
How Americans Die - minimax
http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/how-americans-die.html
======
wtvanhest
The data is interesting, but somewhat difficult to draw conclusions from
without considering how different rates are impacting other rates. What is
really noteworthy here is the approach to showing the data. Its effortless to
scroll through.

Here are some things I noticed after the fact:

1\. I naturally wanted to finish the presentation and was compelled to click
to see if there were any amazing insights.

2\. After the fact, I have no idea how I even advanced the presentation, all I
knew was that I clicked something. It was 100% natural.

It fully pulled me in. I can't remember if there were ads on the sides or more
information.

[added] I went back and looked at it again and I think what made it so
flawless is that the first page gave me no option but to click the right hand
arrow which taught me what to look for. I clicked the right arrow, and then I
knew to click it again to advance. The progress dots on the top let me know
that I didn't have much time left. Really amazing work here.

~~~
basseq
Agreed the data is interesting and the UI is pretty slick. I found the graphs
to be poorly designed, both in terms of y-axis labeling and transitions
(sometimes it's %, sometimes deaths/100,000, etc.), as well as things like
labels.

In some cases, the findings in the text don't seem to be reflected in the
graphs.

~~~
mryingster
My thoughts exactly. The axis labeling could have used some units, and for me,
the colors were too similar to differentiate and pair up with the key at the
bottom. The data seemed interesting, but these issues kept me from fully
appreciating the data.

~~~
aganders3
It doesn't really _solve_ the problem of similar colors, but clicking on the
legend entries highlights the data on the graph.

~~~
mryingster
Interesting. That's helpful. For some reason I wasn't seeing that behavior on
my ancient FF that I use at work. Thanks!

------
joshuak
So to achieve longevity escape velocity [0]

1\. Don't have unprotected sex if you're less than 44 years old.

2\. Don't kill yourself, or do drugs, if you're less than 54 years old.

3\. Invest heavily in heart disease, cancer, and alzheimer's research.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity_escape_velocity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity_escape_velocity)

~~~
exratione
Not really. Actuarial escape velocity is a concept that emerges from the SENS
proposals [0]. Next to nothing you do with your life has truly significant
expected impact on your future longevity other than providing support and
funding for SENS and SENS-like research aimed at repairing the root causes of
all the big killer age-related conditions.

(Less significant here means a ten year swing in life expectancy. Exercise,
not smoking, calorie restriction - these are things that can make 5-10 year
expected differences. Everything else is pretty marginal if you exclude the
obvious exogenous line items like risk of accident. But an improving
implementation of SENS provides indefinite extension of healthy life out to
the expected limits due to accident rates, which is somewhere in the 1000-5000
year range for present data).

The mainstream medical research community is largely focused on patching late
stage manifestations of aging. Most work and funding goes towards either
manipulating proximate causes rather than root causes, or trying to find ways
to alter the operation of metabolism to make the disease process less terrible
- but again without addressing causes. Until such time as the research
community is overtaken by the "address root causes" disruption currently
taking place, of which SENS is an exemplar, but by no means the only movement,
then progress towards extended life and defeat of age-related disease will
continue to be painfully expensive, slow, and marginal.

The trends in life extension achieved through medicine to date are all largely
incidental, unintentional. Where aging itself as a collection of processes [1]
has been slowed it wasn't because that was the deliberate intent. Again,
because until very recently no-one has been trying to address aging itself
rather than focusing on the nature of its outcomes. It is the same difference
as that between working to reverse or prevent rust in metal structures versus
working on repairing structural failures that occur due to that rust.

[0]:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC423155/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC423155/)

[1]: [http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-
research](http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research)

~~~
epaladin
I'm a bioinformatics guy trying to move toward this research. Do you work in
the field?

~~~
xaa
I do research at the interface between aging and bioinformatics.

It's a great place to be because many aging researchers, while smart and
capable at their own techniques, are basically in the informatics stone age.
So there is a lot of collaboration potential.

As for GP's comments, I'd agree that there needs to be more focus on "root
causes" and fundamental mechanisms in aging research. But SENS itself is
broadly considered hokum.

~~~
exratione
I expect the informatics stone age in aging research will start to dissipate
more rapidly in the years ahead, given that Calico and Human Longevity look to
be focused in that direction.

