The Nice People Thread, No.16: A Universe of Niceness.

Pyxis

zagubov wrote: »

It's one thing there's confusion when a century starts and finishes but your mention of the Yesterday channel reminds me when the OU used to broadcast its lectures at night.

Some people not used to that would expect to watch a Wednesday night lecture by staying up late on Wednesday night not realising that the programmes had been on that same morning and they'd missed it!

Yes, that's how Radio Times organises its entries in the magazine.

Was confusing to start with, especially as the TV recorder operates the other way round!

PasturesNew

Everybody dies.... tragically ....

I'm still pecking at this tree. What happens is you hit bunches of information - and get "interested" in filling out bits and pieces.

I am trying to build a whole tree, to give the maximum chance of getting the right information and correct link - start by building a huge tree of findable people .... then you take your odd shaped jigsaw bit and see if it fits anywhere .... I've had a "nearly" so far.... so still filling data.

Anyway .... floating around in 1485-1699 or so .... I then took a branch down to the last century, just because the info was available.

And .... everybody dies! Tragically!

Doing trees 1880-1950 is filled with dead people of the "unexpected" variety. With more newspapers published and more records kept you get more information than a simple 1710 entry of "Bob died, buried 14th".

I had a chap in the tree - he caught my eye as his mother had lost the family name when she married - and there he was using it again! I suspect it was something to do with an inheritance.

Then bugg4h me .... he dies, aged 48. So soon after changing his name.

So I looked down his tree and found his daughter marrying in 1913. "Awww a wedding" I thought. She'd been 11 when her dad had died.

I noticed her mum'd remarried and had two new boys, her half-brothers.

But then ... OH NOES ... WW1.

She has 2 children and is six months pregnant when her husband is killed! Look deeper - and her two half brothers are killed too. Look deeper and they were all in the same battalion. Her half brothers died on the same day - and her husband was injured then, but died 2½ months later of his wounds.



Oh no.... then along comes WW2 and her son is killed.

So, she lost her dad, her husband, her two half brothers and her son unexpectedly. She died in 1970 and her two surviving children (one of whom never saw her dad as she was born 3 months after he died) died in 1995 and 1997.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

PasturesNew wrote: »

Everybody dies.... tragically .....

Which is why I couldn't give a rat's backside about my family tree.

Rich - Poor - Rich - Poor - Rich - A Century Of Some More B0ll0cks - Me...

The rest is up to someone else. :beer:

zagubov

vivatifosi wrote: »

I wonder if there is an older person somewhere in the world that we don't know about. Jeanne Calment lived to 122 and a half. Would we know if there is someone who has achieved extreme longevity but doesn't want the attention?

She is such an extreme yet verifiable outlier, it's surprising that nobody else comes close, particularly as we are supposedly living longer. Maybe the Japanese person who is still alive at 117 will carry n for a couple of years.

Looking at the table on Wikipedia

One person (Calment) lived to 122
One lived to 119
Six lived to 117 (one of whom is still alive)
Ten lived to 116 (one of whom is still alive). The oldest man was 116, everyone living longer was female.
Twenty five lived to 115 (one of whom is still alive)

From what I can gather, scientists would be surprised if many other people came close to Jeanne Calment's record, at least in the very near future.

She could possibly have lived longer; the retirement home she stayed in got tired of her visitors and started banning them, then her health quickly declined. Her lifestyle wasn't conducive to longevity as she smoked and drank spirits over extremely long time periods, although she never had a days illness nor did she develop dementia. There's nothing we can learn from her.

She's like the archetype of everybody's great-uncle Bert who smoked 80 woodbine a day and lived to their 90s. Some people are genetically optimised by sheer dumb luck, and they have no message for us.
It might have been interesting if such people went on a restricted calorie diet like the ones that make animals live longer; then we might learn what the real human longevity limits are.

Pyxis

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Which is why I couldn't give a rat's backside about my family tree.

Rich - Poor - Rich - Poor - Rich - A Century Of Some More B0ll0cks - Me...

The rest is up to someone else. :beer:

:rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

That's very funny!

zagubov wrote: »

She could possibly have lived longer; the retirement home she stayed in got tired of her visitors and started banning them, then her health quickly declined.

That is very, very telling.

Maybe that's the message for us?

PasturesNew

I can confirm that if you sit at the PC for 20 solid hours, not even stopping to eat food .... determined to find a record, a line, an evidence in a family tree .... and if you fall asleep at the keyboard.....

