Oh, come on. Getting confused between means and medians is one of the classic errors, especially if you're dealing with a measurement that you don't look at all that often. I happened to know offhand that life expectancies are traditionally reported based on means, because my dad is a gerontologist, so I grew up hearing about life expectancy data. But I honestly think it would be more useful to report medians, and in fact that's what you often see in, say, cancer-survival studies -- what percent of people survive to 1, 5, and 10 years after treatment. (And if you go to the full data tables, you can figure out median survival time and the overall distribution.) Will wrote as if life-expectancy was a median-survival figure, and he 'fessed up when somebody pointed out his mistake, and demonstrated that he does understand what the mistake actually was. Are you as much of a mensch when you screw up?