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Introducing myself [newbie alert]


Danielovich

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Hi all,

Dean suggested that I've introduce myself, and how can you refuse this guy  :Dxyz 
 

Maybe you could start a new thread to introduce yourself, on either ChitChatGeneral Health, or CR Practice, depending on the angle you want to take in your intro. You could also post to Members Only, but then Google can't crawl it, and by now I suspect you know how I feel about that ☺.

Lets start with boring facts, I'm 30 and I live in Israel. (Am I the first Israeli representative here?)
This implies that my English is not my first language, but I'm working on it continuously.

I'm practicing a mild CR, mostly via IF(24 hours fast once a week) and TRF for the paft few years.
I've done my share of experimenting with different diets (Paleo, Keto, Vegan), and currently I'm following a Mediterranean diet. Which easy to follow in Israel, And suits my taste buds  B)xyz 

My background is in Physics and Engineering, and currently I'm the CTO of a mobile health startup company named Healthymize:
 

I'm not sure about your personal background (you haven't told us much yet), but your day job as Cofounder and CTO at Healthymize.com sounds incredibly interesting and relevant:

 

Healthymize is developing a suite of smartphone apps that passively monitor and diagnose diseases based on analyses of patients' voice and breathing during regular voice calls , without interfering with their daily routines.

 

That sounds so cool - if you can really pull it off! I'd love to learn more about you and your company / technology. It sounds very relevant to several of our mutual interests ☺.

Currently we are doing clinical trials in order to collect sufficient labeled data.
If you have more specific questions, I'll gladly answer them.

In general I'm interested in longevity and quality of life, Thus I also do weightlifting to preserve my lean mass and hopefully would be able to fight off sarcopenia.
Also I'm interested in Stoicism, as it gives practical tools for daily use. 
Funny anecdote, I had a discussion on the Facebook group of Stoicism with Massimo about longevity. He was against us (the human race) trying to achieve it, and I was in favor. His ending words (I've tried my best):
 

Daniel, as I said, it's a long and complicated discussion. I respect your opinion, but you are far from convince me, and I have devoted quite a bit of thought to this.

 

Nice to e-meet everyone here! 

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Daniel, thanks for officially introducing yourself, and welcome once again.1

 

It sounds like you've got a solid diet and lifestyle dialed in. Congratulations! I know that can be especially difficult to maintain in the face of the frenetic life of an entrepreneur. And it sounds like you are an experimentalist - a man after my own heart!

 

Regarding Healthymize - I was wondering if you could share (at least at a high level) the kinds of tech you employ to analyze the patients' voice for health conditions. I.e. machine learning, artificial neural networks, etc. I'm fascinated by all aspects of getting computers to understand and model people and human behavior, as you may already have surmised...

 

I'm interested in Stoicism, as it gives practical tools for daily use. 

 

I've always loved the Stoics myself. My copy of Sharon Lebell's translation of Epictetus's Manual called The Art of Living (not to be confused with her similar Epictetus book Manual for Living - which is good but not nearly as good as AoL) has so many different-colored highlights, there is barely a word that isn't at least one color ☺. Seriously, it was that book I had on my lap during the hardest 4 hours of my life a couple years ago... Anyone interested in no-nonsense advice for getting through difficult life situations, there is no book I can recommend more highly that Labell's Art of Living. It's short (113 pages) with just a paragraph or two per page, but life changing if you're faced with serious challenges.

 

But as for a philosophy to live by day-to-day, I find the stoics too pessimistic and defeatist.

 

On that note:

I had a discussion on the Facebook group of Stoicism with Massimo about longevity. He was against us (the human race) trying to achieve it, and I was in favor.

 

Nice dialog with Massimo. Thanks for sharing it. First off. Your dialog shows just how much Facebook sucks for such discussions. It's much worse in terms of communicating ideas and engaging in dialog than even the old CR email mailing-list, from 10+ years ago. Wow. Really bad. Same goes for the CR Facebook page. Entirely worthless for productive discussions. This place is so much better, I'm sure you agree.

 

But on the topic of stoicism and life extension. I'm not at all surprised by Massimo's reaction. Death is (currently) beyond our control, so trying to postpone it is both selfish and foolish, according to a true stoic like Massimo. A very defeatist attitude, and I agree with your perspective rather than Massimo's. I just don't think a "let's fix it, damn it!" attitude regarding the ravages of aging and death aligns well with stoicism - so in that sense Massimo is more true to the philosophy. It seems to me a true stoic would simply chose to accept death with head held high. Opening to a page (18) in my copy of The Art of Living that I apparently post-it'ed during those dark hours, not one, but two appropriate aphorisms (of course) jump out, one with an orange highlight and the second having highlights in yellow, pink and green (picture to prove it ☺). They read:

 

Inner peace begins when we stop saying of things "I have lost it" and instead say "It has been returned to where it came from."

and:

The important thing is to take great care with what you have while the world lets you have it.

 

Very helpful (if hard to swallow) advice when times are tough and you're dealing with (impending) loss, but not exactly an attitude that encourages striving to make the world a better place...

 

Same goes (to a large degree) for Buddhism, another philosophy/religion I much admire and appreciate, but don't entirely subscribe to as a result of its largely pessimistic passivity, although I will acknowledge the current Dalai Lama does a really nice job bucking that stereotype.

 

I'm a huge Nietzsche fan - in fact we've got a whole thread devoted to him, and many miscellaneous posts about the man with the big mustache :-{ sprinkled around this place, like here.

 

But in this context, I perhaps most appreciate the Existentialists, and in particular Sartre's descriptions of humans as possessing "existence before essence". We're thrown into the world, but get to define who we are, and what we stand for. Plus, you just gotta love Camus' portrayal of Sisyphus (discussed here and especially here).

 

In the end, as Camus said, "we must imagine Sisyphus happy"...

 

sisyphus.jpg

 

Now I must get back to my own personal boulder, that mega-post response I've been promising someone for days and haven't yet finished, he says sheepishly. Oh, wait a minute... That was you. Now I don't feel so bad postponing that one to spending time here! Daniel I hope you don't mind waiting another day.☺

 

--Dean

 

1I promise never to say "welcome" again to you. But it just feels rude not to in this context, despite having said it several times to you already on other threads and in our PM exchange...

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  • 1 month later...

Nice, I did a road trip across the USA back in July that went thru Colorado (and 24 other states).  The best for CE was crater lake, Oregon (the deepest lake in the country, also probably the most beautiful place we visited). Even in July there were kids sledding up there, and we had a snowball fight.  I was wondering why no one was in the water, then I stuck a foot in and it was shockingly cold, after a minute of just wading in it, my legs went completely numb. But that didn't stop me from doing this:

craterlakeOR.jpg

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