Yet another how-long-you're going-to-live calculator

I had no sooner finished my posting Today is the first day of the rest of your life. How many more might there be? (Redux) than I came across yet another longevity test; this one is "The Original Death Calculator: Life-Expectancy Quiz" designed by one Dr. David J. Demko, described as a professor of gerontology (at what university not given), accessible at the website www.demko.com.

This calculator begins at age 79 and then lists 30 questions to obtain plus years to add and minus years to deduct. Many of the questions are similar to those in the Paris Match and the "Eons" calculators described in the (Redux) posting below: Longevity of grandparents, Family history of vascular disease, Healthy Diet, Smoking, etc. However, some others are unique among the three calculators: "Where is your ancestral home?" (ranging from minus 2 for the USA to plus 3 for Japan), "Do you volunteer on a weekly basis?" (plus 2 if you do, minus 1 if not), "Left-handed" (minus 1 if so, 0 if not), "Height over 5ft, 8 inches," for men only (minus 6 months for every inch). It also includes a question about owning pets (plus 2 if you do)–the lack of which in the other two surprised me, as I noted in (Redux); but it did not include one about being a parent–which also surprised me about the other two.

I did my calculation using the Demko calculator and came up amazingly close to my longevity according to the "Early Warning" and the "Eons" ones: the Demko one has me living to age 86, whereas the other two both said 87. The Demko website states that the 30-question calculator is a "sub-set" of the "Original Death Calculator," which contains 201 questions. This "original" calculator is available on a CD-ROM for $19.95 from www.amazon.com. I am thinking of ordering it; if I do, I’ll do a posting about it.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. How many more might there be? (Redux)

An earlier posting, Today is the first day of your life. How many more might there be? on February 9, 2006, provided a test one can take to get an idea of to what age he might live. It came from an article from the October 1996 issue of the French magazine Paris Match which included the test from an original source provided by two British life insurance actuaries. It can be accessed by keying in "paris match" in the "SEARCH THIS BLOG" box in the upper left corner of this screen.

I have recently come upon two other such tests: the "Early Warning Life Expectancy Calculator" and the "Eons Longevity Calculator", which can be accessed respectively at http://home.worldonline.dk/eskemj and www.livingto100.com.

In the first of these, one just types in his gender, the date of his birth (day, month, and year), the time of his birth, and the country in which he was born (only Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the USA are available). Following that, the calculator churns a bit and then displays the exact time of his death (day; month; year; time in hour, minutes, and seconds). I found that I was going to die at age 87 on June 16th of a certain year at 5:33 A.M. and 36 seconds. Obviously such a calculation with no data about the individual’s health condition, lifestyle, health history of his parents and siblings, etc. is not credible. However, strangely enough, the second of these calculators (which asked for much of one’s data) also said I would live to 87.

To do a comparison of the three calculations of my longevity I redid the one from Paris Match and found that I would live much longer–to age 96.7. In doing it I took a conservative approach, in that for any question for which the answer was doubtful I took the shorter life choice–example: I could have added two years to my life if I had answered that my father lived to age 80, but did not do so because he suddenly died of a heart attack six days before his 80th birthday.

A comparison of the questions asked by the two calculators that do delve into one’s health profile–the "Eons Longevity Calculator" and the one in Paris Match–is interesting. The former asks 40 questions and the latter 24. The former’s questions (said to be composed by a Thomas Perls, M.D.) get into more nitty gritty about worry and stress, personal hygiene, and diet (it asks "Do you floss your teeth?", "Do you use sun screen?", "How much tea and coffee do you drink?"), whereas the latter is more general in its questions. The Eons one also gives advice as to how to add years to one’s longevity–e.g., taking aspirin every day could add 1.0 years, cutting back sweets can add, 0.5 years, minimizing exposure to the sun can add 0.5 years.

I am surprised that neither of these calculators asks anything about raising children; certainly being a parent (and later a grandparent) enriches one's life and tends to add to its longevity--assuming, of course, that the children turn out to be decent adults. Likewise, the calculators ask nothing about owning pets--I am sure that my blood pressure goes down when I pet our four cats, and that the great pleasure that I have in their being around must go toward longer life for me.

Notwithstanding that two calculators say I will live only to age 87, I’m going with the one that says 96.7–those extra 10 years sound good.

The Paris Match put me at 86.2. Very generous. I'll take it!Am enjoying the Eons site. Thanks! --Posted by rapa to Rambling Musings of Mycroft Watson at 10/20/2006 10:27:46 PM

Congratulations, rapa. But you can do even better if you cut back on snack foods. I hope you do as well, or better, on the Demko calculator. Mycroft.

Merger & acquisition mania

Mergers and acquisitions (known as "M&A" in the financial world) have been going lickety-split for many years. This makes me think of the companies that I worked for during my 43 years of toiling (I also worked as a part-time consultant for several years after retiring from full-time work). I worked for seven companies, six of which were publicly-held and one was privately-owned; six of the seven publicly-held companies have merged or disappeared.

The thought of acquisitions is with me because of the announcement just a few days ago of the proposed takeover of Mercantile Bankshares--the holding company of Mercantile-Safe Deposit & Trust Co., in Baltimore--by PNC Financial Services Group, located in Pittsburgh. Mercantile is a blue-blood institution in Baltimore and the last independent major bank–the news of the takeover has reverberated throughout the city. As described below, I worked at Mercantile for 18 years.

