80 Year Old Birthday Quotes

We, by contrast, have a risk of death which doubles every eight years. This doesn’t start out so bad: aged 30, your odds of dying that year are less than 1 in 1,000. However, if you keep on doubling something it can start small but, eventually, get very large very quickly: at 65, your risk of death that year is 1 percent; at 80, 5 percent; and by 90, if you make it that far, your odds of not making your 91st birthday are a sobering one in six. There is some evidence that this relationship flattens out after the age of 105 or so, meaning that these exceptionally long-lived people might have technically stopped aging—but, with odds of death around 50 percent per year by then, they might wish it had flattened out slightly sooner.

Ebenezer Fox returned to Boston in May of 1783, only twenty years old but a seasoned adventurer. During his time at sea he had survived several battles, endured the hatch of the Jersey, and escaped from both the British and the French. His life had been endangered on numerous occasions, he had been wounded in the encounter on Jamaica, and he had lost part of his hearing. At the end of it all he received $80, his share of the Flora’s plunder. By prior agreement his master was to receive half of this, but upon Ebenezer’s return Mr. Bosson demanded it all. Legally, that was his right. Despite more than three years of harrowing escapades and service to his country, young Ebenezer Fox was still apprenticed until his twenty-first birthday to a Boston barber who never went to war.