Sit Longer, Die Sooner 341
mcgrew writes "Bad news for most of us here — The Chicago Tribune is reporting that even if you get plenty of exercize, sitting down all day reduces your lifespan. From the article: 'Even after adjusting for body mass index (BMI) and smoking, the researchers found that women who sit more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours; for men, long-sitters were 17 percent more likely to die.
People who exercise regularly had a lower risk, but still significant, risk of dying. Those who sat a lot and moved less than three and a half hours per day are the most likely to die early: researchers found a 94 percent increased risk for women and 48 percent increase for men, they announced recently in the American Journal of Epidemiology.'"
Tell that to Buddhist Monks! (Score:5, Interesting)
Totally anecdotal; I haven't done a scientific study, but I have noticed that Buddhist monks, you know, that guys that sit perfectly still 8 hours a day 7 days a week, tend to live much, much longer than the average person. I think that is a bit of a hole in their study.
Correlation? Causation? (Score:4, Interesting)
The article doesn't cover correlation vs. causation at all. Does anyone have a link to an abstract or similar?
Exercise Ball (Score:5, Interesting)
I sit on one of those exercise balls while programming. It keeps you moving and discourages slouching.
Re:Link to the actual paper (Score:1, Interesting)
One gets the feeling that the metric is that "any physical action that wasn't performed by a caveman is bad". Cavemen didn't sit in chairs for long periods -> sitting in chairs for long periods will reduce your life span.
Re:6 billion counterexamples (Score:2, Interesting)
Immortality is a physics problem. Doctors may be able to prolong life, but I doubt they will solve the universes inevitable end (big crunch, heat death, proton decay, or whatever). I am still pretty confident that everyone has to die.
Re:6 billion counterexamples (Score:4, Interesting)
The simpler definitions for life must include crystal growth and possibly fire. The more complicated ones, which exclude what we'd consider "chemical" or "mechanical", don't exclude botnets and some internet-spreading malware. Under some definitions, warez can be considered a parasitic organism, and any programmable computer as a form of host to all sorts of "life forms".
Now add the blurry definitions for "consciousness" and what "being self-aware" means, along with the debate over whether or not we have free will on any level, and you could say that we are both dead and alive at the same time, and/or that our property of "being alive" flickers on and off.
challenging death (Score:2, Interesting)
Rarely has the geek factor at Slashdot been so painfully evident. No matter how relevant the topic, a superficial stupidity in the summary text reduces this place to a tribe of impulse-challenged baboons trading shallow bon mots like a feces fight.
Quoted at Stress : The Frontal Cortex [scienceblogs.com]:
Troglodytes in the high art of back-stabbing, as Sapolsky humorously demonstrates with his own poison pen:
Bezos' grandfather had something useful to say about cleverness at the expense of what matters:
Bezos at Princeton [youtube.com]
Almost every society mentioned in Buettner's study of longevity move around a lot:
Dan Buettner: How to live to be 100+ [ted.com]
Here we are hunched over our keyboards having a feces fight about the semantics of immortality rather than thinking about major life choices. If a computer programmer's office chair was a protein complex, there would be a conjugate protein that binds the chair and expired occupant into a handy burial pod that can be rolled (rather than wheeled) out of the room.
With rare exceptions, you don't see death sitting down on the job all that often. Here's another obligatory Ted link:
Challenging Death [youtube.com]
I had completely forgotten the cape wipe. Nice touch in the editing room.
This sad display leaves me contemplating an update to the video tombstone memorial from Atom Egoyan's "Speaking Parts" with the text of "last post" and "last tweet" added automatically to the rolling feed by the web-scrapers of omniscience. Even St Peter has an iPad these days to assist in the great summing up.