Memento Mori, Re: This Week in Google Alerts: conference, sketch

Marc Aramini · 13 Jul 2014, 23:22 · from 2014-July.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: marcaramini at gmail.com (Marc Aramini)
Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 16:22:11 -0700
Subject: (urth) Memento Mori, Re: This Week in Google Alerts: conference,
	sketch
In-Reply-To: <CAMwO0gw5Jrf_HwAJK6sYiGj_8BRma-Q4FK84vt0kkPsDD=uJnQ at mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAMwO0gw5Jrf_HwAJK6sYiGj_8BRma-Q4FK84vt0kkPsDD=uJnQ at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAF1072zeFxZzyD0VbVP2jFGMVnGUPjdi475H99Mt9egW8bBgAw at mail.gmail.com>

The stressful and long decline of rosemary is concerning. This might be the
most depressing analysis ever undertaken on urth list.  I have felt myself
to be very fortunate in my childhood heroes.  I am so grateful that my time
and Gene's just happened to overlap significantly.

There's a picture at the Fuller award I didn't know was taken at the time,
where, for the many kindnesses he showed me, thinking we were mostly
alone,  I told him that I loved him, and he would always be my hero,
thinking I would never see him again.  Then the nebulas were in California
the very next year, and Gene named grandmaster, so it proved to not be the
last time.

http://i213.photobucket.com/albums/cc282/maramini/Mobile%20Uploads/image_zps379db714.jpg


On Sunday, July 13, 2014, Gwern Branwen <gwern at gwern.net> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 12:47 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern at gwern.net
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> > - Via
> http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jenniferfitz/2014/06/should-you-be-writing-right-now-and-what-about-the-kids-and-what-about-a-conference-this-summer/
> > , http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/9005474225.html "Prominent
> > Catholic Writers to Speak at Catholic Writers Conference in Chicago
> > Area":
>
> By the way, I know how easy it is to let time slip by and never get
> around to doing something you always intended to do but never quite
> got around to. If you want to write fanmail, see Wolfe in the flesh,
> get an autograph for a book, perhaps buy an autographed special
> edition etc, you should do so soon. As soon as possible.
>
> It will sound morbid to point this out, but the odds are not good for
> Wolfe surviving too many more years, and if you pass up opportunities
> you may well discover you passed up your last such opportunity. List
> members may not have much experience with how elderly people can
> abruptly decline and die, or how mortality exponential increases over
> time in the Gompertz curve, so here's some numerical calculations from
> SSA actuarial tables.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Wolfe tell us that Wolfe is now age
> 83. http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html 83: instantaneous risk
> of death that year, 0.083230 or 8.3%; remaining life expectancy: 6.66
> years.
>
> Over the next 7 years, each year an American male's risk of death is:
>
> - 83: 0.083230 (8%)
> - 84: 0.091933 (9%)
> - 85: 0.101625 (10%)
> - 86: 0.112448 (11%)
> - 87: 0.124502 (12%)
> - 88: 0.137837 (14%)
> - 89: 0.152458 (15%)
> - 90: 0.168352 (17%)
> - 91: 0.185486 (19%)
> - 92: 0.203817 (20%)
> - 93: 0.223298 (22%)
>
> Risk increases dramatically each year, and since that's just the risk
> each year, the cumulative risk increases even more dramatically. This
> is why despite billions of people on earth, only one person (Jeanne
> Calment) has survived to 122 years (and the record age has actually
> fallen steadily ever since).
>
> The probability of surviving to a particular age is the conjunction of
> each negated risk (since you have to not die in each previous year);
> so to survive to 84, one has to beat 1 * (1-0.083230) = 0.9168, and to
> survive to 85, one has to beat 1 * (1-0.083230) * (1-0.091933) =
> 0.8325, and so on. It's easy to automate the calculation up to age 93
> in Haskell:
>
>     ghci> scanl (*) 1 $ map (1-) [0.083230, 0.091933, 0.101625,
> 0.112448, 0.124502, 0.137837, 0.152458, 0.168352, 0.185486, 0.203817,
> 0.223298]
>           ~>
>
>  [1.0,0.91677,0.8324885835899999,0.7478869312826661,0.6637885416337929,0.5811455406233024,0.5010421827404082,0.42465429364417107,
>
> 0.35316289400058754,0.28765612144399455,0.2290269137396439,0.1778856619554089]
>
> Or, the probability an American male (like Gene Wolfe) will survive to
> a specified age, having survived to age 83, is:
>
> - 1y, 84: 92%
> - 2y, 85: 83% (4/5)
> - 3y, 86: 75% (3/4)
> - 4y, 87: 66% (2/3)
> - 5y, 88: 58%
> - 6y, 89: 50% (coin flip)
> - 7y, 90: 42%
> - 8y, 91: 35% (1/3)
> - 9y, 92: 29%
> - 10y, 93: 23% (1/5)
> - 11y, 94: 18%
>
> These figures are population-wide averages, which don't take into
> account individual circumstances. On the positive side, Wolfe is
> high-status and has received many honors and can look back on a
> sterling writing career with great satisfaction; on the negative,
> Wolfe has lost his wife recently, which is a well-known risk factor
> for men, is not in perfect health, and may be overweight. On net, I'd
> say these figures are underestimates.
>
> So, this implies that if you pass up an opportunity this year in favor
> of next year, there's a >10% chance Wolfe will be permanently delayed;
> if you wait 2 years, ~20%, 3 years, 25%, and so on. These are not
> negligible risks.
>
> --
> gwern
> http://www.gwern.net
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net <javascript:;>
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20140713/64c18cc1/attachment.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net