You discover......

.... absolutely NOTHING new that you didn't know at the start.

vivatifosi

zagubov wrote: »

From what I can gather, scientists would be surprised if many other people came close to Jeanne Calment's record, at least in the very near future.

She could possibly have lived longer; the retirement home she stayed in got tired of her visitors and started banning them, then her health quickly declined. Her lifestyle wasn't conducive to longevity as she smoked and drank spirits over extremely long time periods, although she never had a days illness nor did she develop dementia. There's nothing we can learn from her.

She's like the archetype of everybody's great-uncle Bert who smoked 80 woodbine a day and lived to their 90s. Some people are genetically optimised by sheer dumb luck, and they have no message for us.
It might have been interesting if such people went on a restricted calorie diet like the ones that make animals live longer; then we might learn what the real human longevity limits are.

Is it possible though that there is someone aged 117 plus that we don't know about?

The majority of people in the chart are American or Japanese. I can believe that there are a huge number of Japanese, due to the previous studies, including the one in Okinawa. But why America, where the route to poor health and obesity echoes the UK? And why are some in the list from France and Italy, followers of the Mediterranean diet, but not Spain or Greece? Why not China, considering it contains a quarter of the world's population?

Is the issue that the people need to be verified, in which case there are other unverified people with a claim (some of which are possibly outlandish), or is it the case that some countries are better/more interested in recording when people achieve such an age?

My point is that the data is too skewed to a number of countries that represent maybe 1/4 of the world's population. What is happening in the other 3/4 of the world? I appreciate that there are countries like Niger or Congo that have been riven by poverty and war and with poor health systems where people are unlikely to live long lives, but what about all the others?

I have a sneaking suspicion that -looking at the list of the 100- that they are less likely to have lived in the colder regions, even where there are good health systems, such as Scandinavia, and more likely to have lived in warm countries such as Japan and round the Med, but why not China or India? There's something not quite right but I don't know enough about the subject to know what.

ETA: also, is height an issue? Both Calment and the second longest living were both under five ft. Wikipedia doesn't give the height for the others. Plus a lot of the longest living Americans were afro-American, is that significant?

SingleSue

Talking of height, Joe went out with old college friends last night to the cinema....they've grown even taller and are now all over a foot taller than he is.

It must have looked like they were taking their kid brother to see a film :rotfl:

Pyxis

vivatifosi wrote: »

I have a sneaking suspicion that -looking at the list of the 100- that they are less likely to have lived in the colder regions, even where there are good health systems, such as Scandinavia, and more likely to have lived in warm countries such as Japan and round the Med, but why not China or India? There's something not quite right but I don't know enough about the subject to know what.

The other thing to consider, as well as warmer climes, might be altitude?

I understand that a lot of longer-lived people live in mountainous areas so less pollution could have something to do with it, as well as, possibly, more walking up inclines from infanthood?
Then living in those types of villages means more eating home-grown food?
And also less individual isolation, as such communities tend to be close-knit.

Obviously combined with other factors.
And genetics. Certain types of people settling in certain types of areas/communities, but sharing a common genome, and possibly even certain character traits!
I mean, what type of person would leave a moderate climate where it is easy to grow food, in order to migrate to colder, northern lands? Maybe people with that sense of purpose also shared a lesser propensity for a longer life?

Who knows? It's interesting speculating, though,


Your point about China is interesting, though. Mind you, China has its share of very cold climate areas, but it must have areas akin to mountainous Mediterranean ones, I would suppose.
Perhaps it is all down to locally-produced olive oil and grapes!
Does China produce olive oil? Or grapes?

I might be wrong, but I think the levels of smoking in China are still quite high, and possibly in India, too? It's not just one's own smoking that does for you, but other people's as well. Look at Roy Castle.

Pyxis

Been googling and found this.......


QUOTE
"The Chinese climate in general is not Mediterranean as it contains cold, dry winters and wet summers, the land is not especially apt to cultivate olive trees," WOOE said.

However, it said that in China's higher areas such as Sichuan, some olive varieties can be cultivated, the organization suggested.

According to WOOE, China produced around 5,000 tons of olive oil in 2016, and expects to produce about 6,000 tons this year.UNQUOTE

China still imports far more olive oil than it produces, so I suppose the answer is no, the 'no olive oil' factor might be a reason why the longer-lived people aren't Chinese.