Not even in the first handfull in general. In the first handfull that represents your particular generation. And since the idea is still pretty novel, there is still only a handfull getting suspended during any given generation.
It's a moderately sized field of peer-reviewed research concerned with preserving organs and tissues for transplantation + several companies who develop cryoprotectants for use by these researchers, but whose work also has spinoff benefits for organizations like Alcor and the Cryonics Institute. These organizations, I am told, specialize strictly in cryosuspending patients and keeping suspended. I wish that Alcor did more work on the revival end of the problem, but I understand their point of view. They want to do just one thing and do it well. They're hoping that as interest in cryonics grows, eventually some NIH or privately sponsored research team will pick up the complicated but not impossible task of revival of whole mammals from total, -210*C freezing.
Actually, as long as there's no disaster that will wipe out Alcor and similar organizations, even if we never figure out a way to unfreeze people, a sufficiently advanced nanomedicine will eventually figure out how to reconstruct exact copies of frozen people down to the molecular level.
Not that I'm philosophically satisfied with such a revival. When I get around to it, I will stipulate in my will that I don't wish any destructive copies to be made of the original until "real" revival becomes possible unless the only alternative is the original getting destroyed anyway.
I can't tell if this is a troll, or joke, or what.
But herbal remedies?! Are you shitting me? Dude, I'm a biology geek, and I can tell you that the field is littered with herbal supplements that don't make a damn bit of difference in controlled trials. A few do make a difference and are worth all the effort. But there's nothing "magic" in the world of herbal remedies that the big bad medical establishment it trying to hide from you.
If there was, don't you think various pre-technological peoples would have already cured cancer and heart disease long before modern medicine was a twinkle in Galen's eye?
Oh, wait, they have and the big bad medical establishment covered it up. After they staged the moon landing and replaced Kennedy's corpse with Elvis'.
Actually, under current law, people can only be put into cryo after they are clinically dead.
However, any religious/ethical/spiritual issues this raises are already raised every time people who are clinically dead for brief periods get revived on an operating table. This is just a quantitative, not a qualitative difference.
Oh the population problem will get resolved one way or another long before cryonics becomes widespread. Even before life-extension by pharmaceutical or bioengineering means becomes widespread.
And the life-history of the typical individual in a post-overpopulation world? Individuals being forced by economics or law to limit family size and wait longer before reproducing, exchanging quantity for quality. In such a world there would be an incentive to live longer and stay productive longer. At least, in scenarios that don't involve starving to death or dying of dysentery at 20 (the world in those scenarios probably wouldn't be able to afford to keep the cryonicists frozen in the first place).
It depends on when you're thawed. There's a theory in cryonics circles, though, that the reviving will proceed in a LIFO manner because the later someone gets frozen, the better the available technology will be, and the easier they will be to revive. The "early adopters" might get revived last, after the medicine of the time has had plenty of practice with the easy cases.
If this is correct, it would mean that the handfull of people frozen now will be the authoritative source of information about the late 20th century... but they'll get revived after you do, so you'll get your time in the sun with your knowledge of the early -to-mid 21st century with the still relatively small number of people who will be frozen at the same time you are.
Choose your spouse carefully, and raise your children even more carefully.
At a cryofeast in my area, I met an entire family who had Alcor contracts. Mom, dad, and three adorable little kids. So I'm definitely not going to marry anybody who isn't at least as cool as the mom was.
On the one hand, euthenasia being legalized in the US (or at least in Arizona) would make cryonics more reliable.
On the other hand, it would be a coup for the people I think of as the "pro-death lobby". It would set the expectation that instead of wanting to live, old people should politely step aside and take a lethal dose of sleeping pills to avoid inconveniencing the younger generations.
So I guess it's not so much the legality of euthenasia I'm concerned about as the cultural expectations it might create.
Looks like your fees go up quite a bit after you stop being a student.
