Mortality Risk Drops With More Exercise--A Little or a Lot

Mortality Risk Drops With More Exercise--A Little or a Lot

"BETHESDA, MD — Good news on the exercise front, including for those who do a little and those who do lot, with a new study showing that any amount of leisure-time physical activity is associated with a significantly lower risk of death when compared with no physical activity at all[1].



 Those who did a little, such as those individuals who did less than the amount outlined in the 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, still had a 20% lower mortality risk compared with individuals who did no exercise at all. Those who achieved the minimum recommended physical-activity target—defined as 7.5 to <15 MET hours per week—had a 31% lower risk of dying compared with the physically inactive.



 Those who did a lot more, such as those exceeding the weekly recommendations, had an even larger reduction in mortality risk. Compared with those who did no exercise at all, individuals who performed approximately three to five times the recommended minimum had a near 40% reduction in the risk of dying. The benefit peaked at around 22.5 to 40 MET hours per/week, report investigators.

"Individuals should engage in a level of physical activity that meets the recommend minimum," lead investigator Dr Hannah Arem (National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD) told heartwire , "but clinicians don't need to caution their highly active patients about a higher mortality risk.""



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An 1850s-Era Oyster Barge Is Saved for Yet Another Life on the East River - NYTimes.com

In The Big Oyster Mark Kurlansky tells the history of oysters - focused on New York where oyster stands were once on dozens of corners.  Until we over-harvested the ancient oyster beds, etc.  Oysters have been undergoing a renewed popularity.  Now a couple of entrepreneurs propose to bring back theold days. - gwc
An 1850s-Era Oyster Barge Is Saved for Yet Another Life on the East River - NYTimes.com

"By COREY KILGANNON
APRIL 3, 2015
NEW HAVEN —

For years, a shoddy shed of dilapidated wood has cluttered up the boatyard of the Fair Haven Marina, a hub for recreational boaters on this stretch of the Quinnipiac River, just east of Yale University.

Brought up from New York City nearly a century ago, it is an 1850s-era oyster barge that has had various incarnations — as a speakeasy, a restaurant called the Old Barge and, finally, as a dive bar before closing for good in 1987. It was then left to languish in the boatyard, too leaky even to use as a storage shed.

“Most people wanted me to tear it down, but I said, ‘That can’t happen,’ ” the marina’s owner, Lisa Fitch, said. “Everyone who grew up around here had a beer here.”

She drank there too, as a young adult, she said, and had eaten there as a child, when the barge was still a restaurant."



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Southern Ocean - photo of the day Volvo Ocean RAce

March 26

Navigation Computer (technical post) | Issuma

How he does it...techniques that Richard Hudson has developed in his voyaging.  Argentina, Brasil, labrador, Greenland, the Northwest Passage, Bering Sea, Inside passage, Pacific Coat, Easter island,and now in Puerto Montt, Chile. Where next? South.

Navigation Computer (technical post) | Issuma



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Issuma: Puerto Montt, Chile

A few weeks back Richard Hudson and crew Max made the journey from Easter island to Chile.  About six hundred miles south of Santiago is the city of Puerto Montt. A city of 150,000 it is beautiful now but at 41 S and 73 W it is due south of New York and at comparable latitude.  The weather turns cold and wet soon. Like Irish winter - high of 50 F, low of 38 F is the average in July.  It is at the north end of a great Gulfs of Ancud and Corcovado about 700 miles north of Cape Horn - a landmark I expect Issuma to pass on its way south. - gwc

In the wake of Typhoon Pam

The tail end of  Cyclone Pam - which brought devastation north - provides power reaching for the six Volvo Ocean Race boats a couple of days out from Auckland, NZ on their way to Brazil.  A helicopter catches the fun. - gwc

Dinner with Dad at Sicily, Ventura

Note any familial resemblances?

Peter, Dad, Nancy, and I at Sicily,
Main Street, Ventura

End of an era

My parents home in Santa Barbara for forty two years.

Thomas Merton and the Eternal Search - The New Yorker

A convert to Catholicism, a searcher, a monk, and a celebrity.  Fr. Thomas Merton was all of those things.  He represented openness despite the cloister, or was it because of the cloister?  He had been a conscientious objector in WW II because he was not a warrior and was committed to the Trappist monastery he had not yet joined.  He explored his own life in and out of the cloister, looked to eastern mysticism in a serious way - and tragically died at 52 - electrocuted in the shower  in a monastery in Thailand.  We are still shocked that the pilgrim  had died so arbitrarily,with so much yet to be seen, thought, and said.  - gwc

Thomas Merton and the Eternal Search - The New Yorker
by Paul Elie

Here ends the book, but not the searching. Thomas Merton ended “The Seven Storey Mountain” with a little Latin to that effect: Sit finis libri, non finis quaerendi. Set tombstone-style in small caps, at once pompous and obscure, it runs against the spirit of the book, which is personal, casual, talky, and self-deprecating—the story of a conversion to Catholicism and a call to a Trappist monastery as the adventures of a young New York dangling man.***

“Well, what is it that I have been trying to say?” he asked in the same piece. After dismissing the obvious answer—that he was trying to make a case for the contemplative life—he answered the question with another question. “When a man enters a monastery he has to stand before the community and formally respond to a ritual question: Quid petis? ‘What do you ask?’ His answer is not that he seeks a happy life, or escape from anxiety, or freedom from sin, or the summit of contemplation. The answer is that he seeks mercy. ‘The mercy of God and the Order.’ ” That, Merton declared, is what he had sought, and he offered his writing as evidence “that I have found what I sought and continue to find it.”

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Greenland Glacier Collapses

Cameras Were Placed In A Remote Area In Greenland. What They Captured Is Stunning And Terrifying