So what are your odds of dying?

Last I looked, it's 100 percent. Why?

Oh. You want to know when? Or how?

This is according to the LiveScience website:

The site, DeathRiskRankings.com, is the brainchild of researchers and students at Carnegie Mellon University. It provides answers based on publicly available data from the United States and Europe, comparing mortality risks by gender, age, cause of death and geographic region. Put your info in, and it produces the probable causes of your demise and provides insight on the timing of that unfortunate event ... the site can compare such things as the odds of death next year by breast cancer for, say, a 54-year-old Pennsylvania woman or her counterpart in the United Kingdom ... of course the results produced by the web site speak to groups of people and cannot predict with accuracy when you might actually kick the bucket. The timing of your own end is based on many uncharted factors, from heredity to lifestyle to untimely accidents.

I just took a cursory look at this, and it's awfully simplistic. There's nothing immediately available for real specifics -- like whether I smoke, drink, drive fast, have a family history of certain illnesses, or go through sketchy neighborhoods at 2 a.m. yelling insults. On the basic view, the calculator merely asked for age (50-59), gender, country (USA or United Kingdom), region (the south Atlantic), gender, and forecast period (in this case, one year). Here are the findings, based on my own scant information:

	Cause of Death	MicroMort
	Total	7,828
	Accidents	506
	Accidents - Other	23
	Blood diseases	20
	Cancers	2,411
	Circulatory system diseases	2,491
	Congenital defects	20
	Digestive system diseases	529
	Endocrine/metabolic diseases	331
	Homicide	49
	Ill-defined symptoms/causes	74
	Infectious and parasitic diseases	270
	Mental and behavioral disorders	123
	Musculoskeletal diseases	25
	Nervous system diseases	132
	Non-cancerous growths	34
	Perinatal problems	0
	Respiratory diseases	397
	Skin diseases	7
	Suicide	284
	Undetermined - Homicide Suicide or Poisoning?	24
	Urinary tract diseases	78

If you can figure this out, let me know. And if you have time to play with this site, have fun.

Some interesting things, though ...

"It turns out that the British woman has a 33 percent higher risk of breast cancer death. But for lung/throat cancer, the results are almost reversed, and the Pennsylvania woman has a 29 percent higher risk," explained Paul Fischbeck, site developer and professor of social and decision sciences and engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon. "Most Americans don't have a particularly good understanding of their own mortality risks, let alone ranking of their relevant risks," said David Gerard, a former professor at Carnegie Mellon who is now an associate professor of economics at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis.