for the chickens to need letting out. She starts with a bit of scrabbling, and if I don't respond to that, a whisker up the nose has never been known to fail! :rotfl:

useless cats here would sleep for a whole weekend if I were still in bed. if I rely on them we'll be a in big trouble!

edit: we actualy use phone for the alarm......but would prefer to get all of this stuff on one machine now. We're growing up I guess.

StevieJ

StevieJ wrote: »

You know you have hit skid row when you are kicked out of the BB house before Kerry :eek:


http://uk.omg.yahoo.com/news/sally-bercow-says-cbb-housemates-another-planet-080000210.html

Maybe I was too kind with Skid row, it would be intertesting being a fly on the wall in the Speakers house

Sally Bercow, the wife of the Commons Speaker John Bercow, has signed up as a columnist for the Daily Star Sunday following her reality television debut, prompting further howls of contempt from Mr Bercow's parliamentary colleagues.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/sally-bercow-signs-tabloid-deal-after-reality-tv-foray-2345865.html