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Futuristic Suit Lets You Feel What It's Like To Be An Old Man
HughPickens.com writes: Andy Newman writes at the New York Times about an exhibit at Liberty Science Center in Jersey City that lets users walk a proverbial mile in their elders' orthopedic shoes and experience the stooped shuffle, the halting speech, and the dimming senses of an 85-year old man. It is not a very pleasant experience. An attendant cranks up a fader and your vision dissolves into melty, grayed-out blobs, like a memorably unvivid psychedelic experience, more knobs twiddle, and your hearing is subsumed in a fog of tinnitus, muffling and distortion. Loaded with hardware and a computer, the suit itself weighs 40 pounds, distributed as uncomfortably as possible. "It's going to get much worse," promises Bran Ferren, the suit's inventor. "You haven't lived."
According to Newman, in just 10 minutes, the aging suit induced a remarkable amount of frustration, depression and hopelessness. There are entire realms of wretchedness attendant upon owning and operating an 85-year-old body that the exhibit does not even touch upon. Comprehensive sagging, internal and external. Pain in places you did not know could hurt. Difficulty urinating. Difficulty not urinating. Watching your friends die off. Watching yourself become irrelevant, an object of pity or puzzlement if acknowledged at all. By allowing a younger generation to feel the effects of aging firsthand, the suit provides a newfound perspective that hopefully inspires a conversation with loved ones about getting older so, collectively, family and friends can better prepare for the future. If doing even the most basic tasks of daily living is this much trouble, you wonder, why bother? But it also makes you a little less likely to lose patience and a little more likely to feel empathy with the older people in your life. "My father, Aaron Newman, happens to be 85," says Newman. "I called him up. I described the treadmill experience and asked if that sounded about right." "No," he said. "It's much worse."
According to Newman, in just 10 minutes, the aging suit induced a remarkable amount of frustration, depression and hopelessness. There are entire realms of wretchedness attendant upon owning and operating an 85-year-old body that the exhibit does not even touch upon. Comprehensive sagging, internal and external. Pain in places you did not know could hurt. Difficulty urinating. Difficulty not urinating. Watching your friends die off. Watching yourself become irrelevant, an object of pity or puzzlement if acknowledged at all. By allowing a younger generation to feel the effects of aging firsthand, the suit provides a newfound perspective that hopefully inspires a conversation with loved ones about getting older so, collectively, family and friends can better prepare for the future. If doing even the most basic tasks of daily living is this much trouble, you wonder, why bother? But it also makes you a little less likely to lose patience and a little more likely to feel empathy with the older people in your life. "My father, Aaron Newman, happens to be 85," says Newman. "I called him up. I described the treadmill experience and asked if that sounded about right." "No," he said. "It's much worse."
And if it doesn't hurt, it leaks.
A substantial portion of the readers of Slashdot are already well aware of how the ypotame of age hits you, squarely in the tummy, before jumping all over you.
It wouldn't be so bad if gravity hadn't increased too. This, of course, being a side effect of the world haven gotten smaller.
This is news? I know there's always this delusional part of the population that says they feel better at 40 than at 20, but they're idiots.
Aging should be studied, understood, controlled and eventually reversed.
Fuck aging. There's nothing glorious about grey hair, bald spots, high blood pressure, failing memory, decreasing processing power, declining physical capabilities, and for the money-hungry among us, the extra cost on society of old, feeble, decrepit bodies.
Why there isn't the same level of excitement for anti-aging, as, say, colonizing Mars, is very difficult to understand.
Remember the old farts you make fun of? The only thing that separates you from them is time.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It took my tailor 60 years to make.
Have gnu, will travel.
Bullshit.
Not bullshit that he did it, bullshit that just anyone could. You've got to have the right combination of genetics to make it to 82 in the first place, not everybody has that.
And almost nobody has the ability to set a record. That's why it's a record, not the standard.
It takes a combination of effort and luck. Without both, you're screwed.