Yup. I'll worry about that when I get there. My paycheck goes up too when I'm a post-doc, and up again when I'm teaching bio 101 to freshmen. Not a lot, but enough.
suppose you instead got a modest 7% interest on that $199/year
I intend to invest as well. Not that I know of too many investments that can predictably average a 7% yearly return, especially when peak oil has whatever economic effects it's going to have.
Anyhow, good luck with the frozen head thing;-)
And good luck with the literal ascension to heaven or literal reincarnation to all the die-hard (no pun intended) non-cryonicists out there. I hope to God that you're right and I'm wrong (because then we'll all end up in the same place after all, except the fundies of course).
It never ceases to astound me how many things there are out there that people think are worse than death. To me, death is the one definite way to lose whatever game we're playing. Maybe people have a more literal belief in heaven than I do. Maybe people are in deep denial about the implacable finality of death. It's none of my business, though. Some people would rather be dead than stupid and broke, and I respect their beliefs.
Call me a throwback then, because I'd rather be alive and keep on struggling to stay that way as long as possible. And the further in the future, the better. To put this into perspective, I'd rather be a homeless guy today than a medieval noble. Again, to each their own.
What the hell. If self-preservation has now become politically incorrect, our society has officially lost all touch with its evolutionary roots.
But any society or subset thereof that does survive the centuries will not be in such hopeless denial about its nature, and they will understand the point of view of a person who wants to do everything he or she can to survive and witness the future for themselves.
So everything you people know about cryo comes from science fiction novels?
Actually, what really happens to cells is that the intracellular spaces suck the water out of them and damage them through dehydration. The point of vitrification is to prevent that.
Anyway, at worst I'll be dead and maybe in some metaphysical realm, and no longer caring about how stupid people will think my gamble was. But I won't be any less dead if I don't try it, so I have nothing (except money that I can't take with me) to lose.
Perhaps rich people are the ones worrying about preserving their assets for the future, but I don't want people to get the impression that you have to be rich to be a cryonicist.
That mistaken assumption is what caused me to take so long to take the plunge.
I'm a grad student, I make 20k/year, and I have a cryo contract. As a full-time student I pay $199 annually and my life insurance policy ($90k coverage) premiums cost about $1k per annually. If I wanted to, I could have taken out a term life insurance policy and I'd be paying in the low hundreds, but since by definition this is an arrangement you'd want to make for the duration of your life, I thought it would be better to lock in a good whole life insurance rate while I'm still young and healthy. Plus my policy has a safety margin of $10k over the $80k neurosuspension fee.
And that's me, a starving PhD student. Some of you people with real jobs can fund your cryo policy, and toss some money into a trust fund for yourself, and have some left over for charity and heirs.
Cryonics is a long-shot, but unlike many other beliefs about life after death, it doesn't contradict the observed laws of physics. I don't ridicule those beliefs or take any action to restrict them, no matter how alien to my way of thinking they may seem. I therefore expect a free and pluralistic society to reciprocate this courtesy toward my own beliefs.
Let's say that a fetus is a human being (though given that it's incapable of negotiation, abiding by a contract, or organized resistance to oppression, it might be more correct to call it a prot-human or a potential-human rather than a full human).
Even so, it is still a human being who needs another human being for its survival. The right of the host human to deny the fetus nourishment and shelter supersedes the fetus' right to survival at their expense just like your right to deny nourishment and shelter to a paraplegic supersedes the paraplegic's right to survival at your expense. If you're a decent person, you will try to provide for vulnerable members of your community as an act of generousity, but the whole point of libertarianism is that nobody should force you to do so.
Furthermore, the parent poster specifically says he supports criminalization of abortions. So in effect he's saying that he wants the government to use tax dollars to punish people for choosing not to offer nourishment and shelter to other people.
I respect him for having and voicing his principles, but these are explicitly not libertarian principles, and so I'm calling him on it for misrepresenting them as such.
It would be more accurate for him to say "I'm a libertarian except for my belief that abortion should be criminalized... etc."
Dude, if you're against a free-living, fully-sentient adult having the right to do as they please with their body and all components thereof, I hate to break this to you, but you're not a Libertarian. You're a conservative passing himself off as a Libertarian.
