Introduction

Who am I? That's a damned good question. I am a 37-year-old Actuary with a wife, four kids, two dogs, a cat, three fire-bellied toads, a salamander, and a cockatiel; a home in the suburbs of Chicago, and a couple of mini-vans.

OK, so what's an Actuary? An actuary is a person skilled in analyzing population statistics and applying them. I work for an insurance company. I'm the guy who looks at national statistics on overall life expectancy, diseases caused by smoking, problems with being overweight, etc. I combine all of these, and determine that if you are a 55-year-old male who smokes 3 packs a day and is 100 lbs overweight, you will die, on average, in the next 5 years. It gets more complicated than that, but you get the idea. Actuaries work primarily in Insurance and in Pension Consulting, but the concepts can apply to other fields. I've heard of actuarial concepts / tables / etc. being used in civil engeneering (instead of time until a person dies, think of time until a bridge colapses).

My wife just turned 36. My sons were born in 92, 95, 99, and 2001.


Links

Here's some of my favorite places to go.


The Straight Dope
Based on a newspaper column written by Cecil Adams. Cecil has answered questions on everything from "Where are all the baby pigeons" to "What are Penile Fractures". Informative AND humerous.


The Darwin Awards
"Darwin Awards celebrate Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by commemorating the remains of individuals who contribute to the improvement of our gene pool by removing themselves from it in a sublimely stupid manner."


The San Fernando Valley Folklore Society's Urban Legends Reference Pages (www.snopes.com)
A site maintained by the The San Fernando Valley Folklore Society, this site contains all kinds of miscelaneous stories, both fact and fiction, along with information on the story. Have you heard about the latest gang initiation called "Spunkball"? Under their "horrors" catagory, read the Spunkball page to find out that this is just a scare with no basis in reality.


Furious George is a silly, adictive little game. Help this little monkey on his cross-country crime spree. You must have a warped sence of humor to appreciate this site.

Cartoons

Alright, so I enjoy comic strips and cartoons. So sue me. Here are some of my favorites:
Red Meat is a surreal trip through rural America.
Calahan. See the demented scriblings of quadraplegic John Callahan. He is sick. I like him.
Calvin and Hobbes. One of the most imaginative main-stream strips ever. It's a shame that the artist quit. Also, see H2G2 sites Calvin and Hobbes and Calvinball.
Committed. OK, so this one is a pannel, not a strip. Still, one of the best mainstream strips today.
Liberty Meadows. Another imaginative mainstream strip.
Non-Sequitur. Wiley is best known as an editorial cartoonist. He puts that sence of sarcastic realism into this daily strip.
For Better or for Worse. Alright, sue me for having a sentamental side. This strip is both realistic and humerous. The characters age in real time, it shows real situations, etc.

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Uncle Shelby Nov 30, 2000
Welcome Mar 29, 2000

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PTVroman

Researcher U115906

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