Perhaps some genetics play into it, be he started walking 10+ miles a day at 60. At 49, I run a 5k in 22 minutes. I've been running for 8 years - I didn't start out at that. Do I have aches and pains? Yes. But far fewer than when I first started. Your body will inevitably break down, but lack of attention to it will accelerate that process.
How about a suit that lets old people feel like to be young again?
Now *THAT* there'd be a real market for.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Old age, as my almost 90 dad says, "sure beats the alternative".
I don't mind my failing body and mind so far. For me, it's not about the car, it's about the trip.
I've seen some cool things happen over the years, and I want to see more.
I wonder what it was like for my grandparents to see all this. They were born in the 1800's and lasted until the 1970's
No cars, no radio, no airplanes, no refrigerators, no air conditioning, no electric lights, no telephone. Only the well to do had heat other than a fire in a box.
My grandmothers could not legally vote when they were young women.
Can you imagine how cool it was to see all that come into life?
As for me, I was 6 years old the first time I saw a television. I still think it's cool in so many ways.
I was a teenager when I saw a computer in use for the first time. I believe it was a GE 200 series.
At about that time, the USA had more nuclear weapons than computers.
There were no satellites yet.
I basically saw the entire space program unfold from start to present. Except when sputnik was launched; I don't recall the actual event. I remember people talking about it later.
Everyone in the neighborhood (suburbian) went outside at night to watch Echo 1 pass overhead. Street lights were still a rarity outside the central city areas. We could see the milky way any clear night, so spotting satellites wasn't hard.
I saw the first man step onto the moon live on TV.
I saw the Berlin wall come down and the Soviet Union collapse. ... well, we'll see what happens.
We're seeing China transform from an anthill slave society into
I grew up in the totally segregated south and saw the civil rights movement happen, and I saw how much individual people can change.
Humanity, when it's working right, is amazing.
The most recent doctor that treated me in the hospital is a black woman. Inconceivable in the 1950's in the South, or come to think of it, pretty much anywhere in the USA.
I remember a 1950's science fiction story where everyone was telepathic. Knowing everyone else's thoughts all the time was a living nightmare.
Thanks to Facebook, texting, etc, we nearly have that now.
I really don't mind so much that I can no longer sleep on one side because it hurts too much to sleep, or that I cannot plan when to go to the bathroom, or that I need the subtitles turned on to understand British television...
There are so many interesting things happening, and thanks to growing up in the 20th century, the whole terrorism thing is, well, shrug, so what, to me.
I'm betting on something like CRISPR/cas9 to be the next "who knew we could do that?" technology. This is going to be way cool.
I'm hoping to see mosquitoes extinct, or at least the ones attracted to humans.
There was a 1958 movie "The Long Hot Summer". It had Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Orson Wells, etc.
If you saw it, you'll remember the closing lines from Will Varner standing in front of his burning barn.
It's like that.
Any web designer who ever uses light gray text on a slightly darker gray background or a font less than 10 pt should be forced to wear the vision fader for a month at least.
Growing up as a geek, I was also really physical. I've played a life of physical sports, like hockey, soccer, football (touch in stead of tackle though), swimming, body surfing, hiking, hunting and climbing, fantastic stuff. Ironically it balances the mental effort I put into electronics and coding and I found I could focus really well.
My true love of physical activity has been Martial Arts. Throughout my 20's and 30's I did Thai boxing and during training the conditioning involved full power kicks and punches all over the body. When I was in my late 30's I could still do the splits, back flip and I was playing soccer when I snapped an achillies tendon, facing a wheel chair and cronic pain syndrome. It took almost three years to be able to walk again and significant determination to do so. I learned alot about physiotherapy and mental determination from sport was . Team sport were over for me, the balistic impacts were from other player. I was able to resume martial arts, currently BJJ, which is like physical chess, I love it. I got to competitition level, competed - only minor titles, but enough to test myself.