My first employer was the public accounting firm Price Waterhouse. I worked for it as an intern in its New York office while still a senior at the University of North Carolina; after graduation, I went back to its permanent staff. Some years ago the firm merged with Coopers Lybrand to form what is now PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Next I went to work for Texaco, the international oil company (whose official name at the time was The Texas Company), as a trainee in its foreign accounting department at its headquarters in the Chrysler Building in New York City. After about 18 months, I was dispatched to a tour of duty at its office in Puerto Rico and, later, to another tour in Dakar, Senegal (Senegal was then a French colony in west Africa but has been independent since 1958). Texaco was acquired by the oil company Chevron in 2001 (Texaco still markets petroleum products under its own name).

Then I returned to the USA to work for Shell Oil Co. at its regional office in Baltimore. Shell is the only one of the six publicly-held companies that I worked for which has remained independent (it is part of the Royal Dutch Shell group of companies).

Next was Commercial Credit Co. in Baltimore; it was founded in 1902 in Baltimore and its stock was publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange during my tenure there. In the late 1960's (1968, I believe) it was acquired in a shotgun wedding by Control Data, a computer company in Minnesota–the acquisition was done to stave off another unwanted suitor, a Hartford insurance company. It was later acquired and reacquired several times by different companies–and picked apart in the process--until remnants of it ended up in Citicorp.

My next employer (after having worked for the private company in Baltimore, following Commercial Credit) was Mercantile-Safe Deposit & Trust Co., in Baltimore, which was by far the largest trust company in the city at the time. I worked there for 18 years as a security analyst, analyzing stocks and bonds held in trust accounts. On October 9, 2006 the news of the proposed acquisition by PNC broke.

My last position was with Alexander & Alexander, the second largest insurance broker in the world during my time there. I worked at its Baltimore area financial center as a financial analyst in solvency assessment of insurance carriers used to place our clients’ coverage. (Solvency assessment is the analysis of insurance companies’ financial strength to avoid those which might not be around to pay future claims.) A&A was acquired in the late 1990's by Aon Corp., a rival insurance broker headquartered in Chicago, and merged into Aon, i.e., A&A no longer exists as an operating entity.

The Baltimore area has lost numerous companies over the years, either independent ones headquartered in the area or large operations of companies headquartered elsewhere. The following companies, which were in business when I came to live in the area in 1955 have disappeared or have been taken over by other companies from elsewhere. (I am just naming them off the top of my head; there are probably others.) Most of these companies completely shut down years ago; others, such as Bethlehem Steel and the insurance companies Fidelity & Deposit and Maryland Casualty, were taken over by other companies far from Baltimore and, as to size of their operations, are mere skeletons of their former selves.

Continental Can
American Can
Koppers Co.
Bethlehem Steel
Arrow Brewing Co.
Gunther Brewing Co.
Maryland Shipbuilding and Drydock
American Smelting & Refining
Crown Cork & Seal
Crosse & Blackwell
Exxon (operated a small refinery while still Esso)
Peterson, Howell & Heather
Noxema
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad
Shell Oil Co. (split up its regional office, with some employees sent to New York and others to Atlanta)
General Motors (closed a large assembly plant two or three years ago)
Western Electric
Martin Marietta (I think it has a small operation in the area following the move of most of its activities to Florida and elsewhere).
Fidelity & Deposit
Maryland Casualty
New Amsterdam
United States Fidelity & Guaranty
Mount Vernon Mills
Schenuit Tire & Rubber
Three major department stores: Hutzlers, Hochschild Kohn, and Stewarts
Braeger Gutman, a discount department store
Upscale men's stores: Eddie Jacob (where I bought my wedding suit) and Hamburgers

1 Comment
Anonymous said...
Don't forget the Baltimore Colts....
Tuesday, October 17, 2006 7:50:29 PM

Good point, Anonymous. Mycroft

The Baltimore Colts were Baltimore’s National Football League team from 1953 through 1983. They won the NFL championship title twice, in 1958 and 1959, both times against the New York Giants. The 1958 game, which the Colts won by 23-17 in Yankee Stadium in New York on 12/28/58, has been called by numerous sportswriters as "the greatest game of football ever played" (for my first-hand experience of the game, see my 9/24/06 posting Football is in the air). They didn’t do so well in the 1964 championship game, losing 27-0 to the Cleveland Browns in Cleveland on 12/27/64; I remember the game well because I had been commuting to Cleveland on business every week around the time of the game, and had shot off my mouth to my Cleveland business colleagues about how bad the Colts were going to crush the Browns, so I had to eat crow when I faced those colleagues in Cleveland the next day after the game.

Those NFL championship games were before the Super Bowl started in 1967 to determine a champion; the Colts beat the Dallas Cowboys by 16-13 in Super Bowl V on 10/17/71 in the Orange Bowl in Miami.

After those 31 years in Baltimore, the team was spirited away to Indianapolis in the dead of night during a snowstorm in early 1984 to become the Indianapolis Colts. Thus, Baltimore was without a professional football team for 12 years until the Cleveland Browns franchise was moved by its owner to Baltimore in 1996, to become the Baltimore Ravens. (During part of those 12 years, a Canadian league team, the Baltimore Broncos, represented the city, playing by Canadian rules–which most Baltimore fans never caught on to.) The Ravens went to Super Bowl XXXV on 1/28/01 in Tampa and beat the New York Giants (again!) by 34-7 (the Ravens went as a wild-card team, meaning that they did not win their league’s championship but went into the playoffs to decide who would go to the Super Bowl as a third choice).