EclectEcon

On Death and Dying

The other night, Ms. Eclectic and I were speculating about how long we expect to live. She's a cancer survivor, and both my parents died of heart disease; so we figured we'd both probably be below average. 

The sudden death of my friend, Alan Adamson, caused me to think more than just idly about the question. So I took this test. The results indicate I might live a little longer than I expected, but then the 50% confidence interval spans a tonne of years, too. Ms. Eclectic had similar results, so we are guessing we still have quite a few years together ahead of us. My results:

Life Expectancy Results

Life Expectancy: 88.47 years
Lower Quartile: 81.08 years (75% chance you will live longer than this)
Median Lifetime: 88.59 years (50% chance you will live longer than this)
Upper Quartile: 95.60 years (25% chance you will live longer than this)

Another life expectancy calculator, which insists on registration (and hence which seems likely to be more commercial) is this one. Unfortunately, it provides only a point estimate instead of a range, but it says I'll live 'til I'm 95. I took it a second time, giving slightly different answers, and it tells me I'll live to the age of 87. And Jack sent this one, which says I'll live until I'm 83.

With results like these, we'd better reorganize our spending to make our pension savings last a bit longer. And if I'm going to live that long, I sure hope low-cost, effective joint and muscle care/repair become available soon!

From a different perspective, my friend Jack says that at our age we must accept the fact that there is a non-negligible probability we can go at any time. I understand that, objectively. But I'm having so much fun, I'm really not ready to go yet.

Alan Adamson

As we age, death makes increasingly frequent visits. The most recent death to affect me was of Alan Adamson, a good friend and co-blogger.

We met through blogging. I had posted some extreme remarks about some outrageous event being hosted in the Faculty of Arts at UWO; his wife saw my posting, and she sent it on to him for his amusement. He started following my blog and making the odd comment. From there we struck up a correspondence and began our blog about curling before we had ever met each other. 

The curling blog was fun for a few years. Even more fun was working together to cover the Scott Tournament of Hearts when it was in London, including doing play-by-play of one of the morning draws on the radio. Alan was a thoughtful, fun-loving guy. You put those two characteristics together, and you have a person who is fun and interesting to be around. 

We continued our curling reporting when the Brier was held in London in 2011, and then at the World Championships out in Regina that same year. 

Alan had been a math prof at Waterloo, but left academia to work for IBM. He enjoyed teaching but didn't enjoy the meaningless research that was expected of him. After many years at IBM, he retired, but was still active in ongoing industry standard-setting conferences.

Through Alan, we met his sister, Rondi, and his wife Melitta. Rondi and I have continued to correspond off and on, and we always enjoyed getting together with Alan and Melitta once or twice a year. 

Alan was younger than me. His sudden death has stunned and saddened me.

Absolutely beautiful and spectacular

I know I've seen it before, but it is beautiful and amazing:

Storm Porn

Next time there's an imminent disaster, I'll watch the network that uses all the already in place webcams to show what's happening rather than allowing/encouraging reporters to agrandize and endanger themselves with the events. 

I admit it. I have a ghoulish curiosity about storms. So do lots of people. Storm chasers are a good example. So are all the people who watch the all-news channels during storms and boost those ratings. But I tire of reporters leaning into the wind and rain, wading in the water, and shouting the obvious extreme cliches.

I'm with this guy.

Then the Hurricane Sandy devastation in New Jersey and New York. Footage of flooded subways, as if massive waves of water finding an outlet in large holes in the ground was a surprise. In Toronto’s east end, a tree fell. Power went out. CP24 savoured it all, at last some real, honest-to-God disaster effects.

For all the raw footage and dramatic scenes of flooding, fires, rescue workers waist-deep in water and darkened buildings lashed by wind, television struggles to convey the authenticity of disaster-inducing storms. The fallback position is disaster-movie cliché and panicked voices in a studio commanding viewers to look (just look!) at this footage of flooding! The term “weather porn” doesn’t do it justice.

On Looking One's Age

I’m old. I’ve finally accepted that.  But the thing is, I  have  always looked older than I am.

When I was 17, my friends used to send me into the liquor store for them because I didn’t get carded. People often mistook me for being in my mid-20s. I liked looking old then.

But during the summer when I was 51, three incidents occurred that brought me up short:

• One day my daughter said, “Dad, I can’t remember. Are you going to be 53 or 54 on your next birthday?” I told her in no uncertain terms that I was going to be 52. And just to make a point, for the next many years we continued to celebrate my 52^nd birthday.

But I naively didn’t chalk that up to my looks. I just thought she had forgotten my age. The next one really hurt, though:

• I was at a bus stop and decided to chat up an attractive young woman who was there, too. “Are you a student at the university?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she replied. “Are you?” Well I knew I looked older than the typical undergraduate stud, so I wasn’t really flattered. I merely smiled and said, “No, I’m a prof.”

But then she added, quite unnecessarily I think, “Oh. Well the only reason I asked is there are lots of seniors in some of my classes.”

Seniors? Me, a senior? Sure, you can get an AARP membership at age 50, and, sure, some life insurance companies urge you to fantasize that you can retire at age 55, but senior? Me? Hmph.

• I’d have written that off as an isolated incident, but a month later when I was ordering a steak at a semi-fast restaurant, I thought I had been undercharged by several dollars. When I graciously pointed out the mistake, the young woman at the cash register smiled, “Oh no, sir. I just gave you the seniors’ discount.”

Seniors’ discount? I was in my early fifties!

For several years after that I used Just For Men.

Ms. Eclectic says that now, many years after those incidents, my age is finally catching up to my looks, and I was beginning to think maybe she was right. But just last weekend, someone asked me, “How old are you?” and guessed numbers in a range about five years older than I really am.

I exhaled deeply and  hung my head in resignation. So now, when people ask my age, I just tell them, “Under 90”.