poly: weather exchange; longevity; drug testing

I saw a news fragment recently that indicated the existence of
a "Weather Exchange", where an insurance company might lay off
hurricane risk.

This sounded a lot like Robin's Idea Futures.

Anyone know any more?

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continuing the Longevity thread ...
I read the Wilmoth article in Science, and he's not quite the despair
advocate suggested by the short summary. I will refine my objections:

(1) "Life Expectancy" is the wrong measure of progress. The correct
measure is "Expected Age at Death, Weighted by the current population".
The calculation is similar to LE, but is done for each age and dotted
with the current age distribution of the living. This will then include
my prospects as well as infants.

(2) quoting Robin,
> I don't think he saying to to try to improve longevity. He's saying
    keep on trying, but don't expect to do too much better than past
    efforts have achieved.
I object. We must choose among available actions, and underestimating the
benefits of an aggressive medical research policy encourages homocide by
neglect. To correctly size the research budget, we need accurate
projections. Saying "the future will probably be like the past" is wrong
when the world really is changing.

-----
Anyone besides me think that angiostatin/endostatin should be tested today
on human volunteers?
(There are probably supply problems: A,E are 500,200 peptide frags from
two native proteins, so it's not as easy as setting some smart chemists to
work to whip up a few tons.)

Rich Schroeppel rcs@cs.arizona.edu
Received on Mon May 11 14:32:50 1998