How They Did That

How does the Death Clock predict the day you will die?

It's the most important question of your life -- and the answer, at least at deathclock.com, is derived by subtracting your age from the average human life span listed in the CIA's World Factbook, and converting that into the number of seconds you have left. (And yet you're still wasting them online.) Raymond Camden, who created the morbid timepiece as a computer-programming exercise, admits, ''It's definitely not very precise.'' And you won't get any better results from the Life Expectancy Calculator (lifeexpectancy.longtolive.com) or the Death Test (test.thespark.com/deathtest/death.cgi) -- which does, however, calculate your chances of perishing in an accident. For a more accurate expiration date, try The Longevity Game (northwesternmutual.com). Devised by Northwestern Mutual in 1977, it culls statistics from the insurance firm's giant mortality database to determine how old you'll be when you turn up your toes.

How does a website determine your Star Wars name?

Most of the Web's so-called name generators, including the Wu-Tang Clan (recordstore.com/wuname), Hobbit (chriswetherell.com/hobbit), and Oz Prison Bitch (members.iglou.com/lyons/bitchGen.html) variations, simply turn the letters of your first and last name into numbers. The resulting digits are then assigned to a pair of words that become your new moniker. (Coincidentally, the President's Hobbit name is Squinty of Simpleton.) But the Jedi Name (www.xach.com/ misc/jedi.html) and Star Wars name generators (www.darryl.com/swname) have more in common with the fad's origins: determining your porn-star pseudonym (the name of your first pet paired with the street you grew up on). The Star Wars version, programmed by 30-year-old Darryl Lee, combines letters from your name with parts of your mother's maiden name, your city of birth, first car, and the last medication you took. Why did Lee seek out his Star Wars alias? ''Basically,'' he says, ''just too much time on my hands.''