Second World War airmen part of study now in its 60th year

A picture of health:

"Murphy didn't realize it on the pivotal day of his RCAF medical, but the records of his height, weight, blood pressure and medical history -- as well as a then-innovative electrocardiogram -- would lead to his inclusion in a landmark medical study.

He was one of nearly 4,000 aircrew recruits who were tracked down after the war by Winnipeg's Dr. F.A.L. Mathewson and asked to have their military physicals become the foundation of the Manitoba Follow-up Study (MFUS).

The study, housed at the University of Manitoba's Bannatyne medical campus, is believed to be the world's longest-running continuous study of health and aging in a specific cohort."

That's Dad, second from the left. What I find really curious, however, is the way the article I had originally cited on Facebook was later politically corrected and then reposted under a different URL on the Winnipeg Free Press site, with the new Picture of Health headline (less factual, more fuzzy and emotional than "study in 60th year") and beyond that, notice how the content has been subtly slanted: In the new article each of the interviewed pilots makes this tagged on as if an afterthought:

With the study now looking at aging, the men are asked how they define successful aging. Analyzing their responses and mortality, Tate has statistically correlated a sense of contentment, feeling useful, staying physically active and having a positive outlook with a higher rate of survival.

Achieving Wellness, Whatever THAT Is

2 Books on Illness and Wellness Give Opposite Advice is a cautionary tale from the NYTimes on the art and science of living:

"Both are practicing physicians who have made second careers interpreting medical principles for a lay audience. Both consider themselves experts not only in illness but also in wellness, that shimmering grail of our time. Both have combed through all the latest studies and are now pleased to provide you, the average healthy adult, with guidelines for staying well.

Both muster science, statistics and a judicious smattering of personal experience to present, with no small fanfare, completely, utterly, diametrically opposite advice."

as the article says,

"You, reader, have undoubtedly already decided which author is a sage and which one a lunatic, which advice is sound, worthy of reading and re-reading, and which is simply misguided."

and therein a fundamental flaw with the whole field of applied learning, the invisibility of The Myth. Believing our myths, inescapably, we take one side or the other the same way we align with baseball teams, rock bands or brands of toothpaste.

A Pair of Flying Slippers

Phil Patton reviews the Buckminster Fuller exhibition at the Whitney: "'An exhibition is a verb,' writes Whitney museum director Adam Weinberg bravely, in his introduction to the catalog of the museum's Buckminster Fuller show, Starting with the Universe.

He is echoing Fuller's own famous phrase 'I seem to be a verb.' But in fact, a museum show is necessarily more like an arrangement of nouns. And this one includes nouns like drawings, photographs, and models, with a few verbs of video of Fuller talking.

'His vision is difficult to approximate and present, much less encompass in an exhibition,'"
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwbcNmxxSMc&hl=en&fs=1]

When people think of Geodesic Homes, they think of the Whole-Earth-Catalog Natural-Spaces style hybrid old-tech with awkward wood-strut and pentagonal panels that leak, rot and escalate the construction costs, bad acoustics and frustrated angry contractors.

But this was not, by a long shot, what Bucky Fuller meant.

Far from it. Bucky meant for us to live in hard-science efficiently and cheaply engineered and prefabricated self-contained domicile LIVINGRY, air-delivered to any location you like, plugged into the ground like a tree (anchored by the septic, the floors suspended around the utilities mast like a hoop-dress) and the whole open-concept thing elegantly enclosed in a ventable Geodesic Greenhouse to conserve energy and 'valve' the outside elements, creating a human-friendly year-round semi-outdoor experience he called "Living in a Garden".

The incredible Sargy Mann

The incredible Sargy Mann and the amazing powers of the brain: "It was really a dazzling festival of colour. There were exquisite juxtapositions – brilliant orange against light green, violent red against a nervous purple, a yellow against a calming blue. All the paintings were representations of his wife, Frances.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNteWnGXRaU&hl=en&fs=1]
What is amazing about all this is that these are the paintings of Sargy since he became completely blind."