I don't know why there are so many of them infesting our little party. Maybe they're ashamed to be Republicans because of that unpleasant jackbooted-thugs image they've been earning themselves lately. Maybe they like the thrill of rebellion without having to actually do anything rebellious.
But being pro-life is about as Libertarian as being pro gun control. Think what you want of Libertarianism, but to set the record straight guys like the parent poster don't speak for the rest of us.
Over and over I hear "but what about overpopulation?"
Strangely, I hear this from people who think nothing of *directly* and *immediately* contributing to overpopulation by having or planning to have multiple children. Why are they not concerned about the population consequences of *that*?
If you're concerned about population, have fewer (or no) kids, support easy access to contraception, support sex education, and make more room on the Earth by wasting less energy and producing less non-biodegradable waste.
Secure? Hah! Only to the extent that the user hasn't bought the latest PDF 'password recovery' app from ElcomSoft (http://elcomsoft.com/prs.html#apdfpr).
The above responder to the parent is right! Sysprep is for nearly identical hardware. Worse, Sysprep can screw up your *source* computer making it forget half the hardware you have and ask for driver install media. Buried deep in M$'s knowledgebase is an article (can't find the link now) that boils down to...
"Use Microsoft Backup to back up your C:\ drive as well as your 'System State'. Then install the same OS version and service pack level off CD onto the machine you're migrating to. Then, use Microsoft Backup to restore the backups you made earlier with the 'overwrite files' option selected."
Works like a charm! I kid you not, I migrated a Windows 2000 installation from a Sony Vaio SR17+ (notebook) onto a self-built desktop with four times as much memory and an AMD 1700+ processor. Saved me tons of time tracking down the original media for all the junk I had installed over the years.
I don't get why some people are so adamant about *don't* take this!!! *Do* take this!!!
Give the self-righteous anti-speed anti-pharms hysteria a rest. Ritalin helps some people, not others. Herbal remedies help some people, not others. Lifestyle changes help some people, not others. Ultimately it comes down to what helps a particular individual, and what a particular individuals wishes are.
I personally think that most "natural" remedies are overpriced placebos at best and random self-medication at worst. Still, an individual has the right to do evaluate their own information and make their own decisons.
Anybody who simultaneously thinks pot should be legal and yet Ritalin is some kind of demon drug that shouldn't even be prescribed to people who *want* *it* is a hypocrite.
I was diagnosed at 14, but my parents did not allow me to take medication. I was on Ritalin for a while in my 20's, and it did help me concentrate... then again, as my shrink put it, "Ritalin would probably help *anybody* concentrate, whether they have ADHD or not."
I've had my share of problems in life (it took me 10 years to finish college) but I don't know if it was the ADHD, the screwed up childhood, the occasional spells of depression, my unrealistic expectations of life the universe and everything, or a little of everything combined.
I'm in grad school now and I haven't been taking Ritalin for maybe five years now. Maybe I self-medicate, I don't know-- I do drink tons of coffee and occasionally other stimulants (but not very often). I haven't tried natural remedies, and frankly don't trust them unless they're backed by research I can look up on PubMed myself (but I'm a biologist, so I guess that's easy for me to say). I do use Melatonin in the evenings though, because it helps me sleep and feel more perky the next morning.
My coping strategies are to make lists of everything I need to do, and carry the list (and a pencil or two) with me everywhere, crossing things off as I do them. Every large, looming, anxiety producing problem can be broken into manageable sub-tasks (and if they're too hard to deal with, that's a sign that *they* need to be broken up into smaller sub-tasks). Owning a PDA helps (though my checklists change so often that data input is too much of a hassle, hence the paper lists). I try to be well organized at home and file stuff I may need later in a hanging file cabinet (and that's a struggle with the very core of my being, let me tell you). When I need to remember to deal with something I sometimes post a note on my door, or in the bathroom, or on my desk lamp. I work at jobs where they're not terribly anal about me being in a certain place by a certain time (luckily that describes grad school as well as the sysadmin jobs I worked before then). Harsh experience (those ten years of college I mentioned...) has taught me to treat all paperwork and bills (except mail order soliciations) as CODE RED priority stuff that I get done as soon as I get it out of the envelope or as soon as I have the necessary information to fill it out, whichever comes first... because if I don't, it's going to sit around forever and get buried under more paperwork. Exercising helps... and by exercise I mean anything that gets your muscles moving and your blood pumping, not necesserily just jogging in a circle-- paintball, ballroom dance, martial arts, rock climbing... you get the idea.