I would love to see more of the people who dismiss SENS criticize it on the
published details of ongoing or proposed research rather than just hand-
waving. Sadly all too few seem to be willing to do so. Clearly it isn't
nonsense, since there are SENS labs and allied research programs in a number
of universities now, including Cambridge, Wake Forest, etc, and a range of
important figures in aging research and other life science fields relevant to
regenerative medicine support SENS.

~~~
xaa
My concern about Calico and the other commercial efforts at aging research is,
will the tools and data they develop be made public so that others can build
on them? Also, supposing they succeed, I find the idea of commercial ownership
of a (real) anti-aging drug morally repugnant in the extreme, perhaps even
dystopian. But I certainly can't deny that Google has informatics experience.

SENS, as I understand it, can mean (at least) 3 different things:

a) The idea that we should focus on root causes rather than late-stage
manifestations. I agree with this.

b) The idea that we should attempt to repair aging-related damage without
needing to know what caused the damage. I find this debatable. We _have_
stumbled on to some big treatments (aspirin, penicillin), without knowing how
or why they worked. But in general, if you take a broken, complex system
(e.g., a car, some source code) and attempt to repair it without understanding
how it works, you will fail. With aging, many changes occur. How can you
determine which changes are "damage" and which are compensatory regulatory
changes without understanding the chain of causation?

c) A specific list of 7 aging-associated markers of damage and proposals to
clear that damage, with the implication that if we do so, we will drastically
reduce or eliminate age-associated morbidity and mortality. _This_ is the part
that is seen as hokum. At best, it is a hypothesis. Let de Grey get a grant
and prove it, like everyone else does, rather than publicity-hunting and
implying that it is only the stodgy old aging research establishment keeping
us from eternal youth. But if you want semi-technical criticisms:

\- On what basis are these 7 types of damage chosen and not others?

\- One of the proposed treatments for the natural shortening of telomeres over
time is the periodic, whole-body addition of telomerase or the equivalent.
Considering that telomerase is overexpressed in cancer and is an important
ingredient to uncontrolled cell division, do you think this is a good idea?

\- On a related note, SENS presupposes that a cure for cancer must be found
before the entire program can be made practical. A minor problem.

\- The technology for several other of his other proposed interventions does
not currently exist; for example, expressing mitochondrial genes only in the
nucleus.

Anyway, I actually share SENS' goals but not its unwarranted confidence in its
specific proposals to achieve them.

~~~
cinquemb
Thanks for your comment. I'm really fascinated by the efforts
people/organizations/corps are putting into such research and the roadblocks
that are potentially in the way of progress.

One thing I'm also fascinated by are the bio "hacker" labs/spaces, and I was
wondering if you think something in that direction would be more suited for
people to build on and if you think that such labs are even close to being in
a position to pursue such endeavors that have mostly been relegated to
universities (and the funding environment for such research) and corporations
(and the closed source environment typically better suited to monetization)?

~~~
xaa
Every aspect of wet-lab biology is very expensive. Beyond the equipment and
reagents, if you want to do in vivo aging research, you need a pathogen-free
environment to house rats/mice for months or years and food to feed them.

Hackerspaces are promising in that they are finding ways to do certain
techniques inexpensively. But to do the kind of wet-lab research that results
in a published paper requires a wide array of equipment that I don't see
available to the layman anytime soon (unless they're independently wealthy).

On the other hand, there is nothing specifically preventing interested
amateurs from doing bioinformatics or aging informatics themselves. Only a few
things (e.g., sequence analysis) require big clusters; you can do quite a lot
on your home PC. If you need data, tons of it is freely available:
[http://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/](http://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) is a good place
to start. [http://rosalind.info/](http://rosalind.info/) provides good
tutorials.

I wish we would see more open-source developers creating well-designed
bioinformatics platforms under the auspices of e.g., Apache or GNU. In general
the programming experience of bioinformaticians is quite low, and we are under
tremendous pressure to publish often, so there is little incentive to maintain
projects over the long-term.

------
webwright
Ugh, the fact that many of these charts show raw # of deaths versus
deaths/100k really masks how much things have improved. In 1968, the
population was 64% of our current population... So a flat line is actually a
pretty massive improvement.

~~~
shutupalready
Thank you, so THAT'S why in the 10th slide it says, " _cancer and heart
disease have become much less deadly over the years_ ", but the data in the
graph says the opposite?

I.e., the graph in slide #10 says:

Cancer in 1990 killed 40422, but in 2010, 50962.

Heart disease in 1990 killed 36545, but in 2010, 45783.

