A nonlinear alternative to measuring age in months or years

[vtk]

A few years ago, I'd heard the result of some study on the relationship between the perceived passage of time, and a person's age. In response, I came up with a series of age milestones, first closely spaced then father apart, so that in theory they should be perceived by someone as being about evenly spaced, if the milestones started when they were born. Now, the first several come too soon for a kid to remember, so they're more for the parents, but I can certainly imagine new parents not wanting to wait a whole year to throw a party for their baby. Recently I've realized this system should work well for celebrating tulpæ, too.

 

Some key milestones:

Level 0: birth

Level 1: about a week

Level 2: about a month

Level 3: about two months

Level 7 or 8: about a year

Level 14: milestones are about six months apart; most adults' earliest memories are from around this time

Level 27: bar / bat / b'nei mitzvah

Level 28 ± a few: adolescence starting; milestones are about a year apart

Level 29: quinceañera

Level 33 ± a few: "adulthood" begins

Level 56: milestones are about two years apart; age measured in years catches up to milestone number

 

You can calculate the milestones for yourself, your headmate(s), or anyone else, using this page:

 

http://vidthekid.info/misc/levelup.php

 

(I promise this does not collect any data, and even if it did, it would be anonymous because it never asks your name. But it doesn't. Well, if I'm being completely honest, I guess data entered could be extracted from the requests written in the server logs, but I'm not even sure how to get at those. Also, maybe I should update my name on that page...)

[jean-luc]

What's the formula you use for calculating the dates?

[vtk]

T(N) = T(0) + C×N²

 

T(0) is the person's time and date of birth or other "zero" milestone. T(N) is the time and date of the Nth milestone. C is a constant, equal to 6d12h19m59s, or 562799s.