The age of one's logarithm ----------------------------
"Let us hasten: time flees, and drags us along with it."
This line by Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711) reflects a sense of time shrinking, often felt in maturity. Children, by contrast, tend to feel that time never ends. The late geneticist Albert Jacquard (1925-2013) saw a mathematical relationship behind this feeling. We would perceive not our age itself but its logarithm, counting birth from conception. For a child born at term, counting their age x in years, this would be log(x + 3/4). Their journey would thus begin at three months, when the perceived age would be zero. We would reach 1 at the age of 9 years and 3 months, and 2 at the age of nearly 100 years.
While it is understandable to shift the start of life back to conception in order to make age zero coincide with birth, it seems a stretch to think that we feel the same length of time between the first ten years and the following ninety. But Albert Jacquard's idea lies in the fact that, at every moment, we estimate the time passed relative to the portion of our life already lived. Thus, 5 years at age 50 is 10% of your life, whereas 10% of your life at age 10 is only 1 year.
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