I have too many already-read books. I'll have to donate 100 or so to make room for more.
The One Child book was fast to read, and really interesting. I'm not too worried now about Chinese kids starting up companies to compete with me.
You are only alive for roughly 1 PPB of the age of the universe. The probability of being alive now is basically zero.
This shows a very poor grasp of what probability is about.
Either your heat is beating - very roughly once a second - or it isn't.
You may recover from a short period when it isn't beating - open heart surgery comes to mind. What happens before it started beating and after it contracted for the last time aren't really of any interest, so it's silly to average over a period longer than a life-time.
I've had several "suits" demand that I produce an "average value" for some metric, where that value would be either meaningless or deliberately misleading.
Where the suits aren't particularly numerate, it can be difficult to get them to understand why their demand is meaningless or misleading. The pedagogical example of averaging over 1e9 years is a simple easy way of getting the point across.
So, yes, it is silly to average over a period longer than a lifetime - that's the whole point.
On a separate tack, I personally find it a useful way of /feeling/ that life is transitory and that we are dead for a lot longer than we are alive.
Corollary: don't take /too/ extreme measures to delay the inevitable; accept the inevitable. The definition of "too" is time-dependent and individual dependent, of course.
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