That seems like cancer and heart disease have become worse, not less deadly
over the years. That slide is baffling unless you realize that the population
must have increased significantly between 1990 and 2010.

~~~
dekhn
In short: more people die of cancer and heart disease now that communicable
diseases are more under control in first world countries. The AIDS death
epidemic was the rare exception.

Graphs like this are misleading and it's often difficult to collect all the
raw data to do the datacube aggregations across multiple dimensions to
visualize the data and understand these sorts of details.

------
ihodes
Probably the four most important things you can do to change your odds of
making it past 80 are:

    
    
        1. Not smoking.
        2. Eating healthily (fiber, vitamins, low sugar; this is a nascent field).
        3. Exercising regularly.
        4. Wearing sunscreen and minimizing sun exposure.
    

These will collectively reduce your risk of common cancers significantly, as
well as protect against heart disease. Additionally, they can help strengthen
your immune system and body against other diseases that e.g. the malnourished
or obese would be more likely to succumb to.

~~~
jzwinck
But don't minimize your sun exposure too much or you may end up depressed and
kill yourself. Maybe the lesson is one of moderation (but not for smoking!).

~~~
revelation
Or just take Vitamin D to sidestep this rather terribly "designed" body
mechanism.

~~~
njharman
I can attest that Vitamin D is no substitute for outdoors / sun in combating
depression and/or SAD.

------
brudgers
_" And, how do suicide and drugs compare to other violent deaths across the
population? Far greater than firearm related deaths, and on the rise_

In 2010, 19,392 of the 38,364 suicides were "by discharge of firearm" [the
same term used for classifying 11,078 homicides and 606 accidental deaths].
Seems a bit odd that the report classifies the accidents and homicides as
"firearm related deaths" but the suicides as unrelated.

From a public health perspective, a 50% reduction in suicide by firearm would
save more lives than the complete elimination of HIV deaths or cervical cancer
deaths or uterine cancer deaths.

[http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_04.pdf](http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_04.pdf)

~~~
dave_sullivan
Should also point out:

    
    
       The category ‘‘drug-induced causes’’
       includes not only deaths from dependent and nondependent use of
       drugs (legal and illegal use), but also poisoning from medically
       prescribed and other drugs. It excludes accidents, homicides, and
       other causes indirectly related to drug use. Also excluded are
       newborn deaths due to mother’s drug use. (For drug-induced causes,
       see Technical notes.) Between 1997 and 1998 the age-adjusted death
       rate for drug-induced causes increased 5 percent from 5.6 deaths per
       100,000 U.S. standard population to 5.9, the highest it has been since
       at least 1979.
    

And doing a little searching for number of deaths from prescribed medications:

    
    
        In 2010, there were 38,329 drug overdose deaths in the United States; 
        most (22 134; 57.7%) involved pharmaceuticals; 9429 (24.6%) involved 
        only unspecified drugs. Of the pharmaceutical-related overdose deaths, 16,451 
        (74.3%) were unintentional, 3780 (17.1%) were suicides, and 1868 (8.4%) 
        were of undetermined intent. Opioids (16,651; 75.2%), benzodiazepines (6497; 29.4%), 
        antidepressants (3889; 17.6%), and antiepileptic and antiparkinsonism drugs 
        (1717; 7.8%) were the pharmaceuticals (alone or in combination with 
        other drugs) most commonly involved in pharmaceutical overdose deaths. 
        Among overdose deaths involving opioid analgesics, the pharmaceuticals 
        most often also involved in these deaths were benzodiazepines (5017; 30.1%), 
        antidepressants (2239; 13.4%), antiepileptic and antiparkinsonism drugs (1125; 
        6.8%), and antipsychotics and neuroleptics (783; 4.7%)." - 
        See more at: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Causes_of_Death#sthash.gaJ8WlzN.dpuf
    

I think the "drugs kill more people than guns" statement in the slide show is
a little disingenuous because "drug deaths" implies "illegal drugs" and not
"your doctor gave you some shit that killed you". Also, I find it hard to
believe that that number starting in, what, the late 70s? is anywhere near
accurate. I'll ask you this: do you think more or fewer people were using
dangerous drugs in the 70s than today? During disco, coke, free sex, and a
general environment of nihilism? My guess is same or less, not the quite
significant growth suggested in the slideshow.

~~~
ashmud
> [...] "drug deaths" implies "illegal drugs" [...].

This probably depends on your community/social circle. Some groups heavily
advocate that pharmaceuticals be limited to life saving emergencies and not
ongoing usage ("pill for everything").

------
minimax
If you liked this, you might enjoy some of their previous articles. It's
interesting to see them iterating on the technique.