I shun anal-retentive, time-obsessed, compulsively rule-following control freaks. They are the ADHD-ers natural enemy. If someone invents a bomb that selectively kills every bean-counter on Earth, I hope they launch it good and hard. For now, just avoid the weasly little bastards.
The flip side of that is that the interesting, lateral-thinking, creative, fun people who can keep up with me disproportionately turn out to have ADHD themselves! To me, having ADHD simply means that I'm less capable of putting up with bullshit that no human being should have to put up with in the first place. ADHD is only a 'problem' in the same way that left-handedness or homosexuality are problems. They're not problems you have, they're problems society has *with* you.
We're lucky that we were born when when we were. I suspect I'd be much, much less functional if there were no computers to enable me to do stuff quickly, before I lose interest, and to remind me of commitments I've made.
A woman (with ADHD) I was shag-buddies with for a while told me that some ADHD males tend to stay erect for a long, long time before they are able to come. I don't know how generally true that is, but I'm that way, and I see it as more of a feature than a bug.
Really, the main bad thing about ADHD is if you someday decide to shag for reproductive purposes. Th
Slashdot Mirror
Not even in the first handfull in general. In the first handfull that represents your particular generation. And since the idea is still pretty novel, there is still only a handfull getting suspended during any given generation.
What better non-metaphysical alternatives are you proposing?
It's a moderately sized field of peer-reviewed research concerned with preserving organs and tissues for transplantation + several companies who develop cryoprotectants for use by these researchers, but whose work also has spinoff benefits for organizations like Alcor and the Cryonics Institute. These organizations, I am told, specialize strictly in cryosuspending patients and keeping suspended. I wish that Alcor did more work on the revival end of the problem, but I understand their point of view. They want to do just one thing and do it well. They're hoping that as interest in cryonics grows, eventually some NIH or privately sponsored research team will pick up the complicated but not impossible task of revival of whole mammals from total, -210*C freezing.
Actually, as long as there's no disaster that will wipe out Alcor and similar organizations, even if we never figure out a way to unfreeze people, a sufficiently advanced nanomedicine will eventually figure out how to reconstruct exact copies of frozen people down to the molecular level.
Not that I'm philosophically satisfied with such a revival. When I get around to it, I will stipulate in my will that I don't wish any destructive copies to be made of the original until "real" revival becomes possible unless the only alternative is the original getting destroyed anyway.
That's why people like me are devoting our lives to studying biogerontology.
Dude, that's actually a good idea. I can't think of anything wrong with it. This could make a damn good sci-fi story.
;-)
And because of you, someday when I'm old and cancer-ridden, I'll buy myself a yacht.
I can't tell if this is a troll, or joke, or what.
But herbal remedies?! Are you shitting me? Dude, I'm a biology geek, and I can tell you that the field is littered with herbal supplements that don't make a damn bit of difference in controlled trials. A few do make a difference and are worth all the effort. But there's nothing "magic" in the world of herbal remedies that the big bad medical establishment it trying to hide from you.
If there was, don't you think various pre-technological peoples would have already cured cancer and heart disease long before modern medicine was a twinkle in Galen's eye?
Oh, wait, they have and the big bad medical establishment covered it up. After they staged the moon landing and replaced Kennedy's corpse with Elvis'.
Actually, under current law, people can only be put into cryo after they are clinically dead.
