Just to put this in perspective, the total sales of adult diapers in Japan is about to exceed that of baby diapers.
More stats about Japan's aging population here. As a footnote to my recent post on the underpopulation bomb, the article mentions a real life scenario that mirrors the fictional one from the anime film Roujin Z: to deal with the boom in Japan's elderly, the Health Ministry is recommending increased use of robots as nurses.
...we begin our lives as noisy dewdrops that will one day learn to crawl, then walk. As science writer Loren Eiseley once put it, people "are a way that water has of going about, beyond the reach of rivers."
Aging = Drying
But then, with every step we take, we begin to dry. The longer we live, the drier we get. One year after birth, a human baby is only 65 percent water – a ten percent drop, says the U.S. Geological Survey.
Babies are wetter than children. By the time we're adults, the USGS says, adult men are about 60 percent water, adult women 55 percent. Elderly people are roughly half water.
Aging can be described in one way as a gradual dessication.
Maybe this is why babies cry so much, they are just trying to shed some of that 75% water they're storing like little sponges of fat. I am going to go drink a glass of water.
Losing a parent is one of the most devastating things that can happen to a child. The world goes topsy-turvy. The psychologist Felix Brown reports that prisoners are two to three times more likely to have lost a parent in childhood than the population as a whole.
But for some people, Malcolm Gladwell points out in his new book, the death of a mother or father is a spur, a propellant that sends them catapulting into life. Because they are on their own, they are forced to persist, to invent, to chart their own way — into a curious category Gladwell dubs "eminent orphans."
There are, he reports, a lot of them. Historian Lucille Iremonger discovered that 67 percent of British prime ministers from the start of the 19th century to the start of World War II lost a parent before the age of 16.
Twelve presidents — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Grover Cleveland, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — lost their fathers while they were young.
A psychologist, Marvin Eisenstadt, poured through a number of major encyclopedias, looking for people whose biographies "merited more than one column" — and of 573 people, Gladwell reports, "a quarter had lost at least one parent before the age of 10. By age 15, 34.5 percent had had at least one parent die, and by the age of 20, 45 percent.
I have not read the new Gladwell book yet, but this particular topic is interesting. It suggests that losing a parent while young amplifies the volatility of outcomes for the child, either for the better or the worse.
It's not a coincidence, I suspect, that in so many fairy tales or young adult stories, the hero of heroine has lost one or both parents early in life: Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Lion King, Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen. Also, let's not forget the comic book heroes: Batman, Spiderman, Superman, and on and on.
And then there are the famous technology executives who lost a parent early or were adoptees, like Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, or Jeff Bezos. I'd always reserved judgment on this theory since anecdotal confirmation can be statistically anomalous, but the statistics above are intriguing.
While no parent would wish such misfortune on their own children, the question remains as to how to cultivate their grit and resilience with the other forms of stress and adversity. Nassim Nicholas Taleb should write a parenting book on how to make your children antifragile.
Photographer Peter Hurley shares a tip for looking more photogenic in portraits: squinching.
Hurley is big on this: squinching isn’t the same as squinting! The difference is minor but important. When you squint, your top and bottom eyelids close up and your eyes end up all but disappearing — you look neither confident nor self-assured.
With ‘squinching,’ you’re lifting and tightening the lower eyelid, while only letting the top one come down a hair. It might seem like a slight difference (and it is) but it’s a big deal when you get in front of the camera.
The move is said to make you seem self-assured and confident rather than wide-eyed and uncertain, and there are some before/after pics at the link to illustrate the difference.
I've tried it with great results, take a look here.