Consumer spending (from last December):
[http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2013-12-20/how-we-
spend.ht...](http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2013-12-20/how-we-spend.html)

Housing prices (from February):
[http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-02-25/bubble-to-
bust-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-02-25/bubble-to-bust-to-
recovery.html)

------
ABNWZ
"This is particularly striking since cancer and heart disease - the two
biggest killers for 45-54 yr olds - have become much less deadly over the
years"

Except your graph shows that cancer death rates have increased by almost 20%
from 1968-2010... Am I missing something here?

~~~
r00fus
Because the graph is not accounting for population increase. The deaths
increased, but the population increased even more. The percentage decreased.

~~~
ABNWZ
Ah yes!! That is why, how silly of me. When put into the context of population
increase, it is an incredible decrease in percentage of people who die from
cancer.

1968 US Population: 200.71 million

2010 US Population: 309.35 million

------
richev
Very nice graphs and visualisations, but am I alone in finding most of them
hard to understand?

~~~
cholmon
Nope. I had to think about Slide 3 for a few minutes: "...because old people
die sooner than the young".

~~~
CocaKoala
Yeah that slide made me lose it and I gave up on the rest of them without even
bothering. How anybody could look at the statement "Old people die sooner than
the young" and think "yeah, that definitely explains what I want to say" is
both baffling and hilarious.

------
ef47d35620c1
I heard once that one cigarette a day as a stress relief may actually extend
your life. I'm not sure about that, but I do think we need to be mentally and
emotionally healthy too. Our health and well-being is not purely physical.

I would think that happy people who are not constantly under stress live
longer.

~~~
Finster
Obviously, there are stress reliefs that don't carry a risk of giving you lung
cancer. I'll take those, thanks.

~~~
ef47d35620c1
I agree, and I think that the COPD is probably worse than the cancer.

I only meant to point out that many people in affluent western countries
smoke, over eat, drink excessively and do other physically unhealthy things
(because they have the money) in order to reduce mental and emotional stress.
If we could reduce stress in general then we'd probably live longer, healthier
lives.

General social issues lead to general health issues.

------
imgabe
So in 1968 all age cohorts had the exact same mortality rate of 100 per
100,000? Why is that?

~~~
shasta
I believe the 100 (or any of the numbers in that chart) are scores which he
normalized to 100 in each age category for 1968. I don't know what the per
100,000 is supposed to mean. As a death rate per year, it doesn't seem
possible. Consider that it's showing ~70/100,000 in the 85+ category. Given
that they'd all be dead in 25 years, that number can't be right.

This presentation is style over substance.

------
tokenadult
About three or four slides in you get the take-away message, which is often
missed in discussions about mortality here on Hacker News: "If you divide the
population into separate age cohorts, you can see that improvements in life
expectancy have been broad-based and ongoing." And this is a finding that
applies not only to the United States, but to the whole developed world. I
have an eighty-one-year-old mother (born in the 1930s, of course) and a
ninety-four-year-old aunt (born in the 1920s) and have other relatives who are
quite old and still healthy. Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even
higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the
world.[1] An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life
expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why."[2] explains what
incremental improvements have led to better health and increased life
expectancy at all ages in the United States. The very fascinating data
visualizations in the article submitted today highlight the importance of
research on preventing suicide, reducing drug abuse, and preventing senile
dementia such as Alzheimer disease, which is where some of the next progress
in prolonging healthy life will have to come from.

Professional demographers try to think ahead about these issues, not least so
that national governments in various countries can project the funding
necessary for publicly funded retirement income programs and national health
insurance programs. Demographers have now been following the steady trends
long enough to make projections that girls born since 2000 in the developed
world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100,[3] with boys likely to
enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human
Ageing"[4] by James Vaupel, originally published in the journal Nature in
2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the leading
scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life
expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever
before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live
to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has
increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six
hours a day."

I was in a local Barnes and Noble bookstore back when I was shopping for an
eightieth birthday gift (a book-holder) for my mom, and I discovered that the
birthday card section in that store, which is mostly a bookstore, had multiple
choices of cards for eightieth birthdays and even for ninetieth birthdays. We
will be celebrating more and more and more birthdays of friends and relatives
of advanced age in the coming decades.

[1]
[http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...](http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html)

[2]
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/life_expectancy_history_public_health_and_medical_advances_that_lead_to.html)

[3]
[http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....](http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.aspx)

[4] [http://www.demographic-
challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...](http://www.demographic-
challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2860ef54d218ce5ce19abe6a59/dc_biodemography_of_human_ageing_nature_2010_vaupel.pdf)

~~~
gbhn
There are a couple of messages later on that are important as well.

