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The RoBlog
Saturday, April 04, 2009
 
Age-Dependent Age Units
I occasionally think about how the speed of time passing is dependent on the age you are. The basic premise is that the older that you are, the smaller a percentage of your life any increment of time is.

With this in mind, and the fact that my daughter firmly corrected me for saying that that she was six ("six AND A HALF"), today's shower thought was about when we should switch what units we refer to people's age as.

This addresses the question of when you switch from days to weeks when talking about a baby's age, and extends it on to old age (where I take a bit of a back-track; see below).

What I've done is assumed that age 30 (years) is about when years start going by really fast, used the percentage of your life a year is at that point (about 3%) and used that fraction as the point that we should change age units starting with minutes after birth. I adjusted things slightly to better fit with units of time that we frequently use (rather than, say, 3 minute increments I went to 5).

So here we go:
Now check this out:

After a while individual years become important again (as a sign of achievement), so I'm suggesting:

And there you have it.

So my daughter will be, no doubt, happy to know that she is 6 and three-quarters, my wife that she will be 36 for an additional year, and my parents that they are 60.

No need to thank me. Your eye-rolling will be quite enough.

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