However, any religious/ethical/spiritual issues this raises are already raised every time people who are clinically dead for brief periods get revived on an operating table. This is just a quantitative, not a qualitative difference.
Oh the population problem will get resolved one way or another long before cryonics becomes widespread. Even before life-extension by pharmaceutical or bioengineering means becomes widespread.
And the life-history of the typical individual in a post-overpopulation world? Individuals being forced by economics or law to limit family size and wait longer before reproducing, exchanging quantity for quality. In such a world there would be an incentive to live longer and stay productive longer. At least, in scenarios that don't involve starving to death or dying of dysentery at 20 (the world in those scenarios probably wouldn't be able to afford to keep the cryonicists frozen in the first place).
It depends on when you're thawed. There's a theory in cryonics circles, though, that the reviving will proceed in a LIFO manner because the later someone gets frozen, the better the available technology will be, and the easier they will be to revive. The "early adopters" might get revived last, after the medicine of the time has had plenty of practice with the easy cases.
If this is correct, it would mean that the handfull of people frozen now will be the authoritative source of information about the late 20th century... but they'll get revived after you do, so you'll get your time in the sun with your knowledge of the early -to-mid 21st century with the still relatively small number of people who will be frozen at the same time you are.
Choose your spouse carefully, and raise your children even more carefully.
At a cryofeast in my area, I met an entire family who had Alcor contracts. Mom, dad, and three adorable little kids. So I'm definitely not going to marry anybody who isn't at least as cool as the mom was.
On the one hand, euthenasia being legalized in the US (or at least in Arizona) would make cryonics more reliable.
On the other hand, it would be a coup for the people I think of as the "pro-death lobby". It would set the expectation that instead of wanting to live, old people should politely step aside and take a lethal dose of sleeping pills to avoid inconveniencing the younger generations.
So I guess it's not so much the legality of euthenasia I'm concerned about as the cultural expectations it might create.
Yup. I'll worry about that when I get there. My paycheck goes up too when I'm a post-doc, and up again when I'm teaching bio 101 to freshmen. Not a lot, but enough.
I intend to invest as well. Not that I know of too many investments that can predictably average a 7% yearly return, especially when peak oil has whatever economic effects it's going to have.
And good luck with the literal ascension to heaven or literal reincarnation to all the die-hard (no pun intended) non-cryonicists out there. I hope to God that you're right and I'm wrong (because then we'll all end up in the same place after all, except the fundies of course).
It never ceases to astound me how many things there are out there that people think are worse than death. To me, death is the one definite way to lose whatever game we're playing. Maybe people have a more literal belief in heaven than I do. Maybe people are in deep denial about the implacable finality of death. It's none of my business, though. Some people would rather be dead than stupid and broke, and I respect their beliefs.
Call me a throwback then, because I'd rather be alive and keep on struggling to stay that way as long as possible. And the further in the future, the better. To put this into perspective, I'd rather be a homeless guy today than a medieval noble. Again, to each their own.
What the hell. If self-preservation has now become politically incorrect, our society has officially lost all touch with its evolutionary roots.
But any society or subset thereof that does survive the centuries will not be in such hopeless denial about its nature, and they will understand the point of view of a person who wants to do everything he or she can to survive and witness the future for themselves.
So everything you people know about cryo comes from science fiction novels?
Actually, what really happens to cells is that the intracellular spaces suck the water out of them and damage them through dehydration. The point of vitrification is to prevent that.
Anyway, at worst I'll be dead and maybe in some metaphysical realm, and no longer caring about how stupid people will think my gamble was. But I won't be any less dead if I don't try it, so I have nothing (except money that I can't take with me) to lose.
Perhaps rich people are the ones worrying about preserving their assets for the future, but I don't want people to get the impression that you have to be rich to be a cryonicist.
That mistaken assumption is what caused me to take so long to take the plunge.
