"Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates"

From Gravity and Levity:

"That decline is no joke; the sharp fall in survival rates can be expressed mathematically as an exponential within an exponential. Exponential decay is sharp, but an exponential within an exponential is so sharp that I can say with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130. (Ignoring, of course, the upward shift in the lifetime distribution that will result from future medical advances.) Surprisingly enough, the Gompertz law holds across a large number of countries, time periods, and even different species. While the actual average lifespan changes quite a bit from country to country and from animal to animal, the same general rule that 'your probability of dying doubles every X years' holds true."

Also: "A simple derivation of the Gompertz law for human mortality." [pdf]

Fermi's Paradox, Caused by Computer Games Not Atomic Weapons?

Read the whole thing:

I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism.
[...]
Heritable variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist the Great Temptation and last longer. Some individuals and families may start with an “irrational” Luddite abhorrence of entertainment technology, and they may evolve ever more self-control, conscientiousness and pragmatism. They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs and contraception. They will stress the values of hard work, delayed gratification, child-rearing and environmental stewardship. They will combine the family values of the religious right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace left.

Fantastic essay. And I read to the bottom and it's... Geoffrey Miller!

Just in Time Inventory as a Symptom of Late-stage Bull Market Complacency

"Just in Time Inventory ranks as one of the great articles of faith promulgated in the late great Bull Market."