Die
by Doug Hawley
Duke Hanley,
an associate actuary, got his idea while working
on a mortality study at Pura Life Company. The
underwriting department gave him access to all of
the underwriting and claims information for 10,000
insureds to see how best to predict their
longevity. After doing multivariate
curve fitting on a number of variables –
blood pressure, weight, height, father’s age
at death, mother’s age at death and a few
other variables, he found out that he could
predict the age at death within one week as long
as the death was natural as opposed to accidental.
He spent months trying to get a meeting with his
supervisor, Larry Jones. Larry had
already told him that he didn’t believe that
there could be a formula that was that accurate
and even if there was, regulators would not allow
the insurance company to use it when setting life
insurance rates. More to the point,
despite Duke doing some things well, he was
considered a bit mental and looked like Albert
Einstein with bad hygiene and style sense.
Duke had no
more luck publishing “Longevity Formula”
in any reputable journal than he had with “Astrological
Sign Determines Blood Pressure.”
Frustrated,
Duke retired and set to work on his other
research project using publicly available health
statistics and medical research papers. One
morning while discarding his used hearing aid
battery into a Styrofoam cup, he noticed that the
cup was about half full. He did a rough
estimate on the time it would take to fill the
cup and guessed it would take about three more
years to fill. He had never calculated
when he would die, but he thought that would be
about three years also. Using his
longevity calculator and the formula for the
volume of a truncated cone and the rate at which
he discarded his hearing aide batteries, he found
out that he would fill the cup at the same time
that he would die in two years and ten months. After
learning that, rather than watch the calendar, he
watched the cup.
Given his
short life span, he redoubled his efforts to
finish his other project, which was easy because
he lived alone and had no interruptions, but when
he got within one year left to his life, he was
missing some vital information. When
he contacted the leading researcher on the topic,
Joe Galvin, he found that it would take thirteen
months to complete the study and get him the data
that he needed. Crestfallen, he gave
up his research, knowing that he would not live
long enough to finish his project.
A week after
the Styrofoam cup was filled Duke was shocked to
find out that he was still alive. Dumbfounded,
he went back and checked all of his calculations. He
realized that he had used 170 pounds for his
mother’s weight rather than the accurate 110
pounds. The “1” must have looked
like a “7”. He must have
been really groggy when he put 170 into his
longevity calculator, because his mother was
petite. He thought that he would
have time to finish that other research. He
was so sure that he didn’t recalculate his
remaining life.
Duke thought
that it would just take a couple of days to
finish that project after he got the data from
Galvin. On the day that he received
the data, he died. That is why we don’t
have a cure for cancer.
Appeared
in Bitchin’ Kitsch
|