I'm a grad student, I make 20k/year, and I have a cryo contract. As a full-time student I pay $199 annually and my life insurance policy ($90k coverage) premiums cost about $1k per annually. If I wanted to, I could have taken out a term life insurance policy and I'd be paying in the low hundreds, but since by definition this is an arrangement you'd want to make for the duration of your life, I thought it would be better to lock in a good whole life insurance rate while I'm still young and healthy. Plus my policy has a safety margin of $10k over the $80k neurosuspension fee.
And that's me, a starving PhD student. Some of you people with real jobs can fund your cryo policy, and toss some money into a trust fund for yourself, and have some left over for charity and heirs.
Cryonics is a long-shot, but unlike many other beliefs about life after death, it doesn't contradict the observed laws of physics. I don't ridicule those beliefs or take any action to restrict them, no matter how alien to my way of thinking they may seem. I therefore expect a free and pluralistic society to reciprocate this courtesy toward my own beliefs.
I've got it! After they put the old people inside robotic exoskeletons I bet they're going to draft them!
Solve the military personnel shortage and the baby-boomer retirement crisis all in one fell swoop!
"It says here you fled to Canada back when we were in 'nam, pops... well, good news! We've come up with a brand new way you can still help out."
Oooh, I feel another sci-fi story coming up!
Let's say that a fetus is a human being (though given that it's incapable of negotiation, abiding by a contract, or organized resistance to oppression, it might be more correct to call it a prot-human or a potential-human rather than a full human).
Even so, it is still a human being who needs another human being for its survival. The right of the host human to deny the fetus nourishment and shelter supersedes the fetus' right to survival at their expense just like your right to deny nourishment and shelter to a paraplegic supersedes the paraplegic's right to survival at your expense. If you're a decent person, you will try to provide for vulnerable members of your community as an act of generousity, but the whole point of libertarianism is that nobody should force you to do so.
Furthermore, the parent poster specifically says he supports criminalization of abortions. So in effect he's saying that he wants the government to use tax dollars to punish people for choosing not to offer nourishment and shelter to other people.
I respect him for having and voicing his principles, but these are explicitly not libertarian principles, and so I'm calling him on it for misrepresenting them as such.
It would be more accurate for him to say "I'm a libertarian except for my belief that abortion should be criminalized... etc."
Dude, if you're against a free-living, fully-sentient adult having the right to do as they please with their body and all components thereof, I hate to break this to you, but you're not a Libertarian. You're a conservative passing himself off as a Libertarian.
I don't know why there are so many of them infesting our little party. Maybe they're ashamed to be Republicans because of that unpleasant jackbooted-thugs image they've been earning themselves lately. Maybe they like the thrill of rebellion without having to actually do anything rebellious.
But being pro-life is about as Libertarian as being pro gun control. Think what you want of Libertarianism, but to set the record straight guys like the parent poster don't speak for the rest of us.
Over and over I hear "but what about overpopulation?"
Strangely, I hear this from people who think nothing of *directly* and *immediately* contributing to overpopulation by having or planning to have multiple children. Why are they not concerned about the population consequences of *that*?
If you're concerned about population, have fewer (or no) kids, support easy access to contraception, support sex education, and make more room on the Earth by wasting less energy and producing less non-biodegradable waste.
PS: I*A*G
Secure? Hah! Only to the extent that the user hasn't bought the latest PDF 'password recovery' app from ElcomSoft (http://elcomsoft.com/prs.html#apdfpr).
The above responder to the parent is right! Sysprep is for nearly identical hardware. Worse, Sysprep can screw up your *source* computer making it forget half the hardware you have and ask for driver install media. Buried deep in M$'s knowledgebase is an article (can't find the link now) that boils down to...
"Use Microsoft Backup to back up your C:\ drive as well as your 'System State'. Then install the same OS version and service pack level off CD onto the machine you're migrating to. Then, use Microsoft Backup to restore the backups you made earlier with the 'overwrite files' option selected."
Works like a charm! I kid you not, I migrated a Windows 2000 installation from a Sony Vaio SR17+ (notebook) onto a self-built desktop with four times as much memory and an AMD 1700+ processor. Saved me tons of time tracking down the original media for all the junk I had installed over the years.
