Friday, October 26, 2007

A ramble: time, golf & death - the last taboo that you cannot postpone with optimism

Another week disappears as 2007 gets devoured – time passes quickly as we age since each year is a smaller fraction of our life so far. Yet our discount rates decline – we become less impulsive. This is the reason that the initiation of destructive drug-taking is concentrated among kiddies and the reason some of us are wise.

The blogosphere goes into partial hibernation each weekend and I feel a bit too disgruntled this morning to make a sensible effort at posting to meet limited reader demands. So this ramble is it.


My golf game yesterday was full of high hopes but disintegrated into a sequence of bad shots. This damaged what was otherwise a promising end to the week. The Zen of a good golf swing - it eludes me!

I am still thinking about death and two websites caught my attention last night:

The Australian Museum has an interesting online discussion of death. One of my favourite web pages at this site is the page on 'corpse fauna'. It is an eexcellent discussion of death.

I also liked this post from ScienceBlogs on whether cancer patients benefit from a positive mental attitude. In short they don't live longer but they do, of course, enjoy a less painful exit.

This is not quite consistent with the advocacy of my earlier post on rational death - I favour realism rather than unthinking optimism but, if you do want to exit with the help of a cognitive error, this is the way to go.

Enjoy your Saturday.

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