Smart Man with a Funny Beard

By the way -- one of these days I'll write a proper blog entry on anti-aging technology, but for the moment let me just indicate that everyone should look at

Aubrey de Grey's website

Not only is he an uncommonly cool-looking individual -- I think he even beats me at my coolest-looking (2000, I think that was -- back when I had numerous bogus paper millions, was still on my first wife, and none of my sons had a moustache, and I still sorta thought we could probably create an AI without an embodiment for simplicity's sake...) -- but he has some extremely interesting ideas on how to combat human aging.

I have my own as well, which intersect only partly with his -- but he's thought about it a lot more than me, so he's probably more likely to be right ;-)

Like the Novamente AGI project, nearly all of Aubrey's brilliant ideas are currently almost unfunded.

Well, it's not as though society doesn't spend money on research. And a lot of good research gets funded. But research funding seems to suffer from the same peculiar human-mob shortsightedness that causes the US to stick with the absurd, archaic English system of measurement year after year ... and that's causing English to emerge as the international language while Lojban remains the province of 350 geeks on an Internet mailing list...

More later! (For readers of my just-previous blog entry: Yes, I'm still procrastinating cleaning the turtle tank!)