The following is from Boomsday (page 119) by Christopher Buckley (2007) Comment by Claude

BADMAP is an acronym for Bio-Actuarial Dyna-Metric Age Predictor. It works like this:

” A person’s DNA profile, family history, mental history, lifestyle profile, every variable –how many trips to the grocery per week, how many airplane flights, hobbies, food, booze, number of times per month you had sex and with whom, everything down to what color socks you put on in the morning– were all fed into the software. RIP-ware would then calculate and predict how and when you’d die. In the testing, they had programmed it retroactively with the DNA and lifestyle profile of thousand of people who had already died. RIP-ware predicted their deaths with an accuracy of 99.07 percent. In a simulation, it predicted the death of Elvis Presley — just four months from he actual date of his demise. The ultimate “killer app.” Continue reading →

“You loaded the software and typed in the search words. Say you’d been arrested for drunk driving or soliciting a prostitute, or you’d been in a gossip page biting the ear of some pretty young thing in a nightclub. Or, for that matter, you had been charged by the SEC with swindling your shareholders. You typed in your name, along with “drunk driving” or “prostitute” or “ear” or “embezzling.” Spider Repellent found all the references to you on the Web and –deleted them.”

— Page 117, Boomsday, by Christopher Buckley

The new novel by Christopher Buckley proposes a way to fix the Social Security mess. From the BusinessWeek review:

“As the baby boomers shuffle into their sunset years, Uncle Sam will hand them a bundle of juicy tax breaks and assorted perks in return for agreeing to a painless lethal injection at age 65. Too draconian? Not to worry. A second option would give slightly less generous benefits to those who prefer to hang around to age 70.”

Only the genius who gave us Thank You for Smoking (the novel, not the movie) could make us laugh at something so serious. And, just so you know, I never trusted our government enough to think there would be anything in the fund by the time I need it and I’m not counting on it.

Oh yeah, the main character is “Cassandra Devine, a 29-year-old Washington public-relations executive by day and diva blogger by night.” (talk about a great stripper name).