Day: November 25, 2007

I had my 20th high school reunion this week. Many of the things I’d like to blog about, I can’t, since a lot of the old high school gang reads Muttroxia. I’ll switch to one morbid train of thought, for one of the coldest posts I’ve ever written.

We’ve had four people from my class die, out of approximately 500. That’s an 0.8% death rate, over 20 years. That seems like it’s very low to me, so I tried to figure it out.

I looked at Social Security Administration data. I think if you divide the age=38 survival rate into the age=18 survival rate, that would mean the probability of surviving to 38 given that you had already made it to 18. I get 97.98% survival, or 2% death rate. Much higher than our 0.8%.

The CDC tables look similar, from them I get a number of 2.1%, that looks like a unisex cohort.

So our class is dying off more than 2 times slower than normal. Way to go!

Update: I’m told that the class size was closer to 525, and we have an unconfirmed fifth death. Let’s call it 1%. If anyone wants the list of the deceased, email me privately.

Although I love Jerry Seinfeld, I was prepared to dislike this movie. The PR campaign had moved far past awareness and cleverness and into the realm of just-shut-up-already-I-get-it. And the first fifteen minutes of the movie looked like Antz with worse animation.

But I was wrong. It was quite funny. You can never forget you’re watching Jerry Seinfeld doing a bee character, but that’s OK. Jerry Seinfeld’s a lot funnier than a bee anyhow.

I watched the movie at the movie theater I worked at twenty years ago. As the lights came up, a sweet feeling came over me. It was the sweet sweet feeling of knowing it was someone’s else job to clean up all the crap my kids had spilled all over the floor.