I don't get why some people are so adamant about *don't* take this!!! *Do* take this!!!
Give the self-righteous anti-speed anti-pharms hysteria a rest. Ritalin helps some people, not others. Herbal remedies help some people, not others. Lifestyle changes help some people, not others. Ultimately it comes down to what helps a particular individual, and what a particular individuals wishes are.
I personally think that most "natural" remedies are overpriced placebos at best and random self-medication at worst. Still, an individual has the right to do evaluate their own information and make their own decisons.
Anybody who simultaneously thinks pot should be legal and yet Ritalin is some kind of demon drug that shouldn't even be prescribed to people who *want* *it* is a hypocrite.
I was diagnosed at 14, but my parents did not allow me to take medication. I was on Ritalin for a while in my 20's, and it did help me concentrate... then again, as my shrink put it, "Ritalin would probably help *anybody* concentrate, whether they have ADHD or not."
I've had my share of problems in life (it took me 10 years to finish college) but I don't know if it was the ADHD, the screwed up childhood, the occasional spells of depression, my unrealistic expectations of life the universe and everything, or a little of everything combined.
I'm in grad school now and I haven't been taking Ritalin for maybe five years now. Maybe I self-medicate, I don't know-- I do drink tons of coffee and occasionally other stimulants (but not very often). I haven't tried natural remedies, and frankly don't trust them unless they're backed by research I can look up on PubMed myself (but I'm a biologist, so I guess that's easy for me to say). I do use Melatonin in the evenings though, because it helps me sleep and feel more perky the next morning.
My coping strategies are to make lists of everything I need to do, and carry the list (and a pencil or two) with me everywhere, crossing things off as I do them. Every large, looming, anxiety producing problem can be broken into manageable sub-tasks (and if they're too hard to deal with, that's a sign that *they* need to be broken up into smaller sub-tasks). Owning a PDA helps (though my checklists change so often that data input is too much of a hassle, hence the paper lists). I try to be well organized at home and file stuff I may need later in a hanging file cabinet (and that's a struggle with the very core of my being, let me tell you). When I need to remember to deal with something I sometimes post a note on my door, or in the bathroom, or on my desk lamp. I work at jobs where they're not terribly anal about me being in a certain place by a certain time (luckily that describes grad school as well as the sysadmin jobs I worked before then). Harsh experience (those ten years of college I mentioned...) has taught me to treat all paperwork and bills (except mail order soliciations) as CODE RED priority stuff that I get done as soon as I get it out of the envelope or as soon as I have the necessary information to fill it out, whichever comes first... because if I don't, it's going to sit around forever and get buried under more paperwork. Exercising helps... and by exercise I mean anything that gets your muscles moving and your blood pumping, not necesserily just jogging in a circle-- paintball, ballroom dance, martial arts, rock climbing... you get the idea.
I shun anal-retentive, time-obsessed, compulsively rule-following control freaks. They are the ADHD-ers natural enemy. If someone invents a bomb that selectively kills every bean-counter on Earth, I hope they launch it good and hard. For now, just avoid the weasly little bastards.
The flip side of that is that the interesting, lateral-thinking, creative, fun people who can keep up with me disproportionately turn out to have ADHD themselves! To me, having ADHD simply means that I'm less capable of putting up with bullshit that no human being should have to put up with in the first place. ADHD is only a 'problem' in the same way that left-handedness or homosexuality are problems. They're not problems you have, they're problems society has *with* you.
We're lucky that we were born when when we were. I suspect I'd be much, much less functional if there were no computers to enable me to do stuff quickly, before I lose interest, and to remind me of commitments I've made.
A woman (with ADHD) I was shag-buddies with for a while told me that some ADHD males tend to stay erect for a long, long time before they are able to come. I don't know how generally true that is, but I'm that way, and I see it as more of a feature than a bug.
Really, the main bad thing about ADHD is if you someday decide to shag for reproductive purposes. Th