Thursday, March 17, 2005

Life expectency

So I was looking through the Life Expectancy rankings and felt suddenly ashamed at not having even heard of the number one country on the list. I'm even more ashamed to be publicly (well, as public as a blog is since I don't think I have much of a readership anymore) admitting it.

RankCountryYears
1 Andorra 83.5
2 Japan 81.6
3 Sweden 80.1
4 Hong Kong 79.9
5 Iceland 79.8
6 Cayman Islands 79.7
7 Canada 79.3
8 Spain 79.3
9 Australia 79.2
10 Israel 79.2


So I went and read about Andorra in the CIA's World Factbook and I think Andorra and the Caymans may not be the most legitimate entrants on this list because they probably have a large population of rich, old transplants that have moved there for tax reasons.

On a different note, I had lunch with Matt (Jigna's husband) and his coworker from Avenade Riccardo today; they were here from Seattle, on a weeklong whirlwind tour of India. They'd spent the week eating at super fancy restaurants in 5 star hotel. I'm glad I was the one to take them to a tiny little south-indian place where they ate a Thaali each (and I drank a lassi) for all of Rs. 77.

I was hoping to treat them to the lunch in exchange for a lunch treat in Seattle, but they wouldn't let me. Damn.

Random Tidbit: Check out Experience with Evaluating Human-Assisted Recovery Processes from the ROC group at Berkeley.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hemant! Thanks for having Matt taste the non-5 star Indian food. Let's see if he gets sick (j/k).
I know he was happy to see you though! Can't wait to see the pics.
-Jigna

Anonymous said...

"....(well, as public as a blog is since I don't think I have much of a readership anymore)...."

Hey, I have a link to your blog saved as favorites and I read almost everything that you put on the blog. I usually dont have anything specific to comment on so I dont post a comment. But I find it pretty interesting because some day when I go back to India I am going to have similar experience.

Last few days I was cleaning up my old machine for the job transition and did not import the favorites to the new machine so I did not read last few posts then. But today I visited the blog and cleared all the backlog :) ...so you can imagine how much admiration is there for your blog :).

In fact I was inspired to keep a blog after seeing yours. I even started one but the job search kept me busy so did not write much. I hope now I can post something regularly.

We talk about you frequently in the music class and we refer the "Yeh safar" song as your song. We all would really like you to start practicing singing again :).

Anonymous said...

you definitely sound like you need reassurance here, so why not, I figured? :). after all, I do read your blog far more regularly than I read my own. you have more of a readership than you think. don't even remember who directed me to your blog first, but its definitely been one of my favourites since..:).
I personally found it reassuring to find a person in the world who is actually "ashamed" that he did not know which country topped the life-expectancy ratings. Here I am still trying to keep up with how many countries we really have and which country is still a country and why...