1\. AIDS was a really important retrograde factor in this general story, and
developing the commitment to research and deploy strategies for dealing with
it was a major victory.

2\. Alzheimers and similar illnesses are a huge factor in terms of healthcare
for the elderly. A similar success there would yield tremendous results.

~~~
joe_the_user
I'm not so sure you can really sketch thing out like that.

AIDS was a virus-born epidemic and it is normal for such things to experience
exponential growth and decline.

Dementia is part of the process of degeneration resulting from aging, from
people basically wearing-out. Like with heart disease or cancer, it seems
likely we can only really expect halting and expensive progress in this field.

The most problematic thing is that extending the life of a cancer victim ten
years without an actual cure would be seen as a modest gain. Similarly
extending the life of an Alzheimer's victim wouldn't be so seen.

~~~
toxoid
The precipitous decline in AIDS deaths (not HIV infection) after 1995 was due
to the introduction of protease inhibitor drugs like Crixivan.

------
mberning
Any info on how they create these visualizations? Are they using any
particular libraries or frameworks?

~~~
apaprocki
I'll ask the team if they're using anything special beyond d3/jq. The team is
run by Lisa Strausfeld, an MIT Media Lab alum. You can also find videos of her
talking about them floating around Youtube, etc.

~~~
mberning
That would be great, thanks. I suspected they were using d3, but based on how
consistent some of their visualizations are with each other I suspect they
have an in house library that they are using as well. Would be cool to hear
from the source :)

~~~
ErikRogneby
yep d3:
[http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/global/js/d3.v2...](http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/global/js/d3.v2.js)

and jquery cycle for the slide show:
[http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/js/jquery.cycle...](http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/js/jquery.cycle.all.js)

~~~
jsdiamond
JQuery Cycle is used for the IE<9 version, which is a slideshow of screenshots
taken from the piece. Everything else is done with d3 and jquery as mentioned.
We have a custom framework for these dataview pieces, all other work is just
based on the same style guide. As seen here: [http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-
data/](http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/)

------
rpedela
The part about suicides is pretty interesting and perplexing. Are there any
insights into why the rate has increased?

~~~
Cthulhu_
One can spend a billion of studies on the causes of increasing suicide rates,
really. I can name a few random causes:

* The US economy, at least for part of the populace, is pretty crappy; working three jobs, money worries, the financial crisis, it all adds up. * The internet; more (negative) news from all over the world, telling people how terrible it all is. At the same time, "Facebook Envy", people getting told how bad their life is in comparison to their facebook friends (which is skewed because a lot of people only put the good stuff on there). * People are dicks.

~~~
bluedino
It's a lot more socially acceptable to commit suicide for the elderly and
terminally ill these days.

~~~
jfoster
How can suicide become "more socially acceptable?" What does the delta consist
of, between suicide being "not socially acceptable" and suicide being
"socially acceptable?"

I've had no experience with anyone I know of committing suicide, but I am not
seeing how to evaluate whether it is or isn't socially acceptable.

~~~
arg01
In conversations about suicide the suicidal person can be talked of as "having
given up"/"took the easy way out", "been selfish to their loved ones", "gone
against god's will".

On the other end of the scale we can talk about "Dying with dignity", "Not
being a burden to loved ones", "finally at peace", "being in a better place".

When more people hold the later views then it is more acceptable in society
for someone to commit suicide because they don't feel that they are hurting
others as much/aren't as evil for doing it (not that I believe they're at all
evil I used that wording as those considering suicide may be self loathing).

You could even make arguments on a case by case basis if you wanted from the
heroic last stand to a single parent leaving behind their children. It all
comes down to what obligations we feel people have to stay alive.

------
dragontamer
<script src="global/js/jquery-1.8.3-min.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<script src="js/modernizer.2.7.1.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<script src="js/underscore.1.5.2.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<script src="global/js/less.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<script src="global/js/d3.v2.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<script src="js/jquery.cycle.all.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

It looks like the majority of this visualization was from the D3.js library.
I've been seeing more and more web-documents of this style, it must be because
of the rise of D3.

