Add some “yada-yada,” and people will understand.
My main village man gompertz wrote three articles. I have 1 and 3 on my website. Yada yada yada.
You P&C folks likely don’t know the man that was gompertz, but he’s ruined more than one actuarial student’s exam hopes.
I finally recycled my paper copy of specs for 1980 CSO, including commutation function instructions. 
When I helped our new ASA develop updated mortality tables last year, he saw some from over a decade ago. He wondered why anyone would use approximations or commutation functions. 
Hit me up with your ideas on what interesting niche of actuarial/insurance books I should look into next, if any. I got as much gompertz as I can find, can’t find anything on makeham. I’ve got enough old mortality stuff right now I think. I’ve got a lot of other books still unscanned but they’re pretty dry, like company results, sales books, etc.
Was thinking maybe some of those recipe books that the company’s used to publish, but that’s likely only 2-3 books maybe (there’s a lot of duplicates).
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And i can’t be buying those $4000 books by famous statisticians anymore, because, spouse makes me defend those purchases and they just don’t understand.
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Do those books increase in value over time?
You could always try to sell it as an alternative investment.
Lol, they decrease as soon as I buy them. If i wanted tangible investments, I’d be buying guns and ammo.
I just bought:
met life cookbook 1918
met life cookbook 1925 (unclear if they’re the same recipes, or different recipes every year)
The universal cook book (from some universal insurance an annuity company)
Three meals a day (met life)
Selected recipes (ontario equitable life and accident)
I used to work at the ontario equitable co. lol. I’ll have to tell the newspaper editor about this once I get the books online (the company newspaper guy is the former chief actuary, I still have lunch with him every year or so).
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ordered two more cook books lol. Actually, one is on canning, by london life.
There were a couple more but they didn’t have (C) dates so I’m a bit reluctant to spend $50US on them.
I feel like I should coordinate publication of a GOA cookbook given the popularity of the thread.
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My life agent sent out an email with regular insurance/annuity stuff - and a recipe for Christmas cookies!!! 
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The insurance cookbooks are starting to roll in. I have one that’s a canning guide from London Life (in Canada). Holy crap, the instructions are actually deadly. They’re canning stuff that shouldn’t be canned, temps don’t get high enough to kill botulism.
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Uh, sounds like you got the version that they send out to policyholders collecting long term disability benefits from them by mistake. 
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Got 5 of the cookbooks scanned and online, two more going online in about 5 minutes.
Including such crowd favourites as peanut butter soup, cottage cheese sandwiches, and boiling carrots for 30 minutes.
And here’s the neat historical connection part. Years ago I worked in the actuarial department at a life insurer. They had pictures of the founder in the hallways, talking about how he’d started the company in a building downtown with a rented typewriter. Well, I published a cookbook from when he was president, and some of the recipes are from his wife. A second cookbook I’ve published is also from a company where he was president, subsequent to him being president at the first company.
One of the cookbooks has someone’s name inscribed in it but it’s a common name so I couldn’t source out who they were or where they were from.
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I’m starting to pull the mortality tables from the various books and put the data into excel spreadsheets so that it’s actually useable. Unless someone has a better idea…
Also, with this much old data, any ideas on a cool project I could do with it? At one point we built a ‘your life expectancy if you were your current age in the year NNNN’ using canadian data going back to about 1850 (I had mortality data for pretty much every decade for Canada). But this data is from a wide range of sources and not really related.
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Also, if someone has some time and would like to help me, this book: mutual of new york
seems like it only has data on deaths, there’s no survival/life data? Which doesn’t make sense to me.
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Love that initial pie chart
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My three Canadian great grandfathers were born in the 1850’s and 1860’s and they all made it to age 90. I imagine they would be aberrations in the Canadian life tables of the period so would be very interested to hear what you come up with for life expectancies for their cohort.
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I sold the site, and they took the calculator offline so I can’t check. however I recall that the life expectancy for slightly older adults was in the late 50’s then increased over time. Who knows though it was meant for entertainment so while the calculations were correct (meep helped me with that), the data? eh.
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Tan to annoyed thoughts. When I sold the site, it had top rankings. I gave them specifics of what to do and not do, in order to maintain the rankings. And they proceeded to do exactly the opposite of everything I told them, for every single thing.
I don’t know why, they’re fine folks. And I called them repeatedly over the next couple of years with ‘you need to not do that’. To no avail. I did get a couple responses of ‘weve decided to start listening to you now’.
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