Why are 95% of 'supercentenarians' (those who are 110 years of age and beyond) women?

Because biological sex.

And so, a short thread on sex and longevity.

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From the beginning of life more girls make it their first birthday almost everywhere around the world, according to the @who. Girls have lower rates of prematurity and fewer complications after birth.

Females don't wait long to begin to dominate when it comes to survival.

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Women are naturally resistant to cancer.

Throughout life, women not only develop less cancers in organs and tissues that they share with men, but even when they do, they're much more likely to survive them.

Note: this is the case even when we adjust for behavior.

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This is Capt. John Graunt (1620 –1674). Today he's considered the father of demography and also the first to show with mathematical certainty that women have a survival advantage over men.

This was the case even though maternal mortality rates were much higher than today.

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A few minutes ago, Kane Tanaka turned 118 years old. And in so doing she smashed another two world records, both the oldest living women and oldest living person.

Tanaka's dream has finally come true.

Here she is (center of photo) at the age of 20, on her wedding day.

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Kane Tanaka (田中カ子) was born premature on January 2nd, 1903 in a small village in Japan. She not only survived her prematurity, but also went on to outlive both her husband and son.

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So why are so many more women making it to the far end of life?

The secret to Tanaka's longevity is the 'Law of Homogameity', which stipulates that the female biological survival advantage is predicated on female mammals having the use of both of their two X chromosomes.

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This is a colorized photo of Kane Tanaka on her wedding day in 1923.

Today, she turned 118 years old and because of COVID-19 hasn’t been able to see her family. If you’d like to send her a personalized message for the occasion, her great-grandson @tanakakane0102 will deliver it.

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This is a pretty valiant attempt to defend the "Feminist Glaciology" article, which says conventional wisdom is wrong, and this is a solid piece of scholarship. I'll beg to differ, because I think Jeffery, here, is confusing scholarship with "saying things that seem right".


The article is, at heart, deeply weird, even essentialist. Here, for example, is the claim that proposing climate engineering is a "man" thing. Also a "man" thing: attempting to get distance from a topic, approaching it in a disinterested fashion.


Also a "man" thing—physical courage. (I guess, not quite: physical courage "co-constitutes" masculinist glaciology along with nationalism and colonialism.)


There's criticism of a New York Times article that talks about glaciology adventures, which makes a similar point.


At the heart of this chunk is the claim that glaciology excludes women because of a narrative of scientific objectivity and physical adventure. This is a strong claim! It's not enough to say, hey, sure, sounds good. Is it true?
The YouTube algorithm that I helped build in 2011 still recommends the flat earth theory by the *hundreds of millions*. This investigation by @RawStory shows some of the real-life consequences of this badly designed AI.


This spring at SxSW, @SusanWojcicki promised "Wikipedia snippets" on debated videos. But they didn't put them on flat earth videos, and instead @YouTube is promoting merchandising such as "NASA lies - Never Trust a Snake". 2/


A few example of flat earth videos that were promoted by YouTube #today:
https://t.co/TumQiX2tlj 3/

https://t.co/uAORIJ5BYX 4/

https://t.co/yOGZ0pLfHG 5/
The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.