A few years ago, I attended a seminar by a researcher on aging. He explained what goes on when a person ages and also what kinds of behaviors can shorten or prolong life. Towards the end of the talk he showed a slide of a smiling older woman whom he identified as a Frenchwoman named Jeanne Calment who died in 1997 at the age of 122 and held the record for being the world’s oldest person ever. Calment would tell people that her ‘secret’ was that she drank and smoked, thus defying the best medical advice. The researcher used that amusing anecdote to illustrate that one can always find outliers for any statistical result.
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