Actuarial

As usual, today’s XKCD makes you think.

• Life-Line, the story of an inventor who learns how to predict the time of a person’s death to within a single hour, was the first story that Robert Heinlein ever sold, in 1939. As in all Heinlein stories, the great part of this story is the portrait of a character: The inventor, who successfully (and a bit annoyingly) remains calm and rational about the fact of death, including his own death, even as everyone around him is freaking out.

Asimov treated the story of the soothsayer as a grand historical epic (Foundation); Clarke wrote stories full of spiritual awe (e.g. The Nine Billion Names of God, 2001), but Heinlein boiled it all down to this one guy in a shabby office. He was the Raymond Chandler of science fiction — until the 1960s, at any rate.

• Kevin Kelly has a countdown clock of the days he has left to live:

  My friend Stewart Brand, who is now 69, has been arranging his life in blocks of 5 years. Five years is what he says any project worth doing will take. From moment of inception to the last good-riddance, a book, a campaign, a new job, a start-up will take 5 years to play through. So, he asks himself, how many 5 years do I have left? He can count them on one hand even if he is lucky. So this clarifies his choices. If he has less than 5 big things he can do, what will they be?

I appear to have eight big things I can do — forty years, 14691 days.

• I think that a timeline which plotted the lifetimes of famous people — including the expected lifetimes of people who are alive right now — would be a great tool. I’ve loved timelines ever since I thumbed through The Timetables of History as a kid.

You need to occasionally think on a timescale that is longer than a single human life. You need to accept that people’s lives have arcs, like stories. You need to remember that the world will go on after you.