------
infosample
Black males die at such a higher rate from AIDS. Are they having that much
more unprotected sex, taking that many more drugs from dirty needles, or
getting that much inferior treatment than the general population?

~~~
scarmig
A big heaping of options 1 and 3, with a bit of 2 tossed in.

Homophobia has AIDS and AIDS-related mortality as comorbidities. There exist
fewer support structures for gay black men than exist for gay white men, which
e.g. reduces knowledge transfer, makes it less of a cultural norm to stay on
your drug regimen, provides fewer role models for how to live as an HIV-
positive man.

It's also important to note another factor: our disproportionately black
prison population and our epidemic of prison rape. Anal rape by multiple men,
many of them with one or more other STDs, is an ideal way for an HIV infection
to be transferred. HIV also gets transferred in prison through consensual sex:
most prisons don't offer free condoms to inmates. The net result is the rate
of contracting HIV is 10 to 100 times higher within prison than outside it.

~~~
infosample
I wish we would treat prison rape like rape which is wrong, period, with no
exceptions. I also wish we would treat the mental problems that lead to
depression and suicide with the same seriousness as that which leads to drug
addiction, prison, and AIDS.

We've greatly reduced death by cigarette related diseases. That was mostly a
behavioral problem, so is AIDS. The rest of the items on this site seem to be
scientific problems.

Not to get too political but we want to do our best to eliminate all these
causes of death. Black males with AIDS seems like low hanging fruit disguised
as a real problem with our society.

------
cheetahtech
It interesting to see that drugs and suicide are the highest causes of death,
well over that of guns. But we seem to be progressing more towards a drug open
world and gun closed world. Do you see the Irony?

~~~
Zigurd
No irony at all. Tobacco is the biggest killer, about 5X alcohol, and alcohol
is about 10X illicit drugs. On top of that, illicit drug deaths could be
brought down by taking the prison and police resources used in the Drug War
and using them for harm reduction. Another thing about the Drug War is that
zero deaths result from marijuana, and that's still a big component of the
Drug War.

On the other hand, guns are used in about 2/3rd of suicides.

~~~
V-2
"guns are used in about 2/3rd of suicides" \- correlation does not imply
causation, it is especially clear in this case

------
EGreg
"That's why total deaths in the 75+ category has stayed constant"

I thought that was a particularly funny statement. Reminded me of the onion:
[http://www.theonion.com/articles/world-death-rate-holding-
st...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/world-death-rate-holding-steady-
at-100-percent,1670/)

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matthewisabel
I created a visualization on a similar topic that looked at mortality rates
state-by-state using the 2010 census data. It was on HN about six months ago.

[http://www.matthewisabel.com/projects/deathrates/geographic....](http://www.matthewisabel.com/projects/deathrates/geographic.html)

~~~
Diederich
Thank you for sharing this. It's effective and straightforward.

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kafkaesque
I got the presentation's/graph's main takeaway, but did anyone else notice
that women's mortality rate hardly changed since 1968? Why was this, I wonder?
Is this a population thing or because women were mostly kept inside doing
safer house duties or what?

~~~
obvious_throw
My initial guess would be that Patriarchy historically oppressed women off of
the battlefield, kept them out of the coal mines, prevented them from enjoying
asbestos work, excluded them from steelworking and construction, and barred
their empowering path to firefighting and heavy industry.

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fophillips
Need some error bars on that data.

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dmritard96
"progress stopped in the mid 1990s" maybe i am missing something but it seems
like the mortality rate would be a lagging indicator progress hence progress
would have "stopped" earlier?

Not that I necessarily would say it stopped at all...

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dclowd9901
If whomever contributed to the code on this is around, could you give us some
insight into building this app, or do a writeup? I'd be super interested to
see how you designed/architected such a smooth and experience.

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drinkzima
Pretty incredible user experience on mobile, haven't seen graphs that look
that good in a mobile web browser (and interactive no less).

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jmnicolas
I don't care much about the topic, but I thought this is a great way to
present data !

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devanti
Surprised how nice the visualization looks, given how ugly the Bloomberg
terminal is

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0003
Any reason why the 75-84 group was out living the 85+ group until recently?

~~~
Cthulhu_
Well if the average age steadily increases, then if your life expectancy used
to be 75 and climbed to 85, the people that would previously die at 75 now die
at 85. As the chart states, average life expectancy is increasing.

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bittercynic
I couldn't figure out any way to navigate without using the mouse.

~~~
chrismcb
The left/right cursor keys didn't work for you?

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RobotCaleb
That's neat, but it's very hard to tell the colors apart.

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jon_black
_Everyone_ knows that the most Americans actually die in terrorist attacks.
How else can you justify such emphasis on fighting it? Hmmmmmmmm.

~~~
b_emery
Terrorists driving cars, apparently.

