Carnegie Mellon University researchers are making themselves popular with death-obsessed kids with their website DeathRiskRankings, which purports to predict in general when you will die, and from what cause. It manages this by taking user-entered information such as age, gender, geographical area, and race, and compares these against publicly-available statistical data from the United States and the European Union.
Further, you can filter your results by region, cause of death, and forecast period, among others. So, for instance, I decided to enter my information: Male, age 40-49, living in the Pacific area, race: “other”, filtered by “dying within 1 year”. Turns out the most results come from “Circulatory system diseases”. Of course, this is really based on data collected from groups, not single individuals, but going through a list of possible deaths does cause one to pause for thought.
What’s great about this site is its term “MicroMort”, which is their word for “a one-in-a-million chance of dying”. So, the more MicroMorts attached to a subject, the greater the likelihood of death from that subject.
My suggestion to the University: put together a way to send this information to someone as a birthday card. “Statistically, you could die of homicide any day now! Happy Birthday!” Your Risk Ranking for losing a friend forever as a result? 300 MicroMorts.
Comments
Bucko
August 27th, 2009 - 1:18:30 PM
No slot for weight? height? muscle-mass? I mean, these things kind a matter, yeah?
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