Over a decade later this activity has led to injuries all over the body that causes all sorts of aches and pains. Over the last couple of years (I diarise injuries) I noted that the *rate* of injuries progressing, recovery time longer. I was still training. My physical strength was still excellent and I'm able to fight guys 20-30 years younger, however I often noticed that strength could exceed my joints. Control was very important, pain was all over my body and, I noticed that I had pretty severe internal scarring accumulated in my muscles. Knots in my back so tight and painful that the physios elbow was into it and his feet were off the ground, and still I needed more pressure. Similar things around the rest of my body. I came to the conclusion that it was time to look at the state of my body.
I talked to my doctor who was surprised when I bought in my data that I had diarised and showed him some of the relationships I'd found, I was pressing him to authorize more physiotherapy. He did and with the assistance of another doctor and two physio therapists (both with Masters themselves who treat currently competing athletes) my body became a bit of an experiment. Dry needling is the main therapy used and over the past two years, I've stopped all training and physical activity and had over 4000 needles stuck into almost every muscle, joint and, tendon in my body. Sometimes 50 needles at a time.
That resulted in various odd and often very painful releases of scar tissue, intense periods of repeated joint cavitaion (cracking) in almost every joint in my body. Joints would go through periods of bone ossification and reform for weeks. One major event involved my left elbow. I was ashen grey, my left arm was numb and my chest constricted, but I wasn't having a heart attack. Instead my elbow released 10-20 degrees of movement, it swelled to almost the size of my knee down to my wrist in a session of 60-100 cavitations of the elbow over six hours. It was exhausting, I'm not sure if I was in shock, but I felt very ill for a few days. After that, I felt amazing, I had been carrying scarring from that injury (I broke my wrist in a fight once) for almost 20 years.
I'm almost at the end of this therapy, a process that uncovered 24 major injuries in my body each releasing with a intensity varying upto what I described above and currently the physios are trying to re-allign my hips, which will probably be the final and most painful cavitaion I've been slowly working up to.
I'm more physically out of shape than I have been because of intentional de-conditioning of the body however, I feel great. I'm middle aged now and I can still not only touch my toes, but stand on my fingers and I'm working my way back to doing the splits. A couple of weeks ago I woke up, got in the shower and realized there was no more pain. As a bonus, I'm also not as grumpy as I used to be and my mind is much cl
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"Just as a FYI, about half the people on this planet don't even have a cock."
But how many of those will you find on Slashdot?
"Watching your friends die off."
Actually, watching my friends pass away is way better than the alternative- having them watch me pass away. I don't like going to funerals but I'd rather go to theirs than they go to mine.
As far as I'm concerned, one of the better parts of getting older is watching your enemies die off. I confess, that's given me quite a bit of pleasure so far. :)
I suppose I should feel bad about it, but I really don't. Every time one of them dies I feel a renewed sense of vigor and satisfaction. "Yipee, I out lived that fucking asshole, yay for ME!" And I have a drink. Not in their memory, but just because I can. :)
So fuck you, Mike W., James P., and Jerry L. You're all dead and I'm still eating bacon sandwiches and banging my lovely young wife. Suck it, boys. Oh, that's right, you can't- because you're dead. ha ha ha ha!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I am 58. People look at me funny when the subject comes up and I say that I don't really want to live past 70. I'm kind of good with 65, really. I don't want to live forever - even if I were to retain good health. I'm currently in excellent health, according to my doctor and all the tests, but I'm still good with 70. By then, it'll be time for me to get out of the way and make room for the next person, so it's all good.
I do kind of wonder what will happen to my digital assets. I'll have to script some sort of bot to keep posting novellas long after I'm dead and gone. Hell, I can just recycle old posts, based on keywords, and still be topical on Slashdot. I just have to scrape all of my old posts, index 'em, and then scan for new threads. There should be enough material in there to go for another dozen years and nobody will even know the difference.
Someday, someone'll realize, "Hey, wait a minute... Shouldn't you be 114 by now?" My great grand kids (none of which do I have at this point) will get to watch it and think it's the greatest troll ever. Or maybe one of 'em will be "me" online when I'm dead and gone. Probably not...
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
It would be filed against every tech company